Missing Home

 

 

My tall daughter wakes at teenage-time, somewhere just before lunch.

She shambles, taller than I and still baby-sleep eyed, and hugs me.

I had a dream, Mum, she says, a horrid one: I dreamt about how much I was going to miss you when I go to school in England.

And I will miss you, I say. Because what else is there to say: I know she’s going to miss me. Though probably not as much I will feel her absence here. She’s 5’10 with lots to say: she leaves a big hole.

I don’t want to tell her about the other things she’ll miss.

When I went away to school in England, at the age she is now, I hadn’t ever worn tights before, never owned a winter coat, didn’t know it could get that cold. I knew I’d miss the sun, my mum, dad.

I expected that.

But I hadn’t counted on the myriad characteristics of Africa that I’d long for until it hurt, like a hunger pang, a tummy pain that wouldn’t go away. A lump in your throat. You don’t though, do you, miss a thing until it’s not there? Especially when it’s not necessarily palpable, not something you can quite put your finger on, or catch its essence in the lens of your camera. Or put it in your suitcase.

So. Off I went, barebrownlegged and green as they come.

I learned quickly why I needed to wear tights when barebrownlegs were rendered blue and goose bumped.

And I learned that Africa’s so big that I couldn’t fit all the bits of her into my suitcase and didn’t even know I’d left them behind until I was so far away it was too late.

Too late to bottle the scent of rain on dust, so that I might flick the lid off from time to time when the longing grew so overwhelming I thought I might burst, and inhale deeply: the smell of Home.

I still, nearly thirty years later, can’t put my finger completely on all the things that collide and collapse and combine to make this place so familiar that it feels like a glove, slip it on and you know it fits. (Not that I’d worn gloves before then either).

See. There’s this space. This big spilling space that stretches and leans and reaches so that a spreading sky can cast itself huge and blue overhead, blue calico strung tight and sprigged with the tiniest horsetail white so that it’s out of piercing range of sharp landmarks, so that it’s pulled high and taut and doesn’t dip and sag and steal those landmarks thunder, so that the stage, when the rain comes is generous for the show is always spectacular as it muddies the blueness and steeps it in charcoal clouds which it rips apart with jagged swords of hot light. You can see for miles in Africa, miles and miles: put your flattened palm to your brow and screw up your eyes and see the furthest away horizons, where the earth touches outspread fingers with darkening sky in reassuring gesture as night falls, as if to say, ‘it’s ok, it’ll all be here in the morning’. Before it plunges itself into mad psychedelic dusk, a son et lumiere, a disco in the sky, the moon a high-strung orb.

 And it’s the peculiar way the dust hangs, plumes of it kicked up by the hooves of cattle or the tyres of a car so that it cobwebs suspended and its motes morph gold and smudge the picture to soft-edged texture. The way it backlights late afternoon.

And it’s the broadwhitetoothed smiles in black and mocha faces, the hopeful way a woman will sit patiently roadside with three piles of six tomatoes each. Waiting for a buyer. It’s the scent of roasted corn she turns on a small fire. It’s the totos that gather at her skirts and laugh and point and wave. It’s the cheerfulness with which a girl will hold a banana leaf aloft as an umbrella in torrential rain. Getting wet doesn’t matter: not when she has cultivated a field of maize. It’s the determined way Africa’s little people soldier valiantly on in the face of adversity and corruption and the crappiest governance. The way everybody says hello. Even, especially, when they don’t know you.

It’s sitting by a river and watching the gentle, slow-tempo, movement of chocolate brown water, gazing at a distant log wondering if it’ll raise a crocodile’s head, noticing the lion ants scurry and dig and home-build in the sand at your feet. Watching and thinking. About everything and nothing. About where in the river it’ll be shallow-safe to take an evening bath.

And it’s the noises you don’t hear until they’re not there. The click and hiss and high-heel kicking of cicadas. The way the noonday bush broils as if a hundred tiny pressure cookers were on an invisible hob. The muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. The shrikes and doves which become white noise until you can no longer hear their squabbling and songs and mourning calls. Roosters who haven’t learned the rules: you’re not supposed to announce the dawn again at ten to three in the afternoon. Who cares? he laughs shrilly, throwing his head back, this is Africa, man, we bend rules here!

