The Seige of Diraklat (2016)
The underground city of Derinkuyu has always fascinated me, however I wished, for the sake of this story, to write of a similar but fictional subterranean city which had phonetic names closer those of Ugarit. The place, names and what little can be gleaned of the culture is all of my fabrication, but inspired by the Arabic invasion of Derinkuyu.
“Urkurak…”
‘Be quiet’, he thought. ‘I can’t help you now.’ She couldn’t see him and needed his reassurance, but he couldn’t give it. They’d hear him. They’d hear anything he said, or any movement he made.
It had been expected; it had even been planned. They had practised how to roll the great stone doors closed, always with the quiet snuffing of the sun that was the cause of everyone’s greatest fear. They had descended the levels in preparation, one by one, moving what livestock they could and leaving the rest as a distraction. They had rehearsed each scurry into their city’s darkest corners and held their breath to feel the ultimate silence of their world. As they rehearsed, Urkurak had been nervous, his fear weighed against the knowledge that it was only pretend.
Yet when it wasn’t pretend – when the shrill ululations of the approaching hoardes could be heard even at second level and the tramping of hooves made dust loosen from the ceilings – the animus took him. Fear seemed a distant and inconvenient memory that he would not bother with now. A part of him even wanted to fight, and not to cower against the cold, arched hollow of stone that he found himself in.
Rahia was different. If she had been scared; truly scared, like Mandmak who had spilled his urine as they rolled each floor closed; then she would never have made a sound, and the thick silence would have been obsessed by her fretful breathing. Rahia wanted only to know that he had not died, or deserted, or given up.
He had felt the Silence before. Once, High Aklekh had made him store grain at the lowest level, and after he had dumped the hard sack, had fallen to the floor to gain his breath. He had been alone at this level, which was reserved only for rituals, and storage during the direst emergencies. The cavern extended invisibly before him and he knew that sounds he made in there, if pitched well, would resonate throughout the entire city. But he had held his breath, and the darkness had begun to drown him. It pressed against his chest like a millstone, filled his nostrils and trespassed over his tongue and throat. He felt as if he was choking on silence; a silence which filled his ears and wrinkled his fingertips. Suddenly a great terror had taken him and he was unable to move or breathe. His vision pulsated although all he could see was a blackness darker than death, and invisible walls contracted and expanded around him. A wind of warm, first-level air brushed over him and then weighed on heavily on his skin. He tried to resist its press in every direction but he was being crushed by silence and darkness. And then, as soon as the animus took him again and the cool air assaulted his lungs, he felt a calm unlike any other he had known before he and Rahia had taken their children and moved into the city. It was the calmness of the otherworld, beyond death and beyond life, where such concerns are forgotten; the tranquil understanding of being. He had then breathed deeply and exhaled, and his had spine shaken violently. Spittle had fallen from his mouth and smacked against the floor, his fingers had clenched at random and his toes had curled tightly, his legs cramping. But he had had no pain. He had felt the soft, incipient burden of his belly flopping around his pelvis, and his eyes had rolled back into his head, where there was colour. He had heard a gurgling sound and his neck had distorted. His nose had bled.
Soon he had returned to the world and the chamber, and nothing would be the same for him thereafter. His secret knowledge of the Silence had been consummated and it could only be spoken about with those who also knew. And among such people, it did not need to be discussed.
A few weeks after, Ikhtak had been bringing goats down when one had tried to gouge him, and he had not reacted. Rahia had not understood his worry, later, when he had told her that he was scared by this. He was scared that he had not felt even the remotest of fears as the horns of the goat had pulled at the fleshy elastic of his arm, nor had he felt any pain. It was a solemn worry, and she had not understood; but how could she?
Today, he was relieved he was so changed, but he could not account for Rahia. The stones had been rolled but it had been too late, and the dwellers had fled to the lower levels, knowing them better and perhaps taking comfort in the familiar before they were to be slaughtered. Urkurak would not be killed today, for he now knew that he could never die – nor had he ever been born. But Rahia did not know this, and she would be scared. She would be more scared for the children, who were silent as the grave.
Urkurak knew that they could not be more than four strides from him, but in the black he could not signal to them. He tried to push his thoughts through the silence, carried on a sea of oily darkness, but did not hope for the success of this attempt. They would be more scared than Rahia. They would be scared like Mandmak and leak their fear but make no sound. He felt no pity. He knew only that they were safe in their suffocating fear.
