The Memory of Love (43 page)

CHAPTER 44

‘Yes please. Mr Adrian?’

Adrian turns his gaze towards Salia, suddenly aware he hasn’t heard a word the man has been saying. ‘Sorry. Can you repeat that?’

Salia regards Adrian for a moment, then repeats, with no hint of hurry or exasperation, what he has just said. From his other side Adrian is aware of Ileana watching him. He closes his eyes and takes a breath. With an effort of will he focuses upon the sound of Salia’s voice.

An hour later the morning meeting is over. Adrian collects his papers for the group therapy session from the desk he keeps in Ileana’s office. Ileana follows him, stands in the middle of the room watching him.

‘Carry on ignoring me and I might throw something.’

He turns to her. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit distracted.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t mean you to actually tell me about it. What I said was
tell
me about it. I can see you’re distracted. You OK?’

‘Yes,’ nods Adrian. He bends his head back to his desk, hears Ileana grunt and move away. He looks up. ‘Are you free for an early lunch?’

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I need to go and see my landlord about renewing the lease. Another time?’

‘Sure.’

Minutes later Adrian makes his way over to the meeting room. He unlocks the door and leaves it standing ajar, moves around opening windows, lifting chairs from the stacks at the end of the room and arranging them into a circle. In his mind he returns to the events of the night a week before. Mamakay’s silence in the car. His own effort not to let himself be disturbed by it, though he was for some reason, and profoundly.

In the end he’d said, ‘He called you Nenebah.’ The only way he could think of to get inside.

‘Yes,’ she’d replied, her face turned away from him.

‘Is that your name then?’ He sounded irritable, he knew, already the jealous lover. An image of Kai, of his bare arm and shoulder as he shrugged on a shirt.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Sorry, but I don’t understand.’ The emotion moved so fast. He felt ridiculous. He strove for a normal tone. ‘I thought your name was Mamakay.’

‘Mamakay is my house name. I told you I was named after my aunt. Nenebah is my real name.’ She shrugged. He hated the gesture, the indifference it projected.

‘I see.’ And he’d thought he knew so much about her.

It turned out he didn’t even know her name.

A sound makes Adrian look up. Adecali has entered the room, wordlessly, and is helping with the chairs. Adecali is making progress, though he continues to be haunted by smells, most notably of cooked meat. Two weeks ago a trader set up outside the front gate of the hospital selling skewers of beef roasted over a charcoal fire. Ileana and Adrian had bought some for lunch, so had a few of the men who were not confined to their wards. One of them carried his portion back to a bed near Adecali. Ten minutes later Adrian was called to the ward, to find Adecali straining at his chains, blowing snot and saliva. Since that day Adrian has held several private sessions with Adecali, trying to encourage him to talk, which sometimes the young man did at an insistent babble and sometimes not at all. He was punctilious, though. Never missed a session. Small steps, steps in the sand. But in the right direction.

‘Thank you, Adecali,’ says Adrian.

The other patients are beginning to appear, shuffling in to take their seats one by one. Whatever scepticism there had been among the staff at the hospital about his sessions – and Adrian had overheard one or two remarks from among the attendants – the men seemed to want them. Adrian found it had soon become unnecessary to go round the wards, for like Adecali they came of their own accord. Once, held up by the traffic, he arrived late to find them all waiting for him in silence outside the locked door.

‘OK,’ says Adrian, when they are all seated. ‘Who is going to begin today? Anyone?’

The night before Adrian had slept fitfully and woken with the sun on his face. Mamakay was already up, preparing breakfast. They sat and ate in the yard. Adrian wished it was a Saturday so he didn’t have to go anywhere. He wanted to talk to her. There had been no lovemaking the night before and now they ate in silence. Adrian put down his plate.

‘You were close then?’ he asked her. They both knew exactly what he was talking about.

‘Yes, we were together when I was at university. I haven’t seen him for a long time. He wanted to go abroad. It’s what he always talked about.’

