Chapter 7

Night thoughts

It was late. Sarah heard a scratching on the window. She checked the front of the house where the holly tree was shaking in a breeze. The driveway was clear and the street empty.  She checked at the gate and there was no sleek saloon parked in the road. She reminded herself that the phone never rang. No one knew her number. The postman delivered only flyers. 

Lying with her pillow alongside her, she reassured herself there was no reason to fear being followed. Not any more. It was she who did the following now, treading a circuit of tested routes that always returned her home. Yet they had not forgotten her altogether. A voucher was always waiting for her at the Post Office. How they had cowed her, kept her low. And who were they to do that to her, when they had no visible reality? Had she turned herself into stone? Made herself unmovable.

These days, little reminders of the past came to her piecemeal. They were assembled as an inventory of incidents and places, maybe all imagined. Disordered and dissonant they resisted coherence. They place-shifted as each new retrieval challenged the previous mosaic. Sometimes Arabic intruded, words like aib , inshallah, mabruk fi yithn alla,, uskuti, ya mama, mughrab, nazik, salaam, selamideiki, – forbidden, God willing, congratulations, in the gift of God, be quiet, oh mother, dusk, nice, peace, bless your hands. They echoed in her head like the bleating of a ewe in a distant valley, a mother calling for her lost offspring. 

She had not forgotten the oasis on the Jeffara Plain. There was the sound of hands patting bread flat to the wall of an earthen oven, the touch of a hand painting a filigree pattern with henna on her foot, and often the muezzin’s call to prayer. There were special places like a sunken garden. How cool it had been in the step down even though the day had been hot and humid. She remembered a liaison with someone in a library. Or was it a hotel? Then being followed by a car; the purring of its engine, she remembered it was green, kerb-crawling. If it was not a car that followed her, then it was a man on foot wearing a large brimmed hat, and not a Libyan. There were other scenes, too painful to be to be thought of as real, as when the lights went out and his hand, someone’s hand, someone special, dropped his cigarette. There was the child lying ill, hot and terrified and would not be touched or comforted; and the boy who had come home breathless with running so fast. Then there was the last intrusion of sound that moved like a shiver down her back, literally down her back, and the roar of a cavalcade. Every night, her last thoughts before she fell asleep were of a child who needed to be comforted and a boy racing home.

She always woke before daylight. Perhaps it was the screech of an owl that disturbed her. Perhaps the yowling of a cat. She shifted the incline of her neck to the pillow to find the best lay of her spine, achingly aware of the skew of its curve. Every turn of her shoulders to the left or of her legs to the right reminded her of the trauma which had severed her present self from her real self and angled her awry from what she had been in every sense of the meaning of ‘awry’. 

Lying askew, she felt the pain melt into the mattress. She reflected on the mystery of the pieces gathering into a narrative of sorts. The fabric of her past life was mending itself and even though the emerging story was not sufficiently coherent to share, she was pleased to find some linkages forming.

At  daylight, an arrowhead of starlings performed its drama above the poplars. The murmuration was deafening. Only when they moved on to perform in another tract of sky, could she hear the wind in the poplars as a calming hush. 

Notes: A boy, a girl, my children, the accident. Who was it dropped the cigarette? The same perhaps who told me to hold on? Glissando is the word I’m looking for – the wind brushing the trees. Playing the leaves like a bow on the strings of a violin.