I settled on to a bench. On my left sat one of these spiritual young men, his eyes closed, clutching a folded prayer mat to his chest. On my other side, a glamorous girl with two sets of eyebrows—one pair painted strangely above her own—who sat joggling a small bag of cashews in her hands. I considered all the months that separated my first ferry trip from this one. The Illuminated Academy for Girls—which, for convenience’s sake, and to save everyone the shame of saying it, we abbreviated, behind Aimee’s back, to IAG—had survived its first year. Thrived, if you counted success in column inches. For the rest of us it had been a periodic ordeal, intense whenever the visits rolled round or some crisis brought the embattled headmaster into our meeting rooms in London or New York, via fraught video-conference. Oddly distant at all other times. I often had cause to recall Granger, in Heathrow, the night of our first return, hugging me round my shoulders as we queued for Customs: “None of this looks real to me now! Something’s changed. Can’t be the same after seeing what I’ve seen!” But in a few days he was exactly the same, we all were: we left taps running, abandoned plastic bottles after a few sips, bought a single pair of jeans for the same sum as a trainee teacher’s yearly wage. If London was unreal, if New York was unreal, they were powerful stage shows: as soon as we were back inside them they not only seemed real but the only possible reality, and decisions made about the village from these locations always appeared to have a certain plausibility while we were making them, and only later, when one or other of us arrived back here, and crossed this river, did the potential absurdity of whatever it was become clear. Four months ago, for example, it had seemed important, in New York, to teach the theory of evolution to these children—and their teachers—many of whom had never so much as heard of the name Darwin. It seemed far less of a priority in the village itself, when we reached it in the middle of the rainy season to find a third of the kids off with malaria, half a classroom ceiling fallen in, the toilet contract unfulfilled and the solar-panel-powered electricity circuits rusted and corrupted. But our biggest problem, as Fern had predicted, was not our pedagogical illusions, exactly, but the wavering nature of Aimee’s attention. Her new thing was technology. She had begun to spend a lot of social time with the brilliant young people of Silicon Valley, and liked to consider herself one of their tribe, “basically a nerd.” She’d become very responsive to their vision of a world transformed—saved—by technology. In the first flush of this new interest she did not abandon IAG or poverty reduction as much as patch the fresh preoccupation on to the old ones, with sometimes alarming results (“We’re going to give each one of these damn girls a laptop: that’s going to be their exercise book, that’s their library, their teacher, their everything!”). Which Fern then had to massage back into some semblance of reality. He stayed “on the ground” not for mere weeks but for whole seasons, partly out of affection for the village and his own commitment to his role there but also, I knew, to avoid working any more closely with Aimee than his preferred distance of four thousand miles. He saw what no one else saw. He noted the growing resentment of the boys, who had been left to fester in the old school, which—though Aimee sporadically rained a little money on it—was now little more than a ghost town, in which children sat around waiting for teachers unpaid so long they’d stopped coming to work. The government seemed to have withdrawn from the village generally: many other previously well-running, or reasonably well-running, services now languished cruelly. The clinic had not reopened, a huge pot-hole in the road just outside the village had been left to crater and spread. An Italian environmental scientist’s reports of dangerous levels of pesticides in the groundwater well were ignored no matter how many times Fern tried to alert the relevant ministries. Perhaps this kind of thing would have happened anyway. But it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the village was being punished for its connection with Aimee, or deliberately neglected in the expectation that Aimee’s money would flow into the gap.
One problem you could not find written down in any of the reports but Fern and I were both acutely aware of it, although we experienced it from opposite ends. Neither of us bothered discussing it with Aimee any more. (“But what if I love him?” was her only response, when we combined forces, by way of conference call, in an attempted intervention.) Instead we worked around her, swapping information like two PIs on the same case. I probably was the one who noticed it first, in London. I kept walking in on sweet nothings being passed back and forth, at her desktop, on her phone, always closed up or shut down the moment I entered whichever room. Then she stopped being shy. When he passed the AIDS test she’d made him take she was so glad she told me about it. I got used to seeing Lamin’s disembodied head in a corner, smiling at me, streaming at us live from, I presumed, the only internet café in Barra. He was there at breakfast with the kids in the mornings, and waved good-bye to them when their tutors arrived. He’d appear for dinner, like another guest at the table. He began to be included in meetings, the ridiculous “creative” kind (“Lam, what do you think about this corset?”) but also in serious meetings with accountants, the business manager, the PRs. From Fern’s end the situation was less queasily romantic, more concrete: Lamin’s compound got a new front door, then a toilet, then interior dividing walls, then a new roof of tile. This did not go unnoticed. A flat-screen TV had caused the latest trouble. “The Al Kalo called a meeting about it on Tuesday,” Fern informed me, when I called him to tell him the jet was taking off. “Lamin was away in Dakar, visiting family. Mostly the young people came. Everybody was very upset. It came down to a long discussion about how and when Lamin joined the Illuminati . . .”
