PART ONE THE BOAT
The sun slips down below the curved horizon, painting a path of glowing tangerine across the dark blue sea, illuminating a three-metre diameter inflatable boat bobbing around on the choppy water. Sixteen people are sitting in a circle, their backs pressed against the sides of the fragile vessel. Fourteen of them have their eyes closed. Several of the sleepers are sliding down where they sit, slumping onto the next one’s shoulder; muttering in their sleep; drooling. The fifteenth is beside a small engine bought from fishermen, holding limply onto the miniature wheel. But he’s not steering and the engine is switched off. In his other hand he’s holding something round and shiny. From time to time he stares at it in disbelief. See his pupils. They’re huge like two black planets. See the whites turned pink and veiny. See the sweat pouring down his face despite the chill of the darkening evening. The 900 milligrams of Lyrica he took before the voyage was supposed to give him stamina and courage. Now the face of his first primary school teacher is looming across the water, duplicated a thousand times, each of them saying, “Tarek! Pay attention!” He turns away from the faces, looks down into the flat bottom of the boat, where curled up between the sand-encrusted trainers of the sleepers is the puppy he found when he was seven, the one his father drowned. The sixteenth occupant of the boat is a woman of twenty years. But though her skin is smooth and unlined, there is something ancient within her, not merely traces of ancestral DNA, but something very much alive and kicking. Shadows of frustration and anger flit across her sharp cheekbones, but they’re not the emotions of this bold twenty-year-old, they’re the emotions of an even bolder woman, a leader, a queen. Her name is Tin Hanan. Since her own death around 1,700 years ago she has been jumping between bodies. Two decades ago, when the mountain dweller who she’d inhabited for ninety one years took her last breath, Queen Tin Hanan, being curious about urban life, flew to the city and chose this about-to-be-born girl, who would be named Yara. But now Tin Hanan is furious. Yara wasn’t supposed to leave the country. The Tuareg queen would never even imagine abandoning the land where she ruled a vast tribe, over thousands of square kilometres of desert. As Yara boarded the inflatable twelve hours ago, Tin Hanan struggled to stop her from getting in, but without success. The young woman had done as she pleased, placing her navy blue holdall with a white stripe between her feet, smiling as she pictured her foul-tempered violent husband awakening to find her gone. And not only her. For inside the holdall with a white stripe is the secret seventeenth traveller, a three-month-old baby girl. The faces of the schoolteacher have sunk into the waves, but the puppy remains, whimpering a little. Tarek tells it to be quiet for it may wake the fourteen sleepers and they‘ll check the time and remind him that he promised they’d reach Spain in two hours, and now twelve have passed. Then he will have to tell them that just after they lost sight of the North African coast he discovered that the compass was broken.
Bless her. She only cried a little and now she’s stopped. My back aches, my legs are cramped and sore, but I can’t stretch out. It would mean touching the bodies of the travellers close to me, and they’re all men. Such a long time sitting here. I thought we’d be in Spain before dark. I’m planning to find a police station, and it’s better to do it in daylight. Daylight is safety. When I find the police station I’ll tell them we need asylum. Tell them what he did to me. I still have some bruises. The baby too. She has a tiny bruise where he grabbed her. Shall I tell them? No. They might try to blame me and take her away, then send me back alone. He’ll kill me, or they’ll put me in prison for taking my baby abroad without consent, then I won’t see her again. They’ll put her in an orphanage.
“Stay brave. Nothing’s going to hurt you. You’ll keep your daughter.”
There it is again. That voice comes from me, but it’s not mine.
“I didn’t want to leave my land, but now that we’ve done it, let’s do it well. That idiot holding the wheel doesn’t know what to do. You’ll have to help him.”
What can I do? This is the first time I’ve been on a boat.
“Talk to him.”
The puppy has vanished but there are more visitors. Tarek’s parents are sitting beside him. They’re shouting at him. He cowers, covering his face with his hands. “Leave me alone! It’s not my fault!” When he uncovers his face he sees that his parents have gone, but that a young woman at the other side of the boat is staring at him and her mouth is moving. He can’t hear her voice because of the lapping of the waves and the buzzing in his head. His pupils like black planets fix themselves on her thin lips. He catches glimpses of her tongue flicking around as she speaks, which reminds him of the lizards in the pine forest he used to pass through on the way to the beach, with his uncle, who taught him how to swim. He’s grateful to him now, because he can hear water around him so he might have to swim soon. Still, the prospect is bamboozling. His neck wobbles; he edges forward at sloth tempo; his head flops forward onto his knees, and sets like concrete. The woman with the lizard in her mouth has gone. Memory has gone. Only the buzzing in his head remains. At the other side of the boat Yara is overcome with helplessness.
