Later that night they weighed anchor and slipped out to sea.
Soon the lights of Stone Town were nothing more than a glow on the horizon. Stars appeared. So many they could not count. Galaxies swam the dark waters, swarmed in the shallows. Nebulae swirled above them. And as they rounded the northern tip of the island and headed out to sea, it was as if they had tumbled off the surface of the Earth into some other, deeper ocean.
They had discussed it, Clay and Zuz, and they’d decided it was too risky to stay. By now, the Boer had probably learned that Clay was still alive. If so, he was still on the island, still hunting Clay. The local cops must have seen the Boer on the beach with Dreadlock and Red Shirt, and they would be searching for him – he wasn’t hard to miss. He may have decided to get to the mainland, but if he’d stayed on Zanzibar, he would be looking for Flame.
Zuz had also made the decision, on behalf of her mother and brother, that the bodies should be buried at sea. She’d seen a movie once where they’d done that – wrapped and weighted the bodies. And she remembered her mother saying that it would be a fine way to be put to rest – the ocean so big and deep and wide; to think that part of you might one day end up in Alaska or Europe as part of a fish or whale. Much better, she’d said, than to be held so tight and close in the same ground where you’d spent all your living days.
And so, with the stars bright and land gone over the horizon, they tied Grace and Joseph together and shackled the big spare CQR anchor to them and wrapped three fathoms of chain around their legs and positioned the bodies on the stern. Then Zuz spoke some words of her own choosing, and Clay promised Grace and Joseph that he would look after Zuz, and they let them pass over the side.
Clay and Zuz stood a long time, watching the phosphorescent wake stream down into the depths, the wind pushing them gradually further away until the glowing scar healed and was gone. After, Clay opened a bottle of whisky and poured two glasses, adding water to one. He sat with Zuz in the cockpit under a following breeze and drank the whisky as the stars disappeared and day came.
‘She loved you,’ said Zuz, trying the whisky and putting her glass on the cockpit seat.
Clay said nothing. If he had been stronger, he would have left weeks ago. Then none of this would have happened. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t, and it had.
‘She told me about you,’ said Zuz.
Clay faced the girl, asked the question with his gaze.
‘She said she was curing you.’
‘Curing me?’
‘She said you had a disease – a bad spirit inside you. That you were too weak to fight it and that she was pulling it from you. She said it was difficult and would take a long time.’
Clay stared at the girl, the perfect reflections of her mother there in the dark irises.
‘She said that after it was gone, you would be free.’
Grace had never mentioned any of this.
‘I know what you and my mummy did together. I saw you.’
Clay looked away, said nothing.
‘Did you love her?’
‘Yes,’ he lied.
‘She wanted to have a baby with you.’
‘Zuz.’
‘She told me.’
‘Zuz, stop.’
‘Joseph worshipped you.’ She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around her shins. Tears bloomed in her eyes. ‘I hated you at first. Now I don’t.’
‘I’m going to take you to your grandmother,’ said Clay, checking the mainsail trim. ‘She can look after you.’
‘You said you were going to look after me.’
‘I will.’
‘How?’
‘By taking you to your grandmother’s.’
‘I want to come with you.’
‘She lives in Nungwi, at the top of the island, doesn’t she?’
‘I said, I want to come with you. I don’t want to live with my grandmother.’
‘You can’t come with me,’ said Clay.
‘Why not?’
Clay stood at the helm, unable to speak.
‘In a year, I can be your wife.’ The starlight caught her eyes. ‘We can have a baby together.’
‘No,’ said Clay. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘You don’t love me,’ she whispered. ‘It was my fault those men came, and now my mother and brother are dead, and you don’t love me, and I am all alone.’ The words came as sobs, wrenched from somewhere deep inside. Tears poured down her face, each a crystalline tragedy.
‘It wasn’t because of you, Zuz.’
She buried her face between her knees.
‘And you’re not alone,’ he said. ‘You have your grandmother.’
Clay let her cry, checked the compass, listened to the sound the hull made through the water.
After a time, she looked up, wiped her face with her hands. ‘Where are you going to go?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. Away from here.’
‘And those men, will they follow you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes. That’s why you can’t come with me.’
‘Why do they want to kill you?’
He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘Because, Zuz, I am not afraid.’
She gazed back at him. ‘They want you to be afraid, though?’
Clay nodded. ‘They want everyone to be afraid.’
‘I’m like you,’ she said. ‘I am not afraid.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘When I’m with you, I feel brave. That’s why I want to come with you.’
‘You’re going to your grandmother’s, Zuz. We’re on the way now. That’s the way it has to be. You’re going to have to be brave by yourself.’
By first light, Flame was lying at anchor just outside the reef edge on the north-western coast of Zanzibar.
Zuz had argued the whole way, as day edged night from the sky and the land breeze brought the scents of the island: cloves, cinnamon, the deep inhalations of wood smoke and cardamom. This was the chemistry of her home, the land of her ancestors. This was where she belonged. But the girl, who was in the process of becoming a woman, would not relent. If he sent her back, she said, the men who had come to kill him would come after her. One was dead, but the other was not. And the white man was still there, she was sure. If Clay left her with her grandmother, they would soon find her. They probably had already, and were waiting there for them even now. No, she said. She had seen their faces, seen what they had done. She was a witness to murder. They would kill her, as they had her mother and brother. And if he went with her, to protect her, they would kill him too. It was stupid to go back, dangerous. She loved him and she didn’t want to put him in danger again. This wasn’t about fear, she said. She wasn’t afraid. But it was stupid to die if you could live.
Finally, though, she’d relented. Not from the force of any arguments Clay had offered. He had remained mute, guiding Flame through the night, following the edge of the broad reef system that fringed the island’s northern shore. It was exhaustion took her. Now she lay curled under a blanket in the same berth that only hours before had been occupied by her mother’s corpse.
Clay checked the anchor, paid out more chain, glassed the shore with the binoculars.
Of course, he knew that all she’d said was true. It was always this way. Faced with two bad options, there was no choice at all. He’d tried running, and this was where it had led him. If he’d stayed in South Africa, Grace and Joseph would still be alive, and Zuz would have had before her the prospect of a normal life – or as normal as an economically disadvantaged fourteen-year-old African-Arab girl could expect to have in 1997 in East Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. A few more years of school, then an early marriage, to a decent husband perhaps; five or six children before she was thirty, a few years of happiness maybe. And if he ran again – ran now? Took Zuz with him as she wanted? It might work for a while. They could keep to the smallest towns, come ashore only when they absolutely had to. He could keep her out of sight. But sooner, not later, questions would be asked. They would be too conspicuous – a thirty-seven-year old white man with an already-beautiful black teenage girl. She without a passport, he without any proof of guardianship. And conspicuous meant vulnerable.
No. Never again would he allow someone else to be hurt because of him.