The Dhow House (38 page)

Bee-eaters have a unique trick: when bathing in water and so exposed they lie with outspread wings and their heads twisted to the side, as if broken, one eye closed, to fool potential predators. They look dead, but are alive.

The car turns at the junction to the beachside airstrip. It is 3 January. I arrive on time for the daily flight to the capital at 3.15pm to find the plane is delayed by three hours. ‘Protocol!’ says the airport staff, thrilled to use these words. ‘Very important people.’

I go outside the airport terminal to wait. Women hawkers sit in the shade, baskets of mangoes at their feet to sell to passengers departing for the capital.

The VIPs turn out to count among their number Charles Mgura, Julia and Bill’s neighbour, and Eugene, the politico I met in the Dhow House. As I board they are strapping themselves into business-class seats. I stare directly at Eugene but his eyes do not even flicker.

The plane pirouettes and glides to the end of the runway. The sun has reached the treetops. We will arrive in a darkening capital with its night-time thunderstorms. My connecting flight to London leaves at midnight. From my seat I watch piebald African sacred ibis peck at the ground. A heron takes flight, wings kneading the air with commanding lassitude. He flies against the red sunset.

The plane charges towards the highway. It is a short-run airstrip and the small jet needs to accelerate quickly to clear the fence at the end of the airfield.

We are aloft and climbing over the coast. I keep my face pressed to the cold of the window. Beneath me I see the scatter of lights of Moholo and Kilindoni. The long stretch of silver beach darkens in the brief twilight.

Tonight people are drinking Duma beer at the Baharini bar, at Reef Encounters, at the Sahara restaurant. Kitesurfers are reposing on the beach, stroking their thin, alert dogs. Women move through white houses, flicking lights that may or may not turn on, thinking of the hour, soon now, when they will serve their husbands a drink. Women in the backland villages light the
makaa
, prepare chicken for the grill; their children will study by candle and kerosene lamps.

The sea sounds louder at night. Mosque swallows pour from minarets, unfurling in curlicues above the ruins of Swahili cities now inhabited by monkeys and narrow-mouthed mambas, by
madafu
hawkers with bloodshot eyes.

Storm is there. What will he do tonight? He has many friends. They will gather in teal pools of darkness, drinking beer by hurricane lamp, listening to trumpeter hornbills swaying in the anaemic upper branches of casuarinas. Evening glosses the ocean. Pied kingfishers fly out of the creek, heading to their roosts for the night.

Note: The majority of place names in this novel do not exist. The names for ethnicities and political factions are also fictitious. However, the bird, animal and tree species named are generally those found in coastal or upland East Africa.

Short glossary of Swahili terms

Askari
– guard, watchman

Bahari
/
baharini
– the sea, to the sea

Baraza
– sofa

Baridi
– cold

Bui-bui
– a chardor, often black and decorated with colourful detailing, worn by Muslim women on the Indian Ocean coast

Bwana
– sir, a term of respect

Dudu
– insect

Duka
– shop

Filusi
– blue-and-yellow ocean-going fish also called dorado or mahi mahi; the common dolphinfish

Hakuna
– not any, none

Jahazi
– type of dhow; can also refer to the mainsail

Kanzu
– the embroidered cotton full-length robe worn by Muslim men on the Indian Ocean coast

Khanga
– a printed fabric worn by women

Kikoi
– a cotton sarong-like wrap, traditionally worn by men to go to mosque in the morning

Kofia
– an embroidered cap worn by Muslim men

Mabati
– galvanised iron sheets used largely for roofing

Madafu
– coconuts/coconut water

Mafuta ya taa
– paraffin

Mahindi
– roasted corn on the cob

Makaa
– charcoal

Makuti
– thatch made from the sun-dried leaves of the coconut palm

Mama
– lady, madam

Matatu
– minibus taxi

Mshumaa
– a candle

Pole
– sorry

Pwani
– the coast

Rafiki
– friend

Sana
– very, or well

Shamba
– farm; a plot for growing vegetables

Wageni
- guests

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My sincere thanks for their help in the writing and publication of this novel go to Veronique Baxter at David Higham Associates for her continued support for my work, Susan Renouf at ECW publishers in Toronto for her diligent and insightful edit, Lauren Parsons at Legend for believing in the novel and for her helpful editorial input, and to Henry Sutton at the University of East Anglia, whose collegial support and reading of an earlier draft of this novel have been invaluable. I am very fortunate to work at UEA, where I am surrounded by talented writers, students and lecturers alike. Terry Stevenson and John Fanshawe’s
Birds of East Africa
is the definitive field guide to the bird life of the region and it has been an essential resource in the writing of sections of this book.

Also by the author

From the Library of Graham Greene

The Rough Guide to Costa Rica

Hunting Down Home

Nights in a Foreign Country

Private View

The Interpreter of Silences

The Ice Lovers

Night Orders: poems from Antarctica and the Arctic

Ice Diaries: an Antarctic memoir

We hope you enjoyed
The Dhow House
, Jean McNeil’s first novel with Legend Press.