“Go to him.”
Yara stands, instinctively bending her legs to keep low, so as not to rock the boat. She grasps the holdall with her left hand, holds up her abaya with her right one, then, picking her way through the legs of the sleepers, creeps across the boat, and sits beside the crumpled body of the pilot. Setting down the holdall she peeps inside at cherub lips and long eyelashes sweeping down onto darkened lower lids. She takes a small round mirror from her pocket and holds it over the space between the cherub lips. The glass clouds over. Satisfied, Yara turns her attention to the pilot. “Brother.” Nothing. As if he’s made of stone. “Brother!” A little louder. One of the sleepers moans. Quietly, “Brother.” Tarek wonders why the lizards are calling him brother. His face is pressing into the floor of the pine forest. But it doesn’t smell of pine, it smells of sweat, and the cherryade he drank yesterday. He realises his face is pressing on his jeans. Lifts his head to see that the woman is now sitting beside him. ‘Go back to your place,’ he tries to say, but it comes out as “gabakaplas”. The woman’s lips start moving again and this time he can hear her words. “What’s wrong? Why isn’t the engine working?” She’s talking about a problem that’s vaguely familiar to Tarek but he can’t quite remember why. He hears his parents moving around in the next room. They are packing to leave. Beyond them his grandmother is in the kitchen grinding peppercorns. She’s refusing to leave. Then he looks around and sees that he’s inside something circular. Outside that there’s a lot of water. Above is the sky, then a universe, silent as the seabed. He shakes with terror.
“What is he clutching in his hand?”
Yara sees that his fingers are closed tight around something, the veins on his arms bulging, beads of sweat popping like frogspawn. She asks him his name. He hesitates, struggling to remember. “It’s Tarek.” “What are you holding, Tarek?” He sees her, hears her, but as if she’s at the other end of a tunnel. Her face is tiny. Her voice is tiny. His neck drops forward again. His head collides with his thigh.
“Force his fingers apart.”
Yara feels stuck. She cannot break a taboo and touch the flesh of this unknown man. But no-one is watching. And all their lives may depend on it. Gingerly at first, she pulls at his rigid fingers. Tarek raises his head to see what is touching him. A crab has landed on him and its pincers are biting at his fingers. He shrieks and tosses the crab into the water. One of the sleepers stirs. Yara strokes the fresh bruise on her hand. “What are you holding, Tarek? Show me.” Her face flies along the tunnel towards him. He can see her clever green eyes and long bony features. Elation courses through him. He’s not alone in this silent universe. He can share his secret. With his free hand he prises open fingers that seem to be welded to the compass sitting in his palm. She takes it from him, tries to find north. The needle whizzes round and round. It doesn’t stop. Yara stares at it, then at the dark sea, then back at the spinning needle. Tarek has dozed off. “Tarek! What about the engine? Does it work?” He’s unreachable.
“Try it!”
Yara turns to the engine. Beneath the words, Yamaha 40, is some kind of handle. She pulls it, there’s a spluttering. She pulls it again, a revving. Again, and it settles into a steady rumble. The boat begins to move. Tarek is thrown onto the empty water container at his feet, he rouses himself, and stops the engine. “Wrong direction!” “What’s the right direction?” “I don’t know. But we must head north-west. That’s what he told me.” A long silence.
“Look at the stars.”
The sky is thick with cloud. There are no stars to be seen. No wind either. The boat sits in one spot, pirouetting a little from time to time. The night shifts forward, second by second. Now it is Yara who slumps down, head on her knees, mouth dry. It is thirst and lack of sleep that has taken her. The boat pirouettes again. Yara dreams of a childhood trip to the fairground. A ride on the Waltzers. Then floods rise up and threaten to swallow the fairground. Becoming conscious, she sees that Tarek is a crumpled mess, and that no-one is awake, so she dares to take her daughter from the bag and feed her. The pair, bonded in isolation on a black sea, coo and smile at each other. Then the mother strokes the smooth head of her child, lays her back down again. The gentle rocking of the boat sends her back to sleep. Now Yara is entirely alone.
