Swansong

Ostensibly a writing gig.

But an excuse to take my time getting back to the Outpost to pack.

So we rendezvous’d. Ant and I. On an island thrown off Zanzibar so that I flew into the archipelago and saw little splinters of land spread to the west, a flotilla of islets fanned like butterflies, coral reefs – all sage greens and aquamarine – visible from several thousand feet up.

We drank wine, swam with turtles, watched dolphins, climbed a 100 year old lighthouse, saw coconut crabs as big as cats, saw storms roll over the ocean which rendered the water more vivid, the sand whiter, witnessed the sun sink  into a sea burnished with last light, took our time. Caught up. A surreally magical interlude.

My days have been scrambled since I have been obliged to rejoin the land of the living, since I have been confined to the convention of regular hours I grapple to find enough of them, as if clutching at marbles. They slip from me, quicksilvered, mercurial. I miss the time I used to squander.

So here again there was enough of the stuff to think about words, to take pictures. And more still was spun of the hours we spent cocooned in the car as we raced inland and through tobacco regions where leaves are lettuce like and fatly glossy, spans like umbrellas wetly dripping for the rain that falls generously. It’ll be a good season observed Ant of his last here. I have missed the motion of wheels, the road trips, the conversations. A four day fix took us west and south, through Morogoro and Mikumi where we gathered the fruit of Marula trees, to the cold highlands of Iringa where I donned a jumper for the first time in months, to the plummeting depths of Songea which we left shrouded in wet, dark mist at four in the morning yesterday. We clambered north again, from where Tanzania stands on tippie toes with Mozambique and Malawi, we drove to where she touches fingers with Zambia and then we struck upwards with the lakes and unseen Congo to the west.

1000 klms we drove our last day, sixteen hours, through sunshine and heavy rain, into the baleful eyes of storm after storm, heavy, darkly lidded and teary and Africa shone all green at the edges whilst the road bled ochre into puddles . We sucked the blackseeded amber fruit of granadilla from aubergine skins, we ate pinkskinned peanuts saltroasted. We saw giraffe and saddle bills. We spotted a serval who bounded through swamp grass hating the wetfeetfeel. And then a fullfat moon rolled into the sky and lit our last hour home like a tilly lamp.

Home. Home? It does not feel like that anymore. Devoid of my children, Pili, the cats. It feels soulless. A small shrug of uncaring disdain. My friend C says houses are bricks and mortar, their soul comes in the stuff inside: the children, the dogs, the cats, the pictures and books and memories. Mine are slipping out.

Get rid of the crap admonishes Ant before he departs for work. I nod enthusiastically. Meaning well.

But when you set to it, to the sorting, it’s easy to get distracted and hard to sift the wheat from the chaff. I ditch two unpublished manuscripts. I remember a thousand articles as I toss reams of research into the bin.  I think back to the time of day school and home school after that: to the joy of being a part of assemblies, sports days, speech day. I remember Hat doing maths by the pool, reading Shakespeare in the swing, watching yeast foam and bubble in the sun as science. I feel the prickle of tears as I read a letter from my son (and I put that to one side), I laugh out loud as I read a story written by my daughter circa 2000. (And I put that to one side). I am glad I kept it all. I urge mothers everywhere to keep the stuff their kids generate on paper.

But perhaps it would have been wise to edit a little with the years!

Valentines and Pink Hair

Time is swept aside by a huge swimming tide and a wind that throws palm fronds to the ground with a rattled crash. Where does it go? Time? Too much of it in the outpost and now it slips through my fingers, mercurial. Too quicksilvered for me to get a handle on. I wonder that I didn’t waste the stuff before?

Hat is home. A precious sojourn from wintery England. She says it’s nice to feel warm, to wear a bikini and shorts and walk barefoot. She takes my camera and I cheat and steal her pictures. Three to make up for lost time (see? lost!) and gaps in posts where I had promised to paste an image in the ether every day.

 

As I write she is dipping tresses of her titian hair into various small bottles of confectionary colouring so that when we trawl the Old Town tomorrow in search of treasures to take back to school she will be rainbow headed and giggling. I say, “I hope that washes out before Matron sees it”; Matron was not enamored of the henna decorated hands at the beginning of term. I’m sure it will Mum, says Hat in a tone that suggests she couldn’t really care either way.

