The Memory of Love (5 page)

‘Papaya!’ says Adrian, recognising the fruit; he has never seen one so large.

‘Pawpaw,’ replies the other.

‘Pawpaw. Is that what you call papaya?’

Kai Mansaray turns and looks at him briefly. ‘That’s what it is.’ He takes a bite. ‘Netherlands?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Kai Mansaray eats rapidly, hunched over the table, arms either side of his plate, as though ready to defend his food. ‘Where you’re from.’ He tears a hunk of bread from the loaf and points it at Adrian’s chest.

‘I’m English.’ Adrian frowns. Obvious, surely.

‘OK. Only we get a lot of Dutch. Medical or emergency? You’re not in surgical.’

‘Actually, neither.’ Adrian takes a sip of his coffee. ‘I’m a psychologist.’

The other man looks up from his food at that, raises his eyebrows momentarily, inclines his head by slowly tilting his chin to one side. ‘Ok-ay.’ The word is spoken in two parts, split down the centre as neatly as if he’d used an axe. As though he is considering the statement carefully, examining its likelihood. Adrian might just have confessed to being the Grand Old Duke of York. ‘So do they make you pay for this place?’ he says, changing the subject.

Adrian tells him and Kai snorts by way of response. ‘For how long? I mean, I take it you haven’t immigrated.’

‘I’m seconded for a year.’

‘So you don’t plan on coming to live here for good. No, well, I thought not. If you did you’d be the first immigrant in two hundred years.’ Kai Mansaray laughs at his own joke, a raucous, ear-splitting sound. ‘We don’t even have any tourists. Except your sort, that is.’

‘My sort?’

The visitor takes another bite of bread. ‘Nothing. What I meant to say to you was, “Welcome!”’ He raises his coffee cup.

‘Thank you,’ says Adrian, and sips at the cold remnants of his cup.

Silence for the rest of the meal, more or less. When they are through eating, Adrian picks up the plates and moves towards the dustbin.

‘Hold it!’ The other man reaches out, removes the plates from Adrian’s hands and scrapes the remainders of the meal into the discarded plastic bag. For a moment he holds it over the dustbin in his outstretched hand, then bends over and peers into the hollow of the bin and grunts, ‘Ants.’

He scoops up the bin, unties the plastic bag and upends the entire contents into the bag, juice bottle, biscuit pieces, ants and all, ties the handles of the bag and drops it into the bin. At the sink Adrian watches him wash his hands with meticulous care, examining the cuticles and searching under the fingernails for grains of dirt.

From the doorway he raises his hand in a salute. ‘So. Next time.’ He slides his feet into his flip-flops.

‘Yes,’ nods Adrian. ‘Next time.’

And watches the door close.

CHAPTER 3

The house where Saffia and Julius lived was in a web of narrow streets in the hills above the city. The paintwork was pale pink, sun-streaked, with dark-pink recesses and a tin roof. An orange tree, laden with fruit, bent over the house, which was reached through an open iron gate. I was early, I knew – but nonetheless I climbed the steps. Still sweating from the uphill walk, I paused and ran my finger around the inside of my collar. A band of stray dogs raced past the gate. I knocked. Moments later there was Saffia, running her palm over her hair and smoothing her skirt. Julius was not yet back from the university. I made an offer to walk a little and return. Naturally she demurred.

‘No, no. You’re welcome. Please, come in,’ she said and stepped back.

I followed her through to a verandah at the back. The house looked directly out over the city.

‘A beautiful home.’ My own voice rang in my ears, the words had come out too loudly, a declamation. Moreover, strictly speaking, it was not the house, which was a modest affair, so much as the view that commanded attention.

‘
I
like it,’ she replied, as though she recognised my compliment for the hollow thing it was. ‘We chose it for the garden, really.’

I hadn’t noticed the garden as such, but now I could see what she meant. It stretched out from below us, and swept one’s gaze up towards the view, rather in the way, or so I am told, an artist composes a painting to draw the eye in a particular direction.

‘Let me perhaps show you before the others get here.’

For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about until I remembered the ostensible reason for my visit. Saffia picked up a basket and a pair of secateurs and led the way down a spiral staircase into the garden.

A pair of fan palms marked the two far corners of the garden and were reached by a network of shaded gravel paths which led down descending terraces. Travellers’ palms, she told me, the leaves always pointed east and west. There were ferns, some the size of trees. Fruit trees: almonds, lime, guava, a great breadfruit tree. Cumuli of white bougainvillea darkly edged with another kind of climbing flower, sweet-smelling with heavy violet heads. Here and there, perhaps where a path divided, or between the roots of a tree, clay pots of plants. And along the far wall more differently sized pots, some holding a single specimen, others containing artful arrangements of flowers and shrubs. She raised them, she told me as we walked, for weddings and the like.

