THE FAT WHITE WOMAN

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 26

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Epilogue

Maharaia Rawiri and the Royal Marines who had taken him with them on the rescue mission flew the women along the coast to the assault ship that had returned them and their equipment to the former colony in the darkness ready to dip their toes back into this particular savage war of peace.

Their appearance, literally from over the horizon, which was where they had been lingering since a politically expedient withdrawal, had nothing to do with the small personal ordeals of two women, British or not. It was part of a hastily planned joint assault with the South African mercenaries and the hard-pressed Nigerian troops that was given the go-ahead following the mutiny of most of the government army and its sudden pragmatic alliance with the rebel forces in the city. The President, trapped in his residence, had been 'extracted' by British Special Forces, according to the newspapers, although this was neither confirmed nor denied by the Ministry of Defence in London. Farzaneh’s rescue was a by-blow to all of this and she remembered very little of events over the next few hours.

After getting out of the helicopter on the deck of the assault ship, she was separated from Mrs Kabba, who went straight down to the ship’s medical facility to receive the treatment that saved her life. Farzaneh was transferred almost at once to another ship, a fleet auxiliary, where she too received the attentions of a doctor and then, in short order, was given a shower and put to bed. She stayed there for two days receiving antibiotics, a course of pre-emptive treatment for infestation with malarial parasites and countless mugs of very hot, very strong, very sweet Navy tea. She was also given a radio so that she could catch up on the news, which, her profession not being a secret, it was thought she would wish to do. She never once switched it on.

She was very quickly put in contact with her father and, as well, received calls from the Foreign Secretary in London and the Minister of Defence. Peter Earle also telephoned. He wanted copy. He begged for copy. Farzaneh declined. She was no longer reporting the news. She was part of it. On the third day, or perhaps it was the fourth, she was flown to the airport, now under the control of the British, and thence, by military aircraft, to Banjul from where she travelled back to Stansted on an all but empty commercial charter. The violence up and down the West African coast was bad for the tourist trade.

Her mother and father were waiting for her as she was brought through Immigration, her passport still on the sands out at the Point or else washing around with all the other flotsam just offshore.

Driving home to Leicester, she had very little to say. Her mind kept fishing up – she smiled at the aptness of the metaphor – a single image, something she had seen from the helicopter as it lifted her away from the beach: Mrs Kabba’s severed arm and hand, half-floating in the waters of the rock pool into which it had, by chance probably, been tossed. Like some lovely white sea tuber, Farzaneh thought all the way home.

All the way home and not for a long time to leave it. There was a great deal of interest in her to begin with, but she had no interest herself in saying anything to anyone, except perhaps the one who could not say anything to her. Mrs Kabba's return to England came about because she was in no condition to resist it. She spent many months in the Leicester Royal Infirmary.

Farzaneh was not allowed to see her at the beginning of her stay. It was only later, and with the approval of Mrs Kabba’s sister Harriet, that she began her visits. Harriet was everything that Mrs Kabba had said she was: a crotchety old maid who railed at Farzaneh about Sib’s – she used the old familiar name still – refusal to co-operate in her rehabilitation. Farzaneh liked her immensely. Her complaints, more often than not, masked fear for her sister’s future and concern for her present, as well as a real affection.

And it was not true that Mrs Kabba was stubbornly resisting those who wanted to help her. She was, when her general condition had stabilized enough, fitted with rudimentary prostheses. In not too long a time, she had learned how to manipulate a magic marker and a small whiteboard. The first time Farzaneh saw her with these, Mrs Kabba managed to write the word “Jimmy” on the board with a crude but recognizable question mark after it. Farzaneh shook her head. Reverend Father James Conteh remained unaccounted for, along with several other African priests who had gone missing during the short but almost unbelievably vicious occupation of the town by rebel forces.

After she had given this news to Mrs Kabba, Farzaneh watched her struggle against the instinctive spasms of her facial muscles as tears welled in her eyes. She hit the white board with her marker and then indicated the eraser for Farzaneh to wipe out that name. She wrote a second name, “Ousman”.

Again Farzaneh shook her head. She had not even thought to inquire about the stewards, any of them. But Mrs Kabba grew more agitated, scrawling lines under the name she had written, banging the white board and then she began gesturing towards herself with the marker and in particular her mouth, her other arm. Then Farzaneh understood.

She understood and what had happened made sudden sense to her. “He came for me, didn’t he?” she said. “He was one of them already or else he joined with them and he came for me, didn’t he?”

Mrs Kabba made her clean the board again and then doggedly formed what for all it’s crudity could be seen as a human head in a bag. Farzaneh did not need the abbreviated form of the word grandfather to know whose head it was or where it had been brought to.

Farzaneh watched then as Mrs Kabba wrote three more words on her board: "like", "my" and, at last, "son".

The muscles in Mrs Kabba’s face began working again and this time she lost her battle to control them. The tears that had already formed and hung, some of them, on her lower lids fell now, and as they fell, Mrs Kabba let go a pitiful howling from out of her ravaged mouth.

On her way home, Farzaneh wondered who or what it was this fat white woman had wailed for. Herself? For what had been done to her? For Father Conteh? For the old man who had served her so long, so faithfully, so patiently? For the young man who had butchered her, her second lost son? For the country and the continent that had contained her and so many of her conquests and that she was unlikely ever to see again?

Farzaneh did not know. “I know nothing,” she said to herself and then again, in a silly Spanish accent, “Hi know naatheeng.”

Mrs Kabba died, of complications following a stroke, some three years after she was taken out of Africa. She lived through her last days with Harriet in the house where they had both enjoyed their quarrelsome upbringing, the house to where, one weekend long before, their brother Tony had brought home with him a fellow officer on leave, a black man, an African.

Farzaneh was also still at home then. She was not working in any sense that her parents could understand but they seemed increasingly less anxious about her apparent aimlessness as the months passed. She attended the funeral and went back, afterwards, with Harriet to Langton Parva, where she stayed that night, sleeping in the same room, the same bed, that John Kabba had slept in. She left the following morning, after promising to keep in touch, a promise she intended to honour.

It was a Bahá'í feast day and that evening there was to be an act of worship in the local centre. Farzaneh, outwardly at least, had become an active member of the community again, although her father, a man who believed as ardently in his daughter as in his God, could not fathom the true feelings of her heart. This time, she excused herself from attending, telling her mother she wanted to have a little while by herself. Then she said, “No, really, I just want to watch telly, if that’s all right.”

But she did not watch television. Once she was alone, she went upstairs to her room and sat down in front of the computer her father had bought her when she first came home and made it clear that she would be staying. She started it up and, when she could, opened a document file. She immediately clicked the “Save” button and typed the four words she had last scrawled in her all too decipherable shorthand on a yellow pad one hot afternoon in Africa, “The Fat White Woman”.

She typed a chapter heading, “Arrival” and then took a pile of carefully written note cards from out of one of the pretty green folders she had brought back with her from Tokyo. These she began to arrange on the top of her desk just to the right of the computer’s keyboard, as if dealing a hand of patience.

Once this was done, she picked up one of the cards, read it and at once began the first sentence of the first paragraph of what she thought, she hoped, would eventually be a book, a long book. “When Farzaneh Jamshidi flew from London to the Gambia on the west coast of Africa her fellow passengers were elderly for the most part, pensioners off for a final frolic in the sun."

It did not seem odd to her that she referred to herself in this way. She had done so throughout her childhood and beyond, although not always using her own name. Sometimes it would be that of a character from a book she had been reading. But now and for all the time it might take to tell Gwen Kabba’s story and her own small part in it, it would be Farzaneh.

finis

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 25, Part 5

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

And so she did what she could for the white woman. The easier tasks first, cutting the rest of the ropes that so cruelly bound her, washing away the sand and the blood. She faltered very early on when she came to Mrs Kabba’s mouth. There was a lot of blood inside it and when she put her fingers between the lips to clear the airway, she found out why: the front teeth, upper and lower were gone and, as her fingers went in deeper they touched what little had been left of Mrs Kabba’s tongue.

She cleansed and bound the stumps of Mrs Kabba’s arms, but she could neither sever the tenuous connection between the left wrist and its hand, nor could she, although she made a fire, stiffen her resolve to cauterise the wounds.

Mrs Kabba was still lying on the sand because Farzaneh did not have the strength to move her very far. She was face down again because Farzaneh’s father advice was that she be kept in the recovery position or as close to it as possible. The girl had done what she could to cleanse and dress the wounds to Mrs Kabba’s breasts and in between her legs. She managed, against all her own expectations, to get the drip into a vein but she could not get anything down Mrs Kabba’s throat. The night was very long and yet it was not long enough.

Some time early in the morning, with the sky already streaking red, Farzaneh heard the sound of motors, outboards again, coming along the coast towards her. Her instinct was for self-preservation, was to return to the forest. Every part of her said that she must. Something else told her she must not. It was with a terrible sensation of weariness that she picked up the cutlass someone had used to mutilate the woman she thought of now as her friend and she got ready for the boats and the men – or perhaps the women – who must be in them.

They were men. Soldiers. Three rubber boats appeared with a truly frightening swiftness around the Point and raced in towards the shore, the engines being let die only a few meters out. At more or less the same time, there was a powerful hammering in the air and a great downdraft as a helicopter materialized more or less above her head and other men, other soldiers, threw ropes down from it.

Farzaneh looked on amazed. So many, she thought, to kill her and make sure of an old woman who was perhaps as good as dead already. She watched as the first soldier came down one of the ropes. She did not even see the others splashing ashore through the surf. She only knew that the hand holding the cutlass was at the end of an arm that had gone – the expression all but made her laugh when she thought of it – “jelly-legs”.

She did not see what was behind her and she did not hear what was being said, shouted, in front of her. Not until she heard her name.

The first soldier was down on the beach and walking towards her. He was, she realized, talking to her, saying her name and telling to put the cutlass down. Her mind had gone “jelly-legs” as well as her arm but she did what she was told and then she got ready to die.

The soldier moved in on her as soon as the cutlass dropped from her hand and he took hold of her by the shoulders before pulling her towards him in an embrace. She had expected to be seized by the throat but perhaps that would come later. She was confused because she could hear the man speaking to her in English. He kept saying her own name and then something else, someone else's. Perhaps it was his but it meant nothing to her. It was like baby talk. “Maharaia,” the man kept saying. “Maharaia Rawiri.”

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 25, Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

She had been thrown face down in the sand, her head pointing towards the water. Somehow she had managed to turn her face to one side and so stay alive. When Farzaneh went to get hold of her, she uttered a terrible groan that caused the girl to jump back in fear. But Farzaneh had felt flesh and, in spite of her own distress, knew she must look again. It was getting darker all the time and she was herself close to the end of her tether. It took several minutes for her to begin to understand some of what had been done. When she did, she moaned herself, a long barely articulated cry of negation that turned, the more she discovered, to a mindless and repetitive chanting of the name of God.

Mrs Kabba had been trussed like a chicken ready for the oven. Her legs were spread, her ankles secured to a bamboo pole. Her knees were bent back so as to allow the pole to be lashed to her waist. Her arms were tied behind her back with cords that pulled them tightly together wrapped around the upper parts of her biceps. But it was the face that truly distressed Farzaneh, for it was all but unrecognisable. Mrs Kabba had been ferociously beaten. Her eyes were swollen shut and her nose was all but closed in by the swelling of her cheeks. Covered with sand, she looked more like some dreadful fetish figure than a human being. The girl knew what she had to do and was intent on doing it but she could not explain herself to Mrs Kabba, only continue to give voice to a perplexed and imprecatory gibberish.

She needed light. She needed a blade of some sort to cut the ropes. She needed clean water. The darkness had completed itself. The sky remained clear but no moon had yet risen, and so the girl raced around trying to locate things by touch. Several times her hopes rose and then fell again almost immediately. She found what she thought was the water she had saved but lifted an empty can. She got hold of one of the lamps but could not find any matches. When she found matches she could not remember where she had put the lamp. In the end, however, she got water and she got light and once she was able to see, she found a cutlass. It had been tossed down quite close to where Mrs Kabba had been left and, even as she picked it up, Farzaneh felt that the amount of sand adhering to it was ominous. She ran the little distance down to the sea to wash it just as the moon came up, its light allowing her to see the bloody gunk not even salt water could easily dissolve. Still, she got it clean and went back to attend to Mrs Kabba. It was when she began to cut through the lashings around her arms that Farzaneh began to comprehend the full of horror of what had been done to her.

She knew that, beyond a certain point, there was very little help she could offer Mrs Kabba without being helped herself and so she emptied out her duffel until she got to the laptop and satellite ‘phone. The bag, like so much else, had been shot up. The computer had a round through it but the ‘phone was in one piece. She turned it on, all the time begging God to have mercy, to make the battery last out the call. The screen came up. She dialled. Then, faster than she had thought would be possible, she heard the call tone and after it her father’s voice, saying, as he always did when he answered the 'phone at night, “This is the doctor. May I help?”

Farzaneh felt her head swim and thought she might vomit then, but managed instead to say “Daddy!”

An age of worry dissolved in his voice when he heard her speak. “Farzaneh, where are you? Mummy and I, Granny too, we –“

She cut across him. “Daddy, please, not now. I’m in great difficulty and you must please help me. I don’t know how long I can talk before the battery runs out here. Please, Daddy?”

She started to sob and her father’s voice at once changed. He was still her father but much more he was the doctor again. “Say where you are.”

She gave him as accurate an account of her position as she could, explained briefly what had happened and said she did not know what might happen next. Her father made no comment. His next voiced concern was whether she was physically injured. When Farzaneh told him that she was all right but her companion needed medical attention for a number of serious injuries, he asked her to begin with the person’s age, sex and general condition and then, starting from the head, told her to move down the body, detailing the injuries as best she could. He told her not to ask questions or make comments, only to describe what she could see or feel with her hands.

The low battery alarm sounded even as Farzaneh began to speak. “Female, late middle age, old age better, sixty-eight maybe. Small, overweight.

“Head – maybe scalp wound. May have received heavy blows. Face bruised, swollen, deformed. Eyes closed. Cheeks, lips swollen. Mouth – I don’t know. A lot of blood there. I don’t know if she’s conscious.”

The girl hesitated and her father spoke to her sharply, telling her to go on. “Daddy - they cut off parts of her arms.”

“Tell me which parts. Start with right arm, then left.”

“The right arm - I think it’s off at around the elbow. They cut the left at the wrist but the hand – is still there. Moving down, Daddy, her knees were badly swollen before these people came and attacked us. They bent her knees back. They tied her up like that.”

Her father only asked if the ropes had been cut. When his daughter told him not yet, not all of them, he said, “Have you examined torso of victim? No? Then very quickly please look at breasts, stomach and genital area. You probably have to cut clothing if she is wearing. Please do it now very quickly.”

Exhausted as she was, Farzaneh did what she was told. She found a gash in Mrs Kabba’s left breast and blood, a considerable amount of it, between her legs.