 

Which is how it should be at – almost – 15.

 

Heaven

When I was little, I thought the sun’s rays, mellowed by the tilt of the earth with rising dawn or fading day, filtered by clouds and horizons, was proof that there was a Heaven; I thought it looked like the images in the prayer books Mum carted to Mass with her to entertain us and buy her a little peace during long droning sermons.   And they did, entertain us, those ‘holy books’ with their pictures and parables and gently nudging stories about what constituted good and evil. But what entertained us more was our little sister empting  Mum’s handbag on the pew beside her and trying on Mum’s Jackie O sunglasses which were so big for her little face that she had to tilt her head back to keep them perched safely on her button nose and prevent them from tipping to the ground. We giggled then (as did the ranks of totos in the seats around us) until Mum opened her eyes and hissed, ‘read your holy books’. So we did.

I don’t think I am a religious person, but perhaps I am a spiritual one. I no longer think the sieved sunlight is heaven.

But I do think it’s heavenly. As are dawn walks in a pearly light on a beach bleached virgin white and unmarked. Except for my own tread.

That’s a precious and peaceful and unearthly sensation.

Not Here nor There

Iota suggested this: a photo a day. Tell me when you’ve had enough …

My eldest daughter took this one: she, her camera and a walking stick as a writing implement headed out to the Sand Island. Of Kenya she says, ‘it’s home’  (a place that might have been for her forefathers but never for her, not until now, when she isn’t away at University in snowbound England where she was born … it’s a complicated thing, this ‘belonging’). And yet, I note, she scribes Karibu in the sand.

Kenya this may be but a Tanzanian bids you welcome with the word.

I wondered who she was willing to her isolated patch of beach? The birds, who flock busily when the tide seeps out until Pili chases them all up again? A lonesome plane puttering through the powder blue sky above, ripping clouds to insubstantial shreds?

Or invisible, faraway passersby in the ether?

 

 

 

Floppy

Viresh says, ‘I know, you don’t want it floppy’.

‘Floppy, floppy’, he says, loudly, taking the surprised expression on my face as one – I assume – of miscomprehension.

Two minutes ago Viresh asked me to test the comfort of assorted mattresses.

If your eyes were closed you’d be excused from imagining something inappropriate was afoot.

No, I agree with Viresh, I don’t want it ‘floppy’ and I have to try really, really hard not to laugh.

Viresh is a mattress salesman in the hot, dusty industrial quarter of Mombasa, his patch opposite the old breweries until, says my cab driver, the breweries realized that the tax took less away in Tanzania and so it moved east and south.

Viresh is also, because I’m looking that day, retailer of sheets, towels, pillows …. Indeed anything, it seems, that takes my fancy, he spreads his arms wide and high, ‘everything you want under one roof, ONE ROOF’. And it is, I concede, a big roof.

I am here in capacity of Reluctant Hotelier, a refit I explain. Viresh clearly thinks my hotel is a chichi five star, not a really modest self catering aspiring to (if I’m lucky) two star status.

I have obliged and taken my shoes off and walked across the mattresses he indicated I should walk across in order that I can identify the difference between First Quality and Second. I can’t but pretend I can and say, ‘oooooh yes!’ obligingly.

We move onto towels and Viresh’s wife, Paris (and I cannot believe that is the name her parents gave her) steps in to assist, urging Viresh to wrap a bath sheet about his waist to demonstrate how generous it is. Viresh does so and then wiggles his hips like a Hawaiian with a hula hoop . I proffer a face cloth and ask if he can do the same with that but he just looks at me as if I’m mad. For I clearly am: I have walked mattresses, smirked at insistence I did not like it floppy (a reference to sheets insufficiently wide to tuck in properly by the way) and now I am suggesting he can wrap something the size of a handkerchief about his not insubstantial middle.

As I pick through his offerings, Viresh conducts conversations with his brother in Guajarati as to the relative merits – I guess by the workings on a sheet of paper in front of him – of one mattress over another and ascertains the exact and requisite size of bed linen in order to avoid unpleasant floppiness.

If I owned a whole chain of hotels I suspect there’d be a minion to do this for me.

But where I wonder, as I stifle giggles, would be the fun in that.

Viresh and Paris wave me away later with big smiles and a violent pink t’shirt as a souvenir (clearly they sell those under that vast roof too) and I step out wondering that my world is getting more surreal by the minute …?

