Gravel Heart(35)

My routine settled into such a pleasing pattern that I started to feel happy. I was required to read books that opened up the world for me and made me see how much roomier it was than I had imagined. I read books which gave me courage and helped me to see, and I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. But there were also moments when I wondered if I was in the right place, studying for the right degree. Salim Masud Yahya, what are you doing here? Perhaps everyone had moments like that. Some of the material I was asked to read estranged me with its showiness and its relentless knowingness and its pointlessness, as it seemed to me. Some I found humblingly incomprehensible despite my best efforts, and I was caught between admiration and contempt for people who spent a lifetime composing and disseminating artefacts of such over-wrought ugliness. Then when I came to write, I found that I had understood something after all and that there was a way through it, which I was beginning to discern. Take heart, take heart!

*

That summer I moved in with a friend I had met at the café. His name was Basil, an Economics student from Greece. He had just completed his degree and was due to start on an MA in September. He rented a flat with his girlfriend, who was also an Economics student from Greece and whose name was Sophie. Basil was tall, elegantly dishevelled and unhurried, serving customers with such graceful tranquillity that even Mark, who preferred an appearance of speed, did not bother to shout at him. At the end of his shift, Basil tossed a thin scarf over his shoulder with a careless flick of his palm before he went out into the street.

Sophie’s father was born in Arusha. ‘It was his talk about his life in Arusha that made me pay attention rather than just think of Africa as one large dark and troubled land,’ she said. ‘It made me see it in detail, so to speak, and that’s probably why I want to work in development studies. I feel there’s a connection somehow.’

Sophie had glowing dark eyes and short unruly dark hair and so I fell secretly in love with her in no time at all. My virginity was becoming an intolerable burden to me. Sophie hung a hammock in the bay of the living-room window and lay swinging in it in the evening, reading, making notes, writing letters, while Basil listened to music through headphones as he read his professional journals or pored over his computer. They made love almost every night, which I could not help being aware of because Sophie came noisily to her climax. I heard them stifling their laughter and giggles afterwards, and then heard Sophie’s soft footfall as she went to the bathroom. I liked to imagine that she walked there naked from her bed. Some nights I waited for her tormented groans before trying to go to sleep myself. Sophie told me that I was too modest and must learn to assert myself. I thought she was being flirtatious in a way I was familiar with. You are such an innocent, she said when she wished to make fun of me. Such a proper Indian Ocean boy.

One weekend Peter came down, and Basil hired a car and drove all of us to Beachy Head where we spent two nights in a rented cottage, walking, cooking, drinking, playing absurd card games late into the night. I did not know that I was not to see Peter again after that weekend. I remember on our last night together he said to me, You like the feeling of sadness, don’t you? It’s an immaturity on your part. Later I wondered if he was also speaking about himself. Some months later he sent me a postcard from Cape Town to say that he was back home now that his country was free. Let’s not lose touch, brother, he wrote, but we did.

*

I auditioned for a part in a production of The Winter’s Tale. The director, Dr Hobson, was our Shakespeare tutor, a soft-fleshed, overweight man who smelt of old sweat. He always wore a greyish-green tweed jacket over a dark jersey, and although he changed regularly, all his clothes smelt. When I went up for my audition, Dr Hobson asked what experience I had in drama and I mentioned the three one-act plays I had appeared in at school, one of them in Kiswahili. Dr Hobson did not react when I mentioned the titles of the plays. One was by Chekhov, because our teacher admired his work for reasons none of us could understand. All the characters were quivering, nervous aristocrats who seemed about to collapse from sheer terror of life. Another was by Rabindranath Tagore, which the same teacher chose for us to give us a sense of the arts of the world. Theatre isn’t all Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw and the rest of that exhausted crew of imperialists, he told us. The Kiswahili play was written by one of our teachers. It was called Msitiri Mwenzako, which I translated for Dr Hobson as Save Your Friend from Shame. That one had comedy and treachery and intrigue and a scene of explosive screaming rage. Dr Hobson made a note on his pad and then said thank you and offered me a part in the stage manager’s team.

Dr Hobson did not want me in his play. I had heard that he was a BNP sympathiser and even wrote material for their campaigns, so I turned up for rehearsal whenever I could and watched everything that went on, sitting there silently while our director became irritated. I was also an admirer of one of the actors, whose name was Marina and who was in one of the literature classes I took where I first came across Herman Melville: There go flukes! I was a distant admirer of Marina, which did not stop me from being secretly in love with her too.

In the three years I had been in England until then, I had kissed some girls at parties when words were not required – snogged some girls at parties when it was dark and the music was loud and everyone had had a few drinks. To be honest, I was snogged by three girls at three separate parties when I had done little to deserve their attentions. One of them told me, as she was pulling my shirt out and reaching into my jeans, that she would have gone to bed with me if I weren’t black, but since I was, she wouldn’t. I asked if she would do it if I were Chinese. She thought for a moment and said she would. She went back to snogging me after that and I made no effort to resist even though honour required that I should repel her and walk haughtily away.