Her father told Farzaneh she must be brave. It was not a request, simply an expectation that was to be adhered to. “Very brave, which I know you are. You must stop bleeding and you must clean all the wounds and you treat for shock, yes? I know these things are difficult for you but you must try.

“If you haven’t done so, first thing is you must clear her mouth. Make sure she can breathe. If she’s alive now, and you say she is, then she is breathing, but you must be sure she doesn’t swallow tongue or choke some other way. Okay?

“Next, you have to stop bleeding at amputation sites. You have to do two difficult things. First, assess partially severed hand and make judgment. Probably, you have to complete amputation. Then, best way to stop bleeding in your situation is cauterise both stumps. Do you understand? Make a fire, very hot, let it burn down to glowing cinder and somehow get the very end of stump into the fire. That way you have no problem with infection. No more bleeding. If you can’t do that, then you bind stumps. Use a lot of cloths. If you still have kit I give you, you use your antibiotics. Try to find out about allergic reaction first, okay? Also, you use saline pack and drip that is with it. I showed you how, remember? These things are all you can do.

“So now you go to work. With God's help, we will bring you back here with your friend safe.”

She felt he was about to hang up. “Daddy, don’t go. Don’t leave me here.”

He spoke her name, and for the first time in their hideous conversation she heard his voice move towards sorrow. She asked what it was that he wanted to say and he told her that to all the other tasks before her now she must add one more: she must pray. He gave this last instruction in Farsi, his own language, which his daughter could but barely understand, although she understood that.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 25, Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 02:45:00 +0000

Farzaneh spent the hours of daylight moving through the forest. She stopped often but always, after a short time, moved on. She had no idea where she was once she lost sight of the big house's compound walls. She had no idea where she was going. She struck what might have been paths worn by human feet at one time or another but always jumped across them so as not to leave the imprint of her own feet on the greasy red earth.

She felt no hunger during her time among the trees, but her thirst was terrible. She came across puddles of peaty-looking water here and there, some large enough to be called pools, but could not bring herself to drink from them. Once, she found a stand of banana palms. There was rainwater caught in some of the leaves and she drank that, feeling better almost immediately she had done so, if only for a short while. From time to time during her wanderings, she heard more gunfire but no other human sounds. Even her voices, one by one, fell away to silence and the only living things she saw were the ants that ruled the forest floor. Sometimes there came the sound of movement high above her head, monkeys perhaps or large birds.

In among the trees the light began to fade. Farzaneh sat down on the wet forest floor and did not know what to do for the best. Her head fell forward into her hands and when she lifted it again there were smears of blood on her fingers. She touched her cheeks and felt the swellings from cuts and scratches she had received from branches and thorns or where mosquitoes had fed from her. She felt herself begin to shiver again and then she fell asleep.

She woke because she smelled smoke. It drifted into her dreams so that she thought for a moment she might be back in her room at Father Conteh’s house. The realisation that she was not was a bitter one. There was a fire somewhere and at first she thought they were burning the forest to force her out into the open. Then she remembered what Mrs Kabba had said about making a big smoky fire. She got to her feet, swaying because her legs were so unsteady. She had to work to get enough spittle to lick onto her finger but she managed that and then she held the moistened finger out in front of her, waiting to see which side of it would dry first. Assuming an onshore breeze, this would be the bearing she would follow back to the beach.

She moved carefully but surprised herself by how soon she could see the flames. The boat was well ablaze out on the water and there were flames trying to take hold of the beach house. She stood just within the shelter of the trees watching the beach, looking for some sign of life. There was none. Whoever had come, whoever had done this, was gone now, and, it seemed, had taken Mrs Kabba with them.

It came to Farzaneh then that she was alone in this place with no means of escape or of communication with anyone in the outside world who might aid her and it was this that sent her running from the trees, across the rocks and on to the sand. Her duffel was there somewhere and in it everything she had brought with her to Africa. She had repacked it just the night before ready to take back out to the boat.

She found the bag on the sand, one item among all the other stuff that had been strewn about, as if a small cyclone had swept through the place, scattering everything before it, leaving the broken remnants in its wake. Farzaneh stood looking at the wreckage. In the dying light, she did not know what to do and she certainly made no conscious decision to set about trying to order the chaos of possessions, but that is what she did.

Her first attention went to the burning beach house. Whatever wood it was made from did not catch easily and she had little difficulty in extinguishing the flames where they had managed to take hold simply by throwing sand at them. Then she went down to the ocean where she began collecting whatever objects lay closest to the incoming waves and moving them back up beyond the range of the tide. She had been working hard for some time, the night descending with its usual swiftness, when she made her terrible discovery.

Bending over what she had taken to be another bundle of something or other that had been dropped near the rocks on the far side of the beach, clothing perhaps or one of the sacks in which they had been storing fruit against the time for their escape, she found Mrs Kabba.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 25, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

She sensed the coming of the dawn as soon as she stepped out from the back of the beach house into the open area that Mrs Kabba called the kitchen. Crossing it, she heard ,or thought she heard, birds moving about among the trees. But when she was among the trees herself the dawn seemed a long way off. She could see little and she could hear nothing other than the noise she herself made moving through the forest.

She got off the path, as she had been instructed, but did not go very far before she stopped. It was not purely disobedience. She had a truly terrible need to empty her bladder and she knew that, if she did not stop to squat then it would empty itself anyway. But she was appalled at the noise she made peeing and the smell that was there afterwards in the close forest air. She pulled on her fatigue pants straightway afterwards, all the time reasoning that peeing now, getting into her trousers now, would only speed her journey when she chose to move again. Yet after she had fastened the waistband button and zipped the fly and, squatting again, had cinched the bottoms of the legs tight around her ankles, she did not move on. She stood there listening to what noises there were outside her head and the voices that clamoured within.

She was very frightened. She had the bitter taste of fear on the back of her tongue. She was shaking again. She was sweating but, as before, felt a terrible coldness all over her body. An ache in her gut, just started, told her she might have to squat again very soon but then an absolutely clear voice spoke through all of the others and said she should wait, if waiting was a possibility. Oh, it was, another voice told her, as a third mocked the whole as nothing but nonsense. So many voices, so much for them to say, so many things for them to tell her. But one voice, pitched lower than the rest and softly insistent, set up its short refrain. All because of you, this voice said. All because of you.

She kept it to that. She would not let it progress. She refused to enter into an argument with it. She kept back the long list of justifications for what she had done that could be summed up with an equal brevity: only doing her job. It failed to convince, perhaps because it sounded too much like the other incantatory excuses that had rolled from off the tongues of the guilty throughout the century’s bloody years. But she could no more shut it up than she could remember the line of poetry that would at least have asked an honest question about what part, if any, she had played in the sudden and awful turn in the war that had brought it to this remote and lonely place.

At the same time, she was praying. She had not prayed since - the last time she had prayed. Her prayer was the little refrain she had always used when she was frightened and she had been frightened so often when she was a girl. She had lain awake in the darkness on so many nights certain that there were bogeymen about or worse, the Nine O'clock Horses.

Who had told her about the Nine O'clock Horses? She did not know, or could not remember if she had ever known. She was not even certain what they were. Yet they frightened her. The mere idea of them frightened her. And so she would pull the covers as far over her head as they would go and she would keep her eyes shut and she would say the magic words, say them over and over again.

She remembered, equally surprised, the old rhymes that had frightened her, barking dogs that warned of beggars, "some in rags and some in tags and one in a velvet gown".

Standing still, the girl listened to all her voices, waited for something to happen, although she did not know what, and, to her shame the moment she realized it, never once wondered about Mrs Kabba in any kindly way, what she was doing, what she intended to do if -. Before she could add to the 'if' there was the clear sound of an outboard motor starting up: one, two, three snarls and then the quiet was ripped from the young day. She turned and went deeper into the forest, moving as fast as the branches and her own shaking legs would let her.

She was not Alice now. She was not Dorothy. She wished she were. She wished she could just click her heels together and say the lovely phrase but she could not. As she could not summon the imperiousness of the blonde-haired child that had reduced her own surrounding horrors to nothing more than a pack of cards she sent flying through the air like so many inconsequential butterflies.

Farzaneh was not blonde and, this side of a bottle of bleach, never would be. She was, and the thought smacked across her with much the same smarting force as a tree branch had just done, Snow White. She laughed because she remembered the name not in English but Japanese: Shiroyuki Hime. In Tokyo Disneyland there was a ride called, she thought, "Snow White's Desperate Journey." Hoosh's kids had made her take them on it again and again and again. And watch the video. And watch the Hello, Kitty version on video as well.

But this was different. This was the latest release and the plot had changed. It was now the Wicked Queen that had sent her into the forest not the hunter. The hunter, and he had friends in this version, wanted to cut her heart out. The hunter and his pals, if they came into the forest after her, if they caught her, bloody well might cut her heart out. Only, not before they had done a lot of other things to her first.

In spite of her best efforts not to, Farzaneh fetched up against the compound wall of the house that Hassan Bangura-Saeed had built for Mrs Kabba and, in spite of what she had been told, squatted down with her back to it. Just to get her breath, she told herself. Just to get her bearings. She had been on the move for what seemed a long time; pushing on slowly through the trees so as not to make so much noise, but moving nevertheless. She had stopped once to ease the aching in the pit of her stomach and then been forced to do so again after only a few paces more. She had thought it must be what Mrs Kabba had warned her against: the skitters. She had begun to sob then and throw the old questions up towards the sky she could no longer see. Why this? Why now? Why me?

But it was not anything she had eaten, only the terror that possessed her. The cramping in her stomach went on but she had had no need to stop again. Hunkered down, her back against the wall, she stayed in the place she had been told to avoid trying to understand what had happened.

Only three people knew that she and Mrs Kabba had come out to the Point: Father Conteh and Mrs Kabba’s servants. Father Conteh was probably dead. The stewards, the old man and his grandson, were either still in the house on Kissy Street or else, according to Mrs Kabba, gone to their own village. So who had come and why they had come were questions the girl could find no answers for. Put it down to rotten luck then, she thought.

There were other questions to deal with, not the least of which was what made Mrs Kabba think she could deal with the intruders. Farzaneh’s first thought had been that she meant to hide somewhere out behind the house, which was why she had offered to help her up, help her negotiate her way out into the old kitchen area on her swollen legs. Then, when she was in the forest, the voices going ten to the dozen inside her head, it occurred to the girl that Mrs Kabba would not hide. She remembered the way in which she had said she would never leave Africa, “not now”.

If she would not leave, she would not hide. She would wait for whoever had come and send them packing because of who she was. And, Farzaneh thought, perhaps she would. Everything else, every other query she had raised, was a question she could not answer. She began to sing to herself, softly, under her breath: another gem from her brother’s record collection. Eddie Cochran? Maybe. She couldn’t be sure. There was just the one line she knew anyway, something about questions that neither she nor Eddie, if it was Eddie, could answer, and then the bit that had always made her laugh, the uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. uh-huh.

She actually started giggling but a burst of gunfire from the beach put an end to that. Bullets from the discharge snapped through the foliage, sliced off leaves, smacked into tree-trunks. Cement chips and dust flew out of the wall some way to her left and it took several long seconds before she realized why but when she did, she threw herself flat on the ground and, when the firing stopped, began to crawl away from where the bullets had hit, following the wall to its end and turning the corner. She had assumed that she already was on the side of the house farthest from the sea. Now she intended to make sure of that before moving away, back into the forest, along as vertical an axis from that side of the compound as she could manage. She was perhaps three metres in among the trees again when she heard Mrs Kabba, it could only be Mrs Kabba, screaming.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 25, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

A Call for Help

A hand pressing down over her mouth woke her. Through her first moments of panic she heard Mrs Kabba whispering insistently, "I shall only take my hand away from your mouth when I am sure that you will not scream or make any other sort of loud noise and agree to do exactly as I ask without argument and, if you must speak, do so only in the quietest whisper you can manage. Do you understand?"

Farzaneh moved her head to indicate that she did indeed understand.

Still Mrs Kabba kept her hand over the greater part of her face. "And do you agree to do as I have asked you?"

Again, the girl’s head moved to indicate that she did indeed agree. Mrs Kabba relaxed her grip but did not move her hand so far away from where it had been that it could not quickly be restored. "I think we may be about to have visitors."

Farzaneh drew breath and Mrs Kabba clamped her nose and mouth again. She said only the word 'don’t' before, slowly, her fingers relaxed once more.

Farzaneh exhaled, took another shallower breath. "How - what makes
you -?"

"I thought I heard an engine – an outboard - so I listened. Then they - whoever they are - cut it and I was absolutely sure. A few moments after that I smelt the exhaust. There must be an onshore breeze. Someone out there is smoking as well. You get a faint whiff of it from time to time. I don't know but I reckon they've cut the engine and are either waiting for the light before coming ashore or else they're hoping to drift in.

"Whichever it is, I think we should assume they could do us harm if they found us and so it is very important, my dear, that you listen carefully and do exactly as I ask you.”

Farzaneh, who had begun to shake again, said, "Yes."

"When I tell you to do so, I want you to get up, put your shoes on and make as little noise as you can while you're about it. Get hold of your pants as well if you can but don't put them on. There isn't time. Get out of here and straight into the forest. Once you're among the trees, keep going. Get off the track as soon as you can. Don't make for the big house, whatever you do. Get in among the thick bush and stay there. Make sure you can see but equally, make sure you cannot be seen. Do you understand? Yes? Then off you go."

The girl moved away from Mrs Kabba, slipping underneath the mosquito netting. She found the pair of trainers she had brought ashore with her other things. She knelt to lace them. Mrs Kabba signed at her to hurry but her fingers seemed thick and clumsy again. She formed each bow with less skill and speed than a five-year-old.

When she was done and had stood up again, she was facing Mrs Kabba. "Come on," she said. "I'll help you."

"No!" Mrs Kabba hissed the word, like a cat treed by dogs. "I can't go with you. I can hardly walk. Alone, you have a chance. I have a chance. Together, we might both die. Now please go. Please go. If - things work out, I'll - I'll make a really smoky fire - I'll clatter on the skiff with the paddle. Oh, I'll make smoke and a hell of a row. Then you can come back. But not before."

Farzaneh reached out in the darkness and touched Mrs Kabba's wrist then fumbled her fingers down to her hand. The pressure she exerted was returned, but it was no more than a few seconds before she felt herself cast off. Such was her distress, she could only think the words of parting; she could not speak them.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 24, Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

“As I said, I was pretty blotto and then, when we got home, Immy, started going on at me – about how I lived. She’d decided, quite correctly, that the party wasn’t an aberration and she went on about the past. My past. Hadn’t I learnt my lesson? Was I still trying to kill myself? She actually said that, which is rather un-sweetly ironic given what happened.

"So, she was going on and on and I just wanted to be sick, which I was. I don’t remember quite how I got into the lavatory. Perhaps she took me there. What I do remember is kneeling in front of the lavatory pan, as one does on those occasions, heaving the contents of my stomach into it, and Immy being there with me, holding my head, smoothing back my hair. And at some point during the proceedings she told me that she loved me.