But my daughter already knows: I’m going to miss Home too, Mum.

And I don’t know what to say then.

Comings and Goings

The skies above the Outpost will get busy now.

The Season has begun. High paying clients on their way out to the Wild West to shoot with cameras or shotguns depending on their proclivity (and their pockets: it costs more to shoot a leopard for real than to capture it in a lens). Their flying machines touch down briefly on the sand strip to refuel, passengers disembark to stretch their legs and use the small airport’s loo. If you’re a woman it’s a squatting affair. It might be the first time they’ve used one like that. They’ll either wrinkle their noses and hold it in (which isn’t a wise choice: this is a big, big country, even from the air) or mark it down as part of the Experience.

High, high powder blue skies without the tiniest snatched fragment of cloud.

Just the odd plane.

Eldest daughter came home in one on Monday. For her summer break.

My friend E whose company is patronized by high-paying camera toting punters organized it.

You got any planes heading west, I asked her, with space for one?

I’ll see what I can do.

Then, how much does she weigh?

Empty seats were taken up with camp supplies, calculations were made as to what weight allowance remained. Enough, I hoped for a tall, lean 15 year old and her bag.

I promise she’ll have minimum luggage, I told E.

She did. Because her kind mother had brought the rest home in the car the previous week. A journey that took ten hours.

Eldest daughter arrived in just two.  Stretched long legs as she clambered out, thanked the pilots who she confided later smelt nice (men’s perfume, she explained, which she approves of being an atomized scent fan of such notoriety herself that I swear she is single handedly responsible for ripping the ozone layer from right above our heads) and came home.

Almost full house, then. Four out of five.

The last time Hat and I departed from the same small facility it was on – for a change – an astonishingly Precise Precision.

The tiny departure lounge which is painted glossy spearmint green was packed to capacity with optimistic people all hoping to get to the capital that day. Precision has competition in the face of Air Tanzania which is back up after a several years hiatus, a brief fanfare of jubilant return and another – admittedly briefer – hiatus when the global aviation authorities found it flouting about 3567 mandatory criteria. Precision heaved a sigh of relief as the competition was grounded.

But they’re back with vengeance.

We sit quietly holding our bags on our laps so that nobody trips over them on their way to the squatting loo and our breath in the hope nobody comes and reports a delay. Or a cancellation.

A large table is carried into the waiting room, there is barely enough room for it beneath the television which is suspended from a wall bracket and blaring music in a snowstorm. And then the table is laid as for tea, thermos flasks and bowls of sugar, cups and saucers, plates laden with slices of cake and fat brown, oil-slicked-samosas, which, prostrate on a napkin look like plump tanned German tourists who have secured the right pool-side towel.

Hat’s eyes grow wide. We have never witnessed a refreshment facility here. Our mouths begin to water.

And then, table all set, two uniformed staff stand sentinel beside it and announce sagely,

Any Air Tanzania customers, please come forward for a cup of tea, invites one. Or coffee, adds his colleague. And cake, suggests the first, not to be outdone in the hospitality stakes.

And then.

Air Tanzania passengers only. Not Precision.

There is the tiniest silence as this information filters into the heads of the assembled passengers before we all begin to laugh in disbelief.

A few of the invited travelers shuffle forth, a bit embarrassed, to collect a cup and fill a plate.

Hat looks on in disappointment. I feel like asking the gentleman who sits back down beside us, laden with samosas, if my daughter can have one. But Hat’s at the age when such maternal pleading would embarrass. So I refrain.

Air Tanzania arrives and races down the strip, kicking up a brief plume of dust. Most of the passengers gaze out miserably. Precision should have been here first.

There are, amongst those waiting, a handful of earnest Europeans. I try not to stare, fabricating stories in my head about what they’re doing in far flung outposts. One bears a handlebar moustache and a bum bag pulled high above his rib cage. I don’t know whether that’s for ease of access or because he’s so thin (he is) that any further down his lean torso and it would be in danger of sliding over narrow hips and presenting a tripping hazard. There is a young girl trying to immerse herself in a book on Africa. The pages are still brightwhite and fresh and new. Like her. Not marked and dog-eared and stained with coffee and cynicism (like me?). There is an American family, each armed with a laptop (universal and ubiquitous accessory to show you mean business as you determine to Make Poverty History). And there is a young man wearing unworn Tevas and carrying a leather manbag. He is sporting neatly pressed khaki shorts trendily long (though not well pressed enough to be rid of new shop creases). He reminds me of somebody. I try even harder not to stare as I fish about in my memory bank for who it might be. His large framed white sunglasses are pushed on top of his head. It strikes me. Daniel Craig. That’s it! Daniel Craig. Though admittedly a less rugged Craig: I don’t think James Bond wears Tevas and white lady-framed shades?

