Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Mid-afternoon he is doing the rounds with Ileana.

‘How is Mamakay?’

‘She’s well.’

‘I liked her,’ said Ileana.

‘And she liked you.’ Adrian is aware of Ileana’s brown eyes watching him. He does not meet her gaze, but pretends to peruse the notes in his hand.

‘Be careful, won’t you?’

He turns over a leaf, says as casually as he can, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Even he can hear the false note in his own voice.

‘You know very well what I mean, my dear. You’re a psychologist.’

Just then Salia approaches and nothing more is said. Today several patients are ready for discharge, among them Abdulai, the young man whom Adrian brought to the hospital and who in turn first brought Adrian. He is clean now, drug-free for the duration of his stay. Attila has signed his release. Salia has arranged a final consultation between Abdulai and Adrian. Adrian is touched by the thought, for Abdulai has been under Attila’s care. He thanks Salia, who nods formally, before retreating from the ward, his shoes sighing upon the gritty lino floor.

The young man sitting on a chair before Adrian is a different soul to the person Adrian brought to the hospital. He has no memory of that first day when Adrian collected him from the police station and brought him to the hospital.

‘The important thing,’ says Adrian, ‘is how you feel now.’

‘I feel well, Doctor. I feel well in my body.’ He is sitting with his shoulders bent forward, his hands buried between his thighs. His voice contains a slight tremor, a hesitancy, otherwise he appears perfectly normal, if a little nervous.

‘And your head?’

‘Yes, I am well in my head. Except sometimes I feel afraid.’

‘What is it you are afraid of, can you tell me?’

‘Things in my dreams.’ He shakes his head hard.

‘That should improve. Who are you going to? Do you have family?’

Abdulai nods his head. His family were the ones who had delivered him to the police station. As Adrian recalls the police suggested Abdulai had become violent.

‘How will you get home?’

‘Mr Salia has given me money for the poda poda .’

‘Your family can’t come and collect you?’

‘My mother has passed on. My father is working.’

At the door Adrian gives Abdulai some of his own money and watches the young man walk to the front gate. He possesses not a single item of luggage, nothing but the clothes on his back. He has spent several weeks in chains, received three meals a day. A few sessions with Attila is all the rehabilitation he’s undergone. Now he is being discharged.

Later, talking to Ileana, watching her perform her tea-making ceremony, Adrian asks, ‘What will happen to him?’

Ileana shrugs and smokes. ‘If he manages to stay off drugs he might be all right.’

‘There’s no follow-up, then?’

‘Even if you could get people to attend, who would run the sessions?’

‘I could.’

‘You’ll be gone in a few months.’ The cigarette in the corner of Ileana’s mouth bobs up and down as she speaks. Adrian watches the length of ash grow, drooping as it increases in length. Just as he is about to push an ashtray towards her, Ileana removes the cigarette and expertly flicks the ash out of the window. ‘Come on. Let’s drink these in the garden.’

Sitting beside him on the bench, Ileana says, ‘There are places he can go. The born-again churches are having a boom time. No surprises there. Same goes for the traditional healers. People believe in them, that’s what is important. Though the traditional healers are really quite interesting. Attila has a lot of respect for them. Some of the antipsychotic drugs we use they were on to hundreds of years ago.’

‘Really? Like what, for example, I mean what drugs?’

‘Reserpine is one I know of.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ says Adrian.

‘No, well,’ says Ileana in a voice that says she is not surprised. ‘We call them witch doctors.’

To Ileana Adrian had made no mention of the fact he was meeting Mamakay later in the day. She is reading now, as she waits for him, her head bent over the open book, an empty bitter-lemon bottle on the table before her, sitting in the clear sunlight at a table with two students. For a moment to Adrian it looks as though she could be anywhere in the world. He slows his pace, to give himself time to look at her. She is unaware of him, lost in the pages of her book. Today she is wearing a fitted print blouse, which exposes her collarbones, and a matching skirt reaching down to her ankles. On her feet a pair of tooled leather sandals. Her hair is tied up high and held back by a scarf. She bites the edge of one thumb, uses the other to follow her progress down the page. She is smiling slightly and he knows, though he cannot see it, that her front teeth overlap very slightly. Her eyebrows are long wings. There is a mole, a concentration of darkness set against dark skin, high on her cheekbone and another below the corner of her mouth. She is not conventionally pretty, the kind of woman Lisa would have called handsome, damning with faint praise a beauty considered to possess too much strength.

Suddenly she snorts, laughs out loud and looks up.

‘Good book?’

She raises the volume to show him the cover. Three Men in a Boat , Jerome K. Jerome. About the last thing he was expecting.

‘Have you read it?’ she asks.

‘Not since I was fourteen. Which bit were you reading?’

‘When they stop for lunch at Kempton Park.’

‘And the man tries to move them on?’

‘That’s the part! Harris! He’s something, I tell you.’ She reads a section aloud and begins to laugh all over again.

Adrian watches her, smiles and laughs too.

She slips the volume into her bag. They walk away from the café, past some of the university buildings. Adrian sees painted signs to various faculties, administration buildings, the amphitheatre. When Mamakay mentioned she would be coming to the university today, Adrian had ventured his interest in seeing it. As they walk she offers him a few items of information, points out a building or two. They wind their way uphill, to where the high-rise buildings give way to older two-storey blocks, and finally to an area dominated by trees and lawns and, set amidst them, a scattering of bungalows.

‘This is where the faculty lived. Nice, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

‘I bet you’re surprised.’

‘Yes,’ he confesses. The grounds are arresting. He isn’t sure now what he was expecting. It wasn’t the university he’d been thinking about all day.

‘Did you study here?’

‘Yes.’

They pass a small stream, the water slipping down a bank of rock and pooling at the roadside. Children are playing in it. They stop to watch Adrian pass by.

‘Here we are,’ Mamakay says.

They have arrived at a curve in the road where the railing has been broken. Adrian looks around, but sees nothing, just the hillside behind them and the trees in front. Mamakay steps through the break in the railing. Adrian follows her along a narrow path. After about twenty yards Mamakay stops. Adrian, concentrating upon his footing, almost bumps into her. He steadies himself, brushing her shoulder; despite her clothing the touch runs through him like a current.

She turns to him and smiles. ‘OK?’

He is standing so close to her. For a moment all he can see are the flecks of brown in her irises, her eyes momentarily in shadow as the wind moves a branch above her. He swallows and nods. He is filled with self-consciousness, aware of his own breathing. She turns away and he follows her gaze to the view through the trees: the city reaching out to the edge of the sea, the red-brown tin roofs of houses, the minarets of the mosques, the steepled roofs and spires of the churches, which dwarf the houses and are in turn dwarfed by the massive white warehouses of the port. The sky is striped with cloud, the horizon is lost in haze. The view of the city is one he has never seen before; he is surprised at the scale of it. Here the sounds of the city are muted. It is cooler, a faint breeze touches him like damp fingers.