The Memory of Love (42 page)

CHAPTER 42

The heavy air holds the last note of the clarinet as she crosses the patio. Adrian has half risen from his seat when she drops into the chair next to him, picks up the bottle of beer and raises it to her lips. Her dress is damp, her face and neck wet. He kisses her cheek, a taste of salt and sweet.

She puts the bottle down and gasps, like a child. ‘How was it? Could you hear properly?’

‘Absolutely. It was great.’

She nods and adds, ‘Except the duff note halfway through.’

‘It was fine,’ says Adrian, who wouldn’t know.

‘It was so-so.’

People pass by the table. Mamakay high fives with one of the other band members and the man slips into the seat next to her. They converse for a few moments about music, in language opaque to Adrian.

During the course of the day Adrian has thought of little else except his conversation with Elias Cole, until Mamakay stepped out on to the stage and began to play. He takes a sip of his beer. Mamakay has almost finished hers. He holds up a hand for two more.

Elias Cole had been asking him to help. He didn’t know, at least Adrian was fairly certain he didn’t know, about Adrian and Mamakay. So in that sense it was not a direct request and Adrian could yet ignore it. Nor is it in any way his professional responsibility. At the same time it is not in his nature to shirk what ought to be done, for he was raised otherwise and now it is embedded in his character. And there is Mamakay. Elias Cole is her father. Elias Cole is dying. Adrian takes a swallow of beer. He watches the people in the club, the people still standing on the dance floor in the wake of the performance, a waiter in oversize shoes crossing the floor with a large tray of drinks, the bare-shouldered hookers at the bar, Mamakay talking to her friend. He watches the way her hands and fingers fly and flutter, the same way she plays the clarinet. He remarked upon it once and she told him it was a mark of poor technique. She is never detained by fantasy, only the escape provided by her music.

Last night, when the moon was less full than it is now, he watched her sleeping. He watched the movement behind her eyelids and knew she was dreaming. He wanted to wake her up, just to ask her if she was dreaming of him.

He loves her. Last night he would have told her so. He would tell her now, but he mustn’t. It is too difficult, too complicated. There is home. There is Lisa. There is Kate. Oh, God. Kate. He mustn’t think it. He looks away from Mamakay towards the sea, out into the blackness. Behind the noise and music comes the sound of the waves on the shore, like shattering crystals.

And because he wants to talk about her, about the two of them, but most of all about love, instead Adrian talks to Mamakay about her father.

Walking down the darkened beach. Behind them the Ocean Club is slowly emptying of people. Adrian relates the conversation of earlier in the day, while he sat at the old man’s bed, does so as accurately as he can, careful to choose the right words. Not everything, just that which concerns her. When he is finished they walk on. Silence, softly punctuated by the sound of their steps, the faint squeak of wet sand. He turns to see her profile traced in moonlight.

‘He’d like to talk to you, I’m sure.’

Mamakay doesn’t reply. Adrian waits through her silence. No sound save the sound of the surf, the occasional sweep of a car on the beach road. Ahead of them a sparse constellation of lights marks the peninsula. Presently they reach a beach bar, closed and empty. There are cement tables set into the sand. She sits on one of them, tucking her legs under her.

‘You don’t understand about my father,’ she says.

‘I don’t know him as well as you, no.’

She shakes her head and looks past him to the sea.

‘Try me,’ says Adrian. ‘Tell me what I don’t know.’

‘OK. I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you a story about my mother and my father. Something that happened. That made me begin to understand what was going on between them. I told you I always acted as the go-between, remember? We never did anything as a family,’ says Mamakay.

‘I remember.’

‘Well, once when I was ten or maybe eleven, my mother took me out for a treat. We went to the Red Rooster, a chicken restaurant in town. It wasn’t anywhere near my birthday and I remember I asked her why we were going. She told me it was because I was such a good daughter. I didn’t really believe her, a child can always tell when a parent is palming them off. Still, I didn’t care. I was happy to have a treat. So we went to the Red Rooster and we ordered chicken wings and soft drinks. My mother was in a good mood, making jokes. I liked it when she was like that; it didn’t happen often. Around my father she was, well, she was much more reserved.’

