Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

I barely registered the vendor as he passed me. I noticed he tried to catch my eye. I shifted my gaze and he moved on. Moments later he was seized by three men who seemed to come out of nowhere. The vendor tried to make his escape, but today wasn’t his day. The place was full of plain-clothes police. A sweep of the whole street at rush hour when the vendors were busiest. They gave him a thrashing and tossed him in the back of a Land Rover.

That and the rain held the traffic up for hours. I passed the time in a barber’s shop. Some weeks before I had been persuaded by the owner to try a moustache. I sat back in the chair while he soaped my face and scraped at the stray hairs, shaping the line of hairs on my upper lip into a neat bar, divided by a parting. I faced myself in the mirror. I was pleased with the result.

And now here was Julius, stockpiling booty in my office, crates of soft drinks and mixers, bottles of spirits. He was planning a party for the moon landing, which threatened to overwhelm the event itself.

‘Hey, Cole!’

I was hot, damp and vaguely irritated to see him. He leaned over the desk, and I caught, mixed in with his own smell, a scent of Saffia.

It almost winded me.

I know how we looked. People couldn’t understand what he saw in me, I’m sure. For I had the same thought. I was, am, a careful man. Julius’s presumptuousness was breathtaking. He had no fear of life. It was there in his fluid attitude to the ownership of possessions, in the way he spent whatever money he had in his pocket. He possessed the ability to drink himself to incoherence and back to lucidity. He would go on, carrying you with him, until all the tiredness had gone. And when, with the new light stretched across the horizon, he would drive the two of us home though he was in no fit state to do so. He would bang the bonnet of the car. ‘No fear, Cole,’ he’d shout, ‘she knows the way home by now.’ Of religion he had no need. He believed in himself. A confidence that extended even to his singing, so that years later when he was remembered, it was as a musical man. Yet the only quality you could say his voice possessed was force. Yes, Julius believed in himself. He didn’t fear death — for death was too insignificant, too small, it resided below the level of his contempt. He had survived a serious childhood illness that killed many others. He drew power from the fact of it, as though it proved he was blessed.

He believed in his own destiny and he made others believe it too. He was a seducer. Of woman, man, child or dog. To him I was company, someone to be won over, simple as that. Plus, he was easily bored.

‘Give me five, Cole!’ Our palms slapped together and slid across each other, our thumbs and forefingers clicked. He hefted a buttock up on to the edge of my desk.

‘What’s up, my friend?’

‘Nothing.’

He bent over for a closer look at me, put out his hand and lifted my chin, his face a mere six inches away. I could feel his warm breath. He gave a low whistle.

‘Suits you, Cole.’

‘Thank you.’ I decided to respond as though he was serious.

He sat back and regarded me thoughtfully a moment. ‘What have you done with Vanessa? That was one fine-looking lady. You need a woman, Cole.’ For some reason he kept using my surname, an occasional habit of his.

I shrugged. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m serious, Cole. I may be a married man but I still know a few of the ladies.’ He winked at me.

I didn’t want to enquire too closely what he meant by that. I felt vaguely unwell.

‘I shall make sure I invite somebody to the party for you. Some fine woman.’

‘Not on my account, please.’

Julius laughed at that. ‘You know, among the Mende, Cole, there is a practice that when a stranger arrives in a village he is given a woman to keep him company at night, often a daughter of the chief himself. The Europeans made much of this custom, to them it proved what people of low morals we all were. But you know why the Mende had this custom, Cole?’

I shook my head.

‘Because they know full well a man needs a woman. It is in the nature of things. A single man is trouble, a hungry jackal. So the village provides a chicken. To me, Cole, this is surely the more civilised approach. And besides, by providing a chicken of their own choosing, now they had a spy in the jackal’s lair! And the European traders thought they were being generous. They kept on coming back. Beware chickens bearing gifts, my friend.’ His laughter rolled like applause around the room.

I swallowed and pasted the facsimile of a smile upon my face.

‘You need a woman, my friend, to cheer you up. Whose tumbu you can tickle with that new moustache of yours.’

Julius’s worry beads, the way I thought of them then. He often carried, in his pockets, some piece of metal, an engine part or piece of some structure, something used to demonstrate a principle to his students or perhaps just something picked up and pocketed in the course of the day. That afternoon it was a nut and bolt he spun on the surface of my desk. I watched his hands, spinning the bolt round and round. Fingers. Knuckles. Fingertips. Nails. The smooth brown surface of the desk. Smooth like skin. Julius’s fingers playing, grazing, stroking, touching. Saffia.

Exams over, the students headed home for the summer break, although, of course, in our country it was the height of the rains. We had, since Independence, stuck with the British scholastic timetable. I had nowhere to go, no family to visit, and I lacked the funds to travel. Banville Jones had secured for himself a fellowship overseas, recommended by the Dean. I wondered how he had managed it. A vacancy had arisen within the department with the departure of another colleague. Some months earlier I would have assumed it was mine for the asking, but now I was less confident. I decided to devote the holidays to completing at least two more papers, and to this end I spent hours each week going through the archives in the university library. I planned to keep myself busy.

Still, I faced the thought of the long break with apprehension. I relied on my regular contact with Julius to see Saffia. Julius was a spontaneous sort of fellow, incapable of planning ahead by more than a few minutes. He would doubtless eschew the mundane rituals involved in keeping in touch. And there were only so many times I could contrive encounters with Saffia, especially in the light of recent, dismaying events.

Meanwhile the day of the moon landing approached. That at least afforded me an evening in Saffia’s company. Julius was as excited as a small child on his birthday. My office had become a drinks store. Kekura was charged with setting up the equipment for the broadcast. I had promised to secure extra chairs, to which end I had placed a request with the Dean to borrow some from the lecture theatre.

In the streets, the fever spread. Women clothed themselves in commemorative batiks and threaded their hair into concoctions contrived to produce the illusion of upward velocity, named their male offspring Apollo. The chief Imam included a denunciation of the mission in his call to prayers. Our own pastor called the enterprise godless, warned against the perils of man’s egotism and pointed, if proof were needed, to the fact of the craft’s pagan name. Julius thought the whole thing hilarious and begged me to invite my pastor to the house for the party. He would invite the Imam, for the pleasure, he said, of hearing them agree on something.

That afternoon in town I collected my suit from the cleaner’s and, on the spur of the moment, I entered a tailor’s shop. At some level I think I felt emboldened by my new moustache, though I would never describe myself as a vain man. I had not the physique to encourage vanity. Still, that day I decided I’d had enough of the starched white shirts I was in the habit of ordering three at a time. The tailor took my measurements and showed me a number of different styles, flicking through the pages of the catalogue. I pointed one out, he smiled and complimented me on my choice. Discussion of the price, as ever, turned out to be a somewhat lengthier business. We reached a compromise on the understanding the shirts would be ready for collection within forty-eight hours, in time for the party.