Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Today Lisa had called in the early morning to remind him of Kate’s eleven-plus exam. Adrian hung up and called back after ten minutes to speak to Kate. If his daughter was at all nervous, it had not shown. ‘It’s very sweet of you to call, Daddy.’ A careful, conservative child, six pounds at birth, petite and china fragile. Lisa had stayed home to look after her for the first year, and then a second, then a third, after which all talk of returning to work had ceased. Sometimes, it seemed to Adrian, he had difficulty telling where his wife ended and his daughter began, as if birth had failed to separate them. Secretly he wished Lisa would go back to work. Meanwhile Kate had grown into a child measured in thought and deed, whose transition to adulthood looked seamless, with none of the messy mistakes other children suffered.

On the telephone Adrian wished Kate luck. He was just about to tell her about the sunbird, when she interrupted him. ‘I’d better go now. So I shan’t be late.’ At times her poise unsettled him, as though she found his efforts wanting. It had not always been so. When Kate was two she’d been prone to nightmares and would insist he — not Lisa — sit by her bed until she went back to sleep. Later he would watch her sleep, wondering what such a tiny creature could possibly be dreaming about.

On the way through town he’d bought several packets of biscuits from a roadside seller. He gives them now to Kapuwa, who takes them to a table in the middle of the room, allotting them carefully among the residents of the ward. Those who can step forward do so quietly to receive their share. Kapuwa carries biscuits over to the chained men. Lamin shambles in. The whole affair is conducted with solemnity and in silence. Kapuwa moving along the line of bunks, the men raising both chained hands to receive the biscuit, followed by a nod or grunt of thanks. Adrian wonders what it reminds him of, then realises. Kapuwa looks like a priest giving communion.

And afterwards, passing through the ward, he no longer notices the smell. The sound of his footsteps reassuringly solid. Adrian feels happier than he has in many weeks, months. Years.

Today she is dressed in a patterned blue lappa and a T-shirt bearing a picture of a dolphin. The T-shirt is too big for her and slips from one shoulder, a slender bone to which flesh and skin cling. Her feet are bare. Forty-three. Two years older than Adrian, the same age as Lisa. Adrian thinks of the fine lines on Lisa’s skin. Agnes’s face is unblemished, she weighs no more than a girl. She could be twenty or she could be sixty. The years are carried not upon her body, but in the light of her eyes.

Today, too, another development. Salia, who must have been waiting for him to arrive, intercepted him within yards of the gate and handed him a gold chain.

She sits facing him, her forearms on the armrests of the chair. This time she looks less often at Salia. She is calm, her voice contains little inflection or emotion. Adrian has less trouble understanding. Time spent helping Ileana with her rounds in the hospital has familiarised him to accents and patterns of the language.

Agnes. She was born and married, she tells him, in a town to the north of the city; her husband worked at the government agricultural project raising different varieties of fruit and vegetables. Dwarf bananas, whose yield equalled and even surpassed the ordinary ones. Pawpaws, larger than the local variety. Guavas, limes, tomatoes and vegetables. He kept a few seeds back for her and she grew them on her own plot at the back of the house and traded them in the market. In time she began to carry them to the city once a week to sell outside the supermarkets to white women. She bore five children, of whom two returned. Both were boys. The girls all survived. Naasu. Yalie. Marian.

Naasu, the eldest, was a helpful child and clever. When she passed her school certificate they gave her a party with sweets and drinks of coloured water. As soon as she finished with school Naasu got a job at the department store in the city. By then, a bag of rice had become so much more expensive. And some months too, Agnes’s husband’s salary at the government nurseries went unpaid.

Sometimes Agnes visited Naasu at the store on days when she went into town to sell her produce. Naasu would leave the counter where she sold cosmetics and take her to the places she and the other girls had lunch, one place in particular called the Red Rooster. Agnes enjoyed herself although it seemed wrong to spend money on food cooked by somebody else. They ate the food out of paper boxes. Afterwards Agnes would collect up the boxes and take them home, though Naasu laughed and tried to persuade her to leave them. Other times Naasu brought home tiny bottles of perfume she said were for giving out to the customers. Agnes saved them to wear on special occasions. Ah, Naasu looked so fine in the clothes she wore to work, though Alfred didn’t like the way she painted her face. Naasu explained she must wear the cosmetics herself, so that the customers could see how they looked. However, in deference to her father, she left home with her face bare. She had to pay for the cosmetics out of her own money; for some reason this knowledge appeased Alfred.

Agnes had never been inside the shop during opening hours, but there were times Naasu let her in through the back after the store was closed. She walked through the empty halls gazing at the displays, the imported fabrics, the shoes with long, narrow heels, the pale dummies with pink pouting mouths. She touched them all, except the dummies, which for some reason frightened her. Naasu laughed and showed her the storeroom, where the disembodied arms and legs were stacked in piles.

Another time a bird flew in. It swooped through the wide doorways from hall to hall and perched on the shoulder of a mannequin.

Naasu no longer works at the store, Agnes tells him. She herself has not been back to the store for many years.

She is not dissembling, this Adrian can see. In turn he doesn’t contradict her, but says, ‘Tell me about the first trip you made, the first one you remember making that you didn’t plan to make.’

It was maybe a year ago. Harmattan time again. It began in the same way as every one since, with dreams so real she could not escape them. She woke in the morning with the soles of her feet dirty; she must have gone out of the house to use the toilet and forgotten her slippers, though she had no memory of doing so. The dreams brought on a headache and she remembered waking in the morning with a blurred patch in the centre of her vision. Then suddenly everything turned black, leaving only a circle of light. She sent the girl out to buy medicine because Naasu wasn’t at home, she had travelled to the wedding of a classmate in another town, she had been gone for two days and was not due for two more.

All that morning Agnes had a strong sense something was about to happen. She went to the door to see if the girl was on her way back from the pharmacy. But even after the child had returned, Agnes found herself rising to go and check at the door over and over. She forced herself to sit down. Anxiety beat in her breast like a bird’s wings, like the bird trapped in the department store. Still she couldn’t stay in the chair for long. She called the child to come and they set about preparing the evening meal. The pressure in Agnes’s skull was joined by a sound like the rushing of air. Her own voice as she gave instructions to the child sounded like somebody else calling from another room. She wished Naasu was home. She tried to block out the sounds and concentrate on what she was doing, but all the time she felt as if she were dreaming, as if standing there cooking with the child, watching her hands slicing meat, was all part of the dream.