Air Tanzania loads waiting baggage into the back of a shiny pick up truck and swoops the 200 meters from the departure lounge to the plane.

Precision lands, rather gracelessly – its planes, old ATRs are called the mules of the skies and are less streamlined that Air Tanzania’s gleaming snow white and new-blue ones.

Precision passengers heave an audible sigh of relief and watch our luggage being chucked onto a handcart and wobbled out to be loaded, one wheel of the four threatening to come loose so that the whole ensemble seems to limp.

Do you think they’re trying to save money? Asks Hat.

The planes board almost simultaneously. The American family is split between the two, their agent made a mistake. (I know this because they reminded themselves of the fact loudly lest we think they are assuming above-their-station Royal Family habits of not all flying with the same carrier).

I bet I’ll get to Dar before you, the cocky young Air Tanzania bound son says to his mother who is anxiously fretting about where and when they’ll all meet for lunch, my plane looks newer and faster than yours. (It is).

No you won’t, says an eavesdropping Precision employee a trifle smugly, you are going via Kigoma (way out in Tanzania’s west, on the watery border with the Congo, you couldn’t get further from the east-bound capital if you tried) You will not get to Dar es Salaam until 3 pm. We will be there before one.

It is really, really hard not to laugh as I skip out to climb aboard my waiting donkey.

And be just the tiniest bit pleased that for once Precision was the right choice.

Firsts

The First time, I think, that I have abandoned my blog for so long. Not intentional. Time stolen by Typhoid. Though that wasn’t a First; I’d had it before, twelve years previously. It didn’t feel as bad this time. (This time I was not afflicted with crippling Typhoid Spine which left me almost prostrate the First time). Though being ill was just as irksome. So much to do …

The First Fiftieth I’d thrown. A surprise party. For my husband. Who was, as he stepped oblivious into a room full of friends (far from the Outpost) rendered quite speechless (another First). The First speech I’d made, standing on my chair, a dry run I said, not a drop inside to give the tiniest bit of Dutch courage. Just Ribena and antibiotics. Perhaps just as well: I didn’t talk for too long. A captive audience can be seductive when you’re silently Outpost bound for as long as I sometimes am. Not the First time my children had made a speech though. Though definitely the First they’d made for their Dad, the First Time they’d raised glasses to him, ‘To the next fifty’, they said, in front of a seated forty. And I wanted to cry. Not for the First time that evening.

The First time my son has flown long haul alone. He is in England. To do lots more Firsts of his own (driving lessons, for a start). He sent me a text from Nairobi where he spent several hours in transit, simultaneously trying to reassure me that he would get his boarding pass on time and that he would not miss his fight: ‘Now u get to bed and don’t worry. Luv ya!’ The First time I am really conscious of Letting Go. The First time it’s spelt out to me. It’s OK though. The excitement he feels at stretching his wings and flying a little further from my nest is tangible. How can it not be infectious?

The First time my eldest daughter has said serious goodbyes. She is leaving one school to go to another in the autumn. She cried. But only for a bit. I told her she was brave. She told me, ‘mama, you just gotta do what you gotta do’. She is right. But she is still brave. Braver than I, surely, at the same tender fifteen.

The First exams Hat has ever had to sit begin on Monday. Is it really necessary, I wonder, that such small people must endure the stress of external testing? She has missed a lot of school lately on account of travels. I told her, as she lay tearfully beside me in my sick bed, ‘education is lots of things, Hat, sometimes it’s proper school and sometimes it’s standing up in front of dozens of grown ups and delivering a speech about your dad’. I think perhaps it’s a mix of the two. The conventional and the less conformist. Perhaps I overdo the unorthodox? Perhaps skipping about a glorious garden with a gaggle of little girls in search of flowers to decorate tables isn’t education. But it is learning.