Especially when Viresh calls me later to ask if I took a note of the prices he gave me for he has not …

 

Reluctant Hotelier

The sound of the surf is my background music. I don’t always hear it. Life and living and answering the phone gets in the way of listening sometimes. I have found my voice. Literally. And after five years of not using it that much, it wears a little thin now and then; too much talking hoarse. Who’d have thought: an hotelier. Of sorts. Do ten bedrooms count as a hotel?

Did you sleep well?

What are you going to do today?

Anything I can help with?

Shall I order you a cab?

Mostly my guests are wonderful, wowed by their – my – view. Only occasionally does the irksomeness of cold water, very tired linen or the geckos that scuttle the walls irritate. Some think hard before coming up with a complaint: couldn’t you have organized a better sunrise? Or, why can’t you turn off the sun a little later?  Some break all the rules. Dorcas haggles her room rate on the phone, ‘next door it is cheaper’, she says. I am insistent, ‘if you don’t want to pay my prices’, I tell her politely, ‘you can always go next door’. ‘I do not want to go next door’, says Dorcas. Then think about it I suggest. Politely.   Dorcas calls back two days later and tells me, ‘I have thought, I will pay your price’. She comes for three days and when she checks out she pays next door’s prices anyway. It’s her turn to be insistent, ‘you told me this price’. I didn’t. But the customer is always right. Even when they aren’t. Dorcas says it’s a very nice place and she will be back next month.   Somehow I don’t think we’ll have availability next month.

 

Sometimes I have to say Sorry. Mostly I smile.

 

I smile less at the fundis though. Renovating what will be home, building what will be my studio. Where, I demand of Omari, where (louder and more emphatic) are my windows? The ones I made a downpayment for three weeks ago and which were promised within one. Omari launches into (yet) another story. But I am not interested and stalk away. Unsmiling. Omari doesn’t care; he laughs at the Reluctant Memsahib, Reluctant Hotelier, really, really Reluctant Builder.

 

So to wash away the sweat – literal, metaphorical – I take to the sea. This evening the tide is dragged low, low, the hide water that threw a plague of blue sting-in-their tails Portuguese Men of War up so that I dared not enter the water for three days has receded and left in its wake a tideline frilled with seaweed and dyed blue. I am not sorry to witness the sandy demise of the bubbled critters that kept me from my swim. I step into jellyfishfree seas gratefully.

 

The sun is sinking and the sky is fading and the dogs gambol, Pili has acres of Africa and Indian Ocean spilling conspiratorially all around her so that she doesn’t’ know where to begin: a crab? A coconut husk? A wave? A bird. She makes me laugh. And Africa, all gilded and soft and syrupy as the sun slides behind the Shimba Hills, slips into the Best Time of the Day.

 

I gather up the dogs and head home, dip my feet into the footbath – Francesca, a French guest from the Congo, who found nothing at all to complain about and paid her dues – gathered up eggyolkyellow Frangipani to float in hers each morning – to rinse my soles of my beach walk and fetch myself a beer to drink. With my new view.

 

Pili collapses in a damp and sandy heap and soon is fast asleep, with the occasional whimper of a dream; she has caught her crab.

I smile.

And the surf applauds.

 

Life’s a Beach

Sorry.  I’m back. Couldn’t stay away. Couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Found that the words clamoured. That even Outpost extricated, I still had – have – things to say.

How different so much is. Where to begin. Change jangles and rattles.

I bumped out of the outpost – a place I’d formed a sometimes uncomfortable allegiance with, developed a curious fondness for – and onto the beach. Flung from East Africa’s far west where the sun dips over the hills and sinks into inland seas and found myself sandy, salty gazing at dawns that sear my ocean drenched, eastern horizon.  Tanzania has slid behind me.  I am back home in Kenya.  Home simply because this is the place I was born, the one that tethers my particular clan to this continent; my Scottish grandfather traipsed up here from Scotland via a ship that docked further south more than 100 years ago.   Yet I have spent more of – most of – my life in Tanzania. An anomaly: this ‘coming home’ malarkey. The children all know they’ve come home: they who have never spent a day of their life living here. Until now, until Christmas.