‘He’s a surgeon.’ Then when she didn’t say anything more, he asked, ‘He was the one you told me about. The one you said you loved.’

And she’d chosen not to spare him at all, looked away and simply nodded.

Five o’clock. Something is burning outside the walls of the hospital. A smell of woodsmoke, scented like cedar, the smell that woke Adrian a night soon after his arrival, the night he’d met Kai. He’d looked out into the corridor and seen a woman give birth to a dead baby. Kai was the first person Adrian had talked to properly since his arrival; they’d become friends. That was six months ago. How much has he learned since then? Sometimes it feels like a great deal, other times not much at all. Adrian lifts his eyes to the sky for a brief moment, enters the darkened corridor and makes his way to Elias Cole’s room.

In his work Adrian has met many kinds of liar: pathological liars, compulsive liars, patients with different kinds of personality disorders. Broadly speaking though, when it comes down to it, there are just two types of liar: the fantasist and the purist. The fantasists are the embroiderers. Simplest to spot because they have a tendency to contradict. A liar should have a good memory, said Quintilian. The trouble with the fantasists is that, in their eagerness to impress, they become careless about the details. The purists, as Adrian thinks of them, are of distinctly cooler temperament. Intellectually-minded, they understand the fallibility of memory, prefer to lie by omission. The silent lie that can neither be proved nor disproved. The fantasists and the purists have one thing in common, and this they share with all liars – the pathological, the compulsive, the delusional, the ones who suppress and repress unbearable memories. They all lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth. And one thing Adrian’s two decades of study and practice have taught him is to discover the purpose served by the lie.

Adrian raises his fist and knocks on the door of Elias Cole’s room. He cannot decide if he is in the mood for this or not. As he steps over the threshold the scent of woodsmoke disappears, to be replaced by another smell: clinical, like powdered aspirin. There is a new sound, too, a whirring. The oxygen concentrator.

‘So it came at last,’ he says.

Elias Cole removes the mask from his face. ‘I take it as a sign of how bad things must be. People like to leave it to the end before they salve their consciences.’

How true, thinks Adrian. He sits down, crosses his legs and laces his fingers, copybook pose of the clinical psychologist. ‘What did you want to talk about today? Was there anything in particular?’

The last time they had been talking about Mamakay, but Adrian would rather speak of anything now than her. To his relief Elias Cole shakes his head slowly.

‘I’ve told you what there is to tell. Now all I want is to die in peace.’

For the first time Adrian feels a faint, cold gust of hostility towards Elias Cole. He says, ‘Something that interests me.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why did Johnson agree to release you? After your arrest?’

Adrian sees Elias Cole shift slightly, and turn to look at him. His surprise is small but evident. ‘The Dean knew Johnson. He had some way to him. That was how he was able to come and see me when I was in custody. But for him I would probably still be there to this day.’ He laughs softly, abruptly.

Adrian doesn’t laugh. He continues, ‘The Dean asked you to cooperate …’

The old man interrupts. ‘I told Johnson what I knew, which anyway was nothing of consequence.’

‘But you said you’d already told him everything. You held nothing back.’

‘I had tried. Johnson was a stubborn man. He wouldn’t believe me until the Dean’s intervention.’

Adrian continues, gently insistent. He has never spoken to Elias Cole this way, has taken him at his word. ‘When we spoke about those events, or rather when you told me what had happened, you used a very specific word. You used the word “arrangement”. The Dean said all you needed to do was come to an arrangement with Johnson.’

‘Yes.’

‘Repeating what you had already told Johnson doesn’t quite fit the description, somehow. Surely he would have wanted something more. As you say he was a proud man. Some sign of victory would have been important.’