My First blog, this one, has lent the confidence to begin a Second. Commissioned by Psychology Today where I will write about Depression. The First time I encountered it, Depression, I wrote it thus, with a capital D. It has remained that way. An inanimate yet palpable presence all the same, an unwelcome visitor with a name (proper noun, proper illness). It is the sometimes-there, always-unwanted presence in our lives. A gooseberry. Gatecrasher at life’s party. Every time it forces me to budge up and make room for it in Mum’s life, I am reminded what a huge space its invisibility invades. I write about it in the hope I can scare it away. From mum’s back door and mine.

You can’t give up. You have to treat each offensive as a First, in the hope it’s the Last.

 

Feeling Small

 

 

If you stand at the edge of the Rift and look down, far, far, far down, you can see Zambia sprawled scrub below you and veiled in dust. If you wait long enough, you can watch the sun setting, as if this is the precise place that the gods, having scoured the planet, deigned that this is where one could witness it sink to greatest effect – all bleeding pinks and molten oranges – and settling to sleep behind bruised western hills.

If you stand on the shore at Lake Malawi with the concertina’d Livingstone Mountains crashing and collapsing into blue depths behind you and caramel coloured sand beneath your feet, you’d swear you were at the seaside: you can’t see the opposite shore. Just water. Miles and miles and miles of it. You expect it to taste of tears. You anticipate the crackling of salt against sun dried skin. But no. None of that. We watched a dugout beach itself and unload enormous pots fashioned to perfect rotundity by hand. No wheels. Just careful, perfectly dexterous, perfectly patient, hands.

 

 

And if you stand in Tanzania’s chilly southern highlands you’ll need a fleece. Perhaps even a scarf. Or a beanie. The nip there pinches hard and long and it’s difficult to remember you’re still in Africa, just degrees beneath her wide sultry equatorial waistband. I couldn’t get close enough to the fire in the southern highlands. A hot water bottle, I enquired? But how to explain, in Kiswahili? Lily-livered feeble framed thin-skinned white woman. Not that anybody said so: they just smiled kindly and said that no, they did not have a rubberized container that I could fill with boiling water and take to bed with me.

I don’t know how many miles we did. A thousand? Two? A road trip that took us, Hat, husband and I, on a horseshoe arc from the centre of the country to the very tip so that we rubbed shoulders alternately – according to our night-time destinations – with Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia and back home through Lupa in the west. I lay in my bed there, on our last night, and listened to what nothing sounds like. And I smiled into the dark, and I thought I lived in an outpost …

Sometimes life distils down to tiny. Tiny little me. Getting out, onto that long road, beneath those big skies, to witness those huge, vast, overwhelming vistas reminds you that, in the grand scheme of things, you’re really very small.

 I think it’s good to be reminded of that from time to time?

We arrived home to smiling dogs and our own beds. We clambered from a car strewn with gum wrappers and dredged heavily with biscuit crumbs. We stretched limbs tangled too tightly for too long and we agreed, It’s good to be home.

Bedsides

Have you ever considered that a bedside table reflects the nature of the very person who climbs into the bed beside it every night?

Not just their preferred reading material. But the people they are.

My own is testament to the hopelessly untidy individual I am. Books and magazines are piled high so that my glasses and nightime bottle of water teeter precariousy atop a backlog of the Spectator and a literary wish list.  And my morning cup of tea battles for space so that I must extract required reading with consummate care.

I am rendered perpetually frustrated that there’s so much to read, so little time; when I do fall into bed, I only manage a page or two before stealing sleep begins to mix up the words so that they start to swim out of the field of my vision and far, far away from my diluted concentration. I know that sleep is close then. A sometime insomniac the feeling of impending unconsciousness is always delicious.

I have just finished Michael Greenberg’s glorious, sad Hurry Down Sunshine. I wept. Mental illness, in this case bipolar disorder, is a cruel thief of lives. And light. And sun: the word features often in the stories of those stalked by Black Dogs and similar beasts: the poet Gwyneth Lewis paints a vivid picture of her Depression in Sunbathing in the Rain. There is, inevitably, a book about madness at my bedside.