That command to look at the stars. There are no stars. And how would I know what to look for? I’ve lived all my life in the city centre. The sky glowed orange at night. Oh my mother! Look at your daughter now! I’m not going to survive this. I’ll be with you soon.
In her distress Yara doesn’t notice that the boat has been grabbed by a current and is moving northwards. In his drugged stupor, neither does Tarek. The sleepers stay asleep, as if under a spell. A few crumbs of light appear in the sky, heralding dawn.
“Look at the stars.”
Yara looks up. The clouds have moved on. The sky is glittering.
“Look for Orion the Hunter. He has broad shoulders. One arm is raised, the other’s holding a bow.”
Yara sees it.
“He has a belt of three stars. If he is near the horizon, sinking down, the right hand star on the belt is pointing west.”
Orion is sinking. Yara uses her small plastic water bottle to poke Tarek, tells him they can find their way by the stars. She explains about Orion’s belt. He has stopped sweating and the black pupils shining with gratitude at her words of salvation have shrunk to their normal size. “Okay. We go north west.”
“No. The boat has already been carried north. Go due west.”
Yara tells Tarek that they have been drifting north so must go west. Tarek starts the engine, and keeping his eye on the celestial hunter, heads north west. Yara hears a sigh of exasperation. One by one the sleepers open their eyes, stretch, reach for their water bottles, then hold them to their flaking lips, tip their heads back, and let the cold liquid wet their throats, and revive their minds. As the light grows Yara can these young men clearly. For the moment they are comradely but they are not always so for she has seen so many like these, in groups around lampposts, and in cafes. Always with the same desperation, alienation; self-loathing disguised as arrogance and bluster, each one asserting that he’s better than the next; obsessed with status.
How did they become like this?
“One hundred and thirty years of vicious colonial rule. Being humiliated generation after generation. Endless theft. Theft of almost everything. Feeling powerless, so doing anything to feel powerful.”
Whose voice is that? She seems to have been with me always. Two arms encircling me. Seven silver bracelets on the right arm, seven gold ones on the left.
“Then the civil war. No-one knew who was doing the killing. The government took criminals from prisons and dressed them up as fundamentalists. Putting the blame on religion.”
All of the sixteen adults on the boat are gazing forward, willing themselves to survive. The wind is behind them, the poky little engine is working well. Then one keen-eyed teenager drops down onto the bottom of the boat, touches his forehead on the black plastic and begins to pray. Land is in sight. Just a strip of it, but golden, glistening, like they’ve been promised. A cheer goes up.
“That’s not the mainland.”
Yara is weeping with joy and relief, so doesn’t hear the voice. Tarek, almost lucid and rational again, smiles, his large white teeth jostling for space in his mouth, as he proudly says, “You see. Two hours. I told you we’d be here in two hours.” The passengers look doubtful and confused, but are too happy to argue. The golden land grows in size. They can make out tiny white houses, a few trees. Yara picks up her baby and shows her the sandy bay now within sight. Tarek looks surprised and thinks of asking her to pay another fare, but changes his mind and tickles the baby under the chin.
