We are on the dhow. The teak groans with each wave. The lateen sail is taut with wind. He is at the rudder, underneath the slatted wood canopy which throws a weave of dark and light on his face. At our feet is a basket full of shaking bream.

A flare of sun over a blood ocean. The sun rises like a proximate planet, a burning ceramic moon. We have been at sea for so long, traversing the Indian Ocean and its jade archipelagos: Vamizi, Mafia, Zanzibar, Pemba. On nameless islands we maroon ourselves, cook cockles and prawns. Whale sharks bask in our wake. It is the Matalai, the period of repose between the winter and summer monsoons.

He stands to adjust the sail. One foot on the gunwale, one balanced on the tiller. I push him off, as easy as I would throw the stone-shaped seed of a mango overboard.

I tell Lucy about the dream. I don’t know why. But she is a confiding person by nature – this is probably why she has been so successful in her work.

‘You’re afraid of yourself. Of what you might do. What you’ve done.’ Lucy’s voice is toneless, professional. She is used to talking to people about their dreams, to excavating them for meaning. Lucy is right. I am always taken aback when people much younger than me see things so much more clearly than I do. What is the point of experience?

Lucy is a black-and-white photocopy of her brother. She is dark-haired in a country where white women are blond as a matter of principle. She is dark-eyed, too, quick and alert. She stands out here among the local whites and expats, almost without exception beautiful women in linen shirts and skinny jeans. Her haircut is gamine; her limbs have the curious pallor of white people who have lived their lives in the tropics and hide from the sun. Storm is also slender, but he has a solidity his sister lacks. They both emit a force field: the power of the protected.

Lucy now lives in a sandstone-coloured apartment in a gated community five kilometres from her parents’ house in Hatton. She has returned to this country from London, against all advice, against history. She would be better off living in South Africa, where her father’s money buys her the right to work, or to England, with her British passport. But something has pulled her back. ‘I’m a white African,’ she says. ‘I only make sense here.’

We meet in the café in the Usimama complex near the university, a rare democratic space in this city. I see professors – immediately identifiable because here they still carry leather satchels – young executives who work in the satellite TV studios across the street and people from the nearby American embassy, although these days they detach their ID badge before entering public places. The city is under constant threat of attack.

Outside the sun burns through the flame trees with their blossoms of acid orange. In the suburbs are lawns of electric green tended by gardeners and sprinklers, thick with bulbuls and cuckoos; at night we hear the whoop of hyena from the Lubaga National Park which borders the hills. Elephant, giraffe and wild dog are incarcerated there, too, only seven kilometres from the red leather chair where the president of the republic sits. On a clear day he can hear the lions roar. From the café we can see the milima ya nyuma ya tembo, the Hills of the Elephant’s Back. Two hills curve high over the city’s western horizon. The wooded forest that drapes them is stocked with turacos and whydahs and is hacked at steadily by nearby slum-dwellers.

The hills are darkening with the late equatorial afternoon. Lucy and I have taken to drinking in this café. We start with a beer and graduate to cocktails. Our meeting again – just being together – seems to require us to drink. By our second cocktail we have become expansive and nearly trusting of each other.

‘I’ve thought of you so often,’ I say. This is true. Not a day has passed in the last two and a half years when I have not woken up with their faces suspended in my mind. It is not Storm’s but Julia’s face, an altered twin of my mother’s, I see most often.

‘Did you?’ Lucy says. She sounds unconvinced.

‘I felt so…’ I stall. I can’t think of any adjective that would not be repulsive to her.

‘Most of us have no idea what our limits are,’ Lucy says. ‘Very few people are ever taken to the boundaries of themselves by their experience. They don’t know if they are good people, or bad people.’

‘Do you know?’

‘Probably not,’ she says, after a while. ‘Or not yet.’ I think

she is telling the truth. Lucy’s instinct is for honesty. She was always an intimate person, so much more than the rest of her family. She is the kind of person who sheds light on your flaws and shortcomings. Lucy has standards. The rest of her family knew this and made her pay, I suspect.

‘How is – your mother?’

‘She’s fine. She’s living in South Africa. So many of us end up there. It feels familiar, although of course it’s a foreign country. She’s met someone. It took a while, but she’s happy now.’

‘Did she leave because of the violence?’

‘No, that calmed down only two weeks after you left.’ Lucy shook a cocktail straw into her passionfruit juice, animating its cloudy contents. ‘In any case, Julia can cope with danger.’

I register that Lucy calls her mother by her first name, now. In the Dhow House Lucy had always been a dutiful daughter. She looked more like her father than her mother, but she and Julia are cut from the same cloth all the same.

I don’t ask about Storm. She does not offer any information either. Because of this wordless agreement we can see each other, pretend we are still family.

We sit in silence for a minute, as if we are only having a friendly conversation, two cousins catching up. Tomorrow I return to the coast, and in a week’s time she flies to Johannesburg to do her postgraduate course in forensic psychology. We could easily have missed each other.

This is last time I see Lucy, probably the last time I will see her in this life. I watch her as she walks to her black Pajero in the car park. She steps lightly on the perimeter of the shadows of potted trees planted to provide shade against the sun. She is as slim as ever. She walks as though the ground is air. When she reaches the car she hesitates. A twin version of her appears – Lucy’s reflection in the car’s window, which is tinted against the sun. I wait in the edge of shade thrown by a palm tree, I think she will turn at the last moment and wave, but she opens the door and gets in the car.

Tomorrow I will return to the coast, where the mosque swallows arrow through the evening sky. It is the Kaskazi monsoon, summer on the coast, which I’ve never experienced. I came to this country for the first time in the winter monsoon, the Kusi, when seaweed tars the alabaster sands of Moholo beach and squally days bring cool rain. I have always liked off-seasons, their neglect and melancholy. The monsoon is both season and climate on the coast: it brings summer and winter, tourists to fleece, times of plenty, times of want. On the coast the wind is everything; time itself swings on its hinge.