Presently we reached an opening and there, a crowd of lushly dressed aristocrats, the Harmattan lilies. They stood magnificent, multi-hued, every shade of a dying sun. Their stems were fleshy, muscular, naked without the modesty of leaves. The flowers thick-petalled and brazenly open, revealing sweeping filaments and shiny, sticky stigmas.

‘The Portuguese brought them from South America. The owners of sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies liked to plant them around their houses. The bulbs were very valuable.’

I had never known that and said so.

‘They grow like weeds,’ she continued lightly. ‘No matter where you put them. No matter at all. In fact when these ones have finished flowering I’ll have to dig a few of them out. I can give you some bulbs.’

‘I’d like that,’ I replied. ‘I’d like that very much indeed.’ There was a moment of silence between us. Our eyes met. She looked away. Somewhere inside me, an emotion bloomed.

Saffia began to cut stems of flowers, for the table. I watched her with her back turned to me, standing against the light. The shape of her neck, the angle of her head, her braids of hair which she smoothed from time to time with the back of her hand. When she turned to look at me, I forced my gaze back to the flowers.

We settled on the verandah watching the light slip from the sky. The scent of night blooms drifted up from the garden. Saffia served me a Star beer and poured herself a glass of ginger ale. I heard the sound of the door and Julius’s voice. Laughter rolled through the empty house. I stood up quickly.

‘I should organise a sweepstake,’ Julius was saying. ‘I could make money from people like you.’ And he appeared accompanied by two other men. One of them he slapped so heartily on the back the chap was fairly propelled out on to the verandah. I recognised him vaguely from the campus.

If Julius was surprised to see me already there he gave no hint of it. Introductions followed. Ade Yansaneh, the one I thought I knew. Kekura Conteh, who worked for the state broadcasting station. They greeted Saffia with familiarity. Julius bent and kissed the top of her head. Without turning she raised a hand and lightly touched his cheek. They demonstrated their affection in the way Europeans did. I found it strange Julius was unembarrassed by it. Saffia stood up and slipped away, returning with three beers and glasses upon a tray. I sat back down. Julius produced extra chairs. Saffia opened the bottles. The general shuffling subsided.

Julius turned to me, he was grinning. ‘Ade doesn’t believe the Americans will make it to the moon.’

‘It’s not possible,’ said Ade firmly, though without elaborating. Instead he shook his head for emphasis.

‘Why not? The technology is there. The Russians have proved it. Several times.’

‘A man was nearly lost in space.’ This from Kekura. I realised I recognised his voice from the radio, high and hectoring.

‘Come now! What is it they say? How do you make an omelette without breaking a few eggs? There’s risk in everything. The point is he succeeded. He walked in space!’ Julius, who alone drank straight from the bottle, wagged his Guinness bottle at Kekura.

‘It is no place for Man,’ said Ade ponderously, as though he were repeating it now for the umpteenth time. I noticed he possessed a hairline that was almost perfectly straight. It cut across his forehead, so that the top of his head looked like a lid. A pedant’s hairline.

‘Ah Ade. You disappoint me.’

‘I can’t see what good will come of it,’ said Kekura. ‘Big men doing battle.’

‘Well,
there
you might have a point.’ Julius, who had been leaning so far back in his chair that it was balanced only upon the two rear legs, now leaned forward letting the chair fall back into place. He put his bottle on the table in front of him and surveyed it closely, as though it were a miniature spaceship. Under him the chair creaked. Beneath his bulk it looked unworthy of its task. ‘For them maybe. But not for the men working to build these machines. They’re doing it knowing that every day they are making discoveries – in science, technology, engineering. Not to reach the moon first, though that is what unites them. But because what they learn along the way will add to the sum of human knowledge. A century of work in a single decade.’ With his thumb he caught a drop of condensation as it slid down the side of the bottle. In the pause that followed I took my chance to enter the conversation.

‘They say we will be able to watch it on television.’

‘That’s right! Hey, Kekura, what do you say? We’ll go to your offices and watch it.’

Kekura inclined his head. ‘It would be my pleasure, certainly.’

‘History in the making. But I tell you something I would like to see more,’ Julius said, still staring at the bottle.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Julius looked up, his face solemn. He reached out and picked up his beer. Suddenly his face cracked into a great grin. ‘The day the first African lands on the moon!’

The laughter erupted just as Saffia opened the sliding door to call us to eat. Julius stood up holding his Guinness bottle aloft. ‘To the first black man on the moon!’

‘To the first black man on the moon,’ we echoed and drank.

