The Gloaming (13 page)

Nothing is new here, I observe, so unlike the accidental present of Magulu. Even Tanga's modern buildings are decades old, cement monoliths stained with mildew and moss, cracking open like tombs. The old colonial buildings live haphazardly among them, their wooden balconies drooping, their thick, whitewashed walls crumbling into the narrow, shadowed alleys. I am careful not to trip on chunks of broken plaster.

Mr Davis and I arrived here a few days ago, shortly before dusk. We had traveled in silence, for it turned out he spoke no English beyond his introduction. When he stopped in front of the Seaview Hotel, he said, ‘This is a good hotel for you.' I paid him three hundred dollars and he drove away.

My room is on the fourth floor, on the corner. A small balcony overlooks the market square, and when I stand at the very edge I can just see the bay. When the heat abates in late afternoon, people appear with baskets as if answering a secret summons. Sounds drift up, the bright trill of bicycle bells, schoolboys running—the slapping of their cheap plastic shoes. The air vibrates with the short, sharp whistling of swifts as they turn and wheel against the dimming sky.

The market closes at dusk, the square empties again and is dark within the hour. Under the one working streetlight, taxis wait. The drivers get out and sit together on the hood of one of the cars, smoking and laughing, listening to football on the radio. I have only once seen a customer. They all drive white Toyota Corollas, though this provides no uniformity: each vehicle is in a different state of decay.

Later still, when even the taxis have gone home, beggars gather under the light. Some of them carry plastic bags containing leftovers from the restaurants around the market—rice and
ugali
, I think, perhaps pieces of fruit—and this they share amongst themselves. I recognize a few of the beggars from the market: the man with elephantiasis afflicting one leg, the man with no fingers or nose, the blind boy. The man with elephantiasis drives a hand-pedaled bike. When they have finished eating, the blind boy climbs onto the back of the bike, and they pedal off.

I sit and watch the dark, empty market. I'm not sure what's going to happen. Maybe nothing will. It could be that I have nowhere to go, so I am here. Anywhere and nowhere are the same place. But I keep thinking about the boy, about Davis. ‘This way, this way.'

 

After Strebel left, after midnight, I could not sleep. My heart looped between the warm feeling of him and the black dog he'd implanted in my mind. I still felt him against me and inside me, his long arms scooping my body to him: a formal lover, wholly aware that we must keep passion at bay. To relish would have been unseemly. We'd made love with great care.

I'd had few lovers in my life other than Tom, and only before Tom; boys my own age, fellow students, callow and unpracticed. I'd never been in love. And then, in October, in my second year at Brown, a man stopped me.

‘I'm looking for the Joukowsky Forum.'

‘You're nearly there.' I was hurrying to the other end of the campus, not wanting to be late for Dutch and Flemish Masters. ‘Just up the block. On the right.'

‘But I'm terrible with directions.' He had turned toward me and I noticed as if by instinct the soft, dark wool of his coat, the glossy silk of his tie. ‘I think perhaps you'd better take me there.'

He'd smiled, the hint of mischief, or complicity—of the accomplices he wanted us to be. I turned—and the ease of that turning, the lightness of movement, belied the weight of the consequence. In that moment my singular life ended: my ambitions to be an art historian, my upcoming year in Florence. It wasn't a sacrifice. I was nineteen, I had faith in opportunity and time, in things working out. All I knew was that I was going to miss my class, and I didn't care.

We walked together and arrived at Joukowsky. There was a poster advertising a lecture about human rights in African prisons by someone called Thomas Lankester. ‘It looks heavy-going,' I said.

‘Very,' he said. ‘But edifying.'

‘Do I need edification?'

‘I hope so.'

And we had laughed together, we had shared the little joke.

After the lecture, Tom took me to his hotel room. He was slow, careful, drawing out each sensation. In that heightened state I could see the threads in the white sheets, taste the aftershave on his neck. He stood over me, looking down. ‘Beauty like yours,' he said. ‘We should bottle it.'

Tom's life wasn't altered by our meeting. Or our marriage. I went with him, not in concession but because I was nineteen and he had chosen me. And he loved me. Surely—surely he had. Yet that love had ended, and I hadn't noticed.

