Mrs Kabba told Farzaneh to sit still and mind her head, then she juggled the ropes and pushed on the tiller. There was a moment when the boat seemed to lose itself, the sails flapped, contrary all of a sudden to the wind, before making themselves right with it again. Farzaneh could feel the push of the hull against the waves. The island was behind them then and receding fast. She admired skills that other people had mastered and she had not. The way this dumpy little woman made her dumpy little boat perform was something worthy of admiration. There were some lines of verse, by Eliot perhaps, that seemed apposite, but they were packed away deep in her memory and she could not find them, like the book or the toy she had so often known was there in the cupboard under the stairs of the first house she remembered living in before her father moved them to the other house, the big house, where there was no cupboard under the stairs for so many things to get lost in. She smiled inwardly to think that she could suddenly repossess a bit of Arabic vocabulary but not the verse of the man she had chosen to write her final dissertation on. “ - but it was taken away after the republic was proclaimed. À bas les rois et les reines, all that sort of thing.” “I’m sorry,” Farzaneh said. “I was trying to remember something and missed the first bit of that. What was taken away?” Mrs Kabba looked away for a moment towards the shore. “A statue of Queen Victoria. You know, the standard Widow of Windsor model.” And then, fixing her eyes on the girl again, she added, “Another fat white woman. I can still read Gregg, you know. It’s the shorthand for lazy people; those that can’t be bothered to learn Pittman’s. I learned it myself during one of my poor mother’s several attempts to set me up for what she called a decent life.” Defensively, Farzaneh mumbled that she had not, in fact, used the expression. “It was a note - to myself,” she said. And then, like one who has shown a recalcitrant puppy just who is mistress with a cuff across its snout but now wishes to reassure it of her love, Mrs Kabba smiled at Farzaneh and asked what it was she had been trying to remember. "I - I was just watching you. The way you handle this boat and - well, I was impressed. And I was trying to - there are some lines, by Eliot maybe. T. S. Eliot?You made me think of them, only I can't properly remember what they what they are."Word for perfect word, Mrs Kabba supplied them and Farzaneh felt as if she had been slapped all over again. They sailed on through the afternoon, following along the line of the coast and it was as if the boat were a device on the face of some great four-banded banner that furled and snapped and rippled in the wind: the blue grey of the ocean, the golden sand, the dense thick green of the mangrove and the forest, the brilliant sky. "How can people be killing each other in the middle of all this?" Farzaneh wondered. Mrs Kabba gave her a look that seemed to demand further explanation of the question before she would begin to offer any explanation and the girl felt the teeth of her own unhappiness again. She wanted only to be off this boat and away from all of this - the woman, the country, the job, herself, her own inadequacies. What she wanted was not what she would get. She knew this. What she wanted was never what she would get. Life so far had always been a gift horse that kicked her long before she ever got round to inspecting its teeth. "I mean," she said, dreading what would come out of her own mouth before she was quite clear what it would be herself, "I mean, all of this." She gestured towards the sky, the sea, the distant golden tree-backed shore. "It's all so beautiful and so, I don't know, so far away from the cruelty that the people here seem to be possessed by. I don't understand it - any of it.""So what do you want then? A lot of happy Little Black Sambos dancing in the sunshine ?""Of course not," Farzaneh snapped back, surprising herself. The disdain in the other woman's voice had stung her. "But that would be preferable to them cutting each other’s heads off and pickling them in vodka. I mean, wouldn't it?""Don't you mean, 'one another's'?" Mrs Kabba made some small adjustment to the ropes. The sails flapped for a moment again, out of breath, confused and then they stretched tight with the wind so that the boat jumped forward in the water. "It isn't as if cruelty is new to this coast, now is it?" Mrs Kabba's voice seemed suddenly kindlier. "After three hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade, I wonder who we are, people like us, to talk about cruelty. The stock from which I come was responsible for that. And afterwards, after our second thoughts as it were, we stopped it. Yes we did, but the very stopping of it only served the better to reveal our power. This great power that began and sustained all of that could also, when it saw fit, end it. "And afterwards? We continued to control the lives of millions. And then we left them. Packed up, went home, shoved up a few buildings first, gave the keys to a previously elected band of trustees and buggered off. The gall then to expect the ones we left behind to behave themselves.""They wanted the British to go, as they wanted the French to go and the Belgians.""Not here they didn't," Mrs Kabba said. She was laughing. "Not here and not a little way along the coast in Freetown. And even if it were a case of getting the white men and the 'mem' to leave, why did they have to go so precipitately? I was here when this place was abandoned. Anyone with even a smidgen of sense could see what was going to happen. I mean, Lord, I was still in my teens and I could see it. I remember watching the hand-over and thinking that it was all too much, too cut and dried and far, far too soon.""But you were - your husband was one of the elite, one of the chosen. Father Conteh said that he was a wonderful man; a lost leader, he called him."Mrs Kabba laughed again. "Well, bless him! Jimmy, I mean. But the fact is that Jimmy never knew my husband; he only knows of him. There's a difference." She looked away for a moment, over and across towards the shore. "My husband was a wonderful man," she said at last. "He was. He was also only twenty-five years old when the British left and he was dead before he was twenty-seven.""I know," Farzaneh said, meaning to offer sympathy.Mrs Kabba pushed it away. "That's just it," she said. "You don't know, and perhaps more to the point, neither does Jimmy Conteh." Abruptly, she changed the subject. "You like Eliot's verse then?"Farzaneh explained that she had written her dissertation on "The Waste Land"."But that doesn't answer the question: do you like the verse?" Farzaneh said that she had begun to like it when she was writing the dissertation. And then it was as if some part of her lost track of the conversation and drew aside to stand, arms akimbo, marvelling at the ludicrousness of it all: two women in a tiny boat, the great continent, the great ocean, the younger one sitting in her panties still, talking not about Michelangelo, but English poetry. It was just then that Farzaneh felt the first tickling sensation of pain, a pricking, a wriggling almost, in her left buttock. It was alarming enough for her to utter a little cry, of revulsion as much as hurt, and to start forward from off the wooden bench. Mrs Kabba looked at her, suddenly alarmed. “What is it? Are you feeling sick?” Farzaneh said that it was nothing. “I lost my balance, that’s all. It must be the sun making me a little giddy.” “Well, do hang on. We’ll be there soon and, if you do feel sick, please shove your head over the side and face away from the wind.” There was now a very peculiar sensation in part of Farzaneh’s backside, as if the flesh there had become chilled. The girl, back in the place she had occupied since the beginning of the voyage, slipped her hands underneath her, seeking to cushion herself from the wooden planking. “Where is ‘there’ exactly?” she asked. “A house of mine. Well, part of it anyway.” “Is this the house the Afro-Lebanese man built for you?” Farzaneh put the question as innocently as she could, but still felt that it must feel like a slap given in return for the ones the older woman had handed out. “I see Jimmy’s been telling tales about me,” Mrs Kabba said. “What else has he been saying?” To be continued ...
