‘What’s your name?’ The boy looks at Adrian through dark, unblinking eyes. He doesn’t answer though his gaze is steady.
‘Your name?’ bawls the woman from the doorway. The sound makes Adrian start. He turns and holds up a hand, but fails to impress her. ‘An idiot.’ And shakes her head, sucking her teeth as she does so. When Adrian turns back the child is still watching him. Adrian regards him for a few moments. He wonders what kind of trouble the boy is in.
‘Excuse me,’ he says to the officer, keeping the dislike out of his voice. ‘Can you leave us a moment?’
She shakes her head. ‘This is a police station.’
Adrian nods, pulls out his notebooks and pens. Under the eye of the policewoman he circles the child scribbling notes until he sees her lose interest and begin to examine the polish work on her nails. Then he moves behind the child and drops his notebook, swearing loudly as he does so. The policewoman straightens up. The child doesn’t move.
The child is a simpleton, Adrian tells the officer in charge. The policeman wants to know what he is supposed to do with the boy. Something in his manner suggests the problem is of Adrian’s making. So Adrian tells him to release the child into his custody and signs off on the paperwork as though he had done so many times before. A flurry of rubber stamping and countersignatures and he is shown the door.
Minutes later, hand in hand with the boy, he stands outside the police station. Adrian’s heart is beating. His armpits are damp, the sweat like ice water. He has no real idea what to do with the boy, he simply couldn’t bear to leave him in that place. Suddenly the child pulls away and darts off into the traffic. Before Adrian can even think of following, he is gone. Adrian turns and looks up at the police station, but nobody seems to be looking.
Four people are jammed into the back seat of the taxi on the way to the hospital. The woman next to him carries a basket containing some kind of fermented food; the yeasty odour mingles with her own smell and that of her perfume. Adrian has never uncovered the alchemic combination of words and fare that would secure him hire of a taxi on his own.
Inside the hospital the staff room is empty. On the two-ring electric hob coffee is simmering in a long-handled, stainless-steel pot. The bubbles rise and burst on the surface like lava. Among the mugs Adrian finds one less stained than the others and rinses it. The coffee is grainy and bitter, reminds him of the pretend coffee he made from acorns as a child. It coats his tongue and turns his saliva sour.
In this heat, he feels like a sleepwalker. His movements are laboured, he can feel the ponderous workings of his brain. He leans back and waits for the caffeine to snap through his system, the nerve endings quivering into life, prickling his skin.
Right now he’d like to talk to somebody, but who? From the desk he dials his home telephone number, listens to the ringing echo hollowly down the line. He counts. A click and Lisa’s voice comes on the line. He listens to her cool, chirpy voice telling callers to leave a name and number. He replaces the receiver without speaking. What would he have said, anyway? To Lisa foreign countries were as alien and remote as Venus. World events revolved continuously, independent of human agency. War, coups, poverty — these existed on a par with viruses, cyclones and black holes in space. One expended emotion with economy. He could have told her about the deaf boy at the police station, anticipated the pause, the deft change of subject on to some more positive, more easily comprehensible matter. It had attracted him at first, brought him back to himself, her brisk, upbeat way of being. He had mistaken it, at first, for a certain tenderheartedness, a tendency to easy bruising.
Later he showers. Standing beneath the spout of water, he feels the urge to urinate. He stands at the edge of the tiled shower cubicle and aims at the toilet bowl. Success brings with it his first sense of achievement of the day.
The shower leaves him only temporarily refreshed. The heat soon takes over again, covering his skin and turning it clammy. In the kitchen he surveys the contents of the fridge, takes a can of evaporated milk, holds it up and lets it trickle into his open mouth.
How quickly one reverts.
He makes himself a cup of instant coffee and then pours into it two fingers of whisky. What he’d really like is a bottle of wine. The satisfying pull of the cork, the guarantee of a long evening suffused in an alcoholic glow. He settles on the couch, takes a cushion from one of the other chairs and places it behind his back. But the inertia prevents him even from reading; instead he stares at a spot on the floor and sips his drink. It is not quite eight o’clock. The evening rolls out ahead of him, like an unlit road.
A knock on the door. The laundry man delivering his clothes. At the third knock Adrian levers himself to his feet.
On the doorstep is Kai Mansaray, dressed much the same as before, only this time he is holding a glass-covered wooden board.
‘Sorry, I thought it was somebody else.’ Adrian steps aside to allow him inside.
‘Oh yeah? Who do you owe money?’ Kai laughs.
‘No. Just my clothes back from the laundry, that’s all.’
‘Well, if that’s what you have to look forward to, it’s as well I came around.’ He steps forward and places the board on the coffee table.
Adrian can’t remember when he last saw a Ludo board. The one Kai sets on the table carries with it the taste of tomato soup, the scent of wax crayons, the rubber-and-sweat smell of the school gymnasium. This is the game he has seen grown men playing in the street, on outsize boards decorated with photographs of footballers and actors.
Adrian pours Kai a tumbler of whisky. They open with the best of three. Kai wins easily and challenges Adrian again. Adrian, who has watched Kai’s strategy closely, has worked out a thing or two, takes the fifth game and the sixth as well. They play double colours. Blue and green: Kai. Red and yellow: Adrian. Adrian mixes the whisky with water to stretch it. Kai plays intensely. Adrian is grateful for the company. In the kitchen he finds a packet of chocolate chip cookies. The cookies are soft and dusty. The chocolate has melted, seeped into the stratum and hardened. They eat the cookies in place of supper, washing the taste away with whisky.
Six sets later, Adrian concedes and leans back in his chair. Fleetingly the events of the morning come back into his mind. For a moment he considers raising the subject of the deaf boy, but chooses not to. If Kai had been a European, it might have been different. Conversation here can be challenging, language is a blunter instrument, each word a heavy black strike with a single meaning. To say exactly what you mean, to ask precisely the right question, this is what has to be done. For the bluntness of the language doesn’t mean people speak their minds. Rather, they use the spaces to escape into.
Besides, he is enjoying the sense of oblivion seeping into him, a result of the whisky and the pleasing monotony of the board game. He feels as close to content as he has done since he arrived. He pours more whisky. The bottle is almost finished.
For a while they sit together in silence. Adrian leaves the room to use the bathroom; when he comes back Kai is leafing through the papers on the side table. He does this in an entirely natural way, unperturbed by Adrian’s reappearance. He extracts a sheet.
‘Yours?’
Adrian nods.
The sketch is of a songbird, made by Adrian the previous day. Since he came here he has resumed this schoolboy pastime. Among his junior-school friends, in that fleeting phase of boyhood when the tide of energy is still displaced into the wholesome, while his friends collected football cards and stamps, Adrian drew the birds he saw from his window: sparrows, blackbirds, crows, thrushes, robins at different times of day, weathers and seasons, in all their moods and guises.