PART TWO THE BEACH
Everyone is talking at once. Some want to wait out at sea until dark, then go onto the beach. Others want to go along the coast to find an empty place to land. Still others are adamant about landing right away while there are still just a few people on the beach, before it gets busy. In the end it is Tarek who will decide, for he is the pilot and the owner of their circular steed. Tarek’s brain is empty of Lyrica, but befuddled by lack of sleep, and overwhelmed by the responsibility on this, his first trip as a smuggler. Also creeping in is the growing realisation that without a compass or the astronomical knowledge of Yara, he may never, after dropping off his human cargo, find his way home. Even if he owned a phone with a navigation device he couldn’t risk using it, for the authorities would track the signal and arrest him for people-smuggling. He falls into panic as he pictures himself in a prison cell being beaten by guards, this image then disturbed by the sound of his stomach growling with hunger. What with all these thoughts and sensations he’s unsurprised to see a tall dark woman in crimson clothes rise up from somewhere near Yara, step over the side of the boat, move across the water, and come to rest on the shore, where she turns around then stands perfectly still, looking out to sea. Sunlight catches the copper rings which form her crown, three of them, one above the other. Just below her throat there is a crescent of heavy brass, a row of red stones hanging from it on tiny chains. On her solar plexus rest three large isosceles triangles, moulded from dull silver, indecipherable patterns etched upon them. The triangles dangle from a copper rope, as does the huge curved rectangle below them. It rests on her belly, bedecked with coloured stones; rune-like symbols splattered across it. As a backwash to all this fabulous metal the crimson fabric falls in folds, down to her bangled wrists and her ringed toes. Tin Hanan, for this is she, continues to stand, looking at the sea, towards home, oblivious to the early sunbathers. They are foreigners, and when they see the ancient queen they believe she’s part of some local folklore festival, or entertainment provided by their hotel, so they start taking photos of her. One man stands right next to her, his arm around her waist, while his wife films a thirty-second video. But later that day, when they replay the film, the images are of the man in his fluorescent green trunks and his T-shirt with a purple leaping dolphin, his arm sticking out at a right-angle, curling at the wrist, encircling an empty space. Tarek stares at the figure on the beach, then down at his torn canvas shoes, then up again at the figure. He’d thought the Lyrica had worn off, but now he’s not sure. Tin Hanan glances around the beach, at the Tropicano Café, the cubicles for showers to wash off the salt, the pirate-themed playground, then glides back to the boat, climbs in, and vanishes beside the huddled, exhausted body of Yara. The passengers, too panicked to notice the ancient queen, are still babbling their disagreements, desperate to thrive, terrified of being caught. One voice rises above the rest, “The people on the beach, they’ve already seen us, they can hear us arguing. We have to go quickly before one of them calls the police! We have to go now!” Tarek frantically looks at Yara, hating the feeling of pressure on him. She must be the one to decide, because she’s a mother, and she knows about the stars.
“Tell him to go ashore.”
“Tarek. We must go ashore. Now.” He starts the motor and chugs towards the shoreline. The fifteen travellers leap into the water, wade through the shallows, mount the sands, then run as fast as they can in all directions, some in twos and threes, some alone, one in a black abaya, a navy blue holdall with a white stripe clutched to her chest. So swift are they that to the holidaymakers they’re like a sudden brief gust of wind, come and gone in seconds. Tarek, alone in the circular dinghy among the empty crisp packets, and silver foil which mothers’ hands wrapped around sandwiches just yesterday morning, is depleted of energy, of will. He has turned off the engine and can hear small children shouting as they build a sandcastle. From the Tropicano Café comes the faint sound of reggae music, which the deflated novice people-smuggler rocks from side to side in time with. A shoal of hundreds of tiny fish becomes one swirling beast and passes through the clear water beside him. His eyes dart between it, and the shore, and the horizon. See the worry lines on his young forehead. See the fear turning his mouth down. How can he get back without a compass? How can he even try to guide by the stars when he doesn’t know where he is? He could drift forever, without supplies. He’s supposed to be at his cousin’s wedding today. His mother, his aunts and the neighbours will already be making the couscous for the guests, bowls and bowls of it, steaming. His mind goes back to that twelve-hour drift on the black sea, the faces of his schoolteacher chiding him, his parents yelling at him. He faces maybe two days drifting, three days, ten days; that prison cell, those violent guards, five years a captive, maybe more. Now see his face change, the worry lines melt, when a decision has been made.
He climbs out of the boat, lets it drift away, and swims around for a while, lazily, trying to look like he’s enjoying it. Strolling onto the sand, he finds a quiet spot, at the edge, near the trees, strips down to his underpants, lies down flat, his arms behind his head in imitation of the posture of the tourists dotted around the beach. As the day wears on more and more arrive, so that the sand is barely visible beneath the bodies reddening and browning. All the while Tarek stays motionless, drifting in and out of consciousness, trying to remember to keep a smile on his face, the same kind of smile he can see on the faces of the holidaymakers. As dusk washes over them, the sunbathers and swimmers slowly leave, to get cool showers in pristine rooms, and later a dinner of steak or seafood. In the end only Tarek remains. Someone has left a striped towel behind. He wraps it around himself, tucking it in at the waist, then dares to approach a drinking water fountain, to take gulps of the warm sweetish liquid. He paddles in the shallows until the lights go out at the Tropicano Café, then creeps around the back, and hunts through the bins. He fills a plastic bag with half-eaten crepes, melon rinds, and dry brioches. Back in his place next to the trees he devours his feast. As he rips the sweet flesh from the melon rind with his large white teeth, he imagines the drumming and dancing at his cousin’s wedding.