“I think I knew what she meant by that trite phrase even given the state I was in at the time - and the circumstances. I mean, holding someone’s head whilst they vomit into the lavatory pan is hardly the moment to express your love for them unless you really do mean it. Anyway, she said it again the next morning.

“She brought me my breakfast – it was a Sunday, Mr Kargbo’s day off. She bounced into my bedroom with tea and toast and her cheery smile, told me that she’d been to early Mass in the college chapel and then, after she’d asked me how I was feeling, how I’d slept, all that sort of rot, she – well, she said that she loved me again. She said she’d loved me more or less since the day we’d first met – a real coup de foudre, you know, love at first sight.

“And I said, more or less, ‘Of course you do, darling. And I love you, too. Always have. Best friends, aren’t we?’ As one does.

"But she shook her head and said that wasn’t what she meant. She meant that she really loved me. She didn’t have to say any more because then I knew. I understood. And all I could think of to say was, ‘Oh, Imm.’

“The rest of the day was – well, rather strained, I suppose. We didn’t go anywhere. We had lunch. We sat out on the veranda. We had tea. We drank her wretched sherry and watched the sunset and we talked. We talked about everything except that. She cooked dinner; we ate it. Afterwards there was more of the sherry and we sat out on the veranda listening to the Sunday play on the World Service; I can still remember the title: Mr Moon.

"It was after that, after the wireless was shut off, that she started to talk. She told me she’d come out to Africa because she was running away.”

Farzaneh lifted up her head, trying to see the face that was so close to hers in the darkness. “From what?”

“There had been an incident at the school where she was teaching involving a senior girl. I honestly don’t think it was much of an incident – a kiss perhaps, if that. But the girl’s parents found out somehow and went to one of the school governors.

"Immy resigned with immediate effect. It was the price that had to be paid for the parents of the girl not to take things further.”

“But why did she come here? I mean, if the parents had agreed not to take matters further, why didn’t she just move to a school in another town? Why such a drastic – such a dramatic – jump?”

“She explained all of that. It was my fault, apparently. The incident with the girl, I mean. I gathered that there had been other – involvements. Again, I don’t think any of them went very far. Lord knows but I had crushes on teachers at school. It’s part of growing up, isn’t it? You know, a hot pash for Miss Smith because of the way the sunlight catches her hair in the last class of the afternoon, the way her voice goes when she reads “La Belle Dame sans Merci” out loud. If Miss Smith should then offer to lend you a book, if she should suggest tea and cakes at the Oriental Café or lunch at her home one Sunday, one or two other girls invited as well, of course, what a thrill!

"Only there didn’t seem to have been very much that was thrilling in any of it for Immy. She said she was ashamed of these – she kept calling them ‘involvements’. She said she kept going after young girls because she couldn’t have the one person she actually wanted.”

“You,” Farzaneh said.

“Yes.

“I remember feeling so sorry for her and yet, at the same time, uncomfortable. Not about the present situation, you understand, but all the times in the past when we’d been together – been together and often been pretty close physically. It occurred to me that – well, I’d never be able to think of any of those times in the same way again; ‘After such knowledge’ and all that. Which is probably why I did what I did next.”

“What?” Farzaneh asked, fearing the answer. “What did you do?”

“Oh, the most stupid thing I’ve ever done in my life, which, according to my sister Harriet, has been more or less a catalogue of idiocies: I took her to bed.”

Again, Farzaneh felt a rush of heat suffuse her.

“I suggested it. I led the way. I instructed her. It wasn’t the first time for me with another woman. I was still very much in my Terence phase; you know, 'nihil humani a me alienum puto' sort of thing."

Mrs Kabba shifted her position slightly, groaning softly as she did so. When she was settled again she said,“There are many good reasons for going to bed with someone but feeling sorry for the person isn’t one of them. I went to bed with Immy because I felt sorry for her. I thought – I thought it was something she wanted very much. I thought it would not cost a lot to give her what she had wanted for so very long. I did not think it would do her any harm, quite the opposite, in fact. I was wrong.”

Farzaneh, ashamed of herself for asking, said, “What was – I don’t want to seem, you know, but what was it like?”

“With Immy? With the couple of other women I've slept with? Lovely! Bed, sex, often is. It’s afterwards that the bloody business starts. Which it did.

"She thought, you see, that the sex was going to be a permanent part of our relationship and it wasn’t, not as far as I was concerned. And I had to say so. I let something go on for too long that I never should have allowed to begin in the first place. I'd thought I could just give her this little bit of happiness, you see, and that would be that. I was wrong. So she left the house, moved to Jimmy’s and within a couple of days she was dead.”

Mrs Kabba did not speak again after this and it seemed to Farzaneh that there was nothing she could say either: there were no words she could think of to say that did not seem utterly trite, even to her. So she said nothing but only lay where she was and listened to the noises of the night until both she and the woman in whose arms she was cradled fell asleep.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 24, Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Again, the fire was let go out as soon as the food was cooked. The women ate sitting inside the beach house with no light except what little of the fading day outside managed to find its way into their shelter. When the food was finished, Farzaneh scoured the dishes they had used with sand. They would not be washed until the morning. After she had helped Mrs Kabba get outside to relieve herself and then helped her back into the shelter, she saw to her own needs. Only after that did she settle herself down for the night.

She lay with Mrs Kabba who, although she declared her knees to be "on the mend", could still not get into her hammock. Farzaneh had absolutely no intention of getting into hers. So they took up the places they had occupied for much of the previous night and more of the morning. Farzaneh nestled into the generous curves of the other older body as if it were something she had done all of her life and Mrs Kabba accepted her, cradled her. "Old cat and young cat," she said for no reason the young cat could think of.

Farzaneh lay listening to the beat of the heart that was not hers; the listless sound of the sea breaking on the sand; the forest shifting. From time to time she heard, but would not listen to, the dull echo of some distant explosion from the town. Her body, jumped with each crash. It was her ears she would not use, not even when Mrs Kabba made some remark. "Hush, here comes a whiz-bang," she said once and then started talking about a show she had seen in Leicester years before. When the day’s light was completely gone, Farzaneh closed her eyes and closing them was at once asleep.

"I'm sorry if I barked at you." The words seemed to echo in her dreams and it took a moment or two before she could come back fully from the shallows of the sleep into which she had fallen.

"Sorry?” Farzaneh said. “I - did you bark at me? I don't remember. When?"

"After breakfast. When you - oh, you know, it was about Immy. The swimming."

Farzaneh began to remember. "Yes, yes, I said something stupid, as usual. But it didn't feel as if you were - barking at me."

Shifting her weight on the unforgiving boards, Mrs Kabba said, "Immy's death is a touchy subject for me."

Farzaneh, aching to sleep again, not talk, wanted this rolled up and put away. "I'm sorry. I say the most incredibly stupid things at times. I always have done. It's because - my parents always said it was because - I don't think things out properly before opening my mouth.

"All the time when I was a kid, my father would tell me to think before I spoke. I can just hear him, 'Think, Farzaneh. Think before you speak.'"

She closed her eyes again and almost at once felt herself falling back into sleep.

"There's something I want you to know. Something I want to say to you about Immaculata. Before it's too late to say it to anyone. I've had to wait a very long time for the person to come along I thought I could say this to. These past couple of days have convinced me the person I've waited to tell is you. May I? Would you mind?"

Farzaneh, awake again, felt she could only say yes.

"Immy was gay. You know, lesbian."

Cradled as she was in Mrs Kabba's arms, Farzaneh could not help but feel a surge of embarrassment engulf her body from her scalp to the very undersides of her toes, a rush of heat that caused her every nerve ending to prickle as if she had received a mild but still significant electric shock. She said nothing.

"I didn't know, not until she told me. All the years we'd been friends, the years we lived together, and I didn't know. I didn't even suspect. I don't think she knew herself, to be honest, not for a long time."

The following silence forced the girl to speak. "So, how - when - did you find out?"

It took a long time for Mrs Kabba, this woman who had seemed incapable of not talking, to answer. "About a week before she died."

Again, there was a silence and, in the end, it was Farzaneh who broke it, asking Mrs Kabba whether she was sure this was something about which she wished to speak. "Now, I mean. Perhaps - another time?"

"No, I am sure. Where we are now, as we are now, seems right."

She began her story by saying how surprised she had been to receive a letter from her friend asking whether she might come out to see her. “It was just before the Easter break. She said she already had a flight reserved, it was only a matter of confirming the reservation and paying for the ticket. The travel agency was taking care of the visa for her. She had never indicated any interest in visiting me until then, so perhaps I should have been asking myself why, all of a sudden, she wanted to come. But I didn’t.

“Well, come she did. I met her at the airport. Liz, the Irish girl I ’d been sharing with, had just moved up to one of the smaller houses on Queensferry. I put Immy in her room.

"She hadn’t told me how long she would be staying. I imagined two, possibly three weeks. When I asked, she laughed and chided me for wanting to be rid of her before she’d even unpacked. Then she said a month, possibly longer. I suppose my jaw must have dropped rather because I remember her laughing and saying she might stay “for ever”.

"You know, I wasn’t sure whether or not she was just pulling my leg and so I didn’t pursue the matter but, at the same time, in all the years I’d known her, she had never been one to tease. It simply wasn’t her.

"It was only a few days later – we were – Lord, we were drinking sherry out on my veranda, watching the sun set, watching the world turn pink, you know, the way it does from up on the mountain. I hadn’t drunk sherry since I’d lived with her in Leicester. It struck me that she’d pretty much taken me over – in less than a week. She’d taken me over and more or less reconstituted the little ménage we’d had in the Leicester house.”

Farzaneh, shifting on the boards, said, “Where was that house?”

“Lytton Road, one of those streets that run between Clarendon Park Road and Victoria Park Road. Do you – yes, you probably do. I forgot that you’re a Leicester girl. More of one than I am, actually.

“Well, that was where we lived and the way we had lived there was pretty obviously the plan Immy had for the way we should live here. The realisation that this was happening struck me with such force that I more or less blurted the question as to how long, exactly, she was proposing to stay.”

“And?” Farzaneh asked.

“And – she simply said what she had said before – a month, perhaps longer. I think that, had I asked when she proposed to leave rather than how long she intended to stay she might well have said this year, next year, some time, never. But I didn’t and, again, the question was left hanging.

“We were happy enough, I suppose – other than the fact that she took over the running of the house, the routines, that sort of thing. I ferried her about the town. Introduced her to the people I knew – not all of them, just those I thought she would approve of.

"And then there was a party at Liz’s. It was her house-warming do and – well, pretty wild, I suppose. Immy was shocked. I remember her sitting on a dining chair against a wall. She’d managed to push it so far back against the wall in fact that another shove and she’d have gone through. Been out in the garden, which is most probably what she would have preferred. I should have taken her home. I didn’t. She took me home. I was too drunk to drive.”

“Father Conteh said – when he talked about Immy - that she’d been upset by something. But I just assumed it was something that had happened at your house. He’d told me about the parties. That was how he got on to Immy, if I remember correctly. Of course, I may be wrong about that.”

“It was something at my house, but it wasn’t a party. Well, it was Liz’s party. That more or less made what happened at my house – happen.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 24, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

They did not get them. The sickly grey-green light persisted all day. Rain fell in petulant little showers that came unannounced and were sharp upon the skin, soaked the hair and clothes. With each spat the air cooled and Farzaneh, in spite of her exertions, would feel chill and shivery.

She was busy again for the whole of the day carrying out Mrs Kabba’s instructions as to what needed to be done to speed their departure when the fine weather they were waiting for should arrive. There was fruit to be gathered in the forest. Water to be boiled and stored in any container that might be used for the purpose. This meant the fire had to be kept burning, which required the frequent replenishment of the wood supply. But what wood she found was wet and so, once she had hacked the branches into lengths suitable for burning, she had to stack them close to the blaze to dry out before feeding the flames. The only time she found herself not engaged in some form of energetic activity was when she went to fish for their supper.

She wanted to try for something bigger than the sardines she had caught from the rocks the day before and so she told Mrs Kabba she would go out in the skiff to roughly where they had first anchored the cruiser. Her plan was not greeted with any enthusiasm.

“I promise I’ll be careful,” Farzaneh said. “I promise not to go round the point. This morning, I just wanted to see – as much as I could – what was happening. Well, I did it and I don’t need to do it again.”

Mrs Kabba, evidently unconvinced, talked about the uncertainty of the weather but, all the while she was speaking, her voice seemed fretful rather than angry, which prompted Farzaneh to offer a further reassurance. “I’m a good swimmer. You’ve seen that. There won’t be an accident. I won’t drown.”

“What are talking about?” Mrs Kabba’s voice was sharper all of a sudden.

“I just thought that perhaps – well, you know, Immy – what happened to her won’t happen to me.”

“Immy didn’t drown,” Mrs Kabba said. “Not by accident, she didn’t. She was a strong swimmer. She took her own life. She wanted to die.”

“Look, I think I should go and get on with things,” Farzaneh said, nervously. “I – if I’m going out on the water then I need to go now.”

She left Mrs Kabba lying inside the beach-house roof. “I promise to be careful,” she said. And then, "Wish me luck."

She was careful. She had luck. Within what seemed like a very short time – an hour perhaps, perhaps less – the girl brought the skiff back to the shore, towing a large fish, another barracuda, still hooked to the line. She got it into the shallows and then onto the sand where she killed it with several blows to the head that she administered with the gaff. She sluiced the sand from the fish with seawater, then gutted it. It was big enough to give them their supper that night with enough remaining for another two or three days. Mrs Kabba showed her how to smoke what they did not intend to eat there and then. They would take the smoked fish with them to eat on their journey.

Farzaneh wanted to know exactly how long the voyage to the islands would be but Mrs Kabba said only that she did not know. “Well, not exactly. It seems sensible to have as much food and water with us as we can: enough for three or four days, anyway.

"I have no chart, remember. With a bit of luck the weather will stay clear all the way and we should be able to see the islands from some way off.”

The girl was visibly shaken by this. “I know that I was – it was me who suggested sailing to the Gambia. I know this isn’t as far but it sounds dangerous. Do you really think the situation here warrants – what you’re proposing we should do. I mean, especially with your legs, your knees, in such a state.”

Mrs Kabba said she did, indeed, think so.

Still, Farzaneh would not let it go. “But, when it all started, when we heard the first explosions, you said it was a raid. The BBC report said it was a raid. Do you really think we’re in more danger here than we would be out on the ocean with no map, heading towards these islands where you think we might be safe -?”

“Safer,” Mrs Kabba said.

“Safer,” Farzaneh echoed her.

“The answer, my dear, is yes,” Mrs Kabba said. “And now what I think you is that you should get on with cooking the fish. I’ve told you what to do. If you’re not sure at any stage – with the smoking, I mean – give me a shout. I’ll give you what help I can.”

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 24, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Preparations

“I take it those indicate the power reserve - or lack of it.” Mrs Kabba, positioned just behind Farzaneh was watching the screens of the laptop and the satellite ‘phone with an interest the girl found intimidating.