Mamakay stops, takes a breath and tilts her chin up at the sky. ‘We’d been there half an hour or so when a friend of hers came in. It’s a small city. It was even smaller then, everybody knew everybody else. You’ve seen how it is. And yet I’d never met this man before. I didn’t recognise him from my parents’ circle of friends. The Red Rooster was in the centre of town and a lot of people from the offices around used to eat there, so I thought this man worked near by. He was wearing a suit, I remember, but his hair was quite untidy and his beard untrimmed. He had a nice way about him: he spoke to me directly and treated me like a person instead of just a kid. My mother became very animated in his company; I remember I felt jealous because
I
had been enjoying his attention. They started to talk to each other and more or less forgot about me. I sulked for a bit and then it was time to go home.’

Mamakay swings her feet down from the table and walks towards the sea. Adrian follows.

‘In the car on the way home my mother told me not to mention we’d been to the Red Rooster to my father. She said he’d told her not to spend money on treats, so we should make it our secret.’ She shrugs. ‘I said OK. I didn’t really think about it again. Later, when I was older and all the girls started talking about boys, I wondered if my mother was having an affair with the man at the Red Rooster. In my head I sort of settled on that as a suitably dramatic explanation.’ She laughs. ‘But in time I forgot about that as well. God, I feel like a cigarette. Do you have one?’

Adrian, who doesn’t smoke and didn’t know she did, says, ‘No. Shall we buy some?’

‘Don’t worry. Let’s go.’

On the walk back along the sand Mamakay removes her sandals and allows the water to run over her feet. ‘Some years went by. I must have been about fifteen. I was rummaging around my mother’s sewing box. I found an old newspaper cutting. I remember it because it had been cut with pinking shears and the edges of the paper were jagged. There was a photograph and a story. I recognised the picture. It was the man we had met at the Red Rooster that day. It said he had tried to blow up the bridge over to the peninsula.’

Adrian stops walking. ‘Jesus!’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did you ask your mother about it?’

‘I did. He was an old friend from a long time ago, she said. Claimed not to remember the day at the Red Rooster. She said she hadn’t seen him in years. But I knew I hadn’t misremembered. The next time I went into her sewing kit, I noticed the cutting wasn’t there any more.’

‘What was his name? The man? Do you remember?’

‘It was Conteh. Kekura Conteh.’

For a few moments Adrian is quiet. They are approaching the Ocean Club again. He says, ‘Kekura was an activist. Could your mother have been involved in something?’

Mamakay laughs lightly. ‘No. At least I don’t imagine so. I’d guess the attack on the bridge was before we met him in the restaurant. Even though there was no date on the cutting, it looked really old. The paper had started to colour and the ends roll over. Maybe they really were just friends. The point is that when we came home from the Red Rooster she told me not to tell my father. I thought, or at least I fancied, it was because she thought my father would be jealous. But that wasn’t the reason at all.’

‘What was it?’

She turns to Adrian. ‘She wanted to keep it a secret because she didn’t trust him. Don’t you see? My mother didn’t trust my father.’

They are back at the Ocean Club. Mamakay sits at a table, her chin in her hand, fingers covering her mouth. The place is empty. The owner brings over two bottles of beer and waves at them to take their time.

Adrian says, ‘Are you sure you’re reading that right? As you say, children can place different interpretations on things. There could be another explanation.’

‘OK. Something else happened,’ she says. ‘Years later, some months after my mother died. There’d been protests on campus. The students were growing tired of the authorities. It was happening everywhere, but the campus was the centre of it all. There were constant power cuts at one time, we were all trying to revise for exams. A group of students got a petition together to demand the Vice Chancellor’s resignation. I signed the petition along with everybody else. I had an exam the day they marched to his office and handed it in, otherwise I would have been there.’

She’s not looking at Adrian. Her gaze, unfocused, rests somewhere upon the table amid the beer mats and cigarette burns.

‘After the exams the students celebrated. There were parties on campus every night, it was the end of the academic year. All my friends were living in hall, except me. I stayed at home to keep my father company that term. The last evening my father called me and told me I was not to go up to the campus that night. He didn’t say why. Instead he said a lot of things. I was out too much. I was out with the wrong crowd. There was talk about me. I was angry and shouted at him. There was talk about him too, I said. About him and a woman called Vanessa.’