Out at sea a round black inflatable boat bobs around aimlessly. The ghostly figure aboard, triangles dancing on her stomach, has become distressed at not being at home, neither in her desert queendom, nor within the body of Yara. She is torn between those two resting places, agitated, jittery, her metal ornaments clinking and clunking in harmony with the masts of the anchored yachts nearby. And in the villages and woods and empty roads behind the beach resort, fifteen illegal migrants wander this way and that, looking for a major road, a route to a large city where they can become anonymous, invisible. Over the following days and weeks, each one of them, on reaching the coast yet again, finally realises that they are on an island.
On the third day after landing, as the sun reaches its highest point in the vivid blue sky, we find Yara, feeling lost and empty without her lifelong inner companion, sitting high in the branches of a gnarled, centuries-old olive tree, looking down over a patch of purple cyclamen. The baby girl is in her arms, laughing at a cicada which is clinging to a twig above her. “Mimouna,” says Yara to her child. “Tell me what to do, for I have no guides left.”
PART THREE THE ISLAND
From above, the island is green, fringed with gold. Much greener than I remember it. As the plane touches down I recall what my mother told me of how I first came here, in a navy blue holdall with a white stripe, on a round inflatable piloted by a very young man named Tarek. She lost track of him the day we landed here and headed into the interior believing it to be the Spanish mainland, but later in our little reception centre she got news of him through our fellow prisoners. After a whole summer of living on the beach disguised as a holidaymaker, he stowed away on a luxury yacht. Discovered at sea by the owners, they took a liking to him and he became part of their family until they dropped him off close to Agadir, from where he gradually made his way through the Atlas Mountains, to his homecoming as a revenant, celebrated with bowl after bowl of steaming cous cous. As for my mother, she stayed on the island until her death seventy five years ago. Visiting her grave is the reason for my visit, or so I tell myself. Back then, after we were caught, we stayed in the reception centre, which was set up especially for us and the fourteen young men from the boat, by the mayor of the largest village on the island. The only other prisoner, female too, but of a very different kind, came later. She was the reason that my mother, at the end of our two years in the centre, waiting for our asylum to be processed, had become a gibbering wreck. That’s a harsh way to describe my own mother, but lately I’ve learnt how to detach myself from her suffering. I’m eighty years old now. I was five when she died and a local couple adopted me, and fifteen when I managed to escape the claustrophobic tyranny of the island. This is my first visit back here. I’m terrified. The first night I stay with a family in their house by the beach. Mass tourism was banned decades ago, and there are no hotels. Visitors have to stay with locals who open their doors to them. I was background checked before I came. They seem to be interested in my story, and the fact that I grew up here. The oldest person in the family is only thirty five, so I‘m a piece of living history for them. They speak in hushed tones around me. I try to glean what I can about how they live, especially their relationship with the island. I notice that they don’t seem to enter the interior, but stay loyal to the coast. Their work is done from home. The children’s school is next to the sea. Their food is delivered, or grown in their patch. They fish. And for information too. They try to find out who my parents were, and how I came to be living here, when I look so different from the locals. All the family look like the couple who adopted me, being descendants of people who came here millennia ago, also in small boats. The wife tells me over dinner about her relatives who left and went to mainland cities and other countries, and then were pressured by the government to come back. Now everyone is asked to stay where they were born, to keep their culture, to honour their roots. The authorities enable them to do that. After dinner we linger together, the parents, two children, and me. They’re waiting to hear my story. I will tell them what happened from when I was three months old. So, as we sit around their firepit of beautifully drawn fake flames, I pull my history out of me, bone by bone, then sandpaper its hooks and barbs, and try to arrange it neatly enough for them to digest. First, the boat, the broken compass, navigating by the stars. I won’t mention Tin Hanan. “After we landed on the beach my mother Yara carried me around the island for three days, looking for a route to a city. Eventually a policeman came along in his jeep, and took us to the mayor’s house. We stayed there while the rudimentary centre was being constructed, then given our own tiny building in the compound where men and boys