‘Papaya!’ says Adrian, recognising the fruit; he has never seen one so large.
‘Pawpaw,’ replies the other.
‘Pawpaw. Is that what you call papaya?’
Kai Mansaray turns and looks at him briefly. ‘That’s what it is.’ He takes a bite. ‘Netherlands?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Kai Mansaray eats rapidly, hunched over the table, arms either side of his plate, as though ready to defend his food. ‘Where you’re from.’ He tears a hunk of bread from the loaf and points it at Adrian’s chest.
‘I’m English.’ Adrian frowns. Obvious, surely.
‘OK. Only we get a lot of Dutch. Medical or emergency? You’re not in surgical.’
‘Actually, neither.’ Adrian takes a sip of his coffee. ‘I’m a psychologist.’
The other man looks up from his food at that, raises his eyebrows momentarily, inclines his head by slowly tilting his chin to one side. ‘Ok-ay.’ The word is spoken in two parts, split down the centre as neatly as if he’d used an axe. As though he is considering the statement carefully, examining its likelihood. Adrian might just have confessed to being the Grand Old Duke of York. ‘So do they make you pay for this place?’ he says, changing the subject.
Adrian tells him and Kai snorts by way of response. ‘For how long? I mean, I take it you haven’t immigrated.’
‘I’m seconded for a year.’
‘So you don’t plan on coming to live here for good. No, well, I thought not. If you did you’d be the first immigrant in two hundred years.’ Kai Mansaray laughs at his own joke, a raucous, ear-splitting sound. ‘We don’t even have any tourists. Except your sort, that is.’
‘My sort?’
The visitor takes another bite of bread. ‘Nothing. What I meant to say to you was, “Welcome!”’ He raises his coffee cup.
‘Thank you,’ says Adrian, and sips at the cold remnants of his cup.
Silence for the rest of the meal, more or less. When they are through eating, Adrian picks up the plates and moves towards the dustbin.
‘Hold it!’ The other man reaches out, removes the plates from Adrian’s hands and scrapes the remainders of the meal into the discarded plastic bag. For a moment he holds it over the dustbin in his outstretched hand, then bends over and peers into the hollow of the bin and grunts, ‘Ants.’
He scoops up the bin, unties the plastic bag and upends the entire contents into the bag, juice bottle, biscuit pieces, ants and all, ties the handles of the bag and drops it into the bin. At the sink Adrian watches him wash his hands with meticulous care, examining the cuticles and searching under the fingernails for grains of dirt.
From the doorway he raises his hand in a salute. ‘So. Next time.’ He slides his feet into his flip-flops.
‘Yes,’ nods Adrian. ‘Next time.’
And watches the door close.
CHAPTER 3
The house where Saffia and Julius lived was in a web of narrow streets in the hills above the city. The paintwork was pale pink, sun-streaked, with dark-pink recesses and a tin roof. An orange tree, laden with fruit, bent over the house, which was reached through an open iron gate. I was early, I knew — but nonetheless I climbed the steps. Still sweating from the uphill walk, I paused and ran my finger around the inside of my collar. A band of stray dogs raced past the gate. I knocked. Moments later there was Saffia, running her palm over her hair and smoothing her skirt. Julius was not yet back from the university. I made an offer to walk a little and return. Naturally she demurred.
‘No, no. You’re welcome. Please, come in,’ she said and stepped back.
I followed her through to a verandah at the back. The house looked directly out over the city.
‘A beautiful home.’ My own voice rang in my ears, the words had come out too loudly, a declamation. Moreover, strictly speaking, it was not the house, which was a modest affair, so much as the view that commanded attention.
‘I like it,’ she replied, as though she recognised my compliment for the hollow thing it was. ‘We chose it for the garden, really.’
I hadn’t noticed the garden as such, but now I could see what she meant. It stretched out from below us, and swept one’s gaze up towards the view, rather in the way, or so I am told, an artist composes a painting to draw the eye in a particular direction.
‘Let me perhaps show you before the others get here.’
For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about until I remembered the ostensible reason for my visit. Saffia picked up a basket and a pair of secateurs and led the way down a spiral staircase into the garden.
A pair of fan palms marked the two far corners of the garden and were reached by a network of shaded gravel paths which led down descending terraces. Travellers’ palms, she told me, the leaves always pointed east and west. There were ferns, some the size of trees. Fruit trees: almonds, lime, guava, a great breadfruit tree. Cumuli of white bougainvillea darkly edged with another kind of climbing flower, sweet-smelling with heavy violet heads. Here and there, perhaps where a path divided, or between the roots of a tree, clay pots of plants. And along the far wall more differently sized pots, some holding a single specimen, others containing artful arrangements of flowers and shrubs. She raised them, she told me as we walked, for weddings and the like.
Presently we reached an opening and there, a crowd of lushly dressed aristocrats, the Harmattan lilies. They stood magnificent, multi-hued, every shade of a dying sun. Their stems were fleshy, muscular, naked without the modesty of leaves. The flowers thick-petalled and brazenly open, revealing sweeping filaments and shiny, sticky stigmas.
‘The Portuguese brought them from South America. The owners of sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies liked to plant them around their houses. The bulbs were very valuable.’
I had never known that and said so.
‘They grow like weeds,’ she continued lightly. ‘No matter where you put them. No matter at all. In fact when these ones have finished flowering I’ll have to dig a few of them out. I can give you some bulbs.’
‘I’d like that,’ I replied. ‘I’d like that very much indeed.’ There was a moment of silence between us. Our eyes met. She looked away. Somewhere inside me, an emotion bloomed.
Saffia began to cut stems of flowers, for the table. I watched her with her back turned to me, standing against the light. The shape of her neck, the angle of her head, her braids of hair which she smoothed from time to time with the back of her hand. When she turned to look at me, I forced my gaze back to the flowers.
We settled on the verandah watching the light slip from the sky. The scent of night blooms drifted up from the garden. Saffia served me a Star beer and poured herself a glass of ginger ale. I heard the sound of the door and Julius’s voice. Laughter rolled through the empty house. I stood up quickly.
‘I should organise a sweepstake,’ Julius was saying. ‘I could make money from people like you.’ And he appeared accompanied by two other men. One of them he slapped so heartily on the back the chap was fairly propelled out on to the verandah. I recognised him vaguely from the campus.
If Julius was surprised to see me already there he gave no hint of it. Introductions followed. Ade Yansaneh, the one I thought I knew. Kekura Conteh, who worked for the state broadcasting station. They greeted Saffia with familiarity. Julius bent and kissed the top of her head. Without turning she raised a hand and lightly touched his cheek. They demonstrated their affection in the way Europeans did. I found it strange Julius was unembarrassed by it. Saffia stood up and slipped away, returning with three beers and glasses upon a tray. I sat back down. Julius produced extra chairs. Saffia opened the bottles. The general shuffling subsided.