Stone Kingdoms (2 page)

His voice at least remains how I remember it – plummy, superior, English. ‘How are you, Naomi?'

I resist the temptation of a facetious reply. ‘I'm not too bad.'

‘Under the circumstances you've been quite lucky.'

‘
Lucky, Mr Stanfield? Yes, I suppose in some ways I have.'

‘The doctor tells me the shrapnel wounds and burns will heal. I believe they're bringing in a specialist to look at your eyes.'

I hadn't noticed it before; he has a slight wheeze in his chest, a little heaviness in his breathing. Perhaps the altitude does not agree with him, perhaps I never heard it before because I was listening too intently to his words.

‘They say he's Swiss and will make my eyes as beautiful as Sophia Loren's.'

‘The Agency will take care of everything, Naomi. You're still our responsibility. Despite everything we'll make all the necessary arrangements and when the hospital gives the all-clear we'll get you flown home.'

‘Responsibility? You make me sound like a child. . . . But I suppose you think I am. An embarrassment anyway.'

He hesitates, and for the first time I can smell the spicy cocktail of his sweat and after-shave. I offer him a seat but he prefers to stand. Perhaps he thinks I might contaminate him, infect him with some of my insanity.

‘I think you've been foolish Naomi, very foolish, but you're still alive and that's something to be grateful for. We've used our influence to keep the lid on this and the sooner we get you home the better. The Consul has been very helpful, agreed to make it a priority.'

‘And where is my home, Mr Stanfield?'

‘Ireland, of course, Naomi.'

‘And what if I don't want to go back to Ireland?'

I hear him clear his throat, the rustle of his clothes.

‘I think perhaps we should talk at another time. What has happened has been a great strain, greater perhaps than the doctors have realized. When you're back with your family to look after you things will seem different.'

‘Nadra looks after me. Nadra is my family.'

‘Nadra?'

It's
as if he hasn't noticed her presence before. ‘This is Nadra,' I say, as I gesture to her with my bandaged hand. He says nothing and I have to hope that his inherent good breeding has at least caused him to nod.

‘Do you get many like me, Mr Stanfield?'

‘Like you, Naomi?'

‘People who go off the rails, people who cause you embarrassment.'

‘Africa affects people in different ways. We try to eliminate the unsuitable with our vetting system, but someone occasionally slips through the net.'

I feel him sit on the edge of the bed and know he is about to patronize me with some personal observation, bestow some pardon for my unsuitability.

‘It's not easy here, and you're young. Nothing can ever prepare someone for the type of things you've seen. Sometimes it's just too much, and when that happens the only thing to do is get out.'

I say nothing and into the silence comes the sound of a baby crying, a full-throated squall rising like a startled bird. He speaks about arrangements, about the right thing, but I have stopped listening. Eventually I feel him stand up again, the thin thread of wheezing lacing his breathing and making the ends of his words lapse into little puffs. He sounds like a man who has climbed too many flights of stairs. He is about to go. I picture him clutching his hat, fastening his briefcase.

‘We'll talk again, Naomi, perhaps when you're stronger. I am staying in the UN compound – I've left the number in the office and you can contact me there.'

As he says goodbye and begins to leave I call out to him, ‘Mr Stanfield, I've never been stronger, never all my life.' I hear the momentary confused halt to his steps and then the fading wheeze of his breathing.