He supposed that he could hit her and make her unconscious, so that she would not take such an unnecessary risk as to utter his name again until the invaders had gone or captured them all, but he did not think his chances of aiming well would be good. He knew that one such as Mandmak or even High Ikhtak would have resorted to hope in this situation, but he could not. He felt the presence of his former self, who too would have merely hoped, and admonished them silently for such foolhardy thoughts. He simply had to deal with whatever situation arose should Rahia make another sound.
She did not. He listened. They all listened, and they were very adept at the skill. They knew that to listen well was not to concentrate on listening, but not to divert focus from listening. It was to listen passively but completely. Only then could one hear all. If Urkurak had listened for a specific sound, then he would not have heard any of the others. But there were none. Even the animals had ceased their shuffling and chewing.
The Silence was beginning to return, seeping in from under the door to their chamber and slowly climbing the walls. Already Urkurak felt the pressure building against the skin of his legs, then his torso. He tasted it on his lips as it tried to breach to his lungs. He waited for sounds from outside. The invaders would not be as practiced in silence as the dwellers were. They would belie themselves at even fifty strides from his position.
There was no sound. The skirmish that had taken place on first level and second level had ended, and no one knew whom had prevailed. But Urkurak thought it was unlikely that the dwellers had won; they were mostly farmers who had moved their livestock underground with the priests and had only basic knowledge of wielding arms, if any at all. ‘How long must we wait in silence?’ he thought. He knew that it would be days before he felt confident that the door could be opened, but he knew that his children would die before then. They had not received their water this day, and one more day without it would leave them very ill.
Rahia gasped. Urkurak made to silence her, until he heard what she had gasped at:
Music.
From bottom-level there was the swell of many male voices singing but one word: "praise". This is what would be sung in the event of a great victory, and Urkurak suddenly needed to know what was being celebrated. Had they really fought off the invaders, or were they tempting the fates by declaring an end too soon? Were they praising what was to come?
Waiting in silence and darkness would not resolve the issue. However, as Rahia opened the door to their chamber and they heard the flat footfall of the other families shuffling onto a third-level corridor, a troubling thought was nagging at the animus of Urkurak.
Rahia’s voice bubbled jubilantly among those of the other mothers and fathers, and the sound of bare feet on dry, stone stairs applauded their descent toward the bottom-level. How sudden can joy be, he thought. How without warning can horror and ecstasy co-mingle. He did not trust it.
As the sound of the voices grew and the large group descended from blackness to deeper blackness, Urkurak remembered something: he had not heard the great stone doors of the ground slide open again.
The Magician (2013)
This short story provided the central character and much of the theme for my novel in-progress, 'The Epistem'. In 2014, it was performed by Robert Lonergan at The Oval Tavern's 'Tales From Croydonia' Festival.
It began on my birthday. At the party, the guests were warming to the idea that proceedings would run late into the night. Those who mattered had arrived, for once, and the mood was running high. One of my friends, whom I do not have the pleasure of seeing very often, is an amateur magician. It was gone 8:00 p.m., and so the mid-May sun had dipped far enough behind the houses to give those of us remaining outside the impression of a benign dusk. Perhaps part of the illusion was the semi-darkness, however a part of me cannot escape the sensation that no illusion was performed; that I had witnessed what had been attested: a feat of genuine magic; wizardry. For argument’s sake, however, I shall refer to what was performed as “the illusion.”
As one who concerns themselves with the rituals and religious practices of various ancient and pagan cultures, I have never subscribed to these new reductionist theories of the universe one hears about these days. I have maintained, despite the scepticism that abounds today and the attitudes of my more rationally-minded friends, that a vein of our existence runs in the inexplicable; that because something cannot be immediately perceived, that does not mean to say with certainty that it does not exist. To many, this is a logically redundant argument. For those who require proof, nothing can exist that does not exhibit evidence of itself. To say that one simply knows of its existence is to run the risk of volunteering oneself to a life of suspicion and eccentricity. That, however, has never bothered me. No, the invisible world was as evident to our ancestors throughout antiquity as it is to me today. Indeed, since our species has had the means to prove the existence and behaviour of things only merely suspected, our capacity for faith has, paradoxically, dwindled.