Madness or something approximating it, or translated as similar, or deviating from the Norm (whatever that is?): I’m reading William Fiennes beautiful, beautiful Music Room now. His imagery takes my breath away. He paints a before-the-storm summer afternoon ‘’sultry and close, the air thicker than usual, planes trawling through it like swimmers”.  And he describes his brother, whose brain was scarred by persistent seizures, and his unique view of the world: the cafe, he said ”was a palace of knives. ‘My heart sunk’, he said, after the plane took off. ‘Didn’t yours?’. And I think: what perfect observation.  What perfect, perfect articulation. For a man mosty institutionalised.

Beneath that is a book on OCD – obsessive compulsive disorder. A tome. I pick out the bits that are relevant to what I need to understand. I flick through pages seeking the pertinent words and phrases and skim the rest. It’d be too overwhelming otherwise.

And then there’s the Good University Guide 2009.  To prove – lest the job of ascertaining exactly who I am is left entirely to a study of my bedside table – that I’m trying to be responsible. And normal. Ish. Amongst all the literature on almost-insanity.

My diary lies sandwiched between a copy of Vogue (purchased in a rash moment of insecurity, to prove I am a real woman and like shoes too) and The Week (so that I feel more In Touch). Every year January is tightly filled in, my language careful and considered. By mid year though ”Can’t remember what I did today, haven’t written since Easter …”. I’d like to be a real diarist. Simon Gray’s Smoking Diaries. Next on my reading list. It’s here somewhere.

There’s a torch (for powercuts), my mobile phone (for same: the screen serves as useful illuminator when the torch’s batteries go flat), a bedside lamp whose small head is angled towards my pillow.

And a vase of paper flowers crafted by Hat almost a year ago. She placed them there shortly after we moved house. Their colour has faded a little and they don’t stand with the same newly folded and starched A4 erectness that they did once.

But they are very lovely.

You Know You’re Home …

You know you’re home

…because of the way a rising sun bleeds a deep scarlet high up into the clouds where you’re British Airways suspended and reminds you you’re African dawn bound, because of the way it collapses to powder blue with just the trace of pink blush too quickly for you to catch it on camera.

… Because bloody Im-Precision Air demands you pay for excess baggage on 4Kg. And with a cursory glance at the scales and absolutely no indication of any kind of a calculation knows just how much you have to pay. Too much: more than you have in your purse. They accept the little you do have. Which leaves you with precisely (the only precise thing about the morning) nothing to buy your hot, cross, tired daughter a coke when your flight is delayed. And then they refuse to issue you with a receipt; they tell you that the paltry amount you have tended will not cover the paper it is written on. Even though it would have bought a generous round of cokes for every other hot, cross, tired passenger in the Departure Lounge when take-off is, predictably and with no explanation why, delayed.

… Because the dogs smile broadly at your arrival and – needily – will not leave your side for days.

… Because there is no rain, only highbluewhite skies as we tumble into our African winter – a misnomer; it is merely mildly less hot than our summer. You’re still in shorts. With sheep skin slippers early in the morning so that bare feet are protected from cold stone floors. It’s an unusual combo. But then again so are Ugg boots and capri pants a la Sienna Miller.

… Because you’re swimming again. Not at dawn. The water is too African-winter-night-time icy for that. Late in the evening when it has warmed just a little but not so much that you swim any way but as fast as you can so that soon you are breathing hard and your arms ache from ploughing through vodka-on-the-rocks clear water.

… Because when you go shopping you don’t dawdle down wide throated aisles wondering, and wandering, aimlessly at the 55 different breakfast cereals on offer. You just buy what Kaidi has – Kellogg’s Cornflakes – and hope they aren’t stale.

… Because you cannot hear the early morning departure of commuters. Only the insistent cackle of indignant guinea fowl and the melancholy hooting of trains as they rumble by distantly.

… Because you can see the night sky. The sputtering glow of a thousand stars bright against a deep velvet night whose richness has not been leached by a neon glow, because you can watch the moon rise: amber, honeyed it slides up and hangs all night like a reading lamp so bright you wonder who left outside lights on.

… Because even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t feel lonely, you do. Even though you told yourself that five weeks of Busy, five weeks of Total Immersion in the Real World, Five Weeks of Social Feast would sustain you through impending famine, would render you gracious under the scrutiny of barefaced isolation, it doesn’t.

How could it: it only reminds you what you’re missing.