I was in the process of texting Fern, to give him my latest location, when I heard a commotion the other side of the engine room, and looked up and saw bodies parting, moving toward the stairs, to avoid a skinny, flailing man who now came into view, shouting, waving his bony arms, in some form of severe distress. I turned to the man to my left: his face remained placid, eyes closed. The lady to my right raised both pairs of her brows and said: “Drunk man, oh my.” Two soldiers appeared and were on top of him in a moment, they took him by each of his wild arms and tried to force him down on to a spot on the bench a little way along from us, but each time his narrow buttocks connected with the seat he sprang up as if the wood were on fire, and so the plan changed, now they dragged him toward the entrance of the engine room, directly opposite me, and tried to force him through the little door and down the dark steps to where he could no longer be seen. I knew by then he was epileptic—I could see the foam gathering at the corners of his mouth—and at first I thought this was what they didn’t understand. As they twisted him out of his T-shirt I kept shouting, “Epileptic! He’s epileptic!” Until four eyebrows explained: “Sister, they know this.” They knew this but had no gentle arsenal of movements. They were the kind of soldiers instructed in brutality only. The more the man convulsed, the more he foamed, the more he infuriated them, and after a brief struggle in the doorway, where he momentarily convulsed in such a way that his limbs locked rigid like a toddler who refuses to be moved, they kicked him down the stairs, reached behind themselves and closed the door. We heard struggle, and terrible screams, dull connecting punches. Then silence. “What are you doing to that poor man?” cried four eyebrows, beside me, but when the door reopened, she lowered her eyes and returned to her cashews, and I didn’t say any of the things I thought I was going to say, and the crowd parted and the soldiers walked down the stairs unmolested. We were the weak and they were the strong, and whatever force is meant to mediate between the weak and the strong was not present, not on the ferry, not in the country. Only when the soldiers were out of sight did the Tablighi who was sitting next to me—with two other nearby men—enter the engine room and retrieve the epileptic and bring him out into the light. The Tablighi lay him tenderly across his lap: it looked like the pietà. He had two bleeding split eyes but was alive and calm. A portion of bench was cleared for him, and for the rest of the crossing he lay there, shirtless, gently moaning, until we docked, when he stood up like any other commuter, climbed down the stairs and merged into the hordes heading for Barra.
? ? ?
How happy I was to see Hawa, genuinely happy! It was lunch time when I kicked open the door, and also cashew season: everyone was arranged in circles of five or six, crouched around large bowls of the fire-blackened nuts that had to now be removed from their burned shells and placed in a series of luridly tie-dyed buckets. Even very small children could do this so it was all hands on deck, even for incompetents, like Fern, who was being laughed at by Hawa for his relatively tiny mound of shells.
“Look at you! You look like Miss Beyoncé herself! Well, I hope your nails are not too fancy, my lady, because now you have to come and show this poor Fern man how it’s done. Even Mohammed has a bigger pile—and he’s three!” I abandoned my single rucksack at the door—I had also learned to pack—and went to hug Hawa around her strong, narrow back. “Still no baby?” she whispered in my ear, and I whispered the same back, and we hugged yet more tightly and laughed into each other’s necks. It was very surprising to me that Hawa and I should have found a bond in this, across continents and cultures, but that’s how it was. For just as, in London and New York, Aimee’s world—and therefore mine—had erupted into babies, her own and the babies of her friends, dealing with them and talking about them, so that nothing seemed to exist except birth, and not just in the private realm, but also all newspapers, the television, stray songs on the radio seemed, to me, obsessed with the subject of fertility in general and of the fertility of women like me in particular, just so Hawa was coming under pressure in the village, as the time passed and people cottoned on to the fact that the policeman in Banjul was only a decoy, and Hawa herself a new kind of girl, perhaps uncircumcised, certainly unmarried, with no children, and no immediate plans for having any. “Still no baby?” had become our shorthand and catchphrase for all this, our mutual situation, and it seemed the funniest thing in the world whenever we exchanged the phrase with each other, we giggled and groaned over it, and only occasionally did it occur to me—and only when I was back in my own world—that I was thirty-two and Hawa ten years younger.
Fern stood up from his cashew disaster and wiped the ash off his hands on to his trousers: “She returns!”
Lunch was brought to us right away. We ate in a corner of the yard, our plates on our knees, both hungry enough to ignore the fact that nobody else got a lunch break from cashew-crushing.
“You look very well,” said Fern, beaming at me. “Very happy.”
The tin door at the back of the compound was wide open, giving on to a view of Hawa’s family’s land. Several acres of purple-tinged cashew trees, pale yellow bush and scorched black hillocks of ash that marked where Hawa and her grandmothers burned, once a month, huge pyres of household waste and plastic. It was somehow lush and barren simultaneously, and beautiful to me in this mix. I saw that Fern was right: this was a place in which I was happy. Aged thirty-two and one quarter I was finally having my year off.
“But what is a ‘year off’?”
“Oh, it’s when you’re young and you spend a year in some distant country, learning its ways, communing with the . . . community. We could never afford one.”
“Your family?”