“It's usually faster than this,” Farzaneh said, and then, as the link was made, her fingers turned spastic. Instead of double-clicking the icon for her browser, she opened the e-mail programme and watched as the first of some thirty-eight messages began to download. She quickly cancelled the operation and brought up instead the home page of the BBC’s on-line news service.

The little she could find was disturbing. There was nothing on the first page of the site and so Farzaneh moved to the Africa section. It was there but only as the third item in a list of brief synopses, a short piece from the BBC’s correspondent in Lagos. The report spoke of a large-scale raid, with heavy fighting in one of the suburbs. According to the Nigerian military, the incursion had been checked and the only ongoing action was against small pockets of rebel suicide squads. An officially discounted M.R.F. source, quoted in the same report, claimed their forces held most of the town.

As Farzaneh shut things down she looked at Mrs. Kabba, who said nothing. Then, like the after-image of something she might just have looked at on the computer screen, the girl saw a flash of what she had witnessed earlier in the day: the mountain burnt out and smoking; the heart of the town ablaze; the Nigerian ships retired even farther from the shore; lines of tracer fire that showed livid against the dark backgrounds of charred earth and oily smoke.

She had woken from her second sleep to find herself still clinging to Mrs. Kabba. Getting up, she had been consumed by guilt when she was shown the grotesquely swollen knees of the woman in whose arms she had slept so thoughtlessly, so safe and careless. She had begun to weep again only to have her tears stopped by Mrs. Kabba’s asking for help to stand and get outside in order to relieve herself.

It was with some difficulty that the two women had made their way out of the shelter and then Mrs. Kabba said she could not get into the forest. Neither could she squat. So she had been forced to stand, her long robe hoiked up around her waist and Farzaneh holding her by the shoulders while she let go the heavy stream of her water onto the sand.

“I feel,” Mrs Kabba had said, “rather like a three-year-old caught short whilst out shopping with Mummy.”

Farzaneh got her back into the shelter and then fetched a wet towel to wipe clean her legs. Afterwards, whilt Mrs Kabba lay down again, she had set about the business of lighting a fire, drawing water and making breakfast.

The night's rain had packed the sand down hard and left the forest dripping. The sky was a heavy, tumbling patchwork of grey and, where the two came together, indistinguishable from the sea whose listless waves took on a different colour only when they ran in close against the shore, leeching, so it seemed, a bilious green from the forest trees. The firewood and kindling were kept under cover and so it was not difficult to start a blaze but still the heavy air kept the smoke down and caused it to roll in coils around the beach.

It wasn’t much of a breakfast: hot tea, a small amount of hot porridge, a couple of sardines, rice left over from the night before, oranges. As soon as they had finished eating and she had cleaned the pans and dishes, Farzaneh had stripped off her clothes, then carried the skiff down to the sea. The tide was up but she could still have waded out to the boat. She took the skiff simply to put the computer and the satellite ‘phone in. She pushed it in front of her through the water. She had intended to push it back to shore. Mrs Kabba had told her to go straight out and come straight back. She had not herself intended doing otherwise. It was just that, with the water still around her knees, she got into the skiff and using her hands as paddles, began to move away from the shore and out past the point. She had to see the town. She had to.

And so she had seen it and, afterwards, she had returned to the boat, climbed aboard, taken all her things from the small cabin, put them into the skiff and walked the light aluminium shell back to the shore, hoping all the while that the water in the bottom of the shallow hull would not find its way inside the polythene wrappings of the computer and the telephone.

From where she lay in the beach-house, Mrs Kabba could not see what Farzaneh had done with the skiff or where she had gone with it, but the time the girl had been away told enough of the story and she was angry.

“Stupid,” she had said. “I cannot believe you could have been so stupid.”

But it was what Farzaneh had seen, added to what the BBC report said and did not say that made Mrs Kabba reverse her judgment of the day before. They must try to get away. When Farzaneh asked where, exactly, they should try to get away to, she was told that there were some islands a day and a night’s sail out from the coast.

Once Mrs Kabba had announced her decision, only the weather held back the moment of departure. “We shall want blue skies,” she said.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 23, Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

The storm that had been threatening through the late afternoon and evening had not shifted its attention to some other part of the coast. Like an elderly actor making a comeback late in life, it managed a startling entry. There was a short low startling rumble and then, before Farzaneh had time to work out exactly what the noise was, the space all around her was lit by a flash of bright white light that seemed then to be put out like a candle flame.

In the sudden darkness a crash of thunder sounded, so loud the girl sat up in her hammock and swung her legs out of it all in one continuous movement. As soon as she was free of the mosquito netting, she fled across the concrete towards Mrs Kabba, successive flashes of lightning providing a horrid sort of illumination for her. She was whimpering as she got to the long bench and under Mrs Kabba’s netting. When she felt the other woman’s arms form themselves around her shoulders and a hand cradle the back of her head, she let go a terrible moan, an altogether inarticulate but still eloquent expression of her distress.

Mrs Kabba soothed her, settled her down so that they lay together on the unforgiving wooden planks that a few odd bits of cloth did little enough to soften. Farzaneh did not care about physical discomfort any more. She was shaking, her body beyond any sort of self-control. She was a marionette and fear pulled her strings. She knew that at some point Mrs Kabba forced a wad of cloth between her teeth. She was able to understand why with her brain but her brain had nothing to do with the way in which her teeth bit down and her jaws locked together afterwards. She felt for a moment that she could not breathe with her mouth clamped shut so tightly but it was a very short moment and afterwards she had only the chaotic imagery of her dreams to instruct her. She went to sleep without knowing that she did so.

When she woke again the world was grey. There was noise all around her but it was only the rain falling, falling heavily. Her mouth was dry. Her jaw hurt, especially at the two points just below her ears. She remembered the cloth she had bitten down on but when she put her fingers up to her face she found her mouth was empty. She was lying tight up against Mrs Kabba, her head cradled in the crook of Mrs Kabba's arm. She felt Mrs Kabba reach her free hand towards her face, smoothing the skin with her fingers before she said, “Do you think you could move, dear? My arm - it’s quite dead.”

Farzaneh sat up and Mrs Kabba moved her arm slowly towards herself, resting it below her breast. She asked the girl how she was feeling. Farzaneh mumbled something and Mrs Kabba had to ask her to repeat herself. “I feel better - than I did. It's just I feel - so cold. Why is it so cold?”

"The rain. The temperature has probably fallen by five or ten degrees. It's enough to make you feel cold even if it isn't actually. And you're sick, aren't you? I should have taken better care of you. After we got the Tumbu grubs out - I should have checked for infection. I shall look, later, after we get up."

Farzaneh had begun to shudder again. "I am sick but not like that. I'm frightened. I told you - on the boat - when we were fishing. I told you then and after that I thought I'd got rid of it all. I thought it was all gone because I told you, because I said it."

Mrs Kabba reached her hand towards the girl's face again, touching the skin of her cheek with tenderness. "That was before - well, before." There was not the need for the sentence to be completed.

"I don't know," Farzaneh said. Her body was shivering so violently again it seemed as if each word was being shaken out of her. "I just know I felt all right. I felt - this is going to sound ridiculous - I felt happy. And then, in the night, I began to think and I just - I frightened myself so."

She began to tremble then with such severity she could no longer properly speak. Mrs Kabba shifted her position as best she could, given her own pain. She stroked Farzaneh's face, her hair. She made soft sounds in her ear. She pressed her own abundant softness against the other slimmer body. At length, that body began to slow in its trembling, the rhythm that had taken possession of it calming. As the girl's breathing returned to somewhere nearer normal, Mrs Kabba felt the wetness of tears that were not her own against her skin. "That's it. That's it. You cry, my love. You have a jolly good cry."

"Why are they so cruel?" Farzaneh asked.

Mrs Kabba, who was drifting off into the beginnings of sleep, started. "What? Are you - all right? Do you want something? Water?"

Farzaneh said, "I try but I can't stop thinking about it."

"About what? What is it you can't stop thinking about?"

She pulled a long breath into her lungs. "About what’s going on in the town; about what they're doing. I've been told about it and I've seen what's left afterwards and it isn't like it is in the books or the films, is it? It isn’t even like television."

Mrs Kabba said, very softly, as if she were still shoo-shooing into the girl's ear, "No, it isn't at all like any of that."

Farzaneh's body shuddered again as she sucked in more breath. "Then how can they - why are they, so cruel? I mean, all of them. It isn't just the - the baddies. What happened to your friends, the doctors and the - that was the baddies, wasn't it?"

Mrs Kabba said that, yes, it was the M.R.F. that had done those things.

Farzaneh shifted her head and began to nuzzle her face against the soft folds of skin that cloaked Mrs Kabba's neck. "The things I saw were all done by the good people and so I've just been thinking that if it was what the good people did then, well, what's the difference? Good, bad, it doesn't seem to matter."

Mrs Kabba moved her hand away from the girl's neck for a moment. For a moment she reached it downwards as if to feel her own knees. It was only a moment and then she put her fingers back into the mass of Farzaneh's hair.

"It's all tangled," she said. "Your lovely hair is all matted up with salt and sand. We should wash it."

Farzaneh was silent. She only rubbed her face against Mrs Kabba, who said, "I used to ask myself those questions, you know: the why, the how. When it all started and we began to hear things, rumours, scary stories that made us all - as they used to say in Leicester, 'frit'.

"It was all a very long way - it seemed as if it was a very long way - from us here on the coast. It wasn't, of course. It was in the very midst of us. We - I - didn't understand that, not to begin with. I didn't understand it for a long time. I think Hassan did."

Farzaneh opened her eyes, turned her face towards the open air, lifted her head. "But he died," she said. "He died before any of this started."

Mrs Kabba said, yes, Hassan Bangura-Saeed had died a long time, years, before the revolt of the Kabbanda and the swift succeeding descent into chaos. "But he knew. I really think he knew.

"You asked me earlier on how I could have loved him, a man like that. It wasn't just my - contrariness. And I didn't love him, in the beginning, I just found him incredibly attractive, physically. The love followed. Quite a long time afterwards, in fact. And it was when I loved him that I could ask him the 'how' questions and the 'why' questions. Do you understand?

"I loved him. I didn't love a lot of the things he did. I told him often enough. I told him what I disliked. I told him he was like a lion, standing over a kill, letting this or that favoured jackal have a piece of it, a haunch, a leg, a flank, a rib bone to gnaw on.

"He said my analogy was wrong. He said he wasn't a lion; he was a dog. He said they all were. He was simply the biggest, the most vicious. And because he was the biggest, the most vicious, he kept the others in order; let them know what they could and couldn't do; what they could and couldn't have. And how much.

“He said, and I will never forget this, he said that without him, or someone like him, the dogs would turn into wolves. And the wolves would want everything. The wolves would never know where or when to stop. The wolves would ravage the country and when there was little or nothing left to ravage, then they would ravage the people. And after the wolves would come other, worse creatures. They would tear the people. Tear them limb from limb.

“There’s a passage in the Bible, in the Old Testament, one of the prophets probably. It says something about a lion or perhaps it's a leopard. I can’t properly recall. The wolf, the lion, the leopard, shall slay them and something else shall, yes, now I remember, ‘a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them and - and’ and I can’t remember. I only remember the wolves and how everything began to fall apart here after Hassan.”

Farzaneh had stopped crying. “I can't understand it, that sort of cruelty.” It was as if she had not heard anything that Mrs Kabba had just said. "I don't want them to do any of those things to me."

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 23, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:55:00 +0000

“I meant - perhaps I should have said that I can’t understand the relationship. I can’t understand how it got started. I can’t understand how it continued. I think I can understand what happened with John. It fits in - I think it fits in with your sort of general contrariness when you were a teenager. And John was on the right side, wasn’t he?”

“The side of the angels, do you mean?”

Farzaneh began to wonder how far she would be allowed to run with this particular bone before Mrs Kabba snapped back at her. “If you like. You could say that he was on your side. Given all that you've told me about yourself then. But Hassan - I just can’t, you know, join up the dots on that one.”

Mrs Kabba shook so much with laughter the planks of the bench creaked. "Join up the dots? Oh, that is precious. I've already told you how funny you can be. It's a talent you should cultivate. Join up the dots - really!"

Farzaneh, in the darkness, said that she had not meant to be funny. "It's just what people say."

"Not anyone that I know.” Mrs Kabba was still laughing. “But, my dear, I feel as if you've spoken to me for the first time. It's as if - oh, so much has been stripped away. I wish it had all happened sooner. I wish - gosh, if this is what comes of taking our clothes off, I wish we'd done it the very first time we met."

"The first time we met was in the foyer of that hotel."

"I know. Lord, wouldn't it have given the people at reception something to talk about?"

“Those people could all be dead now,” Farzaneh said. “Jimmy, as well.”

Mrs Kabba said yes, of course, she understood that. The veneer of humour was too thin. Rubbed off too easily. "We really should sleep and, in the morning, if we can, somehow, we should try to find out what has happened, what is happening. But, without a radio..." Her voice faded in the darkness.

Farzaneh told her about the satellite 'phone and computer packed way in her duffel on the boat. "I'll get them in the morning. I didn’t have time to charge the batteries before I had to leave Jimmy's but there might be enough power left to dial up the web. We could see what there is on the BBC site."

She heard Mrs Kabba saying that she had not the faintest idea what she was talking about. "But the important thing is that you do. I shall watch in wonder as you conjure up this technological marvel - in the morning. But now, I do think we should try to sleep. Don't you?"

It began to rain, the unfamiliar gentleness of the onset surprising the girl for she had become accustomed to the spectacular: the wind, thunder, lightning bolts, the cloud-released torrents. This rain fell so lightly, the sounds of it striking the tin roof of the shelter, the forest leaves, the rocks, the sand, were only just discernable. It was much more the sense of wetness in the air and the evident drop in temperature that told her what was happening. Yet the rain's hand was a quietening one and the restless stirrings in the forest subsided under its touch. Even the wind calmed to nothingness. Still she could not sleep.

Her mind, like the butterfly she had seen in the forest, like the butterfly her mother had so often told her she should have been named for, moved here and moved there, never settling upon any one thought for more than a second or two before taking flight again. Sleep would not come.

Her thoughts shifted to a song she knew from the days when she had hovered at the very edge of growing up: twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Her brother Hushang was already married then and she had made free with the odd collection of records he had left behind him at home. Mostly put together from ‘finds’ he would bring back to the house after foraging among the second-hand stalls in Leicester market, it contained a very peculiar mix of music. One of the records Farzaneh had liked then was by Hank Williams. The high nasal whine of the voice, the steel guitars and fiddle enchanted her for months and left their mark even after she stopped playing the album. She remembered a furious argument she had with a girl at Cambridge over the authorship of “Your Cheating Heart”. Now, she tried to remember the name of the band, Hank Williams and the something somethings. Like sleep in the song and in the real world this night, the name would not come. Yet she could remember that the album was a recording of an old radio show, "The Health and Happiness Hour". She began to giggle.

Then she remembered another record of Hoosh’s she had listened to relentlessly for a while, “Playing With The Queen of Hearts”. She started to hum the tune to herself, recalling only the chorus, recalling only part of the chorus.

