‘Habari, Mama Gloria!’
They chat for a moment. Her Swahili is good — fluent, I assume. And I think she’s serious about her orphanage and her commitment. She tells Jamhuri I’ve come to look at the house. He glances in at me, smiles, the most brilliant wide smile, ‘Karibu, Mama, karibu sana!’ Welcome.
We stand in the gloaming. The late evening light, soft and translucent, has made the world benign. The house is white and round and sheltered by red-blooming tulip trees. A hundred yards from the door, a low sandy cliff dips to the sea and a swarm of mangroves. White egrets flock to roost. The sun slips behind the mangroves, creating spangles and diamonds through the leaves. The air vibrates with the wild looping song of Bulbul birds.
‘Karibu,’ Gloria says, and hands me a set of keys.
Tanga, May 25
Gloria lives on the other side of the bay, but without a view of the sea. I’ve ridden over here on a bicycle I rented from Mickey. He owns a stable of bikes at the market.
‘I’m no Martha Stewart,’ Gloria gestures down the hallway. ‘But it’s got potential.’ The house is a long cinderblock bungalow with seven rooms and three bathrooms set one after the other with military precision. ‘I’m leaving it to the kids to decorate. I want their crap on the floor, their socks in the sofa, crayons on the walls. Noise, mess, you know, that’ll make it home.’
The house waits ready for them. The rooms have beds, the bedding neatly folded on the mattresses. There are toys, stuffed animals and plastic cars, a bicycle with training wheels and pink tassels on the end of the handlebars.
‘I’ve been promised the last permit.’ She lights a new cigarette from the last. I study the orange-red packet with the logo of a racehorse. Why a racehorse? What connects horses to smoking? Or roosters? Gloria continues: ‘A couple of days, they assure me I’ll have it. I have ten kids already, and another sixteen needing space.’
She tells me she had a revelation. She takes a long drag, exhales through her nose — a talent which secretly intrigued me as a child, for I thought of dragons. ‘I was in the dentist’s office, back in Ashland, looking through an old National Geographic and there’s a thing about children in Africa with AIDS. I was just about to start reading when the nurse came in and said Doctor Babbits was ready for me. I sat in the chair and Babbits gave me the gas. I have terrible trouble with my teeth. As I was sitting there with him drilling away and feeling a bit floaty, I saw those children. They were alone. They were hungry. They were scared and helpless. I started crying. It was unbearable. Babbits thought it was pain and gave me another hit. But it was the children.
‘I went home — trailer home, trailer park. I kept thinking how I was this fat, useless, middle-aged woman with rotting teeth. Eating, watching TV, waiting tables in an economically fucked, bigoted little town in semi-rural Michigan. “More coffee, sir?” “Can I take your order, Ma’am?” Ten bucks, keep the change on a $9.47 bill. The sum of my life. “Will that be all?” What if it was all? Fifty-three lousy cents.’
Exhale. Fresh cigarette.
‘I have got to quit these damn things before the kids come.’
The housekeeper brings in a tray of coffee and small, dry biscuits. Gloria looks at me enquiringly.
‘White, no sugar,’ I tell her.
‘Figures,’ she says, handing me a cup.
‘Does it?’ I recall my own deductions about black coffee drinkers.
‘Ladylike, careful.’ She takes hers white with three heaping sugars. ‘So I sold my trailer, emptied my savings. You’d be surprised how much money you can save up when you’ve got nothing and no one to spend it on. I flew to Dar, didn’t know anyone, anything. Sure, I was worried that I didn’t have enough money, didn’t know what I was doing. But that was just brain blah-blah. I had conviction: I had to do something about those poor kids, they were all that mattered. That was two years ago.’
I’m genuinely impressed. ‘Just like that?’
Gloria snaps her fingers. ‘I even changed my name. Used to be Mary. Plain old Mary. Tired Mary. Mary of the sore feet. The other waitresses, we’d call ourselves Sisters of the Blisters. On the way to the airport I heard The Doors. And I thought, Gloria. Yes, I will be glorious. And you?’
These last two words jump out at me, unexpected as a barking dog. ‘Me?’
She raises her brow inquisitively.
‘I don’t have a story, Gloria.’ I can’t hold her gaze, so I turn to regard the toys, clean and neatly sorted in boxes. ‘Just the divorce.’
‘Everyone has a story.’
‘Tom was the interesting one.’
‘Tom? The ex? Did he tell you you weren’t interesting?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Then what was it like?’
‘Usually,’ I say. ‘Usually, people don’t notice I don’t talk. They’re happy talking about themselves.’
‘Now, that is certainly true. I love talking about myself.’
‘He left me.’ I know it’s what she wants, the petty drama. ‘For another woman.’
‘Kids? Kids make a divorce real messy.’
We didn’t want children. We wanted each other. Tom in the doorway, watching me put in the diaphragm. Pushing me against the sink, ‘I need you all the time.’
‘No. No children.’ I start to tear up. It’s like someone’s sliced open an onion.
Gloria truly appreciates the tears. Her voice softens. ‘You’re still young. You’ve got plenty of time.’
‘And you?’ Ping! Lobbing back.
‘Children?’ She puffs out her cheeks. ‘Son. James. But he’s passed.’ She reaches for the cigarettes. ‘Yes, James passed quite a while ago now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Maybe you wouldn’t be if you’d known him. He turned out wrong.’
It seems so much to reveal, this wrong, dead son, but she wants me to know about him. Who he was and his being dead defines her, pins her like an insect on a lepidopterist’s board. I study her face and search for him. Did he look like her? I wonder where he fits into the dentist’s office, the need to save.
At any rate, Gloria moves on. ‘Hey, I’m being pushy, too direct. That’s the American in me. And, crap, am I going half crazy waiting for this permit. How about I show you around? We could do a little tour of Tanga’s finest tourist attractions.’ She adds this with a little smirk.
She won’t take no for an answer.
Arnau, April 17
Two days after the inquest, I saw Mrs Berger. She was walking along the path from Arnau to the bridge. I was on the way to the bus and hurried to catch up with her.
‘Mrs Berger?’
She stopped and turned. Her face was tightly drawn. Her forehead was deeply furrowed and the skin under her eyes smudged so dark a tone of blue I thought she had been beaten. She was a neat person, dressed so that everything matched her olive wool skirt. The neatness only exaggerated the disarray of her face. She looked at me blankly.
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Of course.’ She glanced behind me, to see if anyone was coming up the path.
‘I…’
I began.
‘I…’
‘What?’ she said.
‘It’s a relief,’ I said at last. ‘About the inquest.’
‘A relief?’ she said astounded. After looking into the hollows of her eyes for a moment, I looked down, as if on the ground among the wet leaves I might find what it was I should say. I’d chosen the wrong word. There was no relief. There was just another day.