So you pour yourself a very cold beer and you watch the sky and you smile at red eyed shrikes gorging on voluptuously plump, pink-fleshed guava and you Count Your Blessings like your mother taught you to.

 

Learning Lessons

Sometimes belly dancers look like they might work in a library.

I learned that last week.

And tried not to let my jaw drop.

And structural engineers like dainty little ballet dancers.

I learned that too. (And felt mildly foolish for my solicitous encouraging of her project – “Oh well done!” – which, on hindsight, must have sounded maternal and patronizing).

Life’s a melting pot of unexpectedness and myriad colour.

Like the kiln – as big as a bed and blue – which rested solidly in the corner of the studio where we worked. Cold cutting glass emerged mellow and warm. Sharp corners smoothed to invitingly voluptuous-glossy roundness. Bold colours fused softly-hued: blues and silvers and greens. Blood reds and rose pinks. Hot oranges and balmy yellows.

I was anxious before I went.

Can I do this? I fretted: learn something new? Is it even the right thing to be learning? For me? Now? At this stage in my life? What if I hate it? Prove incompetent in the face of creativity? Is it self-indulgent? A waste of time and money?

When you’re a metaphorical million miles away from the reality, ideas frequently seem blindingly brilliant. Up, close and personal and when your vision’s cleared and you’re on a train bound for Crewe and that reality is hastening towards you at the speed of light (or at least an intercity East Midlands train), your confidence evaporates.

In the end, though, the apprehension was unfounded.

Because I did learn. Not just that belly dancers can look like librarians and structural engineers like ballerinas. I learnt how to cut silver, mould clay, fuse glass, string beads, set a tiny olive coloured stone into the metal heart I had created so that when I polished it and watched with satisfaction and a spreading child’s smile as the mirror-shine evolved, the tiny gem winked encouragingly.

But I learned something else too. Something much more important.

I discovered that, despite the nerves and the intervening years between my last classroom experience and this one, despite a careworn self-assurance and the worried grappling to clutch at lifesaving (and certainly sanity preserving) straws, despite an innate shyness exacerbated by Outpost living, some bolder part of me was given the opportunity to unfold.

I surprised myself. I laughed a lot and loudly, asked endless questions, made dozens of mistakes and enjoyed every one. And some latent self confidence bubbled to the fore. Because I could do it: I could learn to do something new.

Which just goes to show: you really can pluck a quite different recipe and garner the necessary and make new jam.

There is something deeply, deeply satisfying in knowing that.

 

 

**************************

 

 

Time is going too quickly.

Spring is racing towards summer. Carelessly, heedlessly.

Mum says there is more blossom than she remembers this time last year; that much of it is premature.

That shouldn’t be out until at least June! She exclaims, gesturing a tumbling violet.

The dandelion (dent de lion, lion’s teeth, I learned that last week too) clocks have quickened. Yellow flowers giving way to feathery heads so that Hat already knows she’ll be married in the afternoon: at three.

The rape has tossed bright picnic rugs across green fields.

This time last year Mum was steeped in black gloom. No amount of blue sky and sunshine and quick-breathed Spring gusts could blow densely gathered greyly-sagging cobwebs away.

This year is different. This year she is well.

I don’t know if that’s because the sky is bluer and the sun brighter.

Or whether they are bluer, brighter because she is well.

It does not matter.

All that matters is that Depression is not darkening her quick-approaching summer horizons.

Silver

My son swims silently up to me in deep green water strung with copper weed which gets tangled in my hair so that for hours later I will be picking bits from my scalp along with granulated sugar grains of white sand.

He grips me about my waist and surfaces, laughing at  my spluttering at the unexpectedness of it.

When I try to do the same though – when I try to take him by shark-like suprise – he turns to face me and smiles through the glass of his mask.

How did you know I was here, I ask?

Your bracelets, Ma, he explains, ”I can hear them jangling under the water”.

I wear nine  thin silver bangles on my right arm and two bronze ones. The latter are snake bracelets. Hat gave them to me. To protect me, she explained, given my penchant for treading on same.

Ah yes. I say.

When my son was small he said the sound of my rattling bracelets, as I tiptoed (somewhat uselessly given the jangling) around the house at night was reassuring. It meant, he said, that Mum was close by. Now he says the noise serves as a warning and gives him time to collapse the game he’s playing on his laptop and replace it with an English essay which he squints at earnestly.