“Playing With The Queen of Hearts”? Here she was in a shack on a beach on the very edge of Africa, not enough miles away from a burning city, sleeping with the Queen of Hearts. Or not sleeping with her. Whatever. It certainly wasn’t really smart.

Farzaneh, wrapped in darkness, chilled now, frightened when she thought about exactly where she was and wondering how, wondering if, she would ever manage to leave this place, was unable to fall away into sleep. She felt trapped. Unable to turn in the hammock, she could only continue to lie on her back and listen to the rain while her mind went wandering where it would.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 23, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

The Shivers

Farzaneh made their one hot meal of the day. She began to prepare it in the late afternoon and everything was cooked well before dusk. When the food was ready, Mrs Kabba said that the fire should be allowed to go out. By nightfall there was only a circle of warm grey ashes on the sand and the two women were already inside the beach-house.

Farzaneh lay in her hammock but Mrs Kabba was on the bench again, stretched out on top of an improvised mattress of old towels and cushions. She had spent much of the day there. The mosquito netting now hung from a hook in one the roof supports above her. No lamps had been lit inside the shelter. The women had gone to bed early in order to sleep, Mrs Kabba said. “We neither of us got much rest last night. It’s essential we do so tonight.”

But they did not sleep. They talked. They talked about Hassan Bangura-Saeed.

“I don’t see why you loved him,” Farzaneh said. She sensed the smile that spread about the face of the woman who shared the strange space, neither properly indoors nor out, they presently inhabited.

“Yes, I did.” Mrs Kabba said at last. “It’s another irony, isn’t it?

"I mean, I think I’ve already spoken to you of the weather when I first met John, how unseasonable it was, and then again at the time after I lost the baby, how little those warm October days suited my mood. Well, here I am, a woman who never loved her husband, falling in love with, hopelessly, helplessly in love with, a man who could never be my husband because he was someone else’s.”

“There was never any possibility of him divorcing his wife and marrying you?”

Without the slightest hesitation, Mrs Kabba said, “No. I knew that from the beginning of the affair. It was only after I began to love him that the knowledge, the fact that he would never marry me, began to – matter.”

Farzaneh, her usual timidity diminished by the darkness, asked about children.

“None,” Mrs Kabba said. “It wasn’t that a child was a physical impossibility. I could have had a baby with Hassan. I wanted one, longed for one with him.

"He would not countenance it. He had children with his wife. He felt that to have others, with me, would complicate the situation for him. Another sort of trail he had no wish to leave behind him, I suppose. I don’t know, not really. He was a complicated man.”

“He was a bad man, according to Father Conteh.”

“I can only repeat myself: he was a good bad man,” Mrs Kabba said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, almost entirely empty of discernible sentiment. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

She paused and then said, “Sometimes actions that of themselves are wrong may be better, in a given set of circumstances, than those that can more properly be called right. I’ve always felt that Jimmy would have had a - what? - a happier life? – had he persisted in his ‘sinful’ relationship with Sister Agnes. He should have had her courage. He should have left the priesthood. He should have gone with her to America. He should have married her. Had children with her. They could have had children. She was considerably younger than he was.”

“I can’t imagine Jimmy - Father Conteh - married,” Farzaneh said. “I can’t imagine him with children. He’s lovely but I just can’t see him with a wife and children, grandchildren. He called me ‘child’ sometimes and I once called him ‘Father’, but I can’t imagine....” Her voice fell away. “It’s like I can’t imagine you with this Hassan.”

“There isn’t anything to imagine. My relationship with Hassan was a fact.”

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 22, Part 5

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

‘Scratch’ was the word Mrs Kabba used and it was the right word. Farzaneh fetched water, wood and kindling and then, while Mrs Kabba attended to the fire, went back in among the trees with the cutlass and a basket to look for the fruit on which the must make their breakfast that day. She did not go as far as the house, so there were no bananas, but she found enough for them to manage with in the short meantime.

“Couldn’t we sail to the Gambia?” Farzaneh said a little while later as she swilled the last of the tea from her enamel mug.

Mrs Kabba made a face. “In theory, yes. In practice, no.

"We haven’t got enough food. We couldn’t store enough water to take with us. We could only follow the coast if we ran the engine the whole of the time, and we don’t have the fuel for that. I can’t sail there because I haven’t got the charts. Even if we had the charts, I haven’t the experience. I’m a good enough Sunday sailor, but this is the farthest I’ve ever ventured with the boat in thirty years of sailing.

"Even if we had all of the things we haven't got - the fuel, the food, the water cans, the - oh, all the rest of it, I still wouldn't undertake such a venture lightly, not with the rains upon us. I mean, look at it.”

She gestured up towards the sky and out towards the horizon where clouds were massing of an altogether more sinister colour than the light grey of those immediately above their heads.

But there was something Mrs Kabba wanted to do with the boat. "I think we should bring it closer inshore. Out there it’s too - too visible. I don’t want some airborne imbecile to take a run at it and then claim to have sunk the rebels' previously unknown naval arm. Do you follow me?”

Farzaneh, thinking of Kaspar Lobbim, said yes.

“Which means another paddle in the skiff for me and a swim for you. Do you mind? And, Lord, I don't know how I shall get out of the skiff and into the boat but I suspect the manoeuvre can only be managed with you shoving me up the ladder. A bit like Ousman did for you - such a naughty boy. Such a very naughty boy."

“And what about Ousman and his grandfather? Will they be all right, do you think?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Mrs Kabba said, yes, they would be fine. “It was obvious that the worst of whatever was going on was nowhere near Kissy Street. I’m sure that at this moment they’re far more worried about me than they are about themselves and, should things go badly, I mean very badly, they would simply leave, get out along the edge of the water.”

There was in Gwen Kabba's voice then that same sense of absolute certainty Farzaneh had heard before whenever she spoke of what her servants would or would not do. It was as if - but there was not the time for her to follow the thought to its conclusion. There were other things she had to do.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 22, Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

There were two questions, Mrs Kabba said: what they could do and where they could go. “Or, if you prefer, we could turn them around. You know, where we can go and what we can do. The order we take them in doesn’t matter because the answers are still the same. We can’t do anything and we can’t go anywhere. We can only remain here and wait.”

“For what?” Farzaneh asked.

“For it all to blow over. It will, you know, in the end.”

Farzaneh was unconvinced. “Jimmy,” she began and then corrected herself. “Father Conteh, I mean.”

“Yes? Jimmy, Father Conteh, what about him?”

“He said something to me once. About a tide, or, or a flood - that would pour across the town one day. And then the war, everything really, would be over.”

Mrs Kabba seemed to glower at her, in the old way. “Once? You make it sound as if this conversation occurred deep in the dim and distant. No matter, I wouldn’t take Jimmy Conteh too seriously as a prophet, if I were you.”

Farzaneh, as if she had begun to dream while still awake, said, “Yes.”

She closed her eyes then, squeezing the lids together, and dropped her head down into her hands. “My eyes - hurt. The salt water. I - I should rinse them.”

She looked up for a moment, her eyes bleary and said, “But, he was right, wasn’t he? I mean, the town, even the university, the mountain, from what we saw - what we could see - everything’s on fire. What I heard in the night must have been the mines he told me about. He said - “

She stopped, then began again. “You know, last night, when I lay in the hammock - I mean, for the second time, after you said we should try to rest even if we couldn’t, you know, actually sleep, In the dark, when I was lying there in the dark, I kept trying to see their faces: Father Conteh’s and the Nigerian officer’s at the checkpoint and the soldiers’ and old Mr. Bah’s. Well, I couldn’t. Isn’t it strange? I wanted to see them and I tried ever so hard, but I couldn’t.”

“It isn’t strange.” Mrs Kabba’s voice had abandoned that edge of harshness it had assumed a moment before. “I tried and tried to see John’s face after he left for the Congo. I tried after the news came that he had been killed. I thought it was a betrayal of him that I couldn’t. Now, I simply feel that none of us can, not properly, not if we’re honest about it. It’s something beyond our powers.

“Sometimes, when I’m in a certain mood, I number the dead, my dead: both sets of grandparents, Mummy and Daddy, John, the baby, Hassan, my brother -”

Farzaneh added Immy’s name to the list, speaking almost before she knew what she was going to say.

Mrs Kabba formed her lips into an unconvincing smile, “Yes, Immy as well, the poor silly darling. I number her with the others. And, you know, I can give them a bodily form. I can dress them. It’s all a bit - a sort of meditative form of playing dolls. But they are, each and every one of them, faceless; as faceless as the baby, John’s baby, I was not allowed to see.

"Oh, in my dreams, when one or the other of them appears, well, yes, they have a face. It’s how I know who they are. But then our dreams, our sleeping dreams, are different, aren’t they? We don’t summon them, they simply happen.”

“Father Conteh?” Farzaneh asked. “He's dead, isn’t he? He must be.” She began to weep.

“If he survived the initial assault and however that was responded to, then, I reckon he’s all right. Jimmy knows that mountain, the forests on it and the town below it like the back of his hand. I should say that,if anyone could get away then it would be him."

“And Mr. Bah?” Farzaneh said, sobbing. “And the students and the women who live - wherever they can on the campus?”

“My dear, you and I both know the stories. But I also know that if Jimmy had the time and the opportunity to get away himself then Mr Bah would be him. They're cousins. Didn't you know that?"

The girl shook her head.

"Believe me, old as those old men are, they would take paths a goat could not follow; paths that few others know about. The two of them are probably safe with other relatives in some remote coastal village by now, eating bonga fish stew and - and worrying themselves silly about us. Well, worrying about you, at least. Don’t fret so."

Mrs Kabba paused, then like a nesting bird ruffling its feathers before settling again, she said, “Look, we’d best think about getting breakfast. We’ll have to scratch for it, but we had best get used to that if we’re to manage ourselves through the time here.”

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 22, Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

“I think that was the sound of a big gun going off,” Mrs Kabba said. Almost as soon as she had finished speaking the door slammed again. It was, this second bang, not as shocking as the first. But the logical deduction as to its origin was. “I think, only think, mind you, someone may have begun to shell somewhere in the town.”

Farzaneh, very clearly frightened now, said nothing, and the older woman, thinking it best to go on setting out her thoughts as they occurred to her, said that she did not mean the M.R.F..

“It’s most likely to be the Nigerians. Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps one of their ships. They have quite big guns on some of them, do they not?”

There was another thud almost as she spoke but the girl had flinched before it sounded.

Farzaneh helped Mrs Kabba back into her hammock and then got into her own. She thought that she would not sleep, that she could not sleep, but she did and when she woke, she woke late and then only because Mrs Kabba was calling to her. She came back to consciousness with an odd mixture of emotions of which shame that she had slept at all, and some unfocussed yet fearful apprehension were the strongest. Once she was up, once she had assisted Mrs Kabba in what was necessary for her, she wanted no food, no drink. She wanted only to get to some place where she could see what was happening to the town and that meant taking to the water.

Farzaneh said she would swim but Mrs Kabba, in spite of her swollen knees and her own objections of a few hours before, replied that they would go out together in the skiff.

The girl could not see how this was to be managed but Mrs Kabba insisted. She got Farzaneh to rummage about among the shelves for an old, mildewed pair of field glasses and, afterwards, to help her down to the water’s edge from where she sent the girl back for the skiff. When Farzaneh returned with boat, she was told to leave it a little way beyond the reach of the tide-line and come to help Mrs Kabba make her way further out from the shore. It was not easy but as the water came up around the tops of her thighs, Mrs Kabba asked that the skiff be floated out to her.

Mrs Kabba got her rump over the side of the aluminum shell and then, again with Farzaneh’s assistance, wriggled herself into a position where she was seated in the stern of the craft with her legs thrust out straight in front of her. The skiff shipped water during this process and so they dared not risk adding even Farzaneh’s far lighter weight, which meant that, after all, the girl was in the water, swimming alongside, one hand on the gunwale, kicking her legs and making an odd sort of half breast stroke with her free hand. In this way then, the apparently awkward fashion of their progress suggesting a hesitancy neither of the women felt, they ventured further out from the shore.

The weather, at least, was with them. The clouds that had come scudding in during the late afternoon and evening of the day before had stayed, thickened. The onshore breeze that had brought them was gone. The air was beginning to grow heavy with an implicit sense of moisture. On the land, the early morning’s relative coolness had already been nudged along by a succeeding heat.

The sea was calm. With Mrs Kabba using one of the oars as a paddle to push the skiff along from the stern and Farzaneh keeping it as steady as she might at the side, they got themselves out past the place where the bigger boat tugged against its cable and then they turned to round the point.

It was not so very far that they had to go and in only a little time Farzaneh was granted the view she had wished for. When she saw it, she instinctively lifted the hand that gripped the side of the skiff and raised it to her mouth. From the skiff, she heard Mrs Kabba make one of her usual schoolgirlish exclamations, only now what she said was not followed with the customary snort of laughter but was simply repeated, and both exclamations were quite free of any tone that might have been considered schoolgirlish. “Lord!” And again, “Lord!”

“We should go back,” Mrs Kabba said.

Farzaneh went to answer her, went to disagree, but a rising swell smacked against the side of the skiff and she swallowed salt water. The far distant, smoke-wreaked town, the fires visible at the top of the beautiful mountain, the helicopters that buzzed about the hillside, unloading each some vicious cargo, the Nigerian boats, standing farther off from the shore than she remembered, the tiny, just barely visible spurts of flame from their forward-mounted guns, smaller, far smaller, than she had imagined last night, as they shot at their target, the anticlimax of the shell burst, all of this, unclear to begin with, dissolved for her completely while she choked and fought for breath, all the time rubbing sea water into her eyes.

“We should go back,” Mrs Kabba said again. “We really should go back.”

Still coughing, Farzaneh reached blindly for the side of the boat, found it, and felt herself turned in the water even as her vision was beginning to clear.

There was then a sudden roaring and a rush of air. Mrs Kabba exclaimed again and Farzaneh managed a glimpse of the fighter jet that had flashed over them, so small it seemed toy-like against the clouds. She watched the aircraft bank and turn and make directly back towards the smoking patch of coast where the beleaguered town was. In seconds, it was rising belly up against the mountain and into the concealing clouds, but they could just see the canisters, little silver seeds, let go from beneath its wings. They seemed to take an eternity to fall and break upon the ground: bright hot orange flashes that together made a single massive sooty yellow bloom.

“We must go,” Mrs Kabba said. Farzaneh, able to speak now, could only agree.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 22, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Farzaneh closed her eyes and tried to reassemble the components of what she had seen: the dark forest releasing its cloud of - of whatever it was, the noise, the lights. She could not do it.

“I know what I heard,” she said. “I know what the effect was, not on me, but on the birds, the bats. It was exactly - what I saw was exactly what you had just been saying before.”

“Yes?”

“You know, about the New Year and the gun being fired. You said how the forest seemed to rise up and release this great cloud of creatures scared by the noise. I was thinking about that.

