Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘Hey, my man. You’re almost too big for that. How goes it?’

The child doesn’t reply, but pulls Kai’s arm around him and buries his face in his side. Together they walk up to the house.

‘Is your mother home?’

‘Yes. But she’s gone out again. She told me to tell you. To Yeama,’ Abass answers in his deep, little man’s voice.

Yeama is a neighbour whose sister-in-law died in childbirth. Yeama has been left with the infant. The father, serving with the army on the northern border, has no idea yet of either the arrival of his daughter or the death of his new wife. Abass’s mother, Kai’s cousin, makes visits bearing baby clothes and tins of formula to Yeama’s tiny house. The child was born prematurely: Kai doesn’t imagine she’ll live too long.

‘How hungry are you? Can you eat again?’

Abass nods.

‘Good,’ says Kai, squeezing the boy’s skinny shoulder.

In the kitchen an aunt sits on a stool in the corner, her chin in her hand, nodding in sleep. At the sound of him she grunts and rises to help, but Kai gently resists and she shuffles off, wrapping her lappa about her, still half asleep. Doubtless they’ve left something in the pot for him, but today he wants to cook. At the worktop he unpacks his purchases. He slices the onions, chops each finger of okra into a dozen pieces. He loves the routine and rhythm of preparing food. It brings him to a feeling of peace, being able to close off a part of his mind, just as he was in surgery, putting the cast on Foday’s leg, or is sometimes suturing a wound, tying off the ends stitch after stitch. Operating affords him a privacy, an escape from the world into a place which has its own narratives, its own emergencies, but which is a less random world, one he can control with his skills. Cooking, though less absorbing, does something similar.

In the corner of the room Abass sits on the stool in the corner, twirling a piece of string around his fingers.

‘So what did you do at school today?’

The child shrugs. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing at all?’

Abass shrugs again.

‘So how did it go, this doing nothing? You sat at your desk and stared out of the window.’ Kai takes a pepper, halves it and dices it swiftly.

‘Yes,’ says Abass, grinning. ‘That’s exactly what we did.’

‘Ah, so you did do something. You sat and you stared. Was that good? What did you see?’

A giggle. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I was looking out of the window this morning. Do you know what I saw?’

‘No.’

‘I saw fifty orange monkeys racing by. Did they come your way?’

Abass’s grin widens. ‘Yes. They did. They ran past the school window.’

‘That sounds interesting. Did your teacher see them, too?’

‘Mrs Turay? No. Because she was facing the blackboard.’

‘What about the other kids?’

‘They were looking at the teacher.’

‘So it was just you. Lucky old you. What else did you see?’

‘Umm.’

‘When I saw the orange monkeys, I noticed they were being followed by a brass band.’

‘Yes. I saw the brass band, too. And …’

‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin?’

‘And all the rats and all the children,’ Abass claps and bounces on the stool. ‘The angry townspeople, the mayor.’

‘One Foot Jombee. The Hunting Devil.’

‘Umm. Umm. A talking sheep!’

‘Now that’s a good one. Can it predict the future?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do arithmetic?’

‘Yes. It can do everything.’

‘Well, maybe you should have given the talking, mathematically-minded sheep your seat in the class while you went and joined the parade. Do you think Mrs Turay would have noticed?’

This last sends Abass into a fit of giggles. Kai carries the pot outside and places it on the fire. There is a stove in the kitchen, but cooking gas is frequently in short supply. And anyway, Kai’s aunts prefer to cook on charcoal. For Kai there is something elemental about it, like bathing in a stream or making a journey by foot.

While the food cooks he goes to wash, dousing himself in water from the bucket in the corner of the bathroom. In his room he slips on a clean T-shirt and a pair of cotton drawstring trousers. Abass sits and waits for him, perched on a set of drawers crammed with papers.

‘Can I sleep here tonight?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘Yes.’

Kai laughs. Abass regards it as a privilege to sleep in Kai’s room and dreams of the day when the room will be his.

‘OK, well, let’s see.’

Together they carry plates of food out to the bench on the verandah, where they eat and watch the world as it goes by.

A rush of air, he can feel his cheeks distort with the force of it. His stomach flips over. He is falling. Falling. The stinging slap of water.

He wakes with a jolt convinced he has levitated, that he may actually have felt the impact of the bed. It takes several minutes for his breathing and his heart rate to return to normal. When it does he can hear the ticking of his watch on the night stand, the howl of dogs calling to one another in the night, the same wavering notes endlessly repeated. He gets up and picks his way through the house. The odd murmur, the occasional sigh accompany his passage. By his reckoning it is around four, the darkness has begun to lift. This is the third night in a row and the lack of sleep is beginning to tell on him. If tonight he doesn’t get a few more hours it will start to affect his work, his concentration, even his hands. He sits and waits for sleep, though he knows it may be as far off as the coming dawn. After an hour he rises and goes back into the house, only partially retracing his steps, to Abass’s room. The child lies asleep on the bed. He picks up the child’s light body and leaves the room. Abass’s thumb falls from his mouth, his hand trails over Kai’s shoulder.

Never waking, the child tucks himself into the crook of Kai’s body and replaces his thumb. Kai lies still and lets his mind follow the rhythm of the child’s breathing until it drowns the howling of the dogs. Until he sleeps.

The static on the line sounds like the breathing of unseen listeners.

‘Can you hear me?’ Adrian’s words, relayed six thousand miles, bounce straight back to him.

A pause, then Lisa’s voice. ‘Yes, I can hear you.’ Around the sound of her voice images cluster. He sees her standing in the yellow light of the kitchen, her arm wrapped around her waist, leaning against the worktop, one leg bent, cradling the phone in her neck, smoothing out a strand of her hair with her hand, the way she used to when they first married.

‘Sorry about the line,’ he says.

‘It’s OK.’

‘How is everything?’

‘Everything’s fine.’ They talk for a few minutes. Kate has chipped a tooth, an appointment at the orthodontist made for Tuesday week. The old apple tree behind the conservatory might need to come down. Dinner the night before with friends of theirs, some of whom had asked after him, had asked what he was doing. The way she reports this makes it clear she was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer.

Adrian says nothing, instead he tells her the reason for his call. ‘You’ll have to go up to my office. Pick up the phone in there.’

‘I’m already in your office. Go ahead and tell me what you want. I have you on speakerphone.’

The image he has been holding of her fragments. He closes his eyes, scans the shelves of his office from memory and directs her to each book. When she is finished, she comes back to the phone, her breathing quickened by the exertion. He adds the names of several other texts and asks her to order them up for him. He pauses, he wants to tell her what is happening to him here. The man in the private room. The woman at the hospital. What he is looking out upon now. A dying sun, a transparent orb against a grainy sky.