Perhaps, then, I was more susceptible than most to the illusion. The magician, during the hours of evening when the sun was still warm and visibility was unhindered, had performed some remarkable feats. One such illusion was to apparently swallow ten fine needles and a line of white thread, unpleasantly exhibiting the inside of his mouth to the spectators after each needle to demonstrate that he was not hiding it, only to regurgitate the whole mess as ten needles threaded along a single line of white cotton. Such antics elicited the jesting cries of “Witch! Burn him!” from some of the more tight merrymakers, however, for whatever reason, to me this was patently obvious to be an illusion. While the performance was seamless (no pun intended), there was no purpose beyond its own impressiveness to the trick. Its end and its means were the same. There were no gods invoked, no ritual enacted. Simply put, it was very adequate showmanship.
As this particular occasion was the event of my own birthday, I wasn’t able to pay due attention to the more refined antics of my magician friend, having been whisked about to talk to so-and-so and receive their happy returns with varying degrees of familiarity. It was only after he had put his tricks away and resumed his more normal activities of drinking and socialising that I had an opportunity to approach him.
“My dear friend, I have missed most of your performance but the party is electrified with your capabilities. What on earth is stopping you from seeking a club or something to perform in? I’m sure rates for skills such as yours are handsome and it is a singular skill that you have.”
“Alas, you would think so, my friend,” came his response through a resigned smile, “yet the magic profession is as crowded as any cabaret act or gentleman’s club. The skills you witnessed were the triflings of an amateur; nothing more. I concede they require a degree of skill, but their acquisition is not beyond the reach of any layman with a keen eye for deception and obedient hands. But you concern yourself with a different magic, do you not; such that actually purports to communicate with the otherworld?”
“Quite so. Do you know something of this world? Or are you requesting what I can promise to be a rather boring history lesson?”
“I can’t say that I’m familiar with the practices, and yet I feel a similar draw to that world and those bygone ways of being.” He sighed, and a solemnity overcame him, which he shrugged off before smiling at me.
“I do, however, have a treat for you. As it is your birthday, and as you missed the majority of my am-dram a moment ago, I would like to perform for you a – well, I don’t know what to term it, I’m sure – let us say a spell. Although don’t get excited; there are no words, no invocation of the devil or any strange beasties for that matter. No – it is a sleight of hand that I was taught once with no religious or even base function – but I can assure you that it is quite impossible.”
I was confused by his last sentence, given the colloquial ambiguity of the word ‘impossible’. “Do you mean to say that it is improbable; that it is impossible to comprehend how you do it?”
“Not at all, my friend, not at all. I mean to tell you that it is impossible. It is unachievable. There is no possible way of doing what I am about to do. Do you have a business card?”
We entered my drawing room, whence I opened a draw in my desk and withdrew one of my stubborn and rather stiff cards, which I placed in his outstretched hand.
“Do not get excited. There is no ceremony to this spell; no ‘abracadabra’ or misdirection. You needn’t even watch; as I say, it is not what I would strictly term magic at all.”
Of course, my reaction to this was to watch intently, my suspicious mind immediately assuming that his very verisimilitude was the trick that he wished me to believe in. Yet it was exactly as he said. He went to work on the rectangular card, with great intensity, folding and exacting small tears, with no particular order that I could discern. He was right – I needn’t have watched. There was no trickery here. He was simply folding and tearing with minute but almost furious detail, concentrating in a way seldom seen in the West. Although guests of the party meandered by amiably, the strange behaviour of my small, rotund friend was not observed as anything more than the eccentricity of a performer. I poured myself a glass of champagne and waited. A few more guests strolled by on their way to the garden and the three of us exchanged pleasantries. Nothing; not any of these experiences; broke the concentration of the magician. Had a storm have erupted in that very room, his resolve would have remained immovable.
At last, after at least fifteen minutes had slowly tocked by on the grandfather clock by the door, he stopped his actions. He was sweating slightly, although his composure was perfect – if anything, he was slightly manic. In his hand he held two window-framed pieces of card linked together like links in a chain. There was no break, anywhere, on either piece of card. They had been torn in such a way that he had made one card into two rectangular borders and linked them without breaking either.
I stared at the artefact in front of me. Slowly, all of the possible methods of doing this feat were analysed and rejected by my mind. I thanked him for the trick – and I am sure that I had gone quite pale – and poured him a glass of whisky. We sat in two wing-backed armchairs in silence for some time, before I quietly excused myself to get back to my birthday party.