"I couldn’t sleep so I went down to the sea. I was standing with my feet in the waves, facing the shore, looking at the forest and thinking about what you’d told me. Then it happened. Until the flares went up, I thought I was hallucinating. But I wasn’t.”

“No, you weren’t. Something startled the bats. Something woke the birds. Something woke me. We aren’t disputing that - listen, for goodness sake, it’s still a cacophony. They won’t quiet down before sunrise now.”

Farzaneh told Mrs Kabba of James Conteh's prediction that if the M.R.F. really wanted to take the capital they - she could not remember whether he had used the word would or could. “Which would explain the detonation of the mines and then the flares.”

“They’ve tried before, and been beaten back," Mrs Kabba said.

“If we went out on the water we would be able to see the town. We’d know then, wouldn't we?”

Mrs Kabba said yes but very quickly added that they were not going to do so. She pulled up the hem of her robe she to reveal her knees, each one increased in size now to the size of a small grapefruit. “I’ve got enough trouble staying on shore. I couldn’t get into the skiff like this.”

“But I could,” Farzaneh said. “Well, I could swim out. You know, just far enough to see.”

“I don’t think that is a very sensible suggestion,” Mrs Kabba said, firmly. “We don’t know what has happened and we cannot, at this point, discover what it is. It could be that it is something, a raid perhaps. There was a period when there were raids. It may have been an arms cache going up. We just don’t know, do we? And there’s nothing we can do to find out, is there? And, whatever it is, it’s going on a long way from where we are. We aren’t in any danger here.”

“But Father Conteh -” Farzaneh said.

Mrs Kabba’s voice was softer by degrees, and she reached a hand out towards Farzaneh, holding it so that it trembled over her crippled knees. “Jimmy, yes, and all the others.”

They sat for some minutes without speaking, enclosed it seemed by the awful screeching from the forest. Farzaneh tried to shut it out, tried to listen above or below the noise for other sounds that might be more awful still. She was still trying when Mrs Kabba suggested they get back into their hammocks and try to rest.

“As my mother always used to say, things may look different in the morning. I don’t know that they ever do, but I haven’t a better suggestion. I mean it isn’t as if we can just make ourselves a nice hot cup of tea -”

She might, Mrs Kabba might, have been about to add the familiar interrogative to what she had just said but, if that was what she intended, she did not. She could not. There was no time. From somewhere far away, far away but not so very far away, rolling over or under or through the noise of the forest creatures, another sound came towards them. It seemed to Farzaneh like a door being slammed shut in a distant part of a large, empty house. As soon as she heard it she looked up again and met Mrs Kabba’s worried stare.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 22, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Voices In the Dark

They talked for a very long time. How long, Farzaneh did not know. She tried keeping count of the number of times the fire was replenished, although, when the supply of wood was exhausted and she came to add them up, she found she could not properly remember: ten, twelve? She settled on ten. What she did properly remember was that, after the first couple of times, it was she and not Mrs Kabba who took wood from the pile and threw it on the embers. Mrs Kabba said her knees were sore, that was why.

When the fire had died down for the last time the talking ended and it was time to sleep, she needed Farzaneh to help her up from her chair then; up from her chair and into to the beach house. There, although she was able to stand while she washed her hands and face and cleaned her teeth, she had to be helped into her hammock. That was when Farzaneh saw Mrs Kabba’s knees, swollen the both of them.

“One of the many degradations of encroaching age, dear,” the older woman said. And then, “If I need to get out of this in the night, I shall have to call for you to assist me. Should you mind, terribly?”

Farzaneh said that she would not and went to make her own preparations for sleeping.

Only she could not sleep. She could not sleep and so, making as little noise as possible, she got out of the hammock and, barefoot still, made her way to where the sea clapped out the rhythm of its song against the shore. She dabbled her toes in the water before walking into the tide, the water aglow with its mysterious phosphorescence where it splashed against her legs.

Knee-deep in the waves, she turned, as she had in the ended day’s early light, and stood looking back at what she had walked away from. She could see very little but the longer she looked the more the inky night surrendered the shapes it was concealing. There was no moon now but even so, as Farzaneh let her eyes range over the sand and rocks, the rough shelter where Mrs Kabba slept, even the ragged wall of trees that marked the forest’s limit became more or less apparent to her. For no reason that she could readily think of, she smiled.

She recalled one of the stories Mrs Kabba had told her as they sat talking by the fire, one of the many incidents she had recounted about her long affair with Hassan Bangura-Saeed. She had been at the big house in the forest with him one New Year's eve when he was at the height of his power as king maker in the country. He had a special section of the president's own guard to protect him, some twenty men, and then there were the Lebanese bodyguards, another dozen or so, he employed at his own expense. To guard him from the guards, Mrs Kabba had said. At midnight, the I.S.U. contingent had begun firing off their weapons to celebrate the New Year. Later, the Lebanese, not to be outdone, loosed off a few rounds from an anti-aircraft gun that had been ornamenting the compound.

"The noise! And then, the most amazing thing: at almost the same time, it seemed as if a shadow lifted up from the forest. It was the bats, disturbed, terrified really, as they fed, and all the birds that had been at roost among the trees followed them up into the sky. Then the whole forest came alive with noise: dreadful shrieks and cries, caterwauls, moans. It was as if the gun had wounded some great dark beast and what came afterwards was the sound of its dying."

Farzaneh thought again, as she had at the first telling, of the dark cloud she had seen lift from the town that evening with Father Conteh. And then, before she could properly understand what she was suddenly witness to, the inky silhouette of the trees in front of her seemed to shiver and another darker cloud lifted up in front of her from the ragged line that was the top of the forest canopy. At what must have the same time but seemed later by at least a second, the dark sky rippled with light and a short succession of dull thuds sounded, the noise seeming to roll along through the air towards her ears as the light had to her eyes. Far up above whatever it was that had taken flight so suddenly, bats, birds, forest demons, another light blossomed, a bright white star-like light that grew in size and hung, ferocious in the brilliance of its glare, at the zenith of its arc. This was joined by a second, then a third bursting star, before it began, slowly, to fall. Farzaneh was still watching the flares, she thought that what she could see were flares, when Mrs Kabba shouted to her from the darkness of the beach house: once, twice, three times. With each call, the tone of anxiety and the timbre of concern in her voice were greater.

Alarmed herself now, Farzaneh ran out of the sea and back across the sand towards the beach house, missed her footing as she went over the rocks, stumbled and smacked her shin as she went down. She cried out from the shock of her fall and the sudden sensation, not so much of pain itself, but the sense that she had somehow breached the defences of her body, letting in - she did not want to think what. Mrs Kabba shouted her name again but her worry now was not about where Farzaneh was, only for what she might have done to herself.

"I fell," Farzaneh said, answering the question that came out of the dark. "But I'm all right, I think. Are you - all right?"

“Yes, yes - you fell. I heard you. Lord only knows how with the racket that’s going on but I did. Have you hurt yourself? Come here. Let me see what you’ve done.”

Farzaneh went over to where the older woman was lying in her hammock, following along the pale beam of a flashlight that came out of the mosquito netting towards her. Mrs Kabba, holding the flashlight with one hand, pulled at the netting with the other. “Come on, let me have a look at what you’ve done. Well, let me have a look once I get this netting out of the way.”

It was a graze, not a bad one but the skin was broken here and there and tiny rosy pearls of blood were already forming. Mrs Kabba tut-tutted and made the girl sluice her shin with some of the boiled water they had set aside for the morning. Then she watched her fumble in the dark to find a clean towel, antiseptic, gauze and surgical tape. It was only when the graze was dressed that she asked about the noise “It was an explosion, wasn’t it?” she said. Farzaneh nodded and Mrs Kabba asked for help getting out of the hammock. “We should light the lamps. I don’t think you can manage by yourself.”

Farzaneh helped with the business of locating the lanterns and then lighting them. The older woman was in obvious discomfort and moved stiffly as she went about the shelter, like a peg doll made to walk by its owner. When, finally, she sat down it was not in the canvas chair she had used outside but on the long shelf-like bench that ran the length of the shelter’s back wall, and she twisted herself sideways so that her legs could lie stretched out rather than have to bend her knees. Settled, her feet dangled over the edge of the bench: Goldilocks on the Daddy Bear’s chair, she asked “So, what was it then that you heard? I only know that I was startled out of my sleep, but what by, I cannot say.”

“I think,” Farzaneh began. “I think it was an explosion - well, three explosions. And then there were flares - parachute flares - in the sky. I’m sure about those.”

“And so?”

“Well, I don’t know. But I remember Father Conteh saying that the soldiers up at the university had hung mines in the trees around their post. Anti-personnel mines. He, I mean Father Conteh, said that was why there wasn’t much danger of his house being broken into any more. The thieves were too frightened to move around at night.”

“And you think that these mines were what went off?”

“Yes,” she said. “What else?”

“A lot of things,” Mrs Kabba said. “We’ve had explosions in the town before, and we’re assuming here that it was the town.”

The girl asked whether she meant car bombs. Mrs Kabba shook her head, her face moving in and out of shadow in a way that, although Farzaneh could not explain it, upset her. But the answer to her question was clear enough. The explosions Mrs Kabba was talking about had not been caused by car bombs.

“We haven’t the cars, you see. Not any more. No, these were arms dumps going off. There are munitions stashed all over the town. Well, there are so many different factions fighting to protect us and each has its stronghold in this or that part of the town. It’s the one thing we never seem to have had a shortage of: explosives, bullets, all that sort of thing. It used to be that you could buy them on the street, like fruit. I remember when Ousman was a little boy, ten or eleven perhaps, he came into the house all excited with something he’d got from the market. It was a hand grenade. I was horrified. Of course, now, boys younger than he was then are soldiers.”

She paused, as if following a stray thought to its conclusion for her own interest, not for her listener’s. “But, as I was going to say, there have been incidents when a house or a garage has gone up - four that I can think of. Once it was the old Esseldo cinema. That was very bad. A lot of people died then, in the cinema compound itself and, of course, in the houses around it”

“But I heard three, quite distinct explosions. And then the flares went up.”

“You’re sure? You’re quite certain?”

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 21, Part 6

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

They met, she said, because she asked his father to build her a house. “The one in town. Daddy died, you see and, dear old thing, left me some money. I'd grown tired of living up at the university - to tell you the truth, I'd grown tired of the university, tired of the petty little expat. world that was up there then. Tired of teaching as well. I had quite lot of money already because of -"

"John," Farzaneh said.

"Quite. It was why I'd been able to get along on the money I received as a volunteer and afterwards as a - "locally-recruited member of staff" is how it used to be put. Well, Daddy's money meant that I could buy a bit of land, build a house, stop teaching and still live quite comfortably here."

"Here but not there, not in England. You really never ever considered going back?"

"No. I mean, as I've already told you, back to what? More teaching? I'd had enough cosy evenings by the fire with Immy to last a lifetime. No. I was better off here, much better off."

"And you were happy in Africa," Farzaneh ventured.

Mrs Kabba smiled before she spoke again. "I was happy in my Africa. I wouldn't want to call it Africa. That's an altogether different place to where I live.

"You look confused, I'm not trying to be deliberately obscure, it's just that - look, I'll tell you a story.

“Some time towards the end of the 70s, when the first hotel had been built out at the beach and the others were going up one by one, I was on my own because Hassan was very busy then. The country was awash with money and he was there in the middle of it all. So, no time for me.

"I decided to drive out to the beach. I parked my car, had coffee at the Sierra Club and then strolled along the sand. I met an English couple, middle-aged, married, from somewhere 'oop' north. I know, I'm being patronizing. But they were from the north and they did, well, the man did, 'talk like that'.

“They stopped me because I was another white face, I think. We chatted for a few minutes. They had assumed that I was on holiday, as they were. The fact that I had a job, a home, a life here astonished them. I could hear the big unspoken question: why? The wife asked where I lived and I told her. She knew nothing at all about the country, not even the name of the capital. She asked if it were possible to visit - the town, I mean.

"I said, of course. I even offered to give them a quick tour there and then. Drive them into town; show them around; take them up the mountain and through campus, then drive through the villages along the top and along the back road to the beach. Do you know the one I mean?"

Farzaneh nodded, while her brain flushed out the images it had stored: the fast fading light, the dense forest, the narrow road, the bridge, the stalled car, the guns, the taste of her own fear.

"The man wasn't interested. He was polite enough in his refusal, but it was a firm one. The wife asked the question that was in my own mind; why not?

"Well, he pointed in the general direction of the town as I had indicated it and he said, in that awful accent, ‘Tha dun't want ta goo thur, luv: thon's Africa.’

"I was appalled at the time, but then the more I thought about it, the more I thought that what he said was uncomfortably true. Africa was over there. It was always over there - for people like him and - this was the uncomfortable part - for people like me. It always was. It always is. It always will be."

Farzaneh, for the first time in a long time, said that she did not understand. She told Mrs Kabba of her first ride along Kissy Street with the marines and how she had seen her sitting out on the veranda and so perfectly in place that she had not known then she was not looking at an African. "And your life, when I began to learn about it, it seemed so closely bound up with everything here. Indistinguishable from the place really. An emblem. That's what made me want to write about you."

Mrs Kabba roared with laughter but quickly choked the signs of her amusement back. "Forgive me, I really didn't mean - it's just the thought of my life being emblematic of anything other than, well, my life. Foolishness, perhaps. A mess, perhaps.

"No, I've led a very privileged existence and one so far removed from that of so many, I'm ashamed. The same continent? The same country? Not even the same planet. Not really the same dimension, even."

They were quiet again after that and for a long time. For a long time until Mrs Kabba said, "But I was telling you about Hassan.

"His father was Lebanese, his mother a Su Su woman. He lived with her until he was eleven and then was sent away to a private school in Beirut, from where he went on, eventually, to the American University. He had further study in London after he graduated and then came back here to run one of the family businesses.

"He was clever, cultured and, when he was young, extremely handsome; beautiful almost, in the way some men are beautiful rather than handsome. He took that from his mother, I believe. She died during the time when he was away but I saw a photograph of her. She possessed a great beauty. I used to twit him sometimes about it.”

"'Twit' him?" Farzaneh wondered.

"Tease him. Taunt him, but in a fond way. I used to say that he could have been anything, anything at all. With his intelligence, his looks, his personality, he could have been anything. Anything except what he was."

"And what, exactly, was he?"

"Oh, to give you the unsympathetic, the objective view, he was a thief, on a massive scale: a smuggler of diamonds and then of armaments, both, again, on a massive scale. He was a corrupter of men. He bought them and he sold them when they were no longer of use to him. Whilst they were of use, he was a panderer to their worst tastes and excesses."

"And yet you loved him." Farzaneh said. It was a statement, not a question.

"And yet I loved him," Mrs Kabba said.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 21, Part 5

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

All this was said to the fire as much as to Farzaneh. When it was finished and before the girl could ask another question, Mrs Kabba began again. “He was a bad man,” she said.

Farzaneh asked who and at once Mrs Kabba gave her the name, Hassan Bangura-Saeed.

“I knew he was a bad man, right from the beginning, before even. He had a reputation, as young as he was. It was only later, when I knew him properly, only then that I understood he was a good bad man: generous, kind, intelligent, a wonderful lover. A wonderful lover.”