After he's gone Nadra feeds me a milky soup of mashed banana. When I've had enough I turn my head away and
tighten
my lips but she clucks and I feel the metal spoon prising them open once again. It is useless to argue and there is no respite until I hear the spoon scraping the sides of the dish and swallow the final soggy crumbs. She makes me drink the glucose mixture, rubbing the teat of the bottle across my bottom teeth until I suck, and when the feeding is finished I make her go to the kitchens to get some food for herself by telling her I want to sleep. I do not tell her the pain is coming back. I had assumed too soon that I was out of its grip. Perhaps the drugs have run their course. The burnt parts of my body slowly begin to tighten as little flurries of pain wash over me, gently at first and then in insistent surges until I want to clutch at my skin to stop the spreading fire. I try vainly to smother the flames that sear my flesh, but all I can do is squirm in the bed and try to stifle the screams. Then I can't hold them any longer and there are running footsteps and voices all around the bed, a moist palm on my forehead, the scuff of a swab on my arm and the sharp prick of a needle. As it punctures my skin I'm crying but my eyes have no tears and even my throat feels dried up, like some dusty river bed. I want something to flow out of me but there is nothing there. Suddenly I am aware the rain has stopped and I don't want it to stop. I never want it to stop. I try to cry but it is only words which come out of me. There are no tears.

It is the ocean which I think of now, the memory I cling to more than any other. As I begin to spin into the slow spiral of unconsciousness I see it, feel it, remember it. Half-remember, half-dream it as I fall backwards beneath the azure shift of its surface, gasp again at the coloured clumps of coral – blue, red, fiery pink. Come, come with me as I hold out my hand to you. Swim among the shoals of fish which dart and disappear into its craggy shelter. The tiny tentacles of coral tremble and shiver as we swim by. Nebulous, filmy, fern-like branches jut out towards me and I touch the delicate tracery with my fingers. See a burst of almost transparent fish shoot past, each marked only
by
a thin filament of electric blue. All around us feathery pinnate branches fan the water as gaudy neon fish I do not know the name of appear and disappear amongst the staghorn coral. A cloud of yellow-tailed fish, their mouths smeared drunkenly with blue lipstick, puff across our path then turn in a collective quiver before pulsing away again. My whole body feels liquid, alive, more fluent than I have ever known it.

I dream it, half-remember it, long to feel the cool water wash over my burnt and broken skin. And then the voices all around me grow faint before they finally merge into the steady surge of the surf against the shore.

2

I
grew up in a house that faces the sea. A squat stone house whose bulbous windows stare out over the grey bucking swell of the Atlantic. A house my father doesn't own but which belongs to the Church, who allow us to live there while he ministers to the scattered congregations of north Donegal. A two-storey house with grey plastered walls, darker blotches on the gables where damp rucks have been replastered, and chimneys coped with sieved cowls. I sleep in a front bedroom and so I fall asleep each night and rise each morning to the shuffling ebb and flow of the sea, the white-frothed breakers which rasp the bevelled beach and tussocky dunes.

There should be some magic in growing up by the sea, but I never feel my life touched by it. Instead there is only the constant sense of being under siege, as if the house is trapped between the mountains, the valleys of bogland and the unrelenting encroachment of the sea. So whether it is the fine slant of grey rain which mists almost invisibly in from the Atlantic, or the squalls rattling the loose glass of my bedroom window, it feels as if we are outsiders, interlopers whom the elements conspire to evict. I think my father believes it too, because each night after the repetitive ritual of his supper he tears the day's date from the calendar, tours the whole house, his heavy steps squirming the floor-boards above our heads, and checks that every window and door is securely locked. Sometimes he goes outside and inspects the car, closes the little iron gate, as if in some public demonstration that our vigilance is eternal and not to be slackened by the advancement of night.

We
are outsiders in the community we live in, part of the declining Protestant population. They cling to their scattered farms or small businesses, only to watch their children move away in search of new lives. Outwardly we are good neighbours to the Catholic community but inwardly we are cautious, even suspicious. And as storms smack in from the sea, and the gulls are tossed skyward like days'-old confetti, our light flickers and shivers as my father disparages their religion and their politics. There is always the unspoken feeling that our future existence is under some vague kind of threat, and so we watch the world from behind our walls, hug the assurance of our certainties, the conviction of our election.

