It was as though she was there all over again, standing, facing him.
It was his eyes: the half-grey, half-green duplicity of them. Not one thing or another, but two things at once. Lightness and dark. Trust and deceit. After and Before.
They penetrated her armour. They dug beneath Lynn and London. And she was there again, in front of him.
Of course, Luke’s skin was white, he had blond hair, and a far more angular nose. A black face, a brown face, even Omar’s movie star, smiling face should have been a closer comparison. But the eyes, the eyes alone sent Emily running downstairs and into the closed room at the back of the house, the door for which she’d days ago finally found the key though not yet opened, locking it fast behind her.
She had no idea how long it took for her to calm herself. She breathed deeply, forcing the air into her closing lungs, and stared straight ahead of her at the panel of the door she rested her head upon. Over and over she told herself that she was safe, she was in England, she repeated it out loud. She conjured visions of snow, and skyscrapers, and trains, and puddles. She rubbed her wool-bound arms and reminded herself of winter winds, of grumpy bus drivers, of white faces. But her body wouldn’t listen. It shook violently. Her stomach contracted and she vomited onto the floor. Emily’s skin was cold but covered in sweat. Outside the room, she heard doors open and close, footsteps on the stairs, then slower ones, the creaking of the couch in the living room, the buzz of the TV; yet they could just as easily have been gunshots and the sickening slice of machete, the hum of laughter, the thud of her face on the ground.
At some point she must have passed out. It happened sometimes. More often lately. A shrill ringing would begin inside her head, growing louder until the pain of it was unbearable, and then finally turn everything to blackness. When she opened her eyes, they were caked in sticky reminders of her desolation, her left arm was numb from lying too long upon it, and the room stank of her own vomit. She looked to see if there was a window.
The room was covered in painted canvasses. Great, five-foot tall ones leaning against a table; smaller, square ones dripping from the walls and piled on top of each other in a careless fashion as if they were excess crates of beer; and a single, carefully positioned canvas set upon an easel, unfinished. Emily approached it and to reveal it better drew apart the heavy curtains that covered the great French doors to the garden, opening a window to let out the smell. There was something about this particular painting that drew her to it. The others were beautiful and intricate, whole stories conveyed in the wrinkles of angular faces, the sideways glance of an eye, or in the meandering paths in the distant corners of vast landscapes. But the unfinished painting was of a different style. It was a face only. Stark and stripped. A crown of wispy blond hair flew about the background as though the figure was in rapid motion, but the blue eyes were still, the skin pale and serene but for a spattering of freckles, and the expression on the mouth unremarkable. Yet the effect was luminous. Somehow full of hope and possibility and strength and courage. Emily looked down. Despite the impression of colour on the canvas, she saw that Lynn had used reds mainly; countless shades of them that must have been painstakingly mixed within the small pallet lying crusty and neglected beside the easel.
Emily’s mother had loved art, though they never owned any, just as her father had loved books though in his job at the hotel he was barely required to read a whole sentence. To Emily’s memory, art was not a means of expression that had touched her much in Rwanda, there was not a tradition of it. There was dance, there was song, but nobody in their village painted; perhaps for lack of tools or time. Still, her mother had taken her as a young child to an exhibition at a small gallery in Kigali and pointed out a painting that she herself had seen three times before. She told Emily that the painting gave her hope, though she didn’t say why or for what reason hope was needed, only stood, staring at it for hours, long after Emily had been ready to go home. Emily’s mother would have liked to learn to paint properly, she told her once, but instead she made do with making beautiful the lives of the children she’d borne, which was no small task in their village but exactly how Emily remembered it.
Luke’s eyes flashed in front of her again, merged with another’s. She raised her fingers to her scar, then she addressed the mess she’d made on the wooden floor, which she now noticed was covered with dust. Slowly, she turned the key in the door and edged her way out into the hallway, tiptoeing towards the kitchen from where she was hoping to retrieve a bucket of water and some disinfectant.
“Emily?” came Lynn’s voice from the living room.
Emily froze.
“Emily? Can you come in here for a moment please?”
Despite a growing feeling of familiarity around the woman, there was always something about the way Lynn spoke that made her requests not questions at all, but imperatives to be followed. Emily moved slowly towards the living room.
Lynn was sitting in her usual chair, her head tipped awkwardly to one side so that she could view the television around a vase of flowers that Emily could only presume had been too heavy for Lynn to move. The woman had deteriorated rapidly in the past weeks, but she refused to bring her sudden frailty to anyone’s attention, most of all her sons’. Instead, Lynn had Emily prepare in advance plates of (newly) assorted biscuits and asked her to keep the teapot ever-ready with a few teabags in the bottom, which she said was for the sake of efficiency, but Emily knew was for illusion. Any extra care that Lynn needed, any new ailment that crept up on her had to be spotted, and not mentioned but dealt with like a trivial inconvenience. Emily stepped forward now and shifted the vase of lilies to the left.