I didn’t see the magician for some time after that, however the artefact he made remained a talisman of something truly, unutterably inexplicable on my desk, at once containing a sense of foreboding and the promise of great liberation.
Everytime I sat down to write at the desk, I could not focus on the matter of the rituals of Ugarit or the Mesopotamian myths, for every element of my frustration at not understanding the matter contained therein was bound up in the two rectangles of cardboard propped against my Tiffany lamp, quite innocuously goading me. After time, I had to ask my wife to safeguard the spell; the “illusion;” amongst her jewellery, as she has never harboured the same sense of mental or spiritual quest that I have. For her, it was an impressive and unsolvable trick with no pertinence beyond its own impressiveness; much as the needle trick was for me. Yet the simplicity and the lack of impressiveness were as much of a mystery to me as the method by which they were achieved. There was no awe to be found here; no ceremony nor revelation, save for the fact that, as far as I could tell, the feat achieved was quite impossible, and that I had been exposed as a fraud. I was a man who attested to belief in the inexplicable, and yet when confronted with an artefact of genuine mystery, could not reconcile that fact to the whips and jackboots of my reason.
Some months later, and after I had laid the matter to rest in my mind for merely practical reasons, I received a letter from the magician requesting a casual meeting in a London tavern as he was passing through the area. Upon the date prescribed, I left by removing my hat and coat from the stand next the door, picked up my cane, and shut the door behind me firmly resolved to leave the matter to rest forever more.
We bought ales and sat at a table by the window overlooking the Southampton Row. As carriages and motorcars testified that London still existed about the walls of our communication, I felt the urge to ask the inevitable question, despite my earlier promise to myself. He had been on a tour of acting work in the provinces and was in need of some respite on the southern coast, and had a train that evening from Paddington. His stories of reprobates and characters of hilarious and ill-repute had us entertained for a long time, however I was not as mirthful as I might have been. The gnawing sensation that I must ask; I must know – the very sensation that I had consoled myself into thinking was the crippling faculty of those without spirituality – pervaded through every ale we drank.
Eventually as the keep brought us the first scotch of the evening, the alcohol had stripped my inhibition enough for me to lower my defences.
“I must know how you performed the illusion – the spell, rather – with the card. It has been troubling me for months. I have been driven to distraction; so much so that my wife has had to confiscate and hide the offending object amongst her effects in the safe. I will tell no one; you have my word; but I must know.”
“I suspected that this would come up. You will be disappointed, my friend; and sorely at that. I have nothing to tell you that I have not already done.”
“The method – there must be one; I watched you do it – the method has to be, as you said, achievable by all who dedicate their time to learning it. Nothing more. Unless you can give me some other explanation.”
“I have told you, and more than once now, that this is an unusual spell. I am beginning to wish that I had not shown you, for I had rather hoped that your appreciation would be more sophisticated than those who simply gawp and clap like seals. Evidently, I have been misled. Ask what you will, but prepare yourself to dislike what I tell you.”
“How do you do it?” I asked, my hands shaking.
After a long pause which nearly maddened me, the magician smiled his mischievous smile at me.
“I can’t do it,” said the magician, “for it is impossible.”
With that, he finished his whisky, left some small coins on the bar, replaced his hat and coat, the former of which he doffed to me, before solemnly walking towards the door.
As he reached the exit, he turned his head to me. He made as though he was going to say something, but he changed his mind, smiled, and left.
The Late Set (2014)
This short story was what led to my beginning the novel 'A Love Supreme', a chapter of which can be found under the Fiction section of this website.
Gearing up for the late set and a poem comes outat me from somewhere. Something about old boots that are lying at the bottom of the ocean. Something about being a kid, the wonder of the sea. Still got that wonder for me. Maybe next time I’m on the boat I’ll look over to see those old boots. If that’s what the poem was about. I don’t remember now, but all the same I go on and that poem’s in my head. At least, the feeling of the poem – I don’tremember the words. The feeling of mystery and depth, terrifying and captivating. So I go on. It’s the best bit of any gig, going on. Loads of cats say it’s the end, the looks on their faces whilst they’re whooping and cheering and shouting for more, but that never swung it with me. Sure, it is the look on them faces, but it’s the look going on. Like they’re thinking “Come on then guys, impress me.” And that’s sure as hell what I’m going to do, but not because they want me to. Just because I want to play like I’ve never played before. And oh, that feeling. There’s something running through my veins still from earlier and it was good stuff so it’s still coursing through, and I come out of the green room and through the little door and out under the lights.This ain’t like theatre, with those guys stuck up on some balcony; they’re right there, under your nose, the air’s full of smoke, you can smell the whisky and the gin and the wine in the air, mingling like a hot cocktail, and the chatter like too much music dies down because you’re up. Maybe I love this part because it’s the only time I really look at them, all those people waiting tohear what you got in store. The rest of the time I got my eyes closed.
