A Fool's Knot (31 page)

As she began to pull the curtains of her bedroom, she noticed a car standing outside the mission house. It had not been there earlier when she was lying in the sun. It was the Bishop's white Datsun. She knew that Father O'Shea had gone to Nzawa that morning to say Mass and she knew that the monthly trip usually took the whole day so, after Mass at nine o'clock, the mission ought to have remained closed until sunset at least. From the vantage of her house, before which the entire town spread out on the far side of a shallow valley, she could clearly see that the mission door was open. Even the car door had been left open and Mutua, the cook, was taking a suitcase from the boot. With curiosity aroused, she dressed quickly, turned off the gas and as ever without locking the door left her house to walk down to town.

She entered the room without knocking. It looked as if it had been hit by a whirlwind, like a junkshop after an earthquake. Every square inch of living room floor seemed to be covered with an admixture of treasures, some discarded and lying in apparently random heaps, others neatly stacked in the chair. Books, clothes, some folded, others creased in piles, a guitar without a case, a large box in the middle of the floor overflowing with green vegetables and fresh fruit composed a still life completed, with ultimate absurdity, by a set of golf clubs, resplendently and gleamingly new propped up by the wall next to the bookshelves, which Father Michael had never filled. Obviously someone had just arrived from Nairobi and this meant that she would probably be soon presented with a fresh cauliflower, a bag of apples or even a piece of steak which could be fried without being first beaten to a pulp with a mallet.

Picking her way carefully between the piles, trying in vain not to step on anything she might soil or break, she managed to reach the centre of the room when Mutua appeared through the open kitchen door, struggling with a large tattered brown suitcase, which he held against his chest. His eyes peeped over the top and, as he greeted her, he clumsily tried to wave his hand as it struggled to find a hold on the case, which was obviously too heavy to risk carrying by its frail-looking handle. The strain became too much and he let out a warning shout as the case crashed to the floor, spilling out its contents and leaving him unbalanced for a moment, staggering and groping wildly at the air for support. Having regained his balance, he looked at Janet in a way that disclaimed any responsibility for the mess and turned to leave the room by the way he entered. He rubbed his back and muttered in English for her benefit, “Too heavy. Too old.”

Her way forward now completely barred by the suitcase and its scattered contents, Janet stood with her hands on her hips and tried to make some sense of the mess, while deciding where next to place her foot. “If you think you're getting your hands on that box of tricks, you're entirely correct,” said a voice behind her, causing her to jump. Janet did not turn round. She did not need to. She just laughed. In a moment she was laughing so hard that tears came to her eyes and she finally turned to see Father Michael Doherty picking his way towards her. “Jaysus, girl,” he said in his usual exclamatory tone, “you'll do yourself an injury. Here, sit down for a minute and I'll get you a beer.” Then, trampling without reserve on the things that Janet had been so careful to avoid, he quickly emptied the last of the contents of the suitcase onto the floor, closed it, turned it on end and invited her to sit on it. Still not quite fully in command of her senses, she sat down and, of course, it collapsed under her weight, spilling her into the middle of the pile of once neatly folded clothes it had previously contained. This just made her laugh harder and she now felt quite unable to stand. “Well, sod that for a lark,” said Michael, kicking aside the now multiply-articulated box and creating a space on the floor with his feet into which he could pull one of the armchairs away from the wall.

“I ought to have known it was you, as soon as I saw this lot,” said Janet a minute later, when laughter no longer choked her words. “No one else could possibly be responsible for a mess like this. So they finally let you loose again on this poor unsuspecting world?”

“That's right,” he answered, kicking shut the refrigerator door, while holding two bottles of beer in one hand and rummaging in the drawer of the chest at its side for an opener. He then issued a quite unexpected expletive and fell down onto his hands and knees to peer around the back of the fridge. “Once before I did that,” he said, “and the effing flame went out. I opened it up the next day and everything was spoilt. And the room was full of kerosene fumes. I nearly gassed Mutua when he turned up for work.”

