Gravel Heart(10)

In that confusion I did not realise the meaning of my father’s absence, until finally I began to understand that he was not living with us any more. For several days the idea frightened me in a physical, heart-racing way, as if I had lost my grip on my father’s hand in a huge crowd of strange people some distance from home, or slipped over the edge of the sea-wall into the black-green water so that my father could not hear my screams. I imagined him distraught that he could not find me and take me home. I was literal in my anxieties at that age and those were my recurring images of abandonment: I was lost in a crowd or sinking soundlessly in the black-green water off the wharf.

When I asked my mother about Baba in the days that followed, she told me again and again that he had gone away for a few days. When the few days were up she said that my father did not want us anymore. She told me that in a way that made me understand she did not wish to speak about it for long. She did not speak with anger but in a voice that was both sharp and resigned at the same time, her eyes bright and glistening, threatening to spark into a rage or fill with tears. It made me reluctant to ask further questions, although I did, again and again, and she did not spark into a rage. She rarely did and I hated it when that happened. She said such ugly things. When I asked if I could go and see Baba wherever he was, she said no. He does not want to see any of us. Perhaps one day. In the end, whenever I asked her why Baba did not want us any more, she sucked in her breath as if I had hit her or else made her hands into fists and turned away, refusing to look at me or give me an answer. I don’t know for how long she did that but it seemed a long time. It was at that time that my mother’s unhappiness began.

Later I knew that my father moved to a rented room at the back of a shop in Mwembeladu which was owned by a man called Khamis, who was related to him in a distant way on his father’s side of the family. My mother took Baba a basket of food every day for years. Day after day, she came home from the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs where she worked, cooked our lunch and took Baba’s share to him in Mwembeladu, walking there in the fierce early-afternoon sun. At first Uncle Amir told her to stop but she took no notice and made no reply, only sometimes she pulled a face of pain and disgust at her brother, and once she pleaded angrily for him to leave her alone. They had a shouting argument about it then and at other times too. Later, it would be my chore to take the basket of food every day to the room at the back of the shop. But that was some years later and by then my father had no interest in me. It seemed that when he gave up my mother’s love, he lost all desire for everything.

My father no longer worked at the Water Authority in Gulioni. He had been dismissed from there. He was no longer a clerk in a government office. He lived on his share of the takings from the market stall where he worked for several hours every day. He went to the market every morning and returned to the shop just after noon. His hair and beard grew bushy and then both began to show signs of grey, making his face glow darkly in that shaggy tangle. He was then about thirty and the signs of age in his young face made people stare at him, and some of them must have wondered what sadness had befallen him, although many others knew. He did not speak willingly and walked through crowds with his head lowered and his eyes deliberately vacant, not wishing to see. I was ashamed of his abjectness and lethargy because even at the age of seven I knew how to be ashamed. I could not bear the way people looked at him. I wished my father would disappear without trace, forever. Even later, when I delivered his basket of food, he hardly spoke to me and did not ask me anything about what I was doing or how I felt. At times I thought he was unwell. Uncle Amir said he was doing it to himself, there was no need for it. There was absolutely no need for it.

Just after Baba left, Uncle Amir moved jobs, from the Coral Reef Inn to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was what he had always wanted. He had worked at a travel agency for some years before moving to the hotel, and those years were like a preparation which sharpened his hankering for the great world, he said. He wanted to travel, to see the world and then to contribute his experience to the progress of his people. That was his dream. Uncle Amir often talked big like that. Whenever he was around he filled the house with his voice and his laughter and his busyness. He told us about the important people he worked with and how they admired him and his style, about the functions he went to and the new people he met there, about how one day he was going to be a big man, an ambassador, a minister.

In those years, our house was made more comfortable. Uncle Amir would have preferred to move to a larger house in a more comfortable neighbourhood. It’s not as if you’ll have to pay the rent, he said many times, but my mother always interrupted him and changed the subject. I’m fine here, she said. Sometimes they glanced at me, and I said I was fine there too because I thought that was what they wanted to know. It took me a long time to work out what they were talking about.

The government had straightened many of the roads in the area we lived in, knocking down small houses because they were backward slums, and building modern blocks of flats instead along the widened and brightly-lit new roads. These blocks were painted in various bright colours and built in different parts of town and even in country villages, where they loomed over the weathered village houses like a menace. There were times when there was no electricity, which meant the roads were dark and the pumps did not work so the water did not run because the pressure was too low to deliver it to the upper floors, and the people who lived in the flats complained about the smell of the blocked toilets in the heat. A few streets, including ours, escaped the clearances and lived on in a tangle of lanes. Sometimes I heard my mother and Uncle Amir arguing about where we lived: so noisy here, no privacy from stupid interfering loud-mouthed neighbours, that woman is always bickering with everybody, this house is a slum and every day I have to look at those monstrous ugly flats. Uncle Amir often described our house as a slum. They argued about other things too, about money and about the lunch basket for Baba. Uncle Amir sometimes stormed angrily away, saying mocking words over his shoulder. He said he would move to his own flat at some point soon, but in the meantime they could at least modernise the kitchen. So various people appeared to instal an electric cooker and fit cupboards, a sink, work surfaces, a washing machine, wire-mesh at the window to keep out the bugs, a ceiling fan, a freezer. You can make iced buns and cakes for us now, and steak and chips, Uncle Amir teased my mother, knowing how little she enjoyed cooking. These were foods from his hotel-working days, and he sometimes rhapsodised about steak and chips to annoy my mother when she served green bananas, or rice and curry yet again. Uncle Amir was always joking and making fun.