Adrian glances at Mamakay.

She catches his look. ‘Oh yes. I knew about Vanessa. I’d known for a long time. I went up to my room and stayed there. I told myself my father was being unreasonable. The strange thing was that if anything he had a tendency to spoil me. After a while I went back downstairs and found him in his study. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there behind his desk. I felt sorry for him. I thought perhaps he was thinking about my mother, as I was. I sat on the floor and put my head on his lap. He just laid his hand on my hair.’

Silence again. She does not lift her gaze from the table, but presses her fingers against her bottom lip. When she speaks her voice is low with controlled emotion.

‘That was the night security forces raided the campus. They attacked the students. A lot of people were hurt. They went through the halls of residence. Twelve students were arrested. Most of them were the ones who had organised the petition. They were expelled and we never saw them again. All of them had been at the party I’d been invited to in one of the fraternity houses. They said it was the first place the police went. Afterwards they forced their way into the dorms. By then the students knew what was happening; some of the male students tried to barricade the doors and to fight back. You can imagine what they did to them …’

There she stops, except for one last sentence. ‘They were my friends.’

‘You dropped out after that.’

‘Yes. I dropped out. I was ashamed.’

She calls the owner and asks for a cigarette. He offers her one from his own pack. She takes it and lights it inexpertly, inhales two or three times. Neither of them speak. As she stubs the cigarette out half smoked, she lifts her eyes to him. ‘So you see there are things about him you don’t know.’

CHAPTER 43

Seligmann has gone for the afternoon, an appointment at the Ministry. Little chance he’ll be back before the day is through, which leaves Kai working alone in the operating theatre with an anaesthetist. Next door Mrs Goma is performing an amputation with quiet efficiency and power tools. The theatre nurse divides her time between the two surgeons.

Kai sits on a stool, bent to his task, music playing on the theatre CD player. When next he looks up at the clock he realises an hour has passed.

Today he feels good. Today he feels in control. Last night, alone in Adrian’s apartment, he’d slept for four hours, worked six, and miraculously slept another six. No sign of Adrian, Kai had breakfasted in the staff canteen before going to emergency to deal with the first of the day’s cases. Together he and Seligmann took care of the usual cooking-fire burns and hernias, more interestingly a newborn with an imperforate anus. After that, not much. Seligmann headed into town, Mrs Goma came in to perform the removal of a gangrenous limb scheduled from early morning. Kai had offered his help, but she waved him away. It was a routine operation and she, like him, seemed to enjoy moments of solitude in the theatre. So Kai fetched himself a coffee and carried it down to the surgeons’ room, where he sat writing up notes. He’d only just begun when the call came for a surgeon to report to emergency.

The woman, partially anaesthetised, was sitting on one of the beds. Her eyes rolled back into her skull, she’d looked on the point of passing out. An odour of ammonia and sweat rose from her. Kai removed the swaddling from her right hand to find her wrist slit so deeply as to sever all the tendons of her fingers, with the possible exception of her thumb. With Mrs Goma busy and Seligmann away Kai had begun the procedure to reattach the tendons on his own. It is a job for a microsurgeon, but there are no microsurgeons on the staff or in any other hospital in the country. Today Kai is this woman’s best chance. It’s proving tricky – locating the ends of the tendons from where they have receded into the wrist, pulling them down, maintaining sufficient tension until he can connect the two ends. He is patient. Still, if Seligmann were to come back from the Ministry early, thinks Kai, it would be to the good.

He looks up at the anaesthetist, sitting bolt upright and wide-eyed on her stool, the telltale look of a person fighting the urge to sleep.

‘What happened to her? Do we know?’

At the sound of his voice she jerks slightly and shakes her head. Kai swivels around to read her admission notes, moving the paper with his elbow.
Possible suicide attempt
. He recognises the handwriting as belonging to one of the Swedish doctors, or is he Dutch? He turns back and searches for the end of another tendon amid the flesh of the woman’s wrist. There it is, narrow and pale. Not once in Kai’s career has he treated a would-be suicide, or even heard of one. He’ll refer her to Adrian. These last few weeks, Kai has barely caught a glimpse of him.