Elias Cole is silent. He purses his lips, turns his head away from Adrian. He lifts the plastic mask, places it over his mouth and nose and inhales. Finally he speaks. ‘The Dean asked me to give Johnson my notebooks. I used to write down much of what happened. That’s something I told you. They were not diaries as such, more notes to myself, aides memoires. There were times, dates, places, people’s names. I kept a note of Julius’s movements and Saffia’s. It was something I did. There was a note of the first time I had seen him, addressing the students – although, of course, on that occasion I was sent along by the Dean. Also of the first dinner I attended at their house. The conversation when Julius proposed a toast to the first black man on the moon. The same phrase that appeared in the newspaper editorial. I think I even made a note of the music that was played. It was all there. Johnson pounced on it, of course.’

‘And that was the reason they released you?’

‘Yes. It was the reason they released me. And the reason they held Julius, too. They thought they had something to go on. But for those notebooks he would not have been kept there for those extra days.’

‘You told me you were angry with Julius – for the position you found yourself in.’

‘It was a very distressing experience. You’ve never been in such a situation: what would you know?’

Adrian is silent, his fingers on his lips, regarding Elias Cole.

Elias Cole averts his gaze, looks to the blank wall. He says with bitterness, ‘Julius acted as though he was my friend. All the times he would stop by my office, take me for a drive. We went gambling together. They borrowed my office, my typewriter. And he never trusted me enough to tell me.’

‘He betrayed you?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But you were betraying him.’

So fast it comes straight off the back of Adrian’s words, the old man snaps, ‘Julius’s betrayal of me was far greater.’

Mamakay stands up and moves several paces across the verandah. Barefoot, soundless. She picks up the clarinet, places her fingers across the keys. Moonlight reflects upon the polished surface of the silver. She is wearing a sarong twisted and tied around her neck. She replaces the clarinet and comes back to where Adrian is sitting. Her face is drawn and thoughtful, she pulls gently at her lower lip contemplating all that he has told her. A moment later she stands up again. Adrian waits.

He has taken the risk of repeating the afternoon’s conversation with Elias Cole, the admission which he sees as a small breakthrough. Whether he cares to admit it to himself or not, he wants to stir her. He wants to find a way under her skin. He wants to make her think about him and nobody else, to show her what he can do. He wants to matter.

She disappears downstairs and comes back with two beers, hands him one.

‘That man, Johnson.’ She is silent, resting the bottle against her forehead, her eyes closed. For a minute she remains that way, then she looks up, directly into Adrian’s eyes, wags a finger twice in the air. ‘My mother.’ She stands up and walks to the railing, turns around to face him. ‘How can I describe my mother to you? She was an extremely composed woman to the point it seemed she was holding something back. It upset me when I was older, after I found out about Vanessa, she had never once confronted him.

‘One day, when I was quite young, we were in town. It was a Saturday. My mother would go to the supermarket, the dressmaker, the covered market for vegetables and meat. She’d take me along to help carry things and keep her company. This one time we had just come out of the supermarket in town – down where all the money changers are nowadays, that was where the supermarket used to be. We were leaving when a man came in. He spoke to my mother, said hello to her, he even used her name. And she cut him dead. It was the first time I had ever seen my mother be so rude. I was astonished. I felt sorry for him. We walked straight past him. I turned back and saw him standing there, his wire basket in his hand. Thin as a bird, in his black suit.’

She sits down and picks up a leaf of paper lying on the small table, begins to fold it, an occasional habit of hers. Adrian has seen it before. He watches her now. She is folding and refolding the paper, fashioning something which she pulls apart before it is completed.

‘Eight or nine years later, just after my mother died, the same man came to our house. My father asked me to bring a bottle of whisky to the study. You know how I knew he was somebody important? Because I carried through the Red Label and my father made a big show of sending me back to fetch the Black Label. It was him, I’m sure. This man’s name was Johnson. He was there a few days before the trouble on the campus, and he was there again a few days afterwards.’ She continues slowly, ‘Johnson must have been a part of it. I told my father who was going to the party. My father told Johnson. My father used me to betray my friends.’