Then this poem comes again. Maybe something I saw. Maybe it’s the horse working slowly on my mind. But it’s beautiful. It’s stern, it’s a message from the deep, but it’s beautiful. It’sno warning, it’s an ally, saying something like “play good tonight, take my advice, whatever that is, and listen to me. I’ll tell you what to play.” So that’s just what I do. I get the signal from the piano, hear everything starting up like the most beautiful car you ever heard, and my cue’s coming, and that’s the last I see of the audience for about ten minutes. I put my reed to my lips and I start to blow. And I love the sound that comes like a surprise and disappears into the smoke. I can feel the music in the very back of my eyeballs, coming from somewhere I long forgot about. I don’t need to do anything, I don’t need to play, it’s just happening by itself. The best gigs always happen like this. Just round the head, a couple of embellishments here and there but it’s not fancy, I’m not here to make friends. It’s the first tune, they want the easy in. A few blues licks, get them warmed up. The piano’s filling the gaps, little notes one at a time, tripping around the edges of the tune. Taking it easy, the junk’s making it easy, and the music starts to swell. I don’t need to look at the band to see them, and they’re all feeling this together. I get to thinking that they can see the poem too, and I think about it while I blow.
Deep down on the seabed there’sa pair of my old boots. They’re wondering what happened, how they got down here, knowing there’s no way back to wherever they came from. But they don’tmind. It’s dark down here, but it’s quiet, and slowly the time goes by. Those boots are going to see things I’ll never see if I live to be a hundred. I want to smile about those boots.
They’re all clapping. My solo’s over and from what I remember it was decent. Not decent as in average, but decent like you tell a decent joke. It wasn’t offensive, it wasn’t brash, it wasn’t crude. It was clean. Next tune I’ll give them something to make them drink a bit. I open my eyes and I smile to the band. They’re having the time oftheir lives. Sometimes this happens, and the more you play with good cats the more often it happens; when everyone’s living the moment together, and if you try and hold on to it then it sinks away like my old boots. You just got to let it happen.
I let myself look at those guys who’ve paid to come through that little door on Frith Street. They’re drinking champagne and they’re smoking and they’re smiling and that’s jazz, brother. There ain’t no feeling like it. The smoke’s curling around the lights in the ceiling and the whole world ends with those walls covered in black and white pictures. I’m up there somewhere, I’m told. Don’t know where. And the music’s sweet.
Something a bit faster now, and we’re bouncing along like an express train. It’s so far from the poem that I forget all about those boots. And I forget about them for the rest of the night. After this tune the waiter’s going to bring me a glass of wine. There’s nothing like the late set, nowhere in the world except the little smoky rooms in New York, in Chicago, in London, in Paris; little smoky rooms with jazz, and late sets, and poems about old boots sinking away.
Wambua's Bar (2013)
As the storm gathered over the archipelago, Michael watched the breathing of the angered sea rise from the shelter of Wambua’s bar. There would be good fishing tomorrow. Perhaps he would go to Kikambala. Perhaps he would stay put.
Now, three years on, storms were rare but rain was frequent. Looking up from his marmalade on toast, he saw the dots and streaks glance from his window; and on standing, saw the water begin to pool and surge around the drains of the High Street. His only good shoes had come apart at the right toe. He would have to visit the Whitgift Centre for gaffer tape or glue in time for work.
Birds had fathered on the course sand. They nattered together, occasionally bothering the clean bones of a large fish. These things sometimes happened. The morning was good. The sun was defying the last dregs of black clouds hanging over the Indian ocean. Today, Michael would fish. No need to go to Kikambala.