“I suppose there is a reason why you decided to lock yourself in my garden room?” Lynn proposed, keeping one eye on the TV and making no mention of the art that flooded the soft-lit space or why it was kept locked. “And why you chose this as the place in which to empty your stomach?”
Emily said nothing.
“Are you ill?”
Emily shook her head.
“Pregnant?”
“No.”
“Have you met my son before?”
Again, Emily shook her head, but this time the action seemed to swing her whole body with it, and the more she tried to restrain it the more out of control it became, rocking from side to side as if she was on a boat, or being tugged one way and another by a force much stronger than herself. She reached for the couch and tried to steady her legs, told herself to get a hold of herself, tried in vain to fight the fuzz, but by then the whole room had taken up the nauseating swaying, spinning relentlessly round and around. Lynn’s voice echoed somewhere in the background, firm, steadying, but too far away. Then again, nothing but black.
The first thing she saw on waking up was the flowers. In her fall she must have knocked the vase because it lay shattered on the floor around her, the white lilies spread across the carpet, absurd with their heads dismembered on the ground and not reaching up towards the sky.
“John bought them,” Lynn said, and Emily turned her head to see Lynn kneeling awkwardly next to her. The frail woman had managed somehow to lower herself onto the floor and place a cushion beneath her head, and fetch a glass of water that she now held out to Emily. Emily sat up and took the glass. “Funny though, I never really liked lilies,” Lynn continued. “They were Philip’s favourite. I kept them in the house for him. John always buys them for me now, but my favourites are daffodils.”
“Yellow.” Emily’s throat hurt.
“They remind me of spring.”
“There were yellow flowers all over the hills in Rwanda,” she croaked. “Yellow and white.”
“That sounds very lovely.” Lynn stood up, moving not towards her hard-backed chair but to the sofa where Emily had never seen her sit, and patted the cushion next to her. “Come and sit with me Emily. It’s time to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Your story. What happened to you in Rwanda. What happened to your family.”
“If your mouth turns into a knife, it will cut off your lips,” Emily mumbled instinctively. Her throat clicked.
“Nonsense. It’s time to let it out Emily. You can start with Luke if you want to.”
Slowly, Emily moved towards the couch and sat tentatively on the far edge. “He reminded me of somebody. That’s all. It’s nothing.”
“Of who?”
Emily’s stomach began to contract again. “Don’t ask me.”
“Of who, Emily? Who did he remind you of?”
“I can’t - ” Emily battled. “I don’t want to - I’ve never spoken about it.”
“Well, it seems to me that you have to.”
Lynn’s voice had not raised but remained at that insistent, commanding level that ushered life in front of it, moved people to act. And suddenly, Emily began to cry.
“That’s good,” said Lynn. “Let it out. I’ll make us a pot of tea.”
She was absent for many minutes and during that time Emily dabbed frantically at her face with the end of her sleeve, mortified, but the tears kept coming. It was shameful to think of burdening another person with her grief, yet oddly, it seemed to have infused Lynn with extra strength, with purpose, and she heard the old lady humming as she boiled the kettle and made slow journeys to and from the garden room, where Emily could only presume she was clearing up the lingering puddle of sick. When she returned, Emily helped her place the tray onto the coffee table but let Lynn pour their cups.
“Sugar?” Lynn asked.
“Three.”
They sipped in silence for a while, then eventually Lynn spoke. “Begin,” she told her plainly. “Begin at the beginning.”
“I don’t know where the beginning is. I’ve never been able to put it all together, in order.”
“Then start somewhere in the middle,” Lynn pressed. “We’ll sort out the chronology later on.”
“No,” Emily shook her head. “I don’t want to remember it.” She knew though that this was impossible because she remembered it every day, even when she felt at her strongest. A mere flash of grey-green was enough. “I just want to forget.”
“But you should not forget,” Lynn answered, with authority. “You should set it free. It’s your narrative Emily, your story. You must tell it, you must make it history, just an account of something that has been, like a book. It’s when it’s caged inside you that it can hurt you; it eats at you then, it festers. It leaves you hunched over with bleeding knuckles.”
Emily clung more firmly to her cup and said nothing.
“It’s my dying wish,” Lynn blackmailed.