were housed in a separate building. The only males were those who had been on the boat. The latecomer was female so she lived with us. I clearly remember the arrival of Oumaima. She came into our lives looking like a half-drowned kitten, soaking, starving, her eyes wide with shock and innocence. She was to keep that expression throughout the time we knew her. How did she get here? She’d been washed up on a remote beach, clinging to a piece of wood. No-one else survived the boatwreck. As she got stronger she helped my mother with the chickens and goatkeeping, and they extended the cleared land, and planted more vegetables. The mayor’s wife had gifted us the livestock to give my mother some purpose and activity so she wouldn’t just be sitting and getting morose. My mother was glad of Oumaima’s company, and often let her look after me, as I tottered around. She didn’t notice the jealous gleam in her eye, which appeared whenever Oumaima believed no-one was watching her. But I noticed it, even as a toddler.” I don’t mention that someone else noticed it too. Tin Hanan, on her frequent visits. She could not rest at ease within the body of my mother, now she’d come to this foreign land, but she felt a responsibility to check on her and protect her. Me she spoke to and revealed her name. I was close enough to my own birth to be able to see her clearly and to accept her presence. When she wasn’t on the island with us, she was moving around the Hoggar, her old queendom, spending some time in her magnificent tomb. Eventually, my mother’s death would release her to enter another body, and after that she stopped visiting. But I tell my hosts none of this. They are likely to be made uncomfortable enough by listening to tales of Oumaima’s evil magic, without hearing of a long-dead Tuareg Queen travelling between bodies.
We share some local dark chocolate made from beans now grown on the island, where the forest has been cleared due to some old gossip about animate flora. They change the subject quickly after mentioning the gossip. I continue with my story. “I saw Oumaima begin to do her spells, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. She‘d get a small piece of paper and write something on it then pour water on the paper. The next day my mother would be exhausted from the moment she woke up, sort of paralysed in her place, unable to do anything. She’d have to call one of the young men to feed the chickens and milk the goats. Oumaima would offer to weed the vegetable patch, taking me with her, but it was my chubby hands that would pull out the dandelions, while she watched me greedily. Other times I saw her writing words on paper, then setting fire to it, and in the days that followed my mother would be tormented by a burning in her chest, unable to settle to anything, rushing from task to task. And Oumaima would hold onto me, put little bows in my hair and squeeze my cheeks till it hurt. Once I woke in the night and saw her crawl across to where my mother was sleeping and cut a lock from her hair, then go out into the night. After that my mother really began to ail. The zest of life went from her. She seemed confused all the time. She would just sit and stare into space.” My hosts are horrified. There are no such practices now. They’ve been rooted out in every corner of the globe, and erased from history. While they exclaim their outrage, I use the pause to let the lump in my throat subside, then continue calmly, lightly, as I’ve been taught. “Eventually my mother lost the gift of language, and just muttered and mumbled. By the time our refugee status was given and we were freed from detention, she was unable to look after herself let alone a child of only two years. Oumaima tried to persuade the mayor to give me to her but he refused. The mayor’s wife, our dearest friend here, let us live in a hut on her land, and she brought an orphaned girl to care for us. Now we were right in the centre of the island.” Shall I talk about the energy of the interior, about its oppressive character, its animism? I don’t think so. I sense that it’s a taboo subject. I definitely won’t mention Tin Hanan. She used to come a lot at that time. She was unaffected by the island’s weird energy, of course. And she tried to undo Oumaima’s magic, but nothing worked. “My mother didn’t live long in that hut, just three years. The soporific air and the power of Oumaina’s spells sucked the life out of her in front of my eyes. Only now can I talk about this in an unshaking voice. We buried her among the ferns, with just myself, a feral cat who loved her, and the mayor and his wife standing by the graveside. The mayor’s wife found a couple who wanted to adopt me and I went to them. Now I want to see the compound we lived in, the hut, and her grave, to thank her, for she saved me from a violent father, and located Orion’s Belt, getting us all out of danger when we were on the boat, and she loved me.” All four listeners have tears in their eyes. I excuse myself, for I’m tired from travelling, and have talked enough for one day, talk that isn’t easy. Though over