“I wasn't expecting you for another few days. In fact I was beginning to think that I might not see you before I left,” she said.

“There was a change of plan,” he said as he stood and immediately located the bottle opener. He told Janet that two priests from elsewhere in the Diocese had both had to return to Ireland at short notice because of illness. One had been diagnosed with hepatitis and would need to take at least six months off. Another had suffered a motorbike accident and had gone home indefinitely. He was in a bad shape, Michael told her. His hip would need a pin through it and then, after healing, he would probably have to learn to walk again. On top of that another four of the missionary priests had completed their two-year tours of duty and their leave was already overdue. “So,” continued Michael, “Bishop O'Hara was left with a difficult choice. Either he had to leave some stations unmanned or he had to bring me back.” With that he went to the kitchen for the glasses.

Janet could only burst into laughter again at what happened next. Immediately he entered the kitchen, Mutua shouted at him in Kikamba, “Don't kick the fridge door. You'll put out the flame!”

“Keep your hair on,” replied Michael, as if offended.

Mutua, whose head was invariably shaven was provoked into listing the reasons for not kicking the fridge door shut, paramount among which was his recollection of trying to relight the burners one day, when a minor flare-up had singed his eyebrows. Michael listened to everything Mutua said and then spoke a few words in Kikamba that Janet did not understand. “Only a stupid fly is killed by a falling turd,” he translated in an aside for her benefit. Mutua laughed and then patted Michael on the back, a gesture of profound affection. He was obviously more than pleased to see him back in Migwani, despite the reappearance of the madness he brought to life in the mission.

Janet's first surprise came a little later. Now seated amid the mess, she listened to the story of Michael's stay in Ireland. He began by apologising for only having written once during his absence. He had been very busy and assured her that he had not forgotten her. Since he had known for a month that he would return before she was due to leave, he had decided not to write. Where he would go, he would not send greetings, he said in Kikamba, immediately translating it for her benefit. Janet dismissed his apology, telling him not to worry, as she leaned forward to offer him a cigarette. “Ah… this is the first shock…” he told her. His expression was wide-eyed as he patted his stomach. “Didn't you guess from the size of the tub that I had given up?” he explained, nodding towards the cigarette.

Janet apologised for tempting him and lit one for herself, but she found herself drawing on it with a new and surprising self-consciousness, perhaps borne of the knowledge that had it not been for her desire to share things with Michael, she herself would never have become a smoker. During the long hours after sunset in what felt like an interminable dry season soon after her arrival in Migwani, when they had passed so many evenings in conversation over beers in the Safari Bar or sitting in the dark on the mission veranda, it had been Michael who had first prompted Janet to take a cigarette. It had always been part of her nature to appear just a little nervous and agitated, just a little too quick with action or reply, and during that period the demands of her work, with its inherent frustrations and impossibilities had brought the mannerism into sharper focus. Michael had tried to tell her that impatience would solve nothing and that she should learn to put her ideals on a slower flame. He offered her a cigarette as an elixir of relaxation and she had smoked ever since. Now she felt estranged from herself as the cigarette burned between her fingers, perhaps because she now feared that the priest might even disapprove.

After a short talk, they worked together to clear away the debris his arrival had scattered and by the time Father O'Shea appeared from Nzawa just before sunset, only the golf clubs and a few shirts, draped over a chair, remained in the living room. Father O'Shea who, during his visits to Migwani, had always ensured that everything was kept in its proper place, exactly as Michael had left it, as if that indicated permanence, was still a little taken aback. In his eyes the room was still in a state of total disarray and he was prompted to announce his arrival by offering, “What on earth is going on here?” well before any greeting came to mind. When Michael appeared in a doorway to answer his rhetorical question, all was immediately and comprehensively explained.

