The Dhow House Read Online Free Page B

word, la , but it is elongated, strung out in Ali’s mouth, laaaaaaaa , then many words of haste and reprobation and the grip is loosened slightly, her hands unbound, her colleagues restrained behind a chaotic cordon of men, the buzz of a pickup waiting nearby. Ali’s words ringing like dark bells in the air. No.

 
     
     
     
    Julia stirred a pitcher of passionfruit juice. Morning sun formed a halo on the patio floor. She sat on a kitchen stool. She saw her aunt studying her. The discerning note in her eye had been replaced by something a shade warmer.
    ‘I was just thinking,’ Julia said, not meeting her eye, ‘about your reaction yesterday.’ She paused. ‘To the jets.’
    ‘I’m sorry. I’m a bit nervous these days. I’ve had a tough four months.’
    ‘But you aren’t near any fighting in – in the north. Where was it you said you are working again?’
    ‘Gariseb. Near the border.’
    ‘I thought all the Western donor agencies had pulled out of there after the attacks on aid workers last year.’
    ‘They did, but two medical corps stayed.’
    Julia seemed to be considering something – whether to believe her, perhaps, even though everything she said was perfectly true. Julia might know that in the company of someone else – a colleague, or someone better informed – she would not have resorted to such pat explanations. The truth was that all the international NGOs who had worked in the area for twenty years – Oxfam, Save the Children, even the UN – had decreed the area unsafe for their personnel, even though it was now a demilitarised zone.
    ‘It must take guts, to be somewhere everyone else has left.’
    ‘Only certain people can do it,’ she agreed. ‘But when you’ve had as much experience in conflict zones as I have, it’s almost a relief to be on your own. And there’s no jets there,’ she said, trying a rueful smile.
    The careful note had returned to Julia’s gaze. Her aunt was wearing another beach dress, this one the sand colour of her eyes. Her feet were bare. She wore no jewelry apart from a pair of glistening diamond earrings. Julia’s pageboy haircut made her face look delicate and strong at once. Her body appeared hard, planar, but also somehow yielding, as if it had retained its memory of fleshier incarnations. Something of her mother’s cast – a very minor echo – the slope of her aunt’s cheekbones, perhaps, pressed upon her memory.
    ‘How did you come to Africa?’ she asked.
    ‘Work, initially.’
    ‘Weren’t you a model?’
    ‘Did your mother tell you that?’
    The sharp tone made her back away. ‘I don’t know where I heard it.’
    ‘I was a photographer.’
    Julia told her the story in a slightly famished monologue, as if she had been rehearsing it, as if she’d had no one to tell her story to in years.
    She started with her parents – Rebecca’s grandparents, who she remembered not very well, they had both died when she was twelve – how they were inattentive bohemians, useless at university applications, no money. About her confusion about what to do after university, a sudden passion for photography, a chance decision to try to find a destiny, a flight to a city she had never heard of before, then called Lourenço Marques.
    ‘I thought it sounded like the name of a dictator, and it was, in a way.’ Julia’s chime-like laugh hung in the morning breeze. Julia told her how she had cut her teeth in Madagascar – a long-forgotten failed revolution – then on floods in Mozambique and finally in Zaire, photographing child soldiers. It was this last assignment that had finished her off, as she put it. ‘The look in their eyes,’ Julia said. ‘I’ve only seen eyes like that on snakes.’
    She watched her aunt absorb the memory of what she had seen. It temporarily weighted her, and for a second Julia became a different person – a version of the woman she might have been, perhaps, if she had stuck with her job. Julia with a blue UN flak jacket.