Emily closed her eyes. She ventured another sip of her tea, allowing the sugary liquid to drip through her, then she filled her lungs with the warm air of Lynn’s fire-heated lounge and looked back up to meet the woman’s stare. Just a hint of a smile rested on Lynn’s lips in testament to her knowing manipulation.
“Okay,” Emily said finally. “I’ll try. I’ll try to give it to you.” Somehow, Lynn inspired courage. Still, she opened and closed her mouth three times before any words came out of it, because once they did there was no turning back, she would lose herself, she would let in the memories she’d fought for eight years to push away, she would go further back than she’d ever before allowed. “You’ll help me?” she urged, but even as Lynn nodded, Emily felt herself drifting dangerously fast, past the cave she inhabited next door to Omar, past the soft bed at Auntie’s, past the chaotic plane journey, and the refugee camp, and the UN officials with their useless guns, past the graveyard, and then suddenly she was not drifting anymore but running, sprinting frantically through the undergrowth, away from a burning church, a dead baby in her arms.
There was no time to bury Mary. No time for the proper rituals. With his hands Papa dug a shallow grave in the earth beneath a Nim tree and Emily and her brothers helped to scatter dry soil and leaves on top of it. Their mother didn’t move. In the days that followed, each of them would experience their own moments of paralysis, seconds in which their minds refused to accept what their eyes saw. This was her mother’s moment: the first death of one of her children, the beginning of what for her was unimaginable. Papa and Rukundo had to steady her as they pushed on silently through the undergrowth. Simeon and Emily trailed close behind. Cassien was at the rear but only, Emily knew, because he wanted to prod her forwards if she slowed, catch her if she started to fall.
Then the men were upon her, pinning her down.
“What men?” Lynn interrupted from somewhere far away. “Where are you?”
Emily stopped. She had forgotten the order again. Everything was jumbled. Her mind was blocking the story. It knew the danger.
“Go back to the undergrowth,” Lynn directed, a clink of flowered china in the background. “Go all the way. You were running.”
Emily half-closed her eyes. Perhaps it would be easier to see only one world at a time, though she was terrified of losing her anchor to this one.
“You will tell me if I wander?” she asked Lynn, and again Lynn nodded.
“You were running.”
Perhaps they should have remained in the bush, but how long could they have lasted there? Already they were hungry and thirsty and so riddled with fatigue that they began falling over at regular intervals, and sitting for too long, and taking too much time to hear the voices calling for cockroaches. Twice Emily saw her mother fall and not even notice the scratches on her legs or the trail of red they made around her calves.
Night fell. Emily heard her parents talking frantically, pleading with each other for ideas, hoping against all probability that there was an answer they had missed, something simple, a way out. Sometimes Rukundo was consulted, but they never shared their conversations with the rest of them. It was not their way to talk to children about such worrying things. “All will be fine,” Emily’s mother promised, guiding her head onto her lap and stroking her hair, hiding her eyes as usual beneath the protective tips of her fingers; but when they thought she was asleep she heard the truth whispered over the other worrying sounds of the undergrowth. The truth was full of things they could not do: They could not try to cross into another village because they would be recognised immediately as outsiders, and identified as Tutsis. They could not try to head for a city closer to the Ugandan border where the rebel army and maybe Gahiji was entering from, because there were roadblocks everywhere. They could not stay in the bush where they would surely be found or die of starvation. At least in their home village, Emily heard her mother suggest, there were Hutus who were their friends. They had neighbours like Ernest who would look after them, who would help them, who would hide them, who had not turned to stone. In the morning, Papa announced that they were going home.
They walked with a peculiar feeling of jubilation. Like when coming back from a long trip and the joy of a clean bed, a familiar chair, and a return to normality is anticipated with a pleasure that grows with every advance. Emily caught herself smiling at Cassien who prodded her in the ribs and smiled back. Even in this moment of danger, she and Cassien shared a fleeting happiness. His grin was the same as the one she’d looked upon her whole life – running through the village on their way to school, climbing trees, spotting clouds, telling jokes from the bed next to her when they were meant to be sleeping – and it promised her that despite what had happened at the church, with the dead bodies and the fire and the crazed men who were not like men but monsters, despite the loss of their baby sister, somehow that incongruous levity would sustain them, and they would be alright. She held her brother’s grin to her, with both hands.
