“I’m just trying to understand why you would—”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing! There can’t be no understanding between you and me any more! You’re part of a different system now. People like you think you can control everything. But you can’t control me!”
“People like me? What are you talking about? Trace, you’re a grown woman now, you’ve got three beautiful kids, you really need to get a grip on this kind of delusional—”
“You can call it by any fancy name you like, love: there’s a system, and you and your fucking mother are both a part of it.”
I stood up.
“Stop harassing my family, Tracey,” I said, as I walked purposefully out of the kitchen, pursued by Tracey, through the living room toward the front door. “If it carries on, the police will be involved.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep walking, keep walking,” she said and slammed the door behind me.
In early December Aimee returned to check on the progress of her academy, traveling with a smaller group — Granger, Judy, her ditzy e-mail proxy, Mary-Beth, Fern and me — without press and with a specific agenda: she wanted to propose a sexual-health clinic within the grounds of the school itself. Nobody disagreed in principle but it was also very difficult to see how it could possibly be referred to publicly as a sexual-health clinic or how Fern’s discreet reports of the sexual vulnerability of the local girls — which he had gathered slowly, and with a great deal of trust, from a few of the female teachers, who had taken great risks themselves in speaking to him — could be brought out into the light of the village without causing interpersonal chaos and offense and perhaps the end of our whole project. On the flight over we discussed it. I tried, stumblingly, to speak to Aimee about the need for delicacy, and what I knew of the local context, thinking, in my mind, of Hawa, while Fern, more eloquently, discussed an earlier German medical NGO’s interventions in a nearby Mandinka village, where female circumcision was practiced by all, and the German nurses had found oblique approaches won traction where more direct condemnations failed. Aimee frowned at these comparisons and then took up again where she had left off: “Look, it happened to me in Bendigo, it happened to me in New York, it happens everywhere. It’s not about your ‘local context’—this is everywhere. I had a big family, cousins and uncles coming and going — I know what goes on. And I’ll bet you a million dollars you go into any classroom of thirty girls anywhere in this world and there’s going to be one at least who has a secret she can’t tell. I remember. I had nowhere to go. I want these girls to have somewhere to go!”
Beside her own passion and commitment our qualifications and concerns looked petty and narrow, but we managed to wear her down to the word “clinic,” and an emphasis — at least when discussing the clinic with local mothers — on menstrual health, which was its own complication for many girls without the means to pay for sanitary products. But personally I didn’t think Aimee was wrong: I remembered my own classrooms, dance classes, playgrounds, youth groups, birthday parties, hen nights, I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying somebody else’s baby on her hip and looking over at you with a secret she can’t tell.
It was a difficult first day. We were glad to be back and there was unexpected pleasure in touring a village no longer so strange or alien to us, seeing familiar faces — in Fern’s case, people who had become intimate friends — and yet we were all also on edge because we knew that Aimee, though she attended to her duties, and smiled in the photographs Granger was tasked with taking, had a mind full of Lamin. Every few minutes she glared at Mary-Beth, who tried to call again but got only voicemail. In some compounds connected to Lamin through blood or friendship we asked for him but nobody seemed to know where he was, they’d seen him yesterday or earlier in the morning, perhaps he’d gone to Barra or Banjul, perhaps to Senegal to see family. By late afternoon Aimee was struggling to hide her irritation. We were meant to be asking people how they felt about the changes in the village, and what more they wanted to see, but Aimee glazed over if people spoke to her for any length of time and we began moving in and out of compounds with too much speed, causing offense. I wanted to linger: I wondered whether this would be our last visit and I felt some urgency to retain everything I saw, to imprint the village in memory, its unbroken light, the greens and the yellows, those white birds with their blood-red beaks, and the people, my people. But somewhere in these streets a young man was hiding from Aimee, a humiliating feeling, and a new one for her, she who had always been the person others ran toward. To avoid reflecting on this, I could see, she was determined to keep moving, and as much as her purposes frustrated my own, I still felt sorry for her. I was twelve years behind her but I, too, felt my age among all those scandalously young girls whom we met in every compound, too beautiful, confronting us both, that hot afternoon, with the one thing no amount of power or money can return to you once it’s gone.
Just before sunset we moved to the very east end of the village, on the border of where it stopped being the village and became the bush once more. There were no compounds here, only corrugated-iron huts, and it was in one of these we met the baby. All very tired, extremely hot, we didn’t notice at first that there was anyone else in the small space other than the woman whose hand Aimee was presently shaking, but as I stepped round to make space for Granger to get inside and out of the sun, I saw a baby laid out on a cloth on the floor, with another girl of about nine, at the baby’s side, stroking the infant’s face. We had seen many babies of course but none as young as this: it was three days old. The woman wrapped her up and passed the tiny package to Aimee, who accepted it into her arms and stood there staring at it, without making any of the usual comments people feel they should make when holding a newborn. Granger and I, feeling awkward, came close and made these comments ourselves: girl or boy, how beautiful, what smallness, such eyes, such lovely thick black tufts of hair. I was saying these things automatically — I’d said them many times before — until I looked at her. Her eyes were huge, wonderfully lashed, black-and-purple, unfocused. No matter how I tried to get her to look at me she wouldn’t. She was a little God refusing me grace, though I was on my knees. Aimee held the baby tighter, turned from me, and placed her own nose on the child’s bud-lips. Granger went outside to get some air. I moved close again to Aimee and craned over the baby. Time passed. The two of us, side by side, unpleasantly close, sweating on each other, but both unwilling to risk moving from the baby’s sightline. The mother was speaking, but I don’t think either of us really heard her. At last Aimee, very reluctantly, turned and placed the baby in my arms. It’s a chemical thing, maybe, like the dopamine that floods through people in love. For me it was a drowning. I have never experienced anything like it before or since.
“You like her? You like her?” said a jovial man, who had appeared from somewhere. “Take her to London! Ha ha! You like her?”
Somehow I passed her back to her mother. At the same time, in some place of alternative futures, I ran straight out of there with the baby in my arms, hailed a taxi to the airport, and flew home.
When the sun fell and nothing more could be done in the way of visiting, we decided to end the day and convene the next morning for the school tour and a village meeting. Aimee and the rest followed Fern to the pink house. I, curious about what had changed since my last visit, headed to Hawa’s. In the absolute darkness I made my way very slowly toward what I thought was the main crossing, reaching out for tree trunks like a blind person, and astonished at every turn by the many adults and children I felt passing by me, who walked quickly and efficiently, without torches, to wherever it was they were going. I made it to the crossing and was steps from Hawa’s door when Lamin appeared beside me. I hugged him and told him Aimee had been looking for him everywhere and expected to see him tomorrow.