She turned her face away from the fire and looked straight into Farzaneh’s face. “Don’t believe all this guff about black men in bed. Most of those I slept with were selfish bastards: the Africans, if anything, more so than the Yanks. I suppose with them, at least, it’s understandable. I mean, when you come from a culture that routinely gets its women to circumcise one another how could the men be anything else?”

She hardened her gaze into a glare, frightening the girl. “You’ve never been with a man, have you?”

Farzaneh said nothing. Mrs Kabba went on, “There was a moment this morning when I thought you might like women but you don’t, do you? Or not in that way, I think?

"Saving yourself for marriage, are you? It must be a very quaint notion to have of oneself nowadays, surely?”

If there had been any more of this, Farzaneh knew that the tears would have started again, but then the other woman’s harshness died away as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had flared up and she said, gently, “I was like you, my dear, once upon a time. Oh, I talked about sex. It was only to shock. I knew almost nothing about it. My mother told me nothing; I learned nothing at school, except for the usual smutty talk - if it is ‘usual’ still. When I menstruated for the first time I thought I had the dreaded lurgy - you know, cancer or some other, equally horrid disease. I told my sister in the end and she handed me a packet of sanitary towels; told me what I was to do with them. It’s more or less the only act of kindness from her that I can remember.

“I was as unsullied, mentally as well as physically, when I married John. My mother - Lord, Lord - my mother ‘talked’ to me before I left home. She said how she and Daddy were so very unhappy about what I was doing, by which she meant getting married and, worse, getting married to a black man, but that there was still something, a duty she had towards me.

"I remember thinking, cripes, this is it then, the birds and the bees. And so it was, in a way. Her way. She went on for a little bit about wifely duties and in the end said that John would know all about that sort of thing, so I was not to worry. The only thing wrong with this was that, as it turned out, John didn’t. He didn’t know about all that sort of thing.

"I spent my wedding night weeping because my husband, the man I’d defied my family for, given up my education for, left my country for, my friends for, didn’t know. Or it seemed that he didn’t. When I got to bed I waited for him and I waited for him. In the end I had to go and look to find out where he was. He was outside on the veranda, looking up at the sky. I went up to him. I asked him would he not come to bed. He said he would, but later. I kissed him. He put me away from him.

"I thought it was a game to begin with. I got hold of him, tried to, you know, drag him into the house. I remember that I was laughing, but then he broke the grip I had on him and he looked at me as much as if to say that I should act my age. That’s when I started to cry. I think I cried for most of the night.

"He did come into our room eventually. It was just before dawn. I remember the smell of smoke from the cooking fires in the lines - where the enlisted men lived with their families. I remember the sound of the women pounding cassava and potato leaf for the days ‘chop’. I remember the first cockcrow. All of it so new to me then.

"Well, ever the gentleman, he apologized for waking me so early but said he must talk to me. I thought, oh, he’s going to explain. It’s all right. He does love me, after all. He does want me. What he had to say was that I must try not to let the servants see that I had been crying or else it would be all over the barracks that he beat me.

"You know, I said to you that I never loved my husband. I think that little talk was what removed the possibility of love between us - I mean, for ever.”

“And yet you stayed with him. You had a baby with him.”

“Yes. I certainly did not mean to, but I did.

"That morning, after our talk, I got a car and a driver and went to see the Governor’s lady. We were still a colony and so the governor was a governor still. It was terribly bad form me turning up on the doorstep all unannounced but she took me in. She was actually in her dressing gown and curlers when I was shown in to her and smoking one of her ‘roll-ups’.

"I’d gone to enlist her help in leaving because I had decided to go home to England. She persuaded me to go back to the barracks. Well, ordered me to go back, really. But, after she’d made it pretty clear that I had very little choice in the matter - my desertion of John would cause what she termed ‘an incident’- she got out of me what the problem was and then gave me some surprisingly good advice.

"Of course, she may have been on her second or third joint of the morning but what she said made sense and I thought that as I had rather made my own bed, I’d better lie in it and see if I couldn’t get my husband to lie in it with me; which I did, eventually, although that side of the marriage was never particularly happy.

“Perhaps if I had been older, more experienced. I don’t mean sexually. I mean if I’d known more about life - here, in particular.

"John was happier with black girls, you see. There were several and I either wasn’t meant to know or else, if I did know, I was meant to put up with them.

"It was a pattern I saw repeated again and again. The business of these men and their girls only caused problems in mixed marriages. I used to attend parties at some of the best homes in town and the mistresses would be there, sitting with the rest of the wives and all the little bastards would be there as well, playing with the children of the marriages proper. It was all very civilized. It was we white girls who found it difficult.

“They were made, most of these mixed marriages, in England, just as mine was. And the men, when they were there in England, were different. They were, I don’t know how to put it, not their proper selves.

"So the marriages were entered into under false pretences and then, within a very short time you would see these poor English girls left to sit out their days on verandas up at the university or down in the town, until the time came when they would grab their kids and as much cash as they could manage to get their hands on and get away. And that wasn’t always easy. I’ve helped in a few escapes myself over the years. Jimmy Conteh, for all that I was calling him names a few moments ago, was a rock for those women and risked much to help them.”

“You never tried to get away again yourself?”

“Not after that first half-hearted effort, no. And anyway, I didn’t have to sit on my veranda for very long.”

“And you never thought of remarrying?”

“No, well, not then. Later, yes, but the only man I would have been glad to marry would not marry me.”

“Hassan -?” Farzaneh began.

Mrs Kabba said yes so quietly, Farzaneh was not sure that she had actually spoken.

And then she began to tell the story of her long affair with this man, this good bad man.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 21, Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Mrs Kabba had let go of Farzaneh to get up from her seat and put more wood on the fire. It seemed an effort for her and as first one then another branch was thrown among the embers, the bright red sparks that flew up into the air had sighs of pain to follow on after them. There was a moment when she seemed to sway over the fire and Farzaneh stood up herself because she feared Mrs Kabba might totter forwards and fall into the glowing bed. She caught hold of her by the elbow, guiding her back into her seat. She did not need to articulate her concern for the older woman to answer it. Her knees were stiff and hurting, she said. Too much unaccustomed exercise. She wanted to make light of it.

“You’ve heard one of our sayings here, perhaps, ‘My head is young but my feet are old.”

Farzaneh said that, yes, she had heard it.

Mrs Kabba laughed, the old laugh. “In my case, the knees take precedence over the feet.”

The wood that had just gone onto the fire caught and in the unsteady light cast by the flames that were now consuming it, Farzaneh, for the second time that day, looked at Mrs Kabba and saw an old woman.

They were quiet together again. Farzaneh sat listening to the rhythmic slap of the waves, only a little way off but well beyond the firelight. A breeze moved fitfully across the sand, startling the trees. The insects shrilled and once every so often some louder sound came out of the dark forest, a flutter, a rustle, a crash, a scream.

Between the women there was no audible communication, but Mrs Kabba had taken hold of Farzaneh’s hand again, almost as soon as she had settled back into her chair. She did speak after a time but only to say how glad she was to have brought Farzaneh with her to this place.

“You keep making me think of poetry. All yesterday and today, I’ve been remembering bits of verse I can’t have thought of for years.”

She stopped and Farzaneh could almost hear the smile coming into her voice. “I’ve just remembered that poem by Yeats - can’t recall the title although I will. I mean the one where he speaks of his ancient knees lacking health. I know how he must have felt. And, in fact, my knees do not feel the most ancient parts of me tonight.”

“You’ve read so much, you remember so much you make me feel ashamed. Was your degree in English? Is that what you taught when you came back.”

Mrs. Kabba said yes but the answer was given in a manner that was quite distracted, as if she had understood the question but was almost entirely concerned with some other, much more important topic.

“What made you decide to come back to Africa? Did you teach in England for a while and then come back or did you come as soon as you had finished your degree?

"And then, after you came back, why did you stop teaching? Why did you stay here? Didn’t you ever think about going back to England - to live, I mean?”

Again the questions were answered. Again the answers were given in a way that suggested this other as yet unvoiced preoccupation. She had done a BA, an MA and then a teacher training qualification, all at Leicester, but she had never taught in an English school, except for the part of the teacher training course that required her to do so. She worked in a book shop in the centre of Leicester for six months while she made up her mind what she wanted to do and at last, one September, she had come back as a volunteer assigned to the university.

“I came for any number of reasons: I had such very fond memories of the place and the people. I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in England.

"After almost six years of living in the same house as Immy I was ready for a change. I loved her, you know, but she had turned into this straitlaced middle-class Catholic spinster schoolma’am and she seemed to think that this was what I ought to become as well. I didn’t. I was ready to kick up my heels again - well, just a little. I wanted something more exciting than the occasional trip to the cinema or the theatre.

"Honestly, Immy’s idea of a good time was tea at Simpkin and James’ on a Friday, and a couple of glasses of sherry to get us through Saturday night. For a really wild time, we went to the Little Theatre.

“ I thought two, three years back in Africa and back in Africa on my own terms, would help me to clear my head, let me find out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I already had a pretty good hunch and my hunch proved to be right. I decided quite quickly that I wanted to spend the rest of my life here.

“Would I ever go back to England? I think I’ve answered that one before for you. I shall never go back. Never.”

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 21, Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

It was a big fish with an ugly head and vicious-looking teeth protruding from its mouth. Mrs Kabba gaffed it out of the water and onto the deck, where it thrashed about until she stopped it with a blow to the head. The women swam ashore, Farzaneh pulling the net containing the sardines. She swam quickly and waited in the shallows for Mrs Kabba to catch up with her.

“The big fish don’t bite, you know,” the older woman said when she stood up out of the water, breathless again from the swim. “Well, fishermen, sometimes, if they’re careless emptying their nets. But not swimmers, not that I’ve ever heard of.”

They dressed themselves and then Mrs Kabba made a fire. She gutted the little fish in the shallows, washed them again in fresh water, skewered them and cooked them quickly over the hot coals of the fire. She and Farzaneh ate the fish with the last of the rice from the evening before and afterwards lay in their hammocks for some time, talking inconsequentially until, first one and then the other, they fell asleep. Farzaneh, tired out from the swimming and all the talking, slept deeply and when she woke again found the netting had been dropped down around her hammock to keep her face from being bitten. Mrs Kabba was nowhere to be seen.

She came out of the forest perhaps a half-hour afterwards, walking confidently with a basket balanced on her head. The basket contained a variety of fruit: mangoes, avocados, a big papaya, plantain, limes, green oranges.

“For tonight and then breakfast tomorrow,” she said, handing the basket to Farzaneh.

The women spent the next hour gathering wood from the edge of the forest for the evening fire; then they went to collect water. When the sun was making long shadows on the sand, Mrs Kabba took the skiff out to the boat to retrieve the barracuda she had caught earlier in the day. Farzaneh wanted to go as well, but she was told to stay behind and try her hand at lighting the fire.

Again the kitchen chores: a pot of rice set on the fire to cook; the fish gutted and washed. Mrs Kabba cut it into thick steaks, soused them with lime-juice and, the rice cooked, the fire fallen to a bed of embers, set the steaks on a grill over it, where they hissed and sizzled. She shoved two of the fat banana-like plantains into the embers unpeeled and raked the coals about them until they were all but covered.

When everything was ready, and the food had been served out on two enamel dishes, they ate, watching the sun dip down towards the horizon. The dirty dishes and cutlery were scoured with sand, then washed in the ocean where the women also washed themselves. Afterwards, there was the luxury of a sousing in half a bucket of fresh water but Farzaneh, drying off rapidly in the warm air and the breeze that came from the ocean could not resist the temptation to lick her own shoulder. Her tongue came away tasting of salt.

Mrs Kabba put on a long loose African robe and coiled her usual concoction of cloth about her head that evening, which surprised the girl. It was, Mrs Kabba explained, to keep the bugs off.

“I haven’t the bottom for slacks,” she said, gesturing vaguely towards Farzaneh’s fatigue pants. “And on the subject of bottoms, how is yours? I should really have had another look. We should have swabbed it with alcohol again. Perhaps you can do so before you go to sleep.”

The fire was all but out until Mrs Kabba threw a few sticks of kindling on top of the fading coals. The twigs smoked and caught. She added several more substantial pieces of wood and watched as they too began to burn.

The women sat out by the fire on the canvas chairs. Farzaneh made her neck ache looking up at the stars. She wanted to register the beauty of the sky but any words that came to her seemed to fall so far short of all that glory she abandoned the effort. She did not speak until Mrs Kabba disturbed her, going off into the beach house. When she returned, she had a pitcher of water and the two mugs that were used for any sort of liquid refreshment. Farzaneh took the one she was offered but did not drink. She was looking at Mrs Kabba restored to her African finery and somehow so far away from her again. As if she had transmitted her thoughts, Mrs Kabba, without any sort of preamble, held her hand out in a gesture that was at once one of invite and supplication.

“Come and sit by me,” she said. “You seem too far away on that side of the fire.”

Farzaneh moved her chair across the sand. “Would it embarrass you to call me Gwen?” Mrs Kabba asked. “You've managed not to call me anything thus far but it must be becoming a strain.”

Farzaneh looked down towards the sand for a moment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was so obvious. It was the same when I was with Father Conteh - Jimmy. He told me to call him by his first name but it isn’t something I was brought up to do. Still, I shall try.” She felt the older woman’s hand take hers, lift it and settle it in the folds of the gown that gathered in her lap.

“I was telling you about Immy,” Mrs. Kabba said. “Or, at least, I started to tell you about her but ended up talking about me. Should you like me to try again? I shall probably say more about myself but then her life and mine were so very often interwoven. Until her story ended, that is.

“I think I told you earlier of her kindness to me after I lost the baby. To cut a long story short, she took me in hand again after the business with Pinky. To begin with, taking me in hand meant that she got me to pick up my education and then, just before the start of my second year at the Tech., she asked whether I might like to share a house or flat with her.

"She had a new post, you see, at a school in Leicester, and she wanted to move back into the city. It was uncomfortable at home, for me, for everyone else. It seemed sensible to leave. At the same time, my parents were anxious that there should not be a repeat of what had gone on before. They knew Immy. They knew what she was like. Difficult as things were with me at home, I don’t think they would willingly have let me live with anyone else. Nor would I have wanted to. Immy was quiet, sensible and that was what I wanted.”

“But - I don’t mean to upset you - Father Conteh said that when you were teaching at the university and living on campus -”

“Yes? What did he say?”

Farzaneh wished she had kept her silence. “He said that, well, you and another woman, another teacher, lived pretty wild lives. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have spoken.”

“No, no, there’s no need for you to apologize. But, oh, Jimmy Conteh! I do know what he says about me. I know as well that he has a habit of introducing me as the local Harriet Beecher Stowe. ‘The little lady that started this great big war.’” Mrs Kabba managed an uncannily accurate imitation of the old man’s voice.

“The irritating thing is that he never dwells on his own past moral failings or his own particular contributions to the mayhem here.”