the decades I have spoken to a range of trauma counsellors, some human, some not, about the slow murder of my mother by a wicked spellmaker, my jaw still twinges a little with rage. I sleep well though, comforted , transported, by the sound of waves lapping onto the same coastline that was once my saviour as I lay innocent, tiny and unsuspecting, in a holdall, on a black circular boat. The next morning I travel by skytrain to the village whose mayor protected us. It takes five minutes. I recall my childhood of tramping for hours on narrow paths, through thorn bushes, to make the same journey. The scene that greets me is familiar yet very different. There are many new buildings, but part of the old village has been preserved as a museum, including the mayor’s house, which I look around. Some of the furniture is familiar, including the kitchen table, and I remember being taught to knead the dough for bread, when the mayor’s wife tried to keep me occupied, after my mother had stopped recognising me. No-one notices me looking around. My tentative sandaled feet make no sound on the satin surface of the network of footpaths looping all over the village. Where our hut used to be is a desalination plant, where seawater is pumped up, then made fit for purpose: irrigating the new crops, cocoa, haricot beans, cassava. The person guarding the gate tells me there’s a network of these small plants all over the island, bringing saltwater from below, to serve the smallholders. No wonder the island looked much greener when my plane was coming in. There’s a shimmering brightness from this perpetual moisture.
Leaving the village I walk along a perfectly smooth road in the direction of the reception centre. As a child this would have frightened me, for the island air could render people so sleepy they would collapse on the wayside and be trampled by a wild boar, as happened to Oumaima, but now the air is fresh, invigorating; wetness from the irrigation systems coursing through it; and sea breezes coming up from the coast, unhindered by barriers of forest, for this has been cut down and replaced with strips of farmland, each one with an elaborate self-maintaining bamboo dwelling beside it.
Where the reception centre was is now covered with groves of cocoa trees. I wander among them, touching their bark, their strangely pendulous brown beans, trying to recall the compound, my shipmates, the names of our goats, and I stay so long that night falls upon the grove and as it does I hear the echoes of whispers, and a heaviness comes upon me, then I dimly realise that the island has not been completely cured of its malaise. This is why my hosts of last night keep close to the coast, and why the dwellers of the bamboo houses lock their doors when dusk comes, and don’t emerge until first light. I spend the night curled up on the ground, padded with leaves from the cocoa trees. I cannot sleep for there is a pressure on me that will not let up. Shadows flit between the trees; growlings and howlings stir me whenever I doze off, even for a second. They spatter me with flecks of desperation, and something else too: can it be amusement? Recognising I must sustain a robust energy field, to protect my own mind and body, I conjure up images of Tin Hanan on her visits to the island. She would talk to me for hours, describing the mountains of the Hoggar region where she used to rule, and her fabulous tomb at Abalessa. She told me it was a circle, like the boat we first came to the island in, but of stone, and enormous. It sat on a hill, the river beneath it, and looked out over the places of her people. The people of the tents. Now, as the island mutters at me ferociously, I visualise myself standing on the hill, by the tomb of Tin Hanan, gazing at a massive open landscape. Nothing can harm me up here. And so I hold that image until daybreak, when the shadows fall back into themselves and the pressure relents and melts away. Some chi gong exercises restore my equilibrium, and I emerge from the grove and its torpor. Making my way to one of the farms I knock on the door of its bamboo house. The woman who opens it reminds me of the orphan who used to tend my mother in the hut. She makes me breakfast and asks me to stay, at least for one night. She is curious, and I am tired. Eighty-year-olds don’t spend nights outdoors on the ground. She says she has chores to do, but before leaving me alone, guides my hands to a levitational hammock, which I climb onto, let myself be suspended, and doze, while the horrors of last night drip down and vanish into the shining cork floor. When I awake I find she has set up a table on the grass, and over a lunch of beans and multi-coloured leaves, I tell her the same story that I told the family by the coast, but this time carrying on after the point where my mother passed away. The twinge in my jaw that was still there yesterday is gone. It seems that the island has taken what remained of my anger. “I was only five when I lost my mother, not that there was much to lose. Yara, for that was her name, had been reduced to nothing by Oumaima’s