The way I hadn't noticed a black dog.

The black dog had been crucial to the accident. If not the cause, then a deciding factor. It had caused me to swerve. Without the black dog, the children would not be dead. Without me, they would not be dead. The dog and I moving along our timelines. But the dog, like Tom, trotted on, away from the scene of carnage, regardless and unchanged.

I think that's why I went to the window, as if I might see the dog. It might be straying up the dark road in flagrant violation of Swiss leash laws, cocking its leg on the lamp post. But of course there was no dog in the road. No cars. Only the still sigh of 2 a.m. The night was clear. I glanced upward at the blinking stars, hemming the mountains.

Then, shifting my gaze, I saw him on the other side of the road.

He had a soft-edged shape, a middle-aged, balding man. I felt I should know him, that I did know him. From the village? Did he work at the hotel? Had I seen him in the supermarket? Was he a neighbor? Had he thrown a curse at me?

But I felt more than familiarity—rather, an intimacy. A connection that in the next second I had to dismiss because I did not know him, had never met him. There was only the
feeling
, and the way he turned from me and hurried off, as if he'd forgotten a pot on the stove.

I knew. He had got the key from Mrs Gassner. He had sat in my kitchen and drunk a cup of coffee. Waiting, watching, scenting. He had wanted some
sense
of me.

He had it now. He'd been standing there in the dark road for hours. He had seen Strebel leave. I had slept with the policeman overseeing his child's death. And while that small, ruined body was disintegrating, I had been kissed, I had been comforted, I had been pleasured.

 

She is American. I know before she opens her mouth. She wears knee-length khaki shorts with pleats. They make me think of Melinda. But this woman has big, soft hips, and the pleats that were sharp and neat on Melinda's speed-walked frame are stretched to wheezing point. If Tom had been here I could almost have heard his eyebrows rise in disapproval. He did not like overweight people.

‘Gloria Maynard,' she says, extending her hand. ‘I'm here reinventing myself by saving the world.'

Gloria tells me she has already asked at reception. She knows I haven't given a check-out date, which has kind of piqued her curiosity. ‘I've seen you walking around the past couple of days,' she says. ‘Thought I'd say hi.'

I want to shout ‘Go away!' but instead I extend my hand and say, ‘Hello. Pilgrim Jones.' There's an odd moment when I don't know what to do next so I say, ‘Come in.'

‘Better idea.' Gloria waggles her car keys. ‘Let's go to the club and get some gin and tonics.'

She sees me wavering—sees my empty room, my lack of immediate, certifiable excuse.

‘I won't take no for an answer.'

She certainly won't.

She drives a white Toyota Corolla with one hand, smoking and gesticulating with the other. She flicks the gold fringe on the dashboard. ‘Bought it from a taxi driver. Actually, he owed me money and in the end he had to give me his car. He had a little habit. Would you believe it, there's a big drug problem in this town. Walk along the front at night and you can buy anything you want. Crank, crack, smack, weed, meth. Because it's a port. Some of the stuff's on its way in, some on its way out. I reckon, this being Tanzania, the same stuff is coming in as is going out.'

This being Tanzania
, I hear, and wonder how she knows—about the drug deals and buying a taxi from a drug addict and this being Tanzania. She looks so Midwestern. She is here to save the world. But why here? And why? And how? I now appreciate that my appearance in Magulu was not just odd but unsettling. Whatever questions I have about Gloria she will surely have about me.

The electric windows don't work. The passenger side is halfway up. ‘Kind of a pain in the rainy season,' Gloria says. ‘The rain gets in and the foam in the seat gets damp and it smells like a boy's bathroom.'

Outside, people flow past. I think how much better dressed they are here than in Magulu, but then I realize it is just after five and I am seeing people with jobs, people who can buy clothes and shoes. If I dared walk down the poorer streets, the tracks that drift off into bean fields and palm groves, I'd see the ubiquitous, tatty, patchwork poor. I hear Martin snicker:
There are always more of them
.

The sea, to my left, appears and disappears through thick stands of fig and mango trees and the shabby remnants of colonial houses. A red-brick hospital built by the Germans a century ago has long been humbled by ivy and the roosting swifts. In the foreground, the new hospital is already decaying, molding. Gloria has a strong opinion about the healthcare offered there and it's not a good one.