But for my husband this is definately about coming home. This bit of beach. Where he grew up and goggled and dug for tek-teks and harpooned supper over the reef.   I’m in the small house he lived in as a teenager; the one built by his father, Grandad Simon say my children of a man they never knew and I only met once. There is a wind swept Tamarind tree planted to the south of the house for their paternal Grandmother, a baobab further along for a much loved Great Uncle. No wonder they are so confident of their roots.

But mine are still trailing. The cuckoo in the nest.  Change is always unsettling, there has been, as my husband articulates gracefully, ‘snot and tears’. Mine. Mostly.   In this hiatus of transience, where all five of us are far flung and scattered until dust settles, I miss the things that ground me: my children, my glass, Ant  – especially Ant – who should be with me  (this is his home after all) but cannot be yet, my words and even – I’ll whisper it – my Outpost.

But all change corrects itself, balance will be restored. I have, after all, found my voice and the words are lining up more tidily now  (a happy symptom of a quieter mind) so that I can pin them down to the page.  My kilns will arrive with my paintings, my own bed, more of a wardrobe than 3 bikinis and half a dozen pairs of shorts, my Outpost has been pasted in the ether so that I can remind myself it wasn’t always as glorious as memory might try to seduce me into believing it was.

And Ant will be home soon.

 

 

PS I considered – should I have a brand new blog for a brand new life? But no: I am still me. It’s just the view that’s changed.

 

rm xx

So Long

So. This is it.

In two days I will climb into the car and drive out of the Outpost for the last time.

It will be odd to think I no longer live here. And the decision to go, when it came, was sudden so that the packing and planning and collapsing of a life into boxes has consumed me. Until now, when there is a moment to sit with a mug of tea, Pili at my feet, and reflect as I gaze across a garden which is bushy tailed and bright eyed so that it will be sad to leave it: the lawn is green and lush; the frangipani voluptuous and the flamboyant bowed low, low with the weight of fiery blossom.

It is difficult to know what to say. How to concertina five years into five hundred words. I have hissed and spat and sworn and flailed. I have laughed and danced and learned. I have telescoped my view to render manageable sometimes overwhelming horizons. I have had time (sometimes too much time) to stop and smell the roses (metaphorically speaking, of course, no roses here). And now – where I’m going – I won’t have the luxury of a slippery commodity which slides too fast in the real world but had a tendency to plod in the Outpost so that I occasionally felt certain my watch must have stopped.  I will be reminded – where I am going – that Time is precious.

The Outpost has changed in the years I have been here. It’s had its edges knocked off; it’s softer, a gentler place to be. Some of that is because outside influence has moulded it thus. Some of that is because I have changed. The Outpost has taught me some stern lessons and lent the time, the opportunity, the excuse, the sanity preserving need to expand to fill the swallowing space that surrounded me. I will never, ever regret the – almost – five years that this has been home. In my most graceless moments I never imagined that lucky is how I’d feel for having lived here. But lucky I have been.

Without the Outpost I’d never have had the chance to teach Hat, have her glorious, uplifting, sunshine company for three years at home instead of incarcerated at school; I might never have had the liberating justification to stick two fingers up to convention; I’d never have the seen the places I’ve seen, travelled the long, lean, lonely miles with just tea and Ant for company, precious road trips together to talk and plan and dream. I’d never have written as many words or made my foray into glass (nor, granted, patronised Elastoplast to the extent I have).   Without the time my solitariness has afforded me I’d never have had the hours I needed at a time my big kids needed me to have those hours, across the ether, to research what they needed researching because they – in their faster paced world – didn’t have those hours, that time. I’d never have learned about the sex lives of chimps without that (such is the dictate of an anth/arch undergrad).

My life isn’t an extraordinary one. But, for the Outpost, it has been less Ordinary.

Without it, I wouldn’t have felt the compulsion, the need, to write, to rant, to describe the minutae to fill the space, to whisper in cyberspace that which was sometimes hard to say out loud (not least because talking to myself might have endorsed the madness the isolation sometimes nudged me towards).

In short, without the Outpost, I wouldn’t have begun to blog.

I thank you all for accompanying me – championing me – on this journey.

With love

rm x

 

Consolation Prizes

Out of and back into the Outpost in the briefest blur of thirty hours. I didn’t know it could be done. But school runs dictate that directness is of the essence.