magic. A couple adopted me and I lived in their forest home somewhere between here and the west coast. I don’t know exactly where. I’m disorientated by all the changes here since I left the island sixty five years ago. The couple were kind, and insisted on getting me educated. But all through those years when I missed my mother like a ripped-open hole in my side, I became weary of the mischief-making of the island’s interior. It poked at my flesh, disrupted my studying, disturbed my thoughts.” I don’t mention how I also missed Tin Hanan, the queen of my world for the first five years of life. The woman doesn’t mind me talking about the island, though. She seems to understand perfectly why she has to lock her doors and close the blinds at sunset. She has to stay here so she’s accepted it. The island is the beast she lives with, and on. It gives her her livelihood, her existence, and as long as she’s careful it doesn’t harm her. She asks me what happened to the other fourteen passengers on the circular boat. “A couple of them were only sixteen. This meant that they were classed as children, and they got asylum and were taken to the mainland. As for the others, one by one they vanished. They wandered around the island, even at night. They were too adventurous.” “They strayed from the path.” “They strayed from the path.” “Curiosity killed the cat.” We paused and drank blackcurrant juice. The best I’ve ever tasted. “Did you grow these yourself?” “Yes, with fertilizer from the beaches. Seaweed. Carry on.” “So I said goodbye to my adoptive parents and travelled to Spain, then Morocco, into Algeria and down to Tamanrasset. A family took me in, and I carried on with my education, winning a place at university to study engineering. The island was wiped from my memory for a long time. Whenever people asked me where I was from, I just said, ‘Tamanrasset’,” and I believed it. I’d gone there looking for Tin Hanan but she wasn’t there. She must have entered the body of someone farther afield. I never saw her again. But I was to feel her one more time. “Then I worked in a lot of places and became a success with my projects. Perhaps you’ve seen my work, and my photo in magazines?” She tells me my face looks familiar but it’s not because of my work. It’s some other reason. Then she stands to go and continue her farmwork, while I clear away the remains of lunch, then potter around the house, noting its distinctive features, its functionality, especially the water systems. When sun descends towards the western horizon, and the farmer returns to wash the soil from her hands, she bolts the doors after her. I help her to check the windows all over her house, admiring its eco-perfection combined with comfort, almost luxury. We eat a relaxed dinner and I compliment her on the way she has made cassava flavoursome. She tells me it’s the herbs and spices that she orders from all over the planet. People in every country have seed banks, in bomb-proof casks, for safety. We talk about agriculture, and I tell her of my past designs for wells. She’s very interested so I speak about the project I’m working on currently. It’s in Pakistan, and unlike all my wells of decades ago it isn’t robot operated. It’s mechanical but people use it, hands on. I’ve discovered that human beings need and value the experience of pulling their own water out of their own land. We start yawning at the same moment. She shows me to a rope ladder, which whisks me up to a room in the loft, and onto a goose feather mattress, but as I try to fall asleep, the hisses and whispers whirling around the exterior of the building make me agitated, almost suffocating me. I am fifteen again, itching to escape. As day breaks we rise and open the doors and windows. I leave the woman hoeing her cassava patch, and slowly begin the long walk back up towards the village. Halfway there, a horse and cart comes along, and I accept a lift, for even my toned muscles are getting sore. After making a few deliveries, the cart drops me off beside a large plain white building on a hilltop, where I’ll perform my last act on the island: paying my respects to my mother. Decades ago it was realised that the cemetery was needed for cultivation, so like all those buried there, she was relocated here, and placed in a drawer, between hundreds of other drawers, each with a silver handle. I pull it open and see the bones of my mother, wrapped in a gauzy fabric made from nettles processed to feel like silk. I touch my forefinger on my lips and kiss it, then place it on her clavicle, the first part of her that I am conscious of knowing, as she clutched me to her, when my father was kicking her. Two arms encircle me. I cannot see them, but there is the jangle of seven bangles on each one. Later, the skytrain whizzes me back to the coast, then another one takes me to the airport.
As I sit on the plane looking back at the island, it looks at me sheepishly, as if it wants to confess that all along it has been playing a practical joke, which has gone on for far too long.
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