From Adrian his mind wanders to thoughts of Tejani. A matter of months now before he would see his old friend again. Rather than anticipation, the thought arrives with a flush of trepidation. Kai feels his heart deliver one extra, uneasy beat. Only a few weeks ago he’d felt the weight of the yoke every time he stepped down from the
poda poda
, walked past the line of people waiting to be seen and into the hospital building. Now he feels anxiety at the thought of leaving it behind. He tries to imagine the journey, the arrival, Tejani and Helena’s home. He lets his mind move forward, in a way he does not usually let himself do, to some unnamed future in an unnamed hospital. He imagines wide, white floors, shining lights, hushed movement. The faces of the people remain featureless.

With the forceps he pulls at the end of a tendon. The forefinger of the woman unconscious upon the table moves as though beckoning to him.

‘Hold this,’ he says to the anaesthetist.

He wonders if Tejani has ever attempted such an operation. He goes to the door and looks through the glass panel. The lower half of a human leg sits in a bucket on the floor. Mrs Goma is bent over, stitching a flap of folded skin over the remaining stump, neat as a hospital corner, watched by Jestina, the theatre nurse brought in to replace Mary. Kai knocks on the door and pokes his head inside.

‘Mrs Goma, may I borrow Jestina?’

Two hours later and Kai has done his best. The woman will never play the piano, but she might wash and dress herself. Kai leaves the theatre through the swing doors. Up in emergency all is quiet. He passes Mrs Mara’s office. He should speak to her, tell her his plans, put things in motion. Outside the door he hesitates. He can hear her speaking on the telephone, calling for her assistant. A moment later Mrs Mara opens the door. How much older she looks, he thinks. She smiles. Kai is one of her favourites, he knows.

‘Hello. What are you doing there? Did you want to speak to me?’

‘No worries. It can wait.’

‘No, come on in.’

‘It might take a bit of time. I’ll come back later.’

Mrs Mara smiles again. ‘OK. By the way, if you see Alex, tell him I’m looking for him.’

‘Will do.’ He smiles back at her, feeling like a hypocrite.

After lunch in the staff room a game of boules is under way. As Kai opens the door a silver ball rolls across the black-and-white tiles towards him. Kai steps backwards. The ball comes to a full stop. One of the medics, a short man with a bald head, darts forward and measures the distance between two balls using his thumb and forefinger, and whoops. Kai never joins in these games, played mostly between the overseas staff. Today he thinks how pleasant it might be. He feels energised by the morning’s work. For a few minutes he sits, watches the silver balls rolling across the floor, gently knocking each other. There are things he could be doing: notes, correspondence. But Kai is in no mood for paperwork. He decides to take a turn around the hospital. Check in with emergency to see if there’s anything new. Maybe he’ll call in on Foday, purely for a social visit.

Outside the sun shines between silvered black clouds. The air is hot, vibrating with the electricity of distant storms. Beneath the corrugated-iron shelter that passes as a waiting area, a dozen pairs of eyes follow his approach. Kai can sense the anticipation grow with his every pace, the collective deflation as he moves beyond them without calling a name or pointing at a patient to follow him. He heads up the ramp to the building when a man runs up behind him.

‘Yes, sir, Doctor!’

Kai turns.

‘You are Dr Mansaray, yes?’

Kai nods. ‘How can I help you?’

The man, a slim, well-spoken Fula, says, ‘They told me you attended to my wife this morning. She had injured her hand.’

‘Yes,’ says Kai. ‘She’ll be on the ward now. It went well. In fact’ – he looks briefly at his watch, then at the doors to the emergency department – ‘we can go along now and see how she’s doing. Come with me.’

Together they make their way along the covered walkways. Kai explains how the operation went, the best that could be expected. Possessed of no expectations of his own, the husband nods and thanks him again. Remembering the note on the woman’s history, Kai asks, ‘What happened?’

‘It was my fault, Doctor. My wife was very angry with her niece. She wanted to slap her. But I held on to her. Then my wife’s niece took this opportunity to say some bad things. My wife tried to break free from me and I let her go. This was my mistake. She went forward too fast and her hand broke the window.’

