Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Adrian stops walking. ‘Jesus!’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did you ask your mother about it?’

‘I did. He was an old friend from a long time ago, she said. Claimed not to remember the day at the Red Rooster. She said she hadn’t seen him in years. But I knew I hadn’t misremembered. The next time I went into her sewing kit, I noticed the cutting wasn’t there any more.’

‘What was his name? The man? Do you remember?’

‘It was Conteh. Kekura Conteh.’

For a few moments Adrian is quiet. They are approaching the Ocean Club again. He says, ‘Kekura was an activist. Could your mother have been involved in something?’

Mamakay laughs lightly. ‘No. At least I don’t imagine so. I’d guess the attack on the bridge was before we met him in the restaurant. Even though there was no date on the cutting, it looked really old. The paper had started to colour and the ends roll over. Maybe they really were just friends. The point is that when we came home from the Red Rooster she told me not to tell my father. I thought, or at least I fancied, it was because she thought my father would be jealous. But that wasn’t the reason at all.’

‘What was it?’

She turns to Adrian. ‘She wanted to keep it a secret because she didn’t trust him. Don’t you see? My mother didn’t trust my father.’

They are back at the Ocean Club. Mamakay sits at a table, her chin in her hand, fingers covering her mouth. The place is empty. The owner brings over two bottles of beer and waves at them to take their time.

Adrian says, ‘Are you sure you’re reading that right? As you say, children can place different interpretations on things. There could be another explanation.’

‘OK. Something else happened,’ she says. ‘Years later, some months after my mother died. There’d been protests on campus. The students were growing tired of the authorities. It was happening everywhere, but the campus was the centre of it all. There were constant power cuts at one time, we were all trying to revise for exams. A group of students got a petition together to demand the Vice Chancellor’s resignation. I signed the petition along with everybody else. I had an exam the day they marched to his office and handed it in, otherwise I would have been there.’

She’s not looking at Adrian. Her gaze, unfocused, rests somewhere upon the table amid the beer mats and cigarette burns.

‘After the exams the students celebrated. There were parties on campus every night, it was the end of the academic year. All my friends were living in hall, except me. I stayed at home to keep my father company that term. The last evening my father called me and told me I was not to go up to the campus that night. He didn’t say why. Instead he said a lot of things. I was out too much. I was out with the wrong crowd. There was talk about me. I was angry and shouted at him. There was talk about him too, I said. About him and a woman called Vanessa.’

Adrian glances at Mamakay.

She catches his look. ‘Oh yes. I knew about Vanessa. I’d known for a long time. I went up to my room and stayed there. I told myself my father was being unreasonable. The strange thing was that if anything he had a tendency to spoil me. After a while I went back downstairs and found him in his study. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there behind his desk. I felt sorry for him. I thought perhaps he was thinking about my mother, as I was. I sat on the floor and put my head on his lap. He just laid his hand on my hair.’

Silence again. She does not lift her gaze from the table, but presses her fingers against her bottom lip. When she speaks her voice is low with controlled emotion.

‘That was the night security forces raided the campus. They attacked the students. A lot of people were hurt. They went through the halls of residence. Twelve students were arrested. Most of them were the ones who had organised the petition. They were expelled and we never saw them again. All of them had been at the party I’d been invited to in one of the fraternity houses. They said it was the first place the police went. Afterwards they forced their way into the dorms. By then the students knew what was happening; some of the male students tried to barricade the doors and to fight back. You can imagine what they did to them …’

There she stops, except for one last sentence. ‘They were my friends.’

‘You dropped out after that.’

‘Yes. I dropped out. I was ashamed.’

She calls the owner and asks for a cigarette. He offers her one from his own pack. She takes it and lights it inexpertly, inhales two or three times. Neither of them speak. As she stubs the cigarette out half smoked, she lifts her eyes to him. ‘So you see there are things about him you don’t know.’

Seligmann has gone for the afternoon, an appointment at the Ministry. Little chance he’ll be back before the day is through, which leaves Kai working alone in the operating theatre with an anaesthetist. Next door Mrs Goma is performing an amputation with quiet efficiency and power tools. The theatre nurse divides her time between the two surgeons.

Kai sits on a stool, bent to his task, music playing on the theatre CD player. When next he looks up at the clock he realises an hour has passed.

Today he feels good. Today he feels in control. Last night, alone in Adrian’s apartment, he’d slept for four hours, worked six, and miraculously slept another six. No sign of Adrian, Kai had breakfasted in the staff canteen before going to emergency to deal with the first of the day’s cases. Together he and Seligmann took care of the usual cooking-fire burns and hernias, more interestingly a newborn with an imperforate anus. After that, not much. Seligmann headed into town, Mrs Goma came in to perform the removal of a gangrenous limb scheduled from early morning. Kai had offered his help, but she waved him away. It was a routine operation and she, like him, seemed to enjoy moments of solitude in the theatre. So Kai fetched himself a coffee and carried it down to the surgeons’ room, where he sat writing up notes. He’d only just begun when the call came for a surgeon to report to emergency.

The woman, partially anaesthetised, was sitting on one of the beds. Her eyes rolled back into her skull, she’d looked on the point of passing out. An odour of ammonia and sweat rose from her. Kai removed the swaddling from her right hand to find her wrist slit so deeply as to sever all the tendons of her fingers, with the possible exception of her thumb. With Mrs Goma busy and Seligmann away Kai had begun the procedure to reattach the tendons on his own. It is a job for a microsurgeon, but there are no microsurgeons on the staff or in any other hospital in the country. Today Kai is this woman’s best chance. It’s proving tricky — locating the ends of the tendons from where they have receded into the wrist, pulling them down, maintaining sufficient tension until he can connect the two ends. He is patient. Still, if Seligmann were to come back from the Ministry early, thinks Kai, it would be to the good.

He looks up at the anaesthetist, sitting bolt upright and wide-eyed on her stool, the telltale look of a person fighting the urge to sleep.

‘What happened to her? Do we know?’

At the sound of his voice she jerks slightly and shakes her head. Kai swivels around to read her admission notes, moving the paper with his elbow. Possible suicide attempt . He recognises the handwriting as belonging to one of the Swedish doctors, or is he Dutch? He turns back and searches for the end of another tendon amid the flesh of the woman’s wrist. There it is, narrow and pale. Not once in Kai’s career has he treated a would-be suicide, or even heard of one. He’ll refer her to Adrian. These last few weeks, Kai has barely caught a glimpse of him.