Years later, in England, there was a third moment of revelation that I can add to my spare collection: a moment of childhood abandon at sea, a topsy-turvy dinner at Africa House, and, the last, the opening of an unsuspected door in prison. By then, my life in London had come to an end and Benji had entirely vanished, leaving me alone with the darkest of thoughts.
Prison does tend to make you think, and in Cookham Wood it was actively encouraged. The hapless Nigerian drug couriers, who were the largest group among us, gave it the name Cookham College and pretended to their relatives at home that their extended absences were because of foreign study. Some earned certificates proving this to be true and returned home with improved prospects for civil service jobs. We were all innocent at Cookham College, in our way, all astonished to be there.
When I signed up for the Open University degree in Social Studies, I was required for my first essay to research the history of my home. My tutor imagined that I would write about Zanzibar but instead I gave him the story of Bayswater; I hadn’t even considered the choice. It took my mind much longer to arrive back in Zanzibar.
I learned from my research that the silly name—Bayswater is in the centre of London, has no bay and isn’t on the water—was an abbreviation of Baynard’s Watering Place, the spot in Kensington Gardens where, three hundred years before, the River Westbourne had been captured and channeled east to supply the City of London. The river is still there, underground, gurgling beneath the streets; without my knowledge, it had been below me all the time. I learned too, that in those days Bayswater had still been country and the conduit had gained its name because it was located in a field belonging to the Baynards. Except it turned out that Baynard was a distortion of the more foreign Bainiardus, after one Ralph Bainiardus, an associate of William the Conqueror, whom I had heard about at school. Colonists, it seemed, immigrants.
It’s hard to explain now the thrill that this first little piece of research gave me. For years I had been rushing around London, all present tense and future hopes. Then the music had stopped and I felt like the awkward one who could not find a chair. In my dislocation I lifted up the simple familiar name of my neighbourhood and found it to be more than it seemed. I scraped at its familiar grime and found a person, a history, a source of water. Then, further back, it led to wars and foreign lands. I tried to extend my discoveries and find out where this Bainiardus came from. Wasn’t that a Roman-sounding name? But didn’t William come from France? Normandy? Where was that? My skills and the books at my disposal were not equal to the task but I now knew how it was to sit at a table in a library and be led from my own life backwards and forwards across the world and time. I only had to scratch the surface of what I knew to make good my escape. All the time that I was carelessly carrying Bayswater on my lips, I had also carried within me another Marcella I had not noticed, one ready to step out of the shadows and make some meaning of the noise and wilfulness. My unreflected life was becoming reflective —except I could not have said that then and all I knew was this new sharp thrill of disturbance to my stunned immobility.
ONE OF ZANZIBAR'S HUGE, UGLY CROWS SAILED IN
through a glassless window and surfed to a landing on the filthy cloth of the table next to us. Then two more, selecting tables of their own. In our conversation’s lull, we were not great enough to deter them. First they went to the sugar bowls, then they pecked at the congealed food they found on the cloths. We watched while the first crow departed at its leisure, launching itself from the table’s edge and dropping lazily before arcing up through the window and out into the night. The others were still not done when the waiter returned, carrying plates of grey beef, mashed potatoes, greens of some sort, cassava, all covered in gravy the same colour as the meat. The remaining crows eyed him, recognised him as foe and made slow, insolent departures.
“Do you want something to drink?” Geoffrey asked. “Beer?”
I nodded. “Or water.”
“Two beers, please.” The waiter stepped back but said nothing.
“You may not get your beer,” I said after he had left. “My aunt has all the beer.”
“We’ll see.”
Geoffrey worked steadily through the shades of grey —the whitish, the orangish, the greenish—while I played with mine. “You’re hungry,” I observed.
“I travelled to the south of the island today, to Makan- duchi. To talk to village women.”
“And did they talk to you?”
“Oh, yes. They talk when you get them away from the men.”
“And what do the men think about that?”
“They don’t mind once they understand what I’m doing.”
“Geoffrey, nobody understands what you’re doing.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, it’s just research. To see how different policies affect different groups. So aid money can go to the right people. Does that make any sense to you?”
It didn’t really. I thought about it until my silence pulled him from a long attempt to cut his meat and he lifted his head. Then I asked, “Aren’t you worried about making enemies?”
“Enemies?”
“You’re choosing between different groups on Zanzibar. You’re asking where money went. These things make people crazy.”
“Crazy? Why?”
“Because if you’re