So Hat and I clambered aboard a tobacco plane on a milky Saturday morning and we climbed high above our spilling slice of Africa and we left the always-voluptuous mango trees behind and winged our way across a million biscuit brown miles to the capital city where rain clouds were just beginning to gather so that the small bird we were in was at the sickening mercy of hotly rising thermals.

Seventeen hours later we were back at the airport. She to board British Airways to London and onwards by coach to school on the biting North Norfolk coast, I to fly west on a dawn of brushed blue silk.

I bustled Hat through check in and immigration; my flight was being called. Hasty goodbyes are better than lengthy ones. Her bright, broad smile made it easier. It wasn’t until later that the parting struck and tears pricked: her absence from my outpost is felt more keenly for her quiet, undemanding presence when she is here is utterly absorbing. Give them wings, give them wings. And so I have. Literally. Metaphorically. Wings supplemented by a battered Antler suitcase and a much loved guitar.

And so she flew north and I came west and for the first time in nearly five years of flying this route and in the astonishing clarity of the morning I saw Mt Meru and Kilimanjaro which straddle the northern border of the country hundreds of miles away; they stood as if facing one another in duel, their shoulders swathed in cloud, their summits sturdy profiles against a rising blue. A small award in recognition of a longer-than-most school run. Once, a long time, and one another school run, in a different part of the country, the children and I spotted a cheetah and her two cubs sitting atop an ant hill right by the road; that was our prize for what was then an eight hour run.

And I touched down on the dust and drove the three hours home. For a cup of tea and a swim with Pili.

 

 

The day is newly, newly rinsed. Full fat rain fell – two whole inches of it so that the ground wasn’t just pitted with the tiny fairy steps of a lightening shower but puddled with the pools of water left by a proper storm which took out the power and felled the bougainvillea so that it lies on the ground like a muddy veil. The wind tossed flamboyant flowers into the pool so that when I swim later I shall surface with fiery petals in my hair. The earth is steamy, breathing warm and wet, sated, and the cicadas are pressurecooked hissy and the frogs in the pond sang of their delight into dawn – amphibious Louis Armstrongs (with laryngitis?). I can almost see the lawn unfurling and I watch the terminalia leaves shiver with the thrill of an overdue power shower, long dormant lilies throw young green heads up and nod agreeably in the freshly washed morning light. And my high whitehot skies are gone as glowering clouds hulk on a grainy, grey horizon.

Hat’s gone back to school. But the rains are here. And where I live, that’s a gift too.

Assassins

 

A Skype conversation between my eldest daughter and I:
 

Her: I got my targets to assassinate; one is in my anthrop class.
 

Me: yes?
 

Her: So I have made a dagger and will take him out today
 

Me: what do you mean targets to assassinate (I am still assimilating the first bit, I haven’t taken cognisance of the homemade dagger and impending homicide yet)
 

Her : I joined the assassins guild, where you get given three targets and have to kill them
 

Me: (this is quite alot to assimilate now) not really kill them?!
 

Her: yes mum, REALLY kill them. Duh.

 

Such are the traditions at Cambridge apparently. The dagger will doubtless join the plethora of evening dresses that were evidently imperative to life at university too, ‘do you know how many formals there are?’ she demanded in Primark (for my budget, especially given the half dozen required, only goes so far). No. I do not. Nor did I know what tubbing was (rowing, if you didn’t either). Though I do understand debating, stand-up comedy and volunteering for the elderly, all of which she has also engaged in. One must wonder when the academics are going to happen: today, presumably, when she takes out her victim in her anthropology class.
 

I walked around Trinity in awe. It is a beautiful college in a lovely city. It was broiling white-hot day that day: a melting 30 degrees. In October? The college porters, in their bowler hats, wore short shirt sleeves and were delightful. One engaged us in a lengthy conversation about a previous student who’d had – at his disposal – a lear jet on a near by airstrip. My daughter will have to use the bus.

 

Husband and I didn’t even pretend to be cool, we snapped away and made our daughter wear her new gown for even more pictures, ‘oh god how embarrassing’, she said.
 

I wrote to her afterwards. Keep a journal I instructed. Write everything down. Save every single ticket for every single occasion. Partly so that I might enjoy her experience vicariously but mainly so that she remembers because when she’s old and addled and embarrassing like her mother, she might not.
 

And then we came home. 9 hours in a plane, 12 in a car and were jolted back to Outpost reality.

And skyped conversations about imminent assassinations.