Several hotels follow with their overgrown lawns and dark windows. Once, during the pre-Independence sisal boom of the forties and fifties, things were different; visitors came and there were buffets and bands. Tanga was a thriving colonial town.

Gloria talks on, her little history lesson, and I nod, yes, yes, how interesting, but I'm imagining the colonial housewives—acolytes to their husbands' careers—trying so hard to keep busy with teas and luncheons, the sweat ruining their frocks; and, how, at the end of the day, when their husbands were passed out in bed and the servants had gone home, they could sit on the sofa, crumpled, stained, their hairdos limp. In the quiet unelectrified dark, they could undo the hooks of their sensible bras, take off their stockings, let the fat roll and the sweat drip and press the last cold drink to their cheeks, and think:
Thank God it's over
.

I recall how I'd take off my clothes after an evening with our Addis associates, our Lagos associates. I'd shed the little black dress like a skin and feel the very edge of unease, like a shift in barometric pressure. I pushed it away with such discipline: that inkling of my boredom.
Thank God it's over
, I would think, then tamp down that thought. Be careful what you think, thoughts become words, words become conversations and conversations become traps. Therefore: think less to say less. Then Tom would reach for me, Tom would touch me, and I was reassured that all I needed to be was Tom's lovely wife.

‘This is it,' Gloria says, juddering to a stop in a sandy layby. I refocus now on the wrought-iron gateway encompassed by bougainvillea, through which I can see the bright blue of the bay. We walk down a long flight of steps, under a flame tree. The clubhouse is a surprise: a new building, well-made, with a large open veranda. Below us, there is a small beach, two pale brown children with a bucket and spade. About half a mile along, on the public beach, hundreds of Tangans thrash about in the water, their raucous laughter punching holes in the quiet of the Yacht Club.

As we sit at the bar, Gloria tells me why she's here—an orphanage for children with AIDS. I lean forward, attentive. ‘I put my life savings into the project. I mean, what the hell was I saving it for if not life?'

But it has been difficult.

‘The Tanzanians don't want to admit there's a problem. It embarrasses them. So rather than take my help, they refuse me permits—not all of them. Just a couple of the really crucial ones. It's a crock. But I also kinda accept that it's a test. If I stick around long enough and pay enough
chai
they'll trust me. I see their point. If I'm going to take care of sick and orphaned children, I'd better be walking the talk.'

Despite first impressions and near-chain-smoking, Gloria isn't a drinker. She sips her G&T carefully, eyes me purposefully. ‘So, Tanga.'

There's no hint of a question mark in her voice, but very clearly she thinks it's my turn.

‘Divorce,' I say. Rehearse. See how it sounds. See if it's big enough to hide in.

‘Men,' she sniffs. Again the unquestioning question.

‘Men,' I lob back.

‘Mine was a first-class prick. Best day of my life when Milton left.'

Down the bar from us a group of men are drinking. They've had too much sun, their old skin blotched and peeling, bits of it actually missing. One of them catches my eye and winks. Sure enough, he calls out, ‘Hey, Gloria, who's your friend?'

She doesn't even turn around, just gives him the finger. ‘No one who wants to know you, Harry.' Then she leans in, stage-whispers, ‘What every girl dreams of, right? An insolvent drunk with Kaposi's sarcoma.'

I laugh. It's an odd sound, and I think how I've held myself back these months, laughter forbidden. I feel something in that moment, maybe spiked by the gin, a possibility, as Strebel said, of life's persistence.

As if reading my mind, Gloria says, ‘Hey, if you're thinking of sticking around, I got this cute guesthouse I'm caretaking. The owner had to go back to Holland. Dying mother. He's asked me to rent it or sell it, whichever comes first. It's right on the sea.' She glances at her watch. ‘It's still light enough. Just up the road. I could show you now if you like.'

The tarmac—such as it is: a fickle strip of tar connecting potholes—segues into a narrow sandy lane. There are houses between me and the sea, hidden by high walls and security gates: a rare show of prosperity. But the walls are intermittent, punctuated by more abandoned mansions and grass lots with mud huts: those who have lost, those who never had.