She pushed her lips into a pout. She wore a narrow skirt and a tight-fitting tamule with puffed sleeves. Her hair had been straightened and tonged into outsize curls. It was not a style I particularly admired. Still, it spoke of the effort she had invested in her appearance that day. Certainly she wasn’t on her way to church.
‘Where have you been?’ She stood, hands on hips.
‘I’ve been here,’ I said. ‘Where else would I be? Coffee?’
In the kitchen I spooned some instant coffee into a cup, poured hot water on to it and filled the cup to the brim with Carnation Milk. Any less and she would act as if I was a miser. Vanessa was the kind of girl who deplored meanness, especially in a man. When I went back outside she had sat herself down at the table. I set the cup carefully on the table along with a box of sugar cubes.
‘Help yourself,’ I said. Sugar was still a small luxury to a woman like Vanessa.
After a moment’s pause she reached out and took two cubes from the carton, dropped one into the cup, placed the other on a teaspoon and began to lower it in and out of the hot liquid, watching the cube crumble and start to dissolve. Still ignoring me she raised the spoon to her lips.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Things have been so busy. The exams are coming up and I have to prepare my students. Late home every night. Up early. I didn’t want to trouble you.’
‘I could have come and cooked for you.’ She kept her eyes lowered.
‘It would be too much.’
‘I don’t mind.’ A pause; she pushed her lips into a more exaggerated pout, glancing at me upwards through her eyelashes. ‘I could have sent something for you.’
‘You’re too good to me.’ I stood up and went to stand behind her. I leaned over and pressed my lips into her neck. She made as if to squirm away. I bit the flesh lightly. She giggled and protested, but with no real conviction. I pulled her up, turned her to face me and kissed her. I tasted the sweetness of the sugar on her tongue, the wax of her lipstick.
We lay in bed together until mid-morning. Later I watched Vanessa as she moved around my apartment, tidying papers, clearing the table, putting my shoes away in the cupboard. In those moments I found myself already comparing her to Saffia. Vanessa was the younger and yet that did not make her any fresher or more innocent. Naive, yes. She tried for a greater sophistication than she possessed. I was happy enough to have her around, she barely had the power to irritate me. Each time the door closed behind her, the space was filled immediately, there was no vacuum where she’d been. My thoughts, in her absence, were not of her. Yet Saffia had already stepped into my dreams.
Vanessa wanted to be the wife of a university professor, the ambition she had set herself. And maybe one day she would be, though she gave herself too easily. I wished her well. I lay propped up against the pillows and watched her trying to create a place for herself in my life. It seemed a shame really, I told myself, but a time was coming when I would have to stop seeing her.
CHAPTER 2
The woman sat skewed in the chair opposite Adrian, knees together, arms pressed to her sides, shoulders forward, feet tucked in. A zigzag on the metal chair. The flesh was sparse on her bones. Around her waist she wore a cloth of yellow-and-black faded geometric shapes. Her breasts were covered by a loose blouse. Adrian could not guess her age. The people here seemed ageless to him. She called him ‘Doctor,’ proffered answers to his questions in a toneless voice, so low he strained to hear. Not once did she meet his eye, but studied her hands folded in her lap. She complained of headaches and asked for medicine for the pain, but the doctors had found nothing wrong with her. So they sent her to him.
Adrian talked about what he could do for her, searched for words he thought she might understand. On the paper in front of him was written her name. He spoke it out loud. For the first time she looked at him. She pointed at a bottle of vitamins on his desk and so he gave it to her. It was an easy thing to do.
That night Adrian Lockheart dreamed. One of the few times he had done so since arriving in the country. He was on the edge of a waterfall, leaning forward, hovering over the rush of water. Down below, he could see nothing beyond the torrent of water. In the dream he was a child again. He stretched out his arms and swallow-dived, waking just as he would have been engulfed by the falling water. The dream was not of death, because he woke softly laughing.
An echo of the feeling returns to him as he sits and gazes out of the window, his thoughts carried adrift on the tide of the voice of the old man lying in the bed. A child’s face appeared over the top of the wall, a child’s grinning face. The eyes met Adrian’s own. A moment later the face disappeared. Then came the sound of laughter and a memory of the dream rose up. The feeling of falling, a surge in his stomach, the glee that comes from an innocent physical pleasure. He turns to where the old man lies, his arms above the cotton sheet, pressed against the length of his body. The old man has stopped speaking and is watching him. His eyes, surrounded by curtains of ashy skin, are small, dark and liquid bright.
Adrian is silent a few seconds longer; he hopes his lapse will appear deliberate, a moment of contemplation.
‘Shall I come by tomorrow?’
The old man inclines his head and continues to watch him.
Adrian, who might be used to such things, feels discomfited. Reflexively he continues, ‘Is there anything you want? Books? Newspapers? I’ll arrange it for you.’
‘Thank you. I have everything.’ The voice is hoarse. The words accompanied by a slight smile, a tightening of the facial muscles, a stretching of the lips, the impression more of pain than pleasure.
‘Very well, then.’
Midday. Adrian rises, gathers his briefcase and jacket and steps into the shaded corridor, where the air is cooler by a degree or two. He leans against the wall. The building has no air conditioning except in the ICU ward, and even there it seems to battle unequally against the burning outside air, which seeps through every fissure in the brickwork. He breathes deeply, counts to three, and walks down the corridor into the daylight.
He crosses the quadrangle towards his office, sun beating squarely down upon the crown of his head. The quadrangle is no more than a patch of yellowed grass, divided into triangles by a pair of crossing paths. Each triangle is hemmed with concrete and contains a single concrete bench. Never has Adrian seen anybody sitting there. Whoever designed the place must have imagined the occupants of the building relaxing or eating their lunch here. But the sun makes it impossible.
Behind the door of his office he sets the briefcase squarely upon the desk, turns on the fan, removes his jacket and stands with his sweat-soaked back to the wind. He pours himself a glass of water from a plastic bottle, opens the briefcase and removes his fountain pen and papers.
When he was first shown to the room, his office, he recognised it for what it was, though neither he nor the woman hospital administrator made comment. Towering walls that reached up to a square of unpainted ceiling. A metal door fitted with a bolt and padlock. A solitary narrow window with six steel bars that reached across the outside sill. An oversized desk covered in scarred, orange-coloured varnish and faced by three chairs of different heights and ages. On a brittle wire a single forty-watt light bulb rotated and cast troubled shadows into the corners of the room. Adrian had knocked his head on it as he crossed the room and now was left with a burn, shiny and taut, on his forehead. Twice he has put through a request for the window to be enlarged.