The shoe had been mended enough to withstand the rain and the notice of the manager. The rain had let up. This was good. This meant work. Michael sat in his small kitchen. The window buzzed orange in the lamplit night. He had put on weight. His chair told him so with occasional squeaks of protest every time he reached for his coffee. He stood suddenly and opened a cupboard, took a bottle of white rum out and dashed his coffee to the top. Then he looked at it. ‘Oh well,’ he thought. ‘It’s done now.’ He drank the coffee and pulled his shoes on delicately.
Wambua say back in the plastic chair, smoking a Sportsman slowly, smiling, his eyes wide and excited. The shade of the Coca-Cola umbrella helped keep their beers cool.
“So you ah goin’.” This was a statement that sat neatly between two pregnant silences. Michael waited, his eyes resting on a stray dog sleeping in the centre of the clearing. Shadows of muhugu and mvinje trees whispered over the plastic chairs and tables. He nodded slowly, an involuntary smile growing on his face too.
“You ah goin’” Wambua said again. Michael lifted his right hand and drew a piece of paper from his trouser pocket, which he slid across the table to Wambua. Wambua eyed it with respect.
“You ah rilly goin’.”
He pushed the visa back across the table.
Michael walked into the loading entrance at the rear of Tiger Tiger on Surrey Street, jus jacket pulled up around his neck even though it was nearly August. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to recognise him, but this was absurd as he didn’t really know anyone. They were all here. In his difference as a Kenyan, he felt the same as everyone. There were Lithuanians, Nigerians, Albanians, Philippinos and British all appearing and disappearing round corners, down stairs, carrying boxes, carrying towels, all under the distance, muted thump of music and to their own tune of clinking bottles and the chorus of a hundred accents shouting. He knew some of them. He never saw others long enough to speak to them. They were all part of a transient background population; not citizens with passports, rights or a foothold on the mountain of British social mobility, but not off-the-boat meanderers with high hopes and poor means. They worked, often every hour god sent, and were largely only ever around each other. There was a community in this, perhaps the germ of a society. Somewhere an elusive lesson hid under the heavy coat of British assimilation. Sometimes they would be given a few beers after their shift. They would talk about women.
Michael’s hands came down with a slap on the thick wood of his boat. His toes curled into the sand. He leant his weight against the sun-bleached bow and scored a deep, slicing cut into the wet beach as he pushed it out into the shallows. Squaws of cormorants sang overhead. The darting dance of shallow water fish vanished as his feet came labouriously down onto the seabed. He had done this a thousand times. It was his marriage. Marriage was beautiful, but marriage was hard. Eustace from Kikambala had gone abroad to earn skills. He worked in Nairobi now. Michael didn’t want to work in Nairobi, but he couldn’t fish forever with his catches. Further down the beach, the ambiguous shriek of children playing echoed around the cove. They were collecting shells. Up on the grasses was the silhouette of Gambo, sitting at a white plastic table under a palm. The steady glare and shrinking of his lit joint was a lighthouse to the teenagers and odd tourist who came to buy his thick, dark Masai bushweed. ‘Wambua will have taken the fridge to Mombasa and it will be fixed and the beers will be cold when we drink under the random bats and bushbabies’, thought Michael. The monkeys will try to steal Grace’s stew. Michael might pick up a coconut to bribe them on his way up there later, but they’re getting bored of coconut. The ploy won’t keep for long. He was further out now, and the sun was up well over the horizon. He would need to get his catches before it reached the archipelago. Perhaps they would throw him a party. Perhaps they had no need.
He rose the stairs and greeted a few people he knew after picking up his bag. His coat had been put in the cloakroom. Nearing the door that is hidden from the other side he heard the squabble of partiers. Like fish at the reef, nudging each other aside as they squirmed towards the coral. He could hear the clink of bottles in his bag with each step he climbed, and then suddenly, through the door, everything became louder, sharper. The lights were not the constant buzz of fire escapes like before; they were moving, pulsing, confusing. The route to where you were going was in a constant state of change. The music was a buzz in his chest like a second heartbeat at a dangerous pace. He had seen the place in steady, bright lighting for his interview and after his shifts, and it was quite heavily decorated. He liked it. Little of that decoration was visible while customers were in. He walked further, slowly, delaying his arrival and letting himself get accustomed to the sudden change in surrounding volume. His bag had got heavier. He walked over the cloakroom. The girl on the desk said “Hello” and opened the staff door, handed him a stool and closed it again. Michael walked into the gentleman’s toilet and to the end of the rectangle of sinks, where he placed his bag and unzipped it. He took out bottles of eau de toilette pour home – every brand – lots of toilet tissue, a bottle of squirtable soap and, his least favourite item: a large, hairdresser’s bottle of lollipops. He sat on his stall, where he would be for the next five hours, and placed the most important item from his bag in front of him: the small silver tray. He looked around to check that no one was looking and put one pound it.
