‘It what?’
‘Like that. It sounds like you’re mad at us, or mad at something.’
‘I’m not angry Aaron. I like you and Fraser fine. I don’t know very much about you yet, but what I do know I like fine. Is it my accent? Does that make me sound angry all the time? It’s just the way people talk where I come from, we don’t think anything of it because we all sound the same to each other, but yes, I think I see how it could sound harsh and abrupt and you could think I was angry. But I’m not. It’s just the way I talk. All right?’
‘OK.’
‘Look, I haven’t started very well, I know. I’m not awfully good at this; guys’ stuff, all that. I’m not having a great time either. I want us all to get on, but it’s just I don’t know what to do with you. Maybe you could tell me what you like to do, help me a little, here.’
‘Well,’ Aaron said, ‘we’d like to swim early. That’s one of the things we like to do here. Do you like to swim?’
‘I love to swim.’
‘There’s another thing we like to do, but Dad doesn’t know about it yet because we’re still learning it.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Play soccer.’
In Gaby McAslan’s head, the crowd at Old Trafford rose as one, cheering.
‘That’s something I like to do very much too.’
‘For real?’
‘For really real. Aaron, there’s something you could help me out with.’
‘What is it?’
Look at him standing there in his flip-flops and yukata, Gaby thought, and forgive me the betrayal I am going to ask of him.
‘Do you know what your Dad’s first name is? What the M. stands for?’
‘Yes,’ Aaron said solemnly, ‘but you must promise that if I tell you, you’ll never tell anyone else as long as you live, not even Dad.’
‘I promise. Cross my heart.’
So he told her what the M. stood for, and Gaby McAslan kept her promise and never told anyone else as long as she lived.
35
He paid the taxi and followed the sounds of voices towards the sea. They were playing football on the hard sand down by the tide line. Piled T-shirts were goals. From the cover of the trees, Shepard watched them run and shout. After Rutshuru it was like the play of angels. He felt that he had turned his back on a dark, looming continent and the monstrous, incomprehensible things that grew in its heart, and was looking out toward the transcendent, healing sea.
The boys wore only surfing shorts; Gaby was in an olive green thong back swim suit. She had a smear of fluorescent blue zinc oxide cream on the upper slope of each bare cheek. The boys wore the cream like war-paint across their nose, eyebrows and tiny nipples. Fraser took the ball off Gaby with a decidedly dirty sliding tackle, turned and blasted it at Aaron in goal. It was still rising as it went past him. As Aaron ran to fetch it, sending white sea-birds flapping up before him, Gaby and Fraser did a victory dance, shuffling their feet in the sand and shouting
‘Dad!’
Aaron hit him like a well-taken penalty. He had not seen him coming up across the sand. The ball rolled away toward the lapping tide. The others stopped in mid war-dance and came running.
‘You’re back early,’ Gaby said. ‘Fallen Angel not take as long as you’d thought?’
Shepard winced, as if inner scabs had torn.
‘You could say that.’ His children clamoured for his attention. He scooped them into an embrace. ‘You seem to be doing all right,’ he said to Gaby.
‘Californians would say I was getting in touch with my inner child. I call it playing.’
‘Dad!’ Aaron shouted. ‘Gaby taught us a football song!’ To the tune of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, he piped, ‘Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs; Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs.’
After that it never stopped being good.
In the afternoon they walked out to the reef with masks and flippers. Gaby pretended to be terrified of the boys’ stories of sea-snakes that came curling around your legs and bit you and you swelled up and went black and your face exploded all in thirty seconds. There was still no food in the banda so they went again that evening to the Kikambala Continental Dining Room. The Giriama waiter gave them a special table on the verandah where they could see and hear the sea and drink Heineken and laugh a lot. The boys were too excited to put themselves to bed and as there was no television or even Voice of Kenya radio it was decided that everyone was to do their party-piece. First of all Shepard sang the Periodic Table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’. After the concluding line about these are all the elements of which we know at Harvard, if there’s any more of them they haven’t been dis-cah-vered, he added, ‘actually, there are about thirty but most of them are just numbers.’
‘Plus fullerenes,’ Gaby said.
‘They’re not elements,’ Aaron declared.
The boys played the old King of Siam trick on Gaby, where she had to kneel before Aaron while Fraser made her say ‘O-watanna-Siam’ faster and faster until she was saying ‘Oh what an ass I am’, which is a trick everyone knows but she went along with it anyway. Then Shepard and his sons did a clod-hopping soft-shoe shuffle to ‘In the Mood’ to which they forgot the words and ended going dah-da-da da-dada, dah-da-da dadada.
‘Your turn,’ Aaron said to Gaby.
Among the debris of previous residents, most of which had been either alcoholic, narcotic or pornographic, Gaby had found an old Spanish guitar. She had reset it from its odd African suspended tuning. She sat on the wicker sofa, tucked her hair behind her left ear and sang first an old Irish Song about nostalgia for places that were now obliterated by farms, junked vehicles, trailer camps and hacienda-style holiday bungalows. Then she sang a song she had always loved about all the lies a man tells a woman and the freedom she finds when walks away from them. None of the males spoke for some time after she had finished. Then Shepard said, ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’
‘My Dad was of the opinion that every civilized human should be able to cook, draw, play a musical instrument, and sing in tune,’ Gaby said. ‘Me and the sisters used to make up soul groups. Put on the little black dresses and do the Motown classics to this karaoke tape we had.’
‘OK troops,’ Shepard declared. ‘Bed. Fishing boat’s coming early.’
They went without a murmur.
Later, when the moonlight through the louvred window turned the mosquito net to a pavilion of light, Gaby said, ‘Shepard, your kids are all right.’
‘Yeah. They are, aren’t they? I know I do it all wrong; it’s not all guys together, they shouldn’t be drinking beer, and they shouldn’t be ogling you in that swimsuit – which they do, believe me. They’re just kids, I should let them be kids. Every time I promise myself this time I’ll just be Dad and not King of the Wild Frontier and Indiana Jones, but then I see them and they deserve so much, and I want them to have everything that I have, see what I see, touch what I touch, hear what I hear, taste what I taste, feel what I feel.’
‘Ogle what you ogle.’
They lay a time side by side in the big ebony bed that had been brought by dhow from Pemba a hundred years ago.
‘Gaby.’
‘Shepard.’
