Whoever Fears the Sea, Justin Fox [i love reading .TXT] 📗

miss his voice down the line from Africa, their sporadic meetings in exotic places, or feel only relief that this long, painful, transatlantic tale had come to an end?

For three years Hannah had been the epicentre of his life. Her base was New York and she’d been adamant that this was where their future home would be, close to her possessive Jewish family. Paul had lived the soutpiel life that English-speaking South Africans have always been accused of: one foot in Africa, one foot abroad, and his saucy bit dangling in the Atlantic. His reluctance to emigrate and embrace her world had been part of their undoing. Geography compounded the loss. He wasn’t good enough: not for her, not for the USA, nor the First World. In the end, he couldn’t cut it.

Paul had resisted that existence, but it had promised a life beyond Africa. He could have become a New Yorker. The possibilities had seemed dangerously enticing, but now her glamorous, jet-set life was closed to him. No more dinners in the Village and weekends in the Hamptons, no more SoHo parties with coked-up soap stars. No more weekends in Miami with Porsches and poolside petting. Now America, and by extension the world, had sunk, Atlantis-like. His global reach had contracted, and a tenuous form of belonging to a foreign land had finally been severed. He felt like a boat person, turned away from an alien shore by the coastguard and packed off back home, or simply tossed overboard. Melodramatically, he retallied the debt he could never escape: AIDS babies, Robert Mugabe, Rwandan genocide. They were all his baggage again. Paul had lost his lover and the world, and been awarded Africa as consolation, as booby prize.

He found it impossible to be alone in his apartment at night. Each evening, he drove the short distance from Killarney to Orange Grove, where he sat on his regular stool at the far end of the Radium Beer Hall’s battle-scarred counter. Paul drank long and hard, but only ever got halfway drunk. He never spoke to anyone other than the barman. But it was better than staying in. It was better than thinking.

 

CHAPTER 3

 

The alarm clock bleated at four-thirty on the morning of his departure. Paul opened his eyes, not believing it was time to go. His head throbbed. He desperately didn’t want to get out of bed. All through the night, he’d writhed in intermittent sleep, plagued by half-dreamed images of a blade penetrating flesh, the splash of a body over the side, a dhow sailing away into the darkness.

The departure seemed more like an ending than a beginning. He knew it was mostly Hannah, but the journey appeared opaque. Certainly, there was an element of danger: he was venturing alone into the Muslim world with nothing but a wallet full of dollars and a desire to go to sea, possibly into pirate waters. A pale Christian boy with an air of betrayal about him, calling himself an African, alone on the Muslim African wave.

Then again, perhaps this was exactly the time to take on an adventure.

The alarm clock sounded again. Paul’s outstretched hand knocked it to the floor. He rolled out from under the duvet. His bags were packed and standing at the door — all the usual stuff plus anti-malaria tablets, insect repellent, his rusting seaman’s knife, a big hat. Passport. Ticket. Camera. Dollars. And a box of condoms — You never know, thought Paul, maybe climb back on the horse. Anything else he could do without. A last will and testament? No, pull yourself together, man.

He took one last glance round the bedroom. The cupboard doors stood open. He could see Hannah’s things stacked in a corner, some of them collected on their journeys together. The capulanas from Maputo, Thai flip-flops, earrings bought in Bamako, a basket from Antananarivo, the box with her face creams and perfumes, wine-dark lipstick, bottles of vitamins and Valium packets. There was the Dogon door bought in Timbuktu on their last trip, and an inlaid wooden replica of a Tintin in the Congo cover. The Belgian reporter looked a bit like Paul with his blond coif, piles of luggage and camera paraphernalia, heading into darkest Africa with the same troubled frown. At least Tintin had his own jalopy and Snowy, a loyal and trusty hound. Paul had nothing.

‘Fuck this,’ he said under his breath as he flipped the light switch. The airport shuttle was waiting in the street below.

Nairobi Airport. Paul threaded his trolley from the international to the domestic terminal through a scrum of touts and taxi drivers. The air was muggy and clouded with insects; his clothes stuck to his body. Once inside the departure hall, he bought a beer and found a plastic seat where he could wait for his connecting flight to Mombasa. He noticed a pair of amorous Italians sitting opposite him. The woman had a hairclip in the shape of a fake tropical flower; the man wore cream loafers without socks. The two nibbled each other’s ears and cooed like overheated pigeons. Irritated beyond reason, Paul felt like pulling out his seaman’s knife and ambling over to lop off their earlobes, so they’d have something more substantial to munch on. Then he remembered the knife was buried in his check-in luggage. Bloody 9/11 security measures.

Paul was exhausted and angry. Angry at the flight’s delay. Angry at the Italians and their edible ears. Angry at Hannah. Angry because he was thirty-one years old and hadn’t sorted anything out yet. Angry that he wasn’t leaping gratefully at this opportunity, or at least sucking an Italian lobe.

He was fuming, too, about love and the mess it left behind when it sailed over the horizon. The second beer wasn’t helping his mood. Love. The swept-off-your-feet species of love, the walking-through-walls kind. Would he ever experience that again? Paul figured he’d blown the one or two shots