The archipelago was long in the dusk and the seabirds were floating against the darkness of the sea in the east. Michael looked back to the beach and to the dust track that ran up the hill between the fan palms. Lovers walked along the shore. Two men were sitting on a drifted log, drinking coconut wine from a Smirnoff bottle and smoking. Michael could hear the occasional laugh bounce across the water, even at his distance. Behind him, the total darkness had struck away the horizon. The moon was rising. From this point of solitude, out on the water, he had often wondered what would happen if he had rowed just a little further out, and let the current take him east without his protest. He would stare at his homeland, waiting with a smile as the sun’s last breath caught the tops of the fan palms and promising laughter. The sea was his confidant during this silent mental fight, listening to him as his ancestors with patience, never advising, just listening dispassionately, but listening very actively. The darkness of his relationship with himself was permissible here. The whips and cudgels that he beat himself with were met with the unmoved stare of omniscience from beneath him. It was enough. He began paddling back to shore, his catch glinting in the bottom of the boat.
They came and went. Some left coins. He tried to put soap in their hands but most knew that he would want a pound for it so refused. Occasionally someone would gladly part with a pound or two, engage him briefly, ask his advice on the perfumes which he was now getting to be an expert on. One man had tried to befriend him once, asking where he was from and saying that he once visited Kikambala. He said that he was a speech therapist and could help with Michael’s stammer. Michael had written his phone number on a posh napkin. He had never received a call. He didn’t like most of the people that came in. They were loud and crass. They pissed on the floor. A few were sick in the toilets or on the floor. They slapped each other’s backs and talked about women, but not in the way that Michael and the other workers did around the upturned glass-washer tray they drank their beers from. They talked about women like they wanted them to suffer. Like a poacher he had met in Junju had talked about animals. He would often hear the clacking of plastic cards on the plastic of closed toilet lids. People would make fun of his stammer. He would smile long enough to persuade them that he was a poor African that would take everything they had with good humour so they would put a pound on his tray. Fights sometimes broke out. Bouncers sometimes barged in and dragged people out of cubicles. There were nights when the windowless, urine-soaked gentlemen’s toilets at Tiger Tiger on the High Street in Croydon, England were the darkest corner of solitude he’d known; when the sound of seabirds and laughing children choked in his memory, and the lane to death was revealed.
His catch slung over his shoulder, he walked the steep dust-track in the vanilla evening, the dirt sticking to his wet feet. Wambua and Grace were laughing. The smell of the woodsmoke blew down the hill, kicking up dry dust, as a thick, brown millipede with bright orange leg tangoed across the path. There were more people that Michael knew sat at tables. He could hear the small radio playing. Cries of ‘Jambo jambo’ greeted him and he lolled up the hill smiling. They ate fish from Michael’s catch and they laughed. He drank cold Tusker. In the morning he would pack his things. Moths batted overhead, the roost chirruped, bats bounced around buildings before clumsily lilting off toward the treeline. He would leave this behind. Perhaps he would come back. Perhaps he would have no need.
Michael arrived home. He was tired and he had a headache induced by cleaning fumes and bright lights. He took his shoes off delicately and laid them by the door. He cleaned his teeth and put his pyjamas on and got into bed. Dreams swept over him like the eager sea.
In the morning, the rain had passed and blue skies with rare, high clouds sat still and looked down in the same way that the sea looked up. It was hot. The heat was close. Michael knew this heat. He went for a walk. He bought fish and rice from the market and walked up to Queens Park past the town hall. He sat on a bench. A parakeet sat on a nearby eucalyptus. It was hot. His breathing slowed. He felt tired and warm. The sun filtered in greens through the zoetrope of chestnut leaves and feathered his closed eyes. He could hear the steady drag of the sea and the children shouting. He could smell Gambo’s smoke drifting across the shore. The grass was thick and burnt in places. His breathing was releasing his weight. He sagged. The corners of his mouth raised. He might have cried a bit. He doesn’t remember.
Perhaps he would stand up and go home. Perhaps he had no need.