Taking the look in Farzaneh’s eyes for one of confusion rather than apprehension, which is what it was, Mrs Kabba went on with her tirade. “He never mentions the fact that he had a prolonged dalliance with an American nun at one point or that he stirred up unrest among the students to the extent that they held a protest demonstration during the graduation ceremony one year with the result that the old bastard who was then president, and also chancellor of the university, sent the army up onto the campus to teach us all a lesson. They torched the student residences, beat students, raped students, shot students.

"In some ways that was the real beginning of - of what’s going on now. A lot of the staff, including myself, hoped that love and Sister Agnes would rid us of him because, to be utterly frank with you, he was a pest and a dangerous pest at that: our very own ‘turbulent priest’.

"And Agnes was a terrific lady, really. I remember feeling rather sad when she gave up on Jimmy and went back to the States alone. I think he might have had a much happier life had he gone with her."

Farzaneh could think of nothing else to say other than to repeat that she was sorry for having broached the subject. Mrs Kabba, however, did not want to let it go.

“What else has he said about me?” she demanded.

Farzaneh reluctantly, and after a deal of prevarication, told her. It was not just the physical pressure of Mrs Kabba’s grip on her hand she felt but that, at least, at last, was relaxed.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 21, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

“I might have loved the baby, but then I never had the chance to find out. After all the business of the birth my feelings were that it, by which I mean the marriage, the baby, had all been a waste of time, a silly interruption. Even that subsided quite quickly to a point when I didn’t feel anything.

"I suppose one could say that I then went after physical sensation. I mean the drink burnt my throat, the sex was sometimes, not very often but sometimes, exciting, the drugs made me - well, hard to describe without descending into the standard druggy clichés and when I got hit, it usually hurt quite a lot and for quite a long time afterwards.

"I doubt very much whether any of this makes sense to you. Oddly enough, I think my sister put her finger on it when she said that I was perverse. This was when I was back at home, after my last bout with Pinky. He very nearly killed me. In fact, what stopped him killing me was that I told him to get on and do it. You know, kill me.

"I wanted to get it over with, all that we - the pair of us - were about. Yet when I said that, when I gave him leave to do to me what we both knew he wanted to do, he stopped. He got off me, got out of the flat. I remember that and then not very much else until I was back in my room at Mummy and Daddy’s. That’s when Harriet said that I was perverse.”

Mrs Kabba pulled in the line. The sardine had been bitten off so that only the head remained attached to the hook. She swore, in her schoolgirlish way, cleared the half-taken bait from the hook and re-baited it with one of the larger fish from the keep-net. Farzaneh winced as the barb of the hook went through the body of the living fish, but she kept on watching, more interested in the performer than the performance.

The line was back in the water. Mrs Kabba was back in her seat. “There’s something hungry down there. We’ll give it another twenty minutes or so and then we’d better think about luncheon. Afterwards, if we still haven’t had any luck, we’ll come back out and move the boat farther from the shore.”

She asked Farzaneh whether or not she was hungry, whether she was thirsty. She asked had she taken her malaria prophylactic. To which questions the girl answered, no, and no, and yes. Mrs Kabba asked what she was taking and when Farzaneh told her Mefloquine, appeared impressed and astonished both. Farzaneh laughed. “Brand name Lariam. My Dad’s a doctor, so he always uses the name of the actual substance when he prescribes for me.”

“You called your father “Dad”. Something has happened.”

Farzaneh was still laughing. “Well, it’s supposed to induce psychosis as a side effect. Perhaps I’ve just gone potty. I mean, look at me. Here I am sitting stark naked on a boat on the ocean with another naked lady. My father would definitely not approve. I wouldn’t have approved myself a couple of days ago - a couple of hours ago even. Now - well, anything goes!”

The laughter was passed across the small space of the cockpit to Mrs Kabba, but Farzaneh, although she smiled still, had let it go. “Can I ask you something?” she said and did not wait for the permission she had requested. “Can I come and sit next to you and can I - will you give me a hug?”

Mrs Kabba first crossed her legs, then patted the space next to her and when the girl moved to it, put her arms around her and kissed her cheek. Farzaneh laid her head then against the white skin that only a very little while before had so revolted her. It was surprisingly soft. She threaded her arms through the arms that clasped about her and said, “I’ve been so frightened.”

“In the time you’ve been here with me or when you were with Jimmy?”

The girl nodded, moving her face against the white soft skin that was now a pillow for her. “All the time. Ever since I got off the ‘plane in the Gambia and - even before that. I seem always to have been frightened. But, the funny thing is that I don’t feel frightened now, with you. I feel - really, really happy.”

There was no more then of human voices, only sea sounds and boat sounds, the soft sough of the wind and the seabirds calling, until the moment Mrs Kabba relaxed her hold on the girl and said she thought they might have caught their supper.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 21, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 02:45:00 +0000

Skin

Neither was long in the sea. Mrs. Kabba said she would swim out to where the boat was anchored, get aboard and then try to catch something for their lunch and dinner. When she set off in her rather stiff breast stroke, head high out of the water, Farzaneh went with her, happy to be swimming again; happy to feel the salt water encase her skin again.

It was not so very far to the boat and she was there well before her companion, who puffed and spluttered the word “Show-off!” as she arrived, then trod water in the lee of the boat for several minutes before reaching out to catch hold of the ladder hooked over the side. She waited for the hull to dip down into the shallow trough of a swell before, with a very obvious effort, pulling herself up onto it.

Farzaneh watched her all the while and watched her as she slumped down in the cockpit, her shoulders heaving while she gathered her breath. Mr Kabba knew the girl was looking at her and tossed off some remark about not being sixteen any more. Farzaneh called back that she would come and help do whatever there was to be done but Mrs. Kabba waved her hands, dismissing the offer. She would, she said, manage perfectly well by herself.

So, Farzaneh swam and dived, played like a porpoise, but her enjoyment was incomplete. To the mad concoction of feelings about Mrs. Kabba this trip had engendered there was added now a sadness: she had not previously thought of her as old. Older, but not old. Yet she was. What had waddled down the beach into the sea was not an old woman’s body. What had hauled itself out of the water and into the boat was. Seventy could not be so very far away for it. Farzaneh dived again, right the way under the boat, came up close to the ladder and got aboard.

Mrs. Kabba had taken a tarpaulin sheet out from a locker in the cabin and with Farzaneh helping her, rigged it up as an awning over the rear of the boat to give them shade. The fishing gear was also fetched out from the cabin lockers.

Farzaneh watched, again admiring the proficiency of the other women’s movements. A line was thrown over the side, with more than a dozen nasty-looking hooks on it. Not ten minutes passed before it was pulled in again and Mrs. Kabba began taking the first of five live fish from off the hooks. Farzaneh held open the mouth of the keep-net as the fish went into it. All except the smallest, that went on to another, larger hook on another, heavier line.

“The proverbial sprat to catch the mackerel,” Mrs. Kabba said. “Or in this case, sardine for whatever comes after it: barracuda with a bit of luck.”

They lolled on cushions in the cockpit through the heat of the morning, Farzaneh descending the ladder to dip herself in the ocean from time to time, and, from time to time, Mrs. Kabba would pull on the fishing line to check that her bait was still in place. It always was.

She began speaking of the past again, telling Farzaneh how she had shared a flat with Immy’s sister and another girl. “We were there for a couple of years, although God knows why the landlord let us stay because there was always trouble: parties, fights. A lot of the time it was difficult to tell the difference between what was a party and what was a fight.”

Farzaneh asked her how she had lived and for a moment Mrs. Kabba seemed uncertain as to what, exactly, the question meant. “If you’re asking about money, I had a pension; because of John it was a pretty generous pension, and there was other money that came to me. I was well provided for.

“If you mean how did I manage to stay alive; I don’t know. I suppose it was some sort of biological contrariness because I now think that, at the time, I did want to die.

"I had this - there was one Yank I got involved with, God only knows what his racial background was but he was always called Pinky because his colouring was so light. He came closest to giving me what I wanted. We were together for a few months and I think the only possible attraction between us was that he enjoyed hitting me and I let him.

"He was the angriest man I’ve ever known. Perhaps that was what I liked about him. I mean, I worked out fairly early on that he was dangerous. I liked that. I liked the idea that at any moment he might turn on me. Substitute “would” for “might”. The only unknown was the timing of it.”

“You must have been so unhappy,” Farzaneh said and immediately hated herself for having given voice to such triteness. She expected some sharp quip in return but it did not come. Mrs. Kabba said only that she was not unhappy.

“I wish I could say that I was; however, the fact is, I was not.”

“But your husband was dead; your baby -” Farzaneh said.

“Yes, I know. It all ought to fit into a nice little formula equalling grief. It doesn’t. I was shocked when I was told that John was dead but I wasn’t particularly saddened.

"It sounds terrible, I know, but my first thoughts were all to do with what would happen to me and to the baby. I didn’t love him, you see.”

“But in the interview, you said -”

“Correct me if I’m wrong but I think I said that I married a black man. I don’t believe I said that I loved a black man.

"And he did not love me, you know, not really. He found me - I think I fascinated him and, in the beginning, he fascinated me. It was never love.

To be continued ...

The Fat White Woman - Chapter 20, Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Clive Collins) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:55:00 +0000

"But you enjoyed Japan, didn't you,” Mrs Kabba said, catching up with her and picking again at the ravel of their conversation. “The way you speak about it suggests you did."

The answer, although it was yes, was heavily qualified. "I got on really well with a Japanese girl who worked with me. She was fun. A nice person and a very good reporter. A good writer. Amazingly good because she used to do all her pieces in English. I enjoyed reading her stuff. But a lot of the other foreigners, make that most of the other foreigners, were Americans."

"And you disliked them," Mrs. Kabba said

"It wasn't quite that strong but I certainly felt uncomfortable around them. They were so - I don't know - so sure about everything, so smug. They had Japan all summed up within five minutes of arriving. Do you know what I mean?"

Mrs. Kabba, nodding, said that she did. "I eventually came back here as a volunteer; not VSO but something similar. There weren't enough British volunteers for us to merit our own orientation programme and so we were lumped in with the Yanks.

"I'd rather had my fill of Americans by this time, particularly black Americans, but I had no choice. I had to do this 'in-country' training, as it was called.

"Most of the bods on the course were all right. Some were downright charming. I remember a couple of the women, both of them librarians from tiny towns in the middle of nowhere. They were lovely. We had the first five days of the course in town but then were trundled off up line where we were stuck a long way out in the bush. The two ladies never complained. Quite the opposite, in fact; they were always saying how much they adored the place, even the camp in the bush. Said it reminded them of home.

"So, not a bad bunch, but there was this one awful chap. A black chap, I should say, and he would keep going on about how Africa was his ancestral home. We, the whites, couldn't possibly understand his feelings because he had come home. We were tourists but he had come home. I suppose I could have told him that I also had come home, but I didn't.

"I couldn't like him. I tried but I just could not. One of his less endearing features was that he habitually addressed me and every other white woman, including the librarians from the middle of nowhere, as 'bitch'. It might be 'Honky bitch', if he were in a caring sharing mood, or 'motherfucking honky bitch' if not. Beg pardon for that last piece of language.

"We were all of us heartily sick of him after the five days we spent in town. The thought of a month in the bush with this character had several of the other Yanks contemplating what they used to call 'termination'. That is, a swift exit from Africa back to the US.

"Well, there was a shortage of - there were always shortages in those days, though ‘those days’ seem paradisial in comparison to now. The particular shortage then was lavatory paper, bog rolls, whatever you call the stuff. When we got to the camp up country we were each given a roll and told to make it last. There would be no “reissue of tissue”.

"The black boy, Jermaine, used up his supply in two days and then, like Oliver Twist, went back for more. It seemed he was particularly fastidious about the lavatory, couldn't pee in front of others, couldn't pee standing up even on his own, and he'd been lining the seat of the latrine with layer upon layer of paper each and every time he used it, so as not to catch anything."

Farzaneh, her cheeks still tear-streaked, had begun to giggle.

"And, just as Oliver got no more gruel, so our Jermaine got no more toilet paper. He went home, to America. Terminated."

They were close to the beach. Farzaneh had a sense of sunshine on the sand before she saw it; imagined the ocean breeze on her skin before she felt it.

She said, "There wasn't anyone quite like that in Tokyo. It was just that they were so - so sure of everything and with so little reason.

"The paper offered these places for little reporter wannabes. I knew it. The Americans didn’t seem to. So, they were all ‘real’ reporters already, having done ninety days on The Kalamazoo Klarion or whatever, and it was - I don't know - as if they were slumming it in Tokyo. Yet, when they actually had to write a story, you’d see them sweating the words out.

"I mean that literally. You’d see them across the office and their faces would be all screwed up with the effort; their eyes all squinty -”

“You make it sound like constipation,” Mrs. Kabba said.

“Exactly. And any word with more than five letters, well, their lips would start moving, ‘m - i -crooked letter - crooked letter - i - crooked letter- crooked letter- i -humpback -humpback -i’.

Mrs. Kabba had tears coming from her own eyes now. “You can be very funny, you know. It’s a talent you should cultivate.”

A few metres more and the women were out of the trees and standing on the rocks again with the sand in front of them and the ocean only a little way beyond. Out at sea, a long way out at sea, the low dark shapes of three Kru boats could be seen making for Banjul. Mrs. Kabba sighed. “It looks as if you've missed your ride.”

Farzaneh said that it didn’t matter. That it was too soon to leave. That she wanted to stay longer. “A couple of days at least, if that’s all right.”

“There’s enough rice for three days, possibly four if we’re careful, and the sea is full of fish,” Mrs. Kabba said. “No veggies, I’m afraid, but there is plenty more fruit in the forest, if you don’t mind helping me forage for it. We’ll have mangoes for dessert tonight. Tomorrow morning we’ll go back to the house and take a cutlass with us this time. There are banana trees at the back. I’m sure we could manage a hand between us.”

Mrs. Kabba’s voice had gone all schoolgirlish again but it had an infectious excitement in it that let Farzaneh see, if only for an instant, the girl the woman must have been. The girl that had made an African soldier fall in love with her, want to take back to his country with him as his companion, bear his children.

Farzaneh felt a sudden surge of affection for this woman. Surprising, shocking even, but it was there, sisterly in a way she had never felt about her own sister and at the same time something more than that, almost but not quite, a sort of crush. “Just now, I think I’d settle for a drink of water and then a swim,” she said, shielding herself from her own embarrassment.

Mrs. Kabba left her standing on the rocks while she went inside the beach house, returning after the briefest of intervals with two of the flowery enamel mugs and a bottle of water. Between them, the women emptied the bottle.

“Now we can have our swim,” Mrs. Kabba said, when they were done with the water. “I’ll put these things back and then struggle into my costume.”

“Why bother?” Farzaneh said. “There’s only me to see you.”

The girl, herself surprised by what she had just let slip from her mouth, watched the quizzical look that flitted across the older woman’s face as her own words came back at her.

“Indeed, you’re right,” Mrs Kabba said. "Why bother?"

To be continued ...