It figures. An injury on such a scale would be hard to self-inflict. And Kai has never once treated a would-be suicide. War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly. Perhaps the Swedish doctor imagines himself trying to end it all if he lived here. No need therefore to refer her to Adrian, which in some ways is a shame.

But Kai still needs to talk to Adrian. As soon as he’s finished with the woman and her husband, he’ll go to the apartment and, if Adrian isn’t there, this time he’ll leave a note. A drop of rain touches his arm. He quickens his pace.

Several hours pass before Kai reaches Adrian’s apartment. The sky is reflected in discs of water across the courtyard. The waiting patients have gone home, to return another day. The building is quiet, even the children’s ward, where it is time for the afternoon nap. Kai passes it, deep in thought. He could take the opportunity to go and see Mrs Mara, though it can wait until another day. If Adrian is there perhaps Kai will suggest a beer someplace. It’s a long time since he relaxed. He’d like to talk to someone about his plans and there’s no one else to talk to. Not Seligmann or Mrs Mara. Not his cousin. He is about to take a step that will change his life, something he has never done before. Though in the past years his life had indeed changed immeasurably, none of it had been of his own doing. He’d imagined his life differently, both of them had, he and Tejani. War had frustrated all his hopes, shut out the light. Everything had ceased. The foreigners fled, the embassies shut down, no flights landed or took off from the airport for years. The country was a plague ship set adrift.

Once, standing in an open space, he’d seen a commercial airliner pass overhead, on its way from one country to another, the sun golden upon its wings. It seemed incredible to him that there were people inside, drinking wine and eating from plastic trays, pressing a button for the hostess. Did they have any idea what was going on directly below them, a nation devouring itself? He felt like a drowning man watching a ship sail by.

And afterwards, when it was finally over, he and Tejani caught up on three years of missed movies, watched Mel Gibson in
Lethal Weapon 4
, Keanu Reeves become freed from a virtual world only to return, people discover a lost island where the dinosaurs still roamed.

How desperate they’d been to get out, they could hardly articulate it. It was never so much a feeling as a frenzy. As each one of his friends, family and classmates made it over the fence, Kai had felt pleased and bereft in equal measure. He had stayed. Nenebah had stayed. The difference between the two of them was that Nenebah, alone among their friends, family and acquaintances, never experienced the desire to leave. The more people left, the more fiercely she clung. She loved the country the way a parent loves the child who wounds them most. What happens if everyone leaves? She demanded he answer her question. She’d made him feel guilty.

So now his turn has arrived and he has never felt more conflicted. For here in this building where he barely has a moment to himself, he has never been so sure of who he is. He can walk the corridors, courtyards and wards blindfolded. Out on the streets he is recognised by his patients and he in turn recognises them. The change had occurred outside of his awareness. In this place of terrifying dreams and long nights, he knows who he is.

His rubber flip-flops suck at the wet concrete. A momentary breeze sends a shower of heavy raindrops from the branches of a tree down upon him. Kai lifts his head to the sky and feels the wind trail across his face. In his pocket he finds a mint, unwraps it and places it in his mouth.

For a moment he is as he once was, before the war, during his university years. He is back there and whole again. The hospital buildings shrink, spread and grow into different buildings with different dimensions. The trees transform into flamboyant trees, like those on the campus, with white-painted trunks. The quadrangle becomes a lawn.

He looks up, and sees her. There is Nenebah, she is walking towards him. For a moment he holds her in his gaze, her long-tailed scarf, books held to her chest. Then the present reasserts itself, the buildings resume their former shape, the concrete hardens. The woman who looks like Nenebah is still there.

The woman does not look like Nenebah. It is Nenebah.

He opens his mouth to call her name, but his voice fails him. For in the next instant he sees that the door of Adrian’s apartment is open and there is Adrian, coming out after her. He sees Adrian’s hand at her back, and the answer of her slight smile, he sees that they are together. He does not know how, but he knows this beyond doubt. He stands in the courtyard while the rain falls lightly on his shoulders. And he is drowning.