I rarely play with the Catholic children of the village and am never allowed to join the pattern of their lives. An only child, I am often alone, shadowing my mother at her domestic chores, or thrown back on my imagination and the world of books and dreams. In the village huddle a post office, a general store, a garage, two pubs and a chapel. I do not go there without some express purpose and my play area is confined to the dunes and the beach. But they are too open, too exposed and wind-swept to allow even a hungry imagination to transform them into something better. So I crouch hidden amongst the sharp fluted grass and rabbit droppings, and spy on the occasional strollers who walk their dogs along the beach, or else I browse in the sea's detritus – bleached tins, shards of glass, the bones of sheep – hoping, I suppose, for some message in a bottle, some object that will inspire speculation about other lives, other places. And when sometimes I chance upon the blackened embers of a fire, a spray of beer cans, I try to read the scattered remains like a book, gently touching and turning them with my foot, trying to piece together the clues. But there are never enough, never enough to help me begin to understand what shapes or colours might infuse the lives of other people.

It is from the dunes that I watch my father swim in the sea. A strange lifetime habit. He swims three or four mornings a week,
all
year long. Maybe he believes it keeps him healthy. I squat in some little gulley or the crest of some dune and watch him cross the road in his towelling bath-robe and open-toed sandals. His white legs are bowed and blue-veined, his bald head shiny in the morning sun, and as the black-faced gulls swoop and cackle above him he kicks off his sandals, folds the dressing-gown carefully, and walks into the sea. He never runs, never tests the water with his foot but wades straight in, shoulders pushing like pistons, until the water reaches his waist. Then he swims out through the swell. Bald head bobbing like a seal, he rolls over on his back, stretches out his arms and floats, kicking up white spumes of water with his feet. From the dunes the water looks cold, but he never seems to be affected or deflected from his course. I wish he could have known what it was to swim amongst the coral. I think it could have healed him.

My father is always old. He was in his early forties when he married, almost fifty when I, his only child, was born. As a small child I am a little frightened of him – the bald bulb of his head, the rawness of his eyes, the strength of his body. And my father has two voices, one which he uses to speak to my mother and me, one which he uses when he speaks for God. Sometimes when I have done something wrong he uses this second voice. It is deeper and slower and has a cadence which rises at the start of each sentence then falls at the end. The words are polished beads strung on the sure line of his thought. It is this voice he uses in church when he stands in the pulpit above his tiny flock. A church that could have been built in any part of the British Isles with its font, polished pews, memorial tablets, and wreath of poppies. Sprinkled across the front pews sits an ageing congregation. I am the only child. When we sing, my mother playing the organ, the faltering voices fade into the vaulted roof.

I suppose this is when I form my first impression of God as someone who lives in lonely echoing places and who speaks in two voices, someone who has slipped into old age.

I
hear my father preach twice every Sunday, the same message delivered in the same voice. After the early service in the village we drive inland, across the black seep of bog with its white wisps of bog cotton and purple heather, until we reach another congregation. Every other Sunday we drive up the coast and hold Communion for a small group of elderly parishioners. I come to know at an early age that my father is a disappointed man. Perhaps it is from snatches of overheard conversation, an expression glimpsed on his face, the set of his shoulders as he walks across the rippled sand towards the sea. I think he feels someone is punishing him, diverting his career into a forgotten backwater where he is destined to be passed over again and again. I know, too, there is never enough money, and in the house there is a constant scrimping and saving, an endless counting of pennies.

Three mornings a week, and sometimes during the evening, he goes to his study and shuts the door. I suppose he prepares his sermons or writes letters. Sometimes my mother sends me with tea and biscuits on a tray and then I knock on the door and wait until he calls me in. When I enter he is sitting behind his desk, his back to the window, but there are no open books or papers, only the dark polished grain of the wood and resting on it his large hands. I think I am another disappointment to him. Despite what Basif says, I was never pretty. Thin, pale-faced, freckled across the bridge of my nose and round my eyes, a frizzy shock of red hair, wiry and coarse to the touch. I always have it cut short in a kind of variation on a bob that only retains its shape for about a week before sparking and jetting into its own crackling life. There is a dresser with a mirror in my room, the glass full of shadows and sky. I stand in front of it and try to dream someone else.