When they reached the edge of the bush that backed onto the graveyard behind their house, Papa motioned for them all to be still and silent. Picking up a fallen branch he crept stealthily towards the house and pushed the back door open. Then he disappeared. In the minutes that followed, Emily’s mother took three, deep, painful gulps of air. She held firmly to a low branch and didn’t blink, even when a bold beetle scurried over her foot. Emily crouched in her mother’s shadow and silently promised God that if only He would let her father reappear safely at the door, she would never do anything bad again. It was the first of many negotiations she had with Jesus, before she realised that such conversations were useless. This time however, she gratefully gave thanks.
It was better inside. The house wasn’t large but it had walls, and windows you could close and doors you could lock. Without being told, they spoke quietly and said nothing at all when they caught sight of neighbours passing by in the distance. Three houses down there lived another Tutsi family but Emily saw nobody emerge from there and Papa told her to get down from the window. Mama went straight to the kitchen where she discovered that the larder had been raided and all their canned food and alcohol stolen. Still there were enough scraps for her to give some morsel at least to each child, which she presented to them in the same formulation in which they always sat, as if it was any other mealtime on any other day and Mary’s absence was only because she was asleep in her cot.
As the day progressed, they allowed themselves the pleasure of slipping into old routines. Papa read one of his books, caressing the pages with his long spindly fingers. At one point he even called to Emily and made her read from the book out loud and discuss what she was reading, as if one day she might need to understand Machiavelli’s musings on appearance and power. But she was too busy thinking about what had happened to her village, what could possibly have made Hutus she both knew and didn’t know hate her so much. There was nothing to distinguish them, that was what she was stuck on. They weren’t different colours, they spoke the same language, they lived together, they married, they shared their lives. Jean was a Hutu, and they’d been best friends, at least before he’d tried to kiss her. After that, she supposed, it was true that he hadn’t spoken to her even when passing in the street, but that was different to believing that she and every other Tutsi must die. Jean couldn’t believe it, surely. Not Jean to whom she’d, almost, been everything. Her father would have the answers and be able to explain it to her; but for the whole of that strange, surreal day, he preferred to talk about Machiavelli. She didn’t press him. It was reassuring to listen to his voice, and cling to the promise within it that there was a future ahead of her for which she must be prepared.
When night fell, Mama and Papa called them together and told them their plan. Mama was going to slip out under cover of darkness and cross over the back of the house to their neighbour’s. They had no more food, no water, they needed help, she said. Ernest would help them. Emily nodded. It was a good plan. Some Hutus had gone mad but Ernest was their friend, their neighbour, he’d been good to them ‘til the last, he’d exchanged concerns with Papa about the riots on the streets and the boys joining the Interahamwe, she trusted the deep bellow of his voice and the laughter that followed the jokes he cracked at his own expense. He would shelter them, he would help.
Mama returned with her arms full of supplies: mangoes from Ernest’s tree, a cup of rice, water. “We’re to watch for his signal – a candle at his window – and then we’re to unlock the door for him. He’ll bring us food,” Mama smiled, the relief on her face impossible to miss. “The rest of the time we stay inside. Until this madness passes. It will pass,” she repeated, looking hard at her daughter, though even at 13 Emily sensed these words were as much for her mother as for herself. Because of them, the rice went down slowly, filtering with difficulty past the growing knot in the pit of her stomach.
During the night, Emily slept in sporadic bouts. Asleep, her dreams were filled with screams and flames crackling; awake, with the eerie silence of her brothers, their wide eyes blinking white in the darkness. Once when she awoke, her mother was sitting at the end of her bed, stroking her ankle. “Sleep my daughter,” she told her when she saw her stirring, but Emily couldn’t. The sadness in her mother’s eyes was too unnerving, her gaze too lingering, as if she was etching Emily into her mind. Emily closed her eyes and for her mother’s sake pretended to doze, until at some point the soft strokes on her ankle did lull her into unconsciousness, and a final untroubled rest.
Lynn had moved closer to her and was stroking her arm. Instinctively, Emily pulled it away.
“That’s not the end, is it?” asked Lynn gently.
Emily shook her head. Weak London light slipped through Lynn’s lounge window.
“Who does Luke remind you of?”
Emily shook her head harder.
“Go on Emily. Please, go on.”
But Emily could not speak. It was the furthest she could allow herself to travel. Lynn studied her carefully. Her face was full of sadness, and sympathy, and curiosity.
“It’s past two,” she said finally. Slowly. “I’ve kept you far too long. I’ll have to pay you.”
“I’m sorry,” Emily stood up, shakily. “I should never have begun.”
“Of course you should.” Lynn paused. “Emily, I think perhaps I need you a little longer each day. I’ll arrange it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Emily again. She backed towards the door, her two worlds dizzying her.
“Slowly,” said Lynn. “Slowly Emily. I’ll see you tomorrow.”