Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘Yes,’ Kai replies. ‘I loved her. I love her.’ He snorts softly again and shakes his head. Silence. Then, ‘There was never anyone else.’

Adrian rises and goes to the window. A cat moves in and out of the moon shadows, its mouth closed around a small animal, a mouse. Death everywhere. Death so ordinary. Still with his back to Kai, he says, ‘I don’t think she ever lost her feelings for you.’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘It matters. Not for me. You hate me right now, I understand that. But for her, it matters. And for you.’

‘I don’t hate you.’

‘I think she still loved you,’ says Adrian. There, he has said it now, the one thing he never let himself think, which had nevertheless tormented him. Kai and Mamakay were so much the same in so many ways; perhaps that is why Adrian had cared for both of them. He remembers his jealousy of Kai. He is jealous no longer. The feeling is gone, obliterated by everything that has happened.

A hospital porter, arriving for work, moves like a shadow along the far wall. Adrian watches him until he rounds the corner. Life going on as normal. Isn’t that what the bereaved always say? How everything seemed so normal, the day their lives were changed. The blue sky, the falling leaves, the song on the car radio, the car crash.

Nothing to do but pour more whisky.

‘She wanted the baby raised here,’ Adrian says, still with his face to the window.

‘I know,’ says Kai. I know.

‘She was happy here.’

‘We all were happy here once.’

Adrian stands at the window and does not move or say anything more. Behind him he can hear the swirl of liquid in Kai’s glass. After perhaps ten minutes he goes and sits down again. ‘There are ways, you know, of controlling the nightmares,’ he says.

Kai shrugs. The gesture sits oddly on him.

‘One day. Whenever you’re ready,’ offers Adrian. ‘There’s no hurry.’

Silence again. Suddenly Kai straightens and places his glass hard on the table.

‘Now.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s do it now. Come on.’

‘Are you serious?’

That awful shrug again. ‘Sure, I’m serious.’

Adrian takes a deep breath. ‘If you want, we’ll do it some other time.’

‘Ah,’ says Kai. ‘Come back when it’s more convenient.’

Adrian feels the inaudible snapping of one strand of his self-control. He stands and goes into the kitchen, where he leans against the worktop breathing deeply. He helps himself to a drink of water. Outside the dark has turned to grey, shifting in shades towards dawn. Adrian stands and lifts the edge of the curtain to look out of the window. An orderly is sweeping the walkways. He can hear the swish of the brush, oddly disconnected from the movements of the man, like a badly dubbed film. Kai is right. For years nobody wanted to know about the killings, the rapes. The outside world shifted its gaze, by a fraction, it was sufficient. The fragmentation of the conscience. What indeed did Adrian think he was doing here? The truth — he had never known for sure. Times he had come close to touching a kind of conviction, only to lose it again. He’d found something, finally, in Mamakay. Something else, something better. He wants to sob and scream, to ram his fist through the glass of the window. Attila is right, Kai is right. What people want is hope and last night Adrian learned what it is like to lose it. He presses his forehead against the glass.

He wants something he can never have again.

He wants to go home.

In the chair Kai sits with his eyes closed, his forearm along the armrest, fingers loosely grasping the whisky glass. For the first time Adrian notices an intravenous needle taped to the inside of his arm. There is a bloodstain on the front of his T-shirt. Adrian moves to take the glass. Kai starts, opens his eyes.

‘Go ahead. Sleep,’ says Adrian.

Kai gives a soft laugh. ‘I thought you knew, man. Sleep isn’t something I do.’ He closes his eyes again. After a while he says, ‘I was serious, you know.’

Daylight. Noise. Adrian wakes from a dream. Riding in a rickshaw on a rutted road. He noticed he was not wearing shoes. He called to the rickshaw driver to stop and climbed down to search among the market stalls for a pair of shoes. He could not find any, he began to panic. He was going to be late. Late for what, though, he did not know, couldn’t remember. Mamakay appeared and pointed to a pair of black flip-flops. ‘These will do,’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’ Adrian replied. He felt better now she was with him. She smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’ Arrows of sunlight. Around him the images disperse. Reality displaces the dream: the apartment, the events of the night before. He is stiff and weary as if he had been beaten. From outside, the sound of a cockerel calling. The juddering is still there. Adrian looks up to see Kai shaking in his sleep. He rises and touches Kai on the shoulder. ‘You’re dreaming,’ he says.

Kai opens his eyes, blinks and wipes his mouth. ‘Sorry.’ He stands and goes into the bathroom. When he emerges his face and neck, the front of his T-shirt are damp. Standing in the kitchen, Adrian feels the presence of the other man as Kai comes in to stand silently behind him. He watches the coffee granules as they dissolve into the hot water.

‘I’d be prepared to try, if you want, that is. There’s one thing we could do,’ says Adrian.

‘What’s that?’

‘It would involve returning you to the scene of whatever happened.’

‘Hypnosis.’

‘Not hypnosis. I won’t put you in a trance as such, though I will ask you to focus your concentration on what happened. It’s a way of reprocessing past events and desensitising you to the impact of them, I mean the way you think about them, if we know what those events were. In this case we do, at least you do. It can reduce the symptoms you experience, the dreams.’

‘Does it work?’

‘I believe so. But it’s only fair I warn you …’

Kai interrupts. ‘Will it make it worse?’

Adrian exhales. ‘No,’ he says.

‘Then what do I have to lose?’

Kai follows Adrian’s index finger as it switches back and forth. He can hear his eyes click in their sockets. He concentrates on keeping track of the finger. Sometimes he seems a millisecond ahead of it, sometimes a fraction of a beat behind. He is sitting on a chair, not the soft wicker armchair, but upon an upright hard chair, his feet square to the floor. Adrian sits opposite, about two feet to Kai’s right. He is holding up his index finger.

‘Keep your eyes on my finger.’

Kai follows the movement of Adrian’s finger, left to right, right to left. He feels, gradually, acutely aware of his own body, of the interlocking bones, the muscles and sinews stretched between the joints, the blood coursing throughout. He feels the hardness of the floor, the weight of his body pressing down on the soles of his feet, the physical effort it requires to sit upright, to keep his body taut and balanced.

‘Think about what you are feeling when you think about the bridge and what happened. What do you think about?’ Adrian’s voice is calm and level.

‘There was a girl. Her name was Balia.’

‘What about Balia?’

‘I couldn’t …’ Kai stops and swallows. ‘She didn’t …’ He shakes his head.

‘Keep following my finger.’

Kai concentrates on the movement of Adrian’s finger. He breathes deeply. He forces his mind to return to the past.

He is walking down the corridor of the hospital, stepping over the bodies of men, the chemical scent of blood in the air. The background noise is of shouted orders, gurney wheels, the whimpered groans of the wounded. Behind the sound of human voices comes the drum roll of machine gunfire, the bass note of mortars exploding in the hills and in the east of the city.