Just a few minutes later, after Michael's story had been retold for his benefit, Father O'Shea said that he would return to his own place in Mwingi since, now that Michael was back on station, his presence would be supernumerary. During Michael's absence he had been visiting Migwani only at weekends to say Mass whilst continuing to teach full time during the week in Mwingi's Junior Seminary. Explaining that he had left on Friday evening with work unfinished and apologizing for rushing away so soon after Michael's arrival, he bid his goodbyes, picked up the haversack he had left by the door and rode off on his motorbike. Within a minute or so the sound of his two-stroke had faded to the north of the town.

“He takes life very seriously,” said Michael, obviously regarding his colleague with a mixture of respect and awe. “He'll not be back before dark.”

Janet agreed, remembering her abortive attempts at conversation with Father O'Shea over recent months. “He's a very generous man,” she said, “but I never really felt that I got through to him, never felt that he was willing to open up and express his own opinions.” In the past, in the days when she lived in London and prided herself in her choice of friends and acquaintances, when she had the luxury to choose, she would have probably dismissed him out of hand and decided on first impressions not to pursue further contact with him. She would have seen him as remote, perhaps intellectual, perhaps too obsessed with the accuracy of his few and carefully chosen words – a bore, perhaps. But here, where choice of friends was never an option, she had persevered and, though never entirely comfortable in his company, she had grown to accept him as he was. Over the months, she had developed a good deal of affection for him, for his profound gentleness and consideration for others alongside her respect for his obvious devotion. Unknown to her that evening, she would never see him again. Also unknown to her was the fact that, over the ensuing years, the simplicity of his faith would reconnect her to her own Catholic roots, would plant a seed that would allow her to rediscover what role religion might play in her life. But that was to be the future.

As Michael and Janet talked, the sun set unnoticed and hours passed. They ate some of the food that Michael had brought from Nairobi, Mutua having prepared it and left it on a low oven, prompting them both to comment that a rare steak was an impossibility in this household. They then sat and talked again for several hours. Janet began to realize that there had been significant changes in Michael. Some of the differences were trivial, such as the decision to give up smoking and the equally surprising fact that he had decided not to buy a bottle of whiskey in the duty-free shop. Physically he had changed a little, though not much. As he had indicated earlier, he had put on some weight around the middle and his face was fuller as well. His hair was cut much shorter, making him look older, she thought. Unchanged was his habit of wearing a hat almost constantly, whether inside or outside. Today's version was a peaked cap rather than his usual bush hat. It perched that night on the back of his head, with the peak stupidly vertical, at times making him look like he had a halo. It prompted Janet to smile, as she remembered their many trips to bars both in Migwani and Kitui, where the angle of Michael's hat acted like an indicator, like an absurd barometer of the length of the evening. As he became drunk, the peak would move further to one side, or if it was the bush hat he wore, it would be pushed further and further back until it eventually fell off. She reminded him with a giggle of the night in Kitui when he had a few too many beers and had finished the evening dancing the bump with an imaginary partner, the cap, that night, having worked its way round half a circle so that the peak was down his neck. The moment she finished the recollection, however, she sensed a change in his manner, and this was clearly a profound change. He seemed now embarrassed, reluctant to accept the memory. In the past he would have played up the joke, now he avoided it, as if admonishing himself for a misdeed. Laconically, he changed the subject after muttering, “Well, let's hope there'll be no more of that.” She sensed a changed purpose about him, a new rationale behind a retained gloss of absurdity, which, in his own words at least, he now seemed determined to play down. Though still evident on the surface, his easy-going manner had been replaced, deeper down, by a new acceptance of responsibility. Janet sensed it immediately, but only interpreted it as evidence of the change that had percolated to the surface in small manifestation. Her reaction surprised her. It was disappointment that she felt and she was shocked at her own selfishness. Later, he tried to express his changed rationale towards his work and it led them into an argument, an intellectual one, but also a heated one, about his right, anyone's right to come to Migwani or any place they didn't belong to impose values from outside.