The next novel from Jean,
Fire on the Mountain
, sees NGO worker Nick parachute unexpectedly into the lives of Pieter and Sara Lisson. With the Lissons, Nick witnesses a fascinating swirl of splendour and acclaim, but senses there’s a murky secret at its heart. This is a story that questions the relationship between truth and narration, families and strangers, father and son, past and present.

Here’s a sample of
Fire on the Mountain
:

PROLOGUE

I know I will remember that city as a film – a backdrop, somewhere I witnessed rather than lived. The first image, just as the opening credits fade, will be the hot tarmac of its streets smoking after rain, an entire city burning from the ground up. But then there are those things you cannot see: the vegetable smell of kelp mashed on the serrated shore of Ocean Point. How when you lick your lips the salt is there. The light – bleached, peering, as if the sun were scrutinising you, trying to determine what use it might have for you. For the full first week I am blinded by it. The summer gales, the blistering light. The sea is buoyant, cold.

As in a film we don’t know the ending yet. Because the city gave me the first period of repose in my life, it is not a place of futures, or even progressions of frames. My life there was a series of stills. To understand their meaning I am trying to animate them into a lurching, false sequence. That city is the only place in my life I have ever experienced a nostalgia for it when I was still there, as if the days and weeks I lived there were destined to be revealed as not real after all; rather they belonged to a separate uncategorised dimension, not past, present or future, and were being pulled out from under me even as I lived them.

In the film, after the rain-smoked streets, we see Pieter. He is walking toward us across the grass. There is a prowling quality to Pieter’s walk which Riaan inherited, along with his narrow, delicate feet. I am next to Sara, her uncle and her cousin. We are all sitting at a stone table underneath a sculpted shrub that overhangs in an unnatural oblong. Flies harass the wedges of cheese, the expert courgette and pepper antipasto Sara has prepared.

Only a few nights ago we nearly lost all this – the pool, the sculpted tree, the date palm, the house itself, with its architectural heritage, its hefty price tag. I remember how darkness filled the kitchen that night as Pieter and I talked, like liquid poured into a glass, both of us so absorbed in the narrowness of our escape we dared not interrupt the moment to light the candles that were our only illumination. How we stepped outside to where the night flowers were still blooming, despite the heat they’d been exposed to, their banana scent travelling on the breeze: Amaryllis, jasmine, bougainvillea. How after five unanticipated months in the city these reversed skies were becoming my skies. I could read the upside down constellations as if I’d never lived all my life in another hemisphere.

Now it is a hot day, a goodbye lunch, and Pieter comes walking barefoot across the grass, past the swimming pool. Patches of sweat soak his sky blue shirt, which has small white stitches in it. He has several buttons open from the neck.

‘You’re half way to taking your shirt off,’ Sara says.

‘Well I would, but I don’t want to scare away the ladies,’ he replies.

‘Or we’ll fall on you and attack you!’ Sara’s cousin grins.

‘Don’t do it,’ I say, ‘it’s not worth the risk.’

Earlier I had watched as Sara’s cousin said to Pieter, ‘Here, give me a kiss hello,’ and he’d said, ‘Why?’, playing his self-appointed role as the prickly, difficult husband. In kitchen, Pieter had looked at the tray of rolled meats and took one between his fingers, twisting it around. Keeping a straight face he’d said, perfectly seriously, ‘I prefer them rolled this way,’ He stood back, waiting for outrage.

The vague air of seduction, of something withheld – do all writers have this? I knew him; I didn’t know him. Perhaps that is all I will be able to say about Pieter, in the future. The writer who was tired of writing; who was always on the brink of giving up; who had been left behind by history; who hadn’t come into history at the right moment; whose books were considered evasive parables in a time of national crisis; whose works had never found popular acceptance, despite or because of their deadly seriousness. I can see him calculating how long it would be before he could indulge his addiction to contemplation again, how long he would have to serve lemonade to relatives on a heat-staggered day.

But today he is Pieter, slim and winningly arrogant, my friend, the father I never had.

I look up and see he is going to leave us. I know this from the deliberate way he approaches the table. He comes up behind Sara’s elderly uncle and hovers. ‘I have to go to a meeting at the national library. I’m going to have to love you and leave you.’ The uncle with the hearing aid takes no notice of him. I stare at Pieter, giving him what I know it is a plaintive look. This may be the last time I ever see him. My flight leaves in four hours’ time.

‘Cheers,’ Pieter says. His voice is distant, even acrid. He has been this way with me all day. I don’t know what I have done; it’s as if he has only today discovered or realised something not to his liking.

After he has disappeared into the house and I hear the car pull away I can’t hear what anyone is saying. A draining feeling pours through me, tugs all the energy out. Suddenly the heat is oppressive. It ripples through the burnt garden and the charred mountain – the tangle of vegetation that used to run rampant without the twice-weekly chop from Lewis the gardener – a kiln heat, a dead mid-afternoon moment, the swimming pool glistening in the late summer light.

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