Meanwhile there were new developments. Stress inoculation. Rewind technique. A practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming made his name with the publication of a theory he named emotional freedom technique. In America a woman psychologist developed a method called eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. Some among the fraternity dismissed it as quackery, though Adrian wondered if this wasn’t, at least in part, because the originator of the technique was both a woman and based in California. Adrian read all the available writings including those of the dissenters. The results, as published, were dramatic and nobody, not even the psychologist herself, whose name was Francine Shapiro, could entirely account for them. Out of sight of his colleagues Adrian attended a training course and on occasion had even practised the technique upon his private clients.
Yet despite investing every effort in keeping abreast of new developments as his chosen field grew ever more populated, increasingly it felt to Adrian that the momentum of his career had dissipated.
So when he saw the advertisement in the back of a professional journal for a government-sponsored psychologist to work overseas, Adrian had mailed an application to the address of the international health agency the same afternoon. He hadn’t mentioned it to Lisa. The post was for a six-week project. In the event his application failed and he’d not bothered Lisa with news of that either. Then, one Friday night, a voice faintly on the telephone from Rome. The successful applicant had been taken ill. Was Adrian free to go at short notice?
Why there? Lisa had asked him, when he finally told her. She’d seemed neither pleased nor displeased, simply baffled. A civil war had placed the country in the news in the last year or so. Several times in the conversation Lisa transposed the name of the country to ‘Sri Lanka’ where a civil war was also being fought, though on an entirely different continent.
The team had stuck together. Beneath a still surface upon which people shopped at the markets and went to work violence bubbled, erupting from time to time in the rural areas. There was a curfew from eight to eight. Nobody left the capital. Adrian enjoyed the camaraderie, the sensation of remote danger. On his return to England he had applied for a further posting and been accepted. When he told Lisa he included, in his account, the impression his return had been requested. She had not been happy and yet it could not be said she had been happy — for several years.
The second time the plane was crowded. Groups of Europeans held conversations outside the toilets, in the aisles, across the backs of the seats. The Africans, for the most part, remained seated. Adrian knew nobody, though one or two among them ventured to ask his business. Or more precisely, with which agency he was working. Adrian’s brief amounted to not much more than the name of a hospital and the information they had requested an in-house psychologist. The hospital administrator, a woman in her forties, with hair pulled back into a knot from which it escaped at spiky angles, was new to her job and seemed unprepared for his arrival. Her brisk manner conveyed less regret at her own lack of readiness than a sense that his coming at this time was something of an inconvenience.
Why? Lisa had asked him. Why this place? He had shrugged and told her there had been no choice. And that was partly the truth. The real truth was he’d always known this country’s name, never made the mistake of confusing it with an island nation thousands of miles away. When, for a few weeks one year, the country was briefly in the news, he knew a little more about it than most, at the very least he knew its correct location. Sierra Leone, the place where his mother had nearly been born.
Nine-thirty-five. He really must be gone. The bird is no longer feeding but sitting at the apex of a curl of razor wire. Adrian carries the plate he has been using as a palette to the sink, holds it under the tap, watches the colours as they run into each other. He leaves the plate upside down to dry on the draining board and goes around the flat turning off lights.
On his way out of the house he takes down several of the reference books from the shelf, tucks them under his arm. He steps outside, into the heat and light, closes the door carefully behind him, turns his key in the upside-down lock and slips it into his pocket.
CHAPTER 8
Adrian and Elias Cole meet each week, at the same hour. Around them the hospital is in constant motion day and night. Adrian finds he has to think, when writing up his notes, consciously, of the day and date, to count forwards from the moment of his arrival. Even the month he forgets. In England, the days would have begun, tentatively, to reach out with silver fingers in each direction. Here, the patterns of the sky elude him. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. But what is one to make of a violet sunset? Or a white evening sun? The one thing of which he is certain is that it is getting hotter. Instead of becoming used to the heat, he is ever more tormented by it.
Adrian is still in the occasional habit of bringing something to each session. Once it was a novel, Huxley’s Antic Hay, from the collection in his rooms. A newspaper bought from a roadside vendor, two thin leaves of dense, smudged text. A radio. He forgets the man’s feelings about music. In time he removes it.
There are days when he must attend the Ministry to sort out his papers. The Labour Office is located on the sixth floor of a building without electricity and consequently no working lift. So far it has taken him several visits on different days to obtain the appropriate forms, establish who is the person who will process them. The man in question possesses a huge, shining bald head, is dressed, always, in a dark-blue safari-style suit and is never to be found in his office. Often he finds him sitting in the corridor talking with others of his kind, chewing matchsticks or cola nuts and watching people like Adrian come and go.
Thursday Adrian arrives back at the hospital exhausted and yet full of nervous energy. He sits down by the old man’s bed. Elias Cole turns and watches him, but doesn’t speak. Together they inhabit the amniotic stillness of the room, silent save for the old man’s breathing, the muted sounds from outside.
His private clients in England, from the moment they left the room they ceased to exist. He did not allow their lives to spill into his.
Here it is different. From the moment he enters the old man’s room it is his own, Adrian’s, life outside that seems remote and unreal. His life in England even more so.
*
Exams had begun. The campus was quiet. Behind the windows rows of students, heads bent, dressed in the obligatory black trousers or skirts and white shirts. Along with the other staff members I took my turn invigilating. I enjoyed the peace, walking the aisles, handing out extra paper, warning the passing of another hour.
In those periods of enforced idleness I thought often of Saffia. The smooth mask of her beauty in repose. The rapid succession of her expressions as she listened to a story, at such times her face had an extraordinary mobility. She was not much given to talking, a listener by nature and by marriage. Julius and Saffia were like the sun and the moon. Everything revolved around Julius, or he behaved as though it did, you were drawn into his orbit. But Saffia was the moon, emanating her own clear, magnetic energy. The one to whom all our stories were told.
Though when Saffia had something to say, it’s true she didn’t hesitate to speak her mind, which was a sufficiently unusual quality in a woman that I was unused to it. She chided me once, for my languor. It was during one of their Sunday-night suppers. We were discussing the price of commodities, of rice. It was a subject I knew little about, but Saffia was full of stirring opinions. She felt an affinity with the farmers, you know. I must have been slow to respond because she berated me. For being too comfortable, she said, like a cat with its own place by the fire.