I can’t remember all that was discussed that night at Saffia and Julius’s table. There was no talk of politics, as I recall. Not in the immediate sense. Later, I wondered what the conversation would have been had they not had a stranger in their midst. I ate without noticing the food. Time passed. The conversation went back and forth. A new Chinese restaurant. The road-building scheme. A new comedy show on the radio of which Kekura was producer and therefore in constant search of new material. A story was told – by Ade, I believe. It went like this: three men visited a car dealership, one an aristocratic fellow dressed in a fine gown and carrying an attaché case. A Nigerian prince looking to buy a fleet of cars. The manager of the salesroom hurried out to greet them personally. The prince shook hands, but did not deign to utter a word, leaving it to his assistants to handle the discussions. They were ready to make a cash deal. Indeed the prince had brought the money with him in his attaché case. The manager, keen to oblige, hastily agreed to allow the two retainers to take one of the latest models for a test drive. Reassured by the presence of the taciturn prince, who sat in the waiting area with his briefcase of cash upon his knee, he decided not to bother to accompany them. Time passed. One hour turned into two. The car and the two retainers showed no sign of returning. The manager decided to speak to the prince and soon realised the magnitude of his error. For this was no prince at all, but a local beggar, deaf and mute, cajoled into unwittingly acting a role for which he was perfectly suited. The attaché case was found to be filled with newspaper.

Everybody laughed, Julius so vigorously he began to wheeze. To my mind it did not seem anything in particular, but I saw a change come over Saffia. She watched with concern and seemed about to rise and go to him when Julius recovered himself. I would have given the episode no heed but for Saffia’s reaction, in the indication it gave of the quality and nature of their relationship.

When the general laughter had subsided, she asked, ‘What became of the beggar, the prince?’

Ade replied he didn’t know.

‘Well, at least he got a bath and a haircut,’ said Saffia. ‘And a new suit.’

‘He probably masterminded the whole damned thing,’ said Julius and everybody laughed again. ‘He could be driving over the border right now.’

‘That’s it! That’s it!’ cried Kekura. He grabbed Julius’s hand and shook it enthusiastically. ‘There’s the punchline. Thank you, my friend. I owe you. Whatever you want, I owe you.’

Julius smiled. Kekura stood up, almost overbalancing his chair, wiped his mouth and replaced the napkin at the side of his plate, straightened his jacket and said, ‘Well, good people, until next time.’ He turned and bowed to Saffia. ‘Another exquisite meal, madam. I thank you.’ He patted his stomach, which prompted a smile from Saffia.

I wished I had thought to praise the meal.

It was close on eleven o’clock. The curfew no longer applied; still people maintained the habit of returning home reasonably early of an evening. By midnight the streets were empty. Ade asked Kekura for a lift. Julius and Saffia rose to see them out. I stood up to shake hands. Very probably I was expected to take my leave too, but I did not.

After the door had closed the three of us remained standing. Then Julius invited me to join him for a whisky on the verandah. From a bottle of Red Label he poured us a half-tumbler of Scotch each. He handed me a glass and sat down, sideways to me, his legs stretched out in front of him. From where I sat I had a view of his profile in repose. He kept a beard, did I mention that? In those days it was a mildly unconventional act. For a long time he said nothing but stared out over the balcony railing.

I wondered where in the house Saffia was.

‘See that?’ said Julius, waving his glass at the view. Scattered lights marked the city and, farther away, the shape of the peninsula. Above us the stars. The moon was hidden behind the eaves of the house. A single, far-off light burned a tiny hole in the thick layer of black that separated earth from sky, a foreign trawler most likely. A row of moving lights made its way across a strip of blackness to and away from the peninsula.

‘When I was a child I came to live in the city with one of my aunts for a few years. My mother had passed on, you know. My aunt, she was a strict woman. Yes indeed,’ and he laughed. ‘I’d like to say I was fond of her but that would be lying. The woman was a bully. A greedy bully. She took me out of the school my father was paying fees for and she used me as her errand boy. Every day she would send me across the bay into town to deliver messages. There was a ferry in those days, a passenger ferry.’

‘I remember,’ I said. The ferry was in fact a fishing canoe, poled by a single man. I had taken it once or twice that I could remember, on the way to visit relatives. The currents in the water could be perilous.

‘Almost always I was the only child on board. The other passengers, the ones I saw every day, were protective of me. Some of them believed there was an evil spirit living under the water. You know how people are – they believed such spirits were especially drawn to children. One day, after some heavy rain, we were caught in vicious currents. The boat swung like a compass needle.’ He took a swig from his glass, leaned forward for the bottle and poured himself some more. Then he pushed it across the table towards me. ‘It lasted a few minutes. Not even that. Seconds. But everyone in the boat was terrified. I was terrified. When we reached the other side they helped me down and set me on the shore. We were all safe, but something had galvanised their mood. I don’t know why. Possibly there were those who were afraid for themselves. Anyway, whatever the cause, something happened in those moments. One of the regular passengers, a woman, insisted on accompanying me home at the end of the day to speak to my aunt. I was nervous of my aunt’s reaction, but I dared not disobey an adult. I led the woman to the house where I lived. Compared to my aunt, this woman was well-to-do. My aunt could see it. She invited the woman in while I waited outside. I have no idea what was said. But from that day on my aunt stopped sending me across the bay, in fact stopped using me as her errand boy and sent me back to school to continue learning. She honoured the arrangement my father had made with her.’