The Dhow House Read Online Free Page A

were so familiar, and yet so removed.
    Julia had certainly met her. Her mother had shown her a photo of her three-year-old self, snug in Julia’s lap, taken on one of her aunt’s trips to England, lemon sunshine behind them, which had struggled through the bay window of their north-facing flat in the spring. In the photograph, Julia had worn a beaded necklace and a white shirt open to display a shield-like breastbone. She would have been in Africa for no more than five years at that point and already looked like a different species.
    She had certainly never met Storm. But he seemed so familiar. As she’d taken his hand she’d felt an odd buzzing in the pit of her stomach.
    From down the hall came the same explosive laughter she’d heard in the kitchen. The sea had receded. She could hear its distant rasp, and within it, an echo of the jet that had exploded into the house at dusk. She had caught a shadow of the plane in the corner of her eye as it tore through the sky. Julia was right, it had flown much lower than would be allowed in Europe, as low as in the theatre of war. They must have been taking the scenic route home, getting a thrill from strafing the waves.
    The plane would have taken ten minutes to fly from the border one hundred and thirty kilometres away. She has never been there, but she knows the terrain from satellite images, how the coastal road winds north from Moholo, dipping inland at two wide river deltas spanned by concrete bridges. North of the Mithi river the landscape changes abruptly, becoming dry and treeless before reverting to the mangrove-choked lagoons of the coast. The road arrives at the town of Puku, a tourist gem of whitewashed mansions, their cool courtyards arranged around tinkling fountains and lined with captive Fischer’s lovebirds huddling in cages.
    North of Puku the road continues, but no one maintains it. Only one kilometre outside of town potholes begin to appear. Soon after the road becomes impassible to anything but a four wheel drive or a tank.
    Puku itself is a place of women – the men are at war. Women wear buibuis , their faces visible behind a delicate grille. The men who have stayed are either too young or too old, men with slim faces, their almond eyes supported by two strict sails of cheekbones. These men wear full-length kanzus and move like cats – spring and recoil, spring and recoil. Some have cicatrised faces, swirling patterns carved into their cheeks.
    The border is thirty kilometres beyond Puku. In those thirty kilometres stand five army roadblocks. You begin to see herds of camels grazing on the dunes, Ali had said, plucking what little they can from the saltbush, the spiky sea grass. The sea comes in blue shards, fronted by foaming yellow dunes. Women’s dress changes there, becomes more raucous, they wear abayas of fuchsia and orange. The faces of the women harden with their eyes ringed in thick kohl, their parched lips.
    Yes, she can feel its presence, the border, even in Kilindoni, and the country that lies beyond it, like a black sword poised above their heads. This is the country that serves up the thin men she operates on, far away in the Sahel, near another section of desert border. This is the country that has wiped itself off the face of the earth, a process of erasure that began not in a war or an invasion but an implosion. She has never been there but imagines it sometimes, its gutted stadia and decapitated minarets. But these are not her own images, somehow. They are being projected to her from elsewhere, so that she may filter and broadcast them to her own mind.
    She can see him, the generator of her false memories, walking towards her that day in Gariseb when she is surrounded by three of her colleagues who try to protect her. He strides with that matchstick gait the fighters she treated there have. She is beginning to sweat and has lost control of her bladder and a warm stream of pee runs down her leg. No , he says – she understands the