I had not considered my whereabouts was always so easily traced, even under the pillowing weight of cool jade and cobalt blue water.

I ask my husband, ‘does the sound of my bangles bother you at night?’ I ought, perhaps, given we have been married for twenty years to have asked sooner, ‘are you aware of them?’.

‘I was once’, he said, ‘not anymore though’. Unless I am not there. Like now. For then he cannot hear them. Sometimes silence is very loud.

On my right hand I wear a heavy silver and aquamarine ring.  It was my grandmother’s. She was given it in India by somebody whom she had befriended, been kind to. 

I wonder if that’s why I have chosen silver to pot as new jam? 

I’m in England to do a course to learn how to work with it.

I am quite hopeless with my hands. Rolling pastry defeats me; I avoid it except at Christmas time and then I scowl crossly at mince pie making, and the dough sweats anxiously at my frustrated and impatient touch.   I am hoping silver will be more compliant, forgiving.

Friendlier.

I hope my fondness of it, my familiarity with it, will make the learning less difficult. I am plunging deep and far from my comfort zone. Amongst people I have never met. And a long way from home.

It’ll be fun, says Hat who looks tall and composed. Taller. More composed than I remember. And I smile.

She’s usually right. And she is wearing, I notice, a new silver bracelet of her own.

Old Rope, New Jam

The sea isn’t blue.

Its hues are touched by the paintbrush position of the sun and the lengthening and lowering of tides.

Now, right now, as I write early morning with a first cup of tea at my side, I am staring at sea glazed silver by a sun that leaves a burnished wake upon the water’s shallow surface; the tide is seeping out. The sand island rising slowly.

By mid morning the island will be wholly visible and the water around it will be dappled jade and aquamarine and turquoise and aquarium green and gin clear at lapping edges. It’s only blue beyond the reef. Deep, dark cobalt.

And as the tide rises with later afternoon winds, white horses will gallop across the ocean but bolt before they reach the beach. There may be rain which will blow heady sea scents through my window and stain the water slate. Sometimes the azure blues or the hot whites or the glowering greys of the sea stretch to link hands with the sky and you can’t tell where one ends and another begins.

I have tried to capture the ocean’s changing moods and shifting shapes and softly morphing colours with my Canon. I was seduced, by the commercials of my childhood, to believe Canon Can. It can’t though. Not always.

Yesterday my son and I tipped into the water with aqualungs. I haven’t done that before. I spied a moray eel almost as big as myself and curled crossly between coral heads. And the crocodile winking eyes of manta rays that thought I could not see them buried beneath the bone white sand at the bottom. I breathed as I had been told to. As you would on land, the instructor said. In. Out. In. Out. Slowly. Don’t be alarmed by all the bubbles, he said, there will be lots. There were. Accompanied by the reassuring wheeze of my regulator. In. Out. In. Out.

It’s a long time since I have done something I have never done before. It’s a liberating, empowering sensation to know you still can.

A family of dolphins attached themselves to the boat on the way home. I wished Hat was with me. Have you ever seen a dolphin, she has asked, I’d like to see a dolphin, she has said. There was a baby that stuck closely to his mother’s side and mimicked her dives so that we could see his small snout alongside hers; the slickly glossed arch of his back bent in perfect synchronization with mum’s. Their dance about the bow so flawlessly choreographed that there were no shrieks or whistles to order an errant performer back into line. Silently, perfectly, beautifully choreographed. Flashes of white beneath a cerulean surface that broke as polished grey.

I took a picture for Hat. I’ll send it to her – even though it does not do the spectacle justice – and try to describe the experience, one of peace juxtaposed peculiarly against sheer exhilaration. I hope she won’t mind that she missed it. Another time, I will say, I promise. Mum assures me she is happy, she met her classmates, the invisible ones, no longer faceless strangers. As if she went to school with them every single day, said Mum. Which she does. In a way. I have bought rainbow shoes, Hat told me in a text message. Rainbow shoes to wear to meet her old-new friends.

One day this will be our home. This little place beside the sea. It was my husband’s mother’s, grandmother’s, my children’s great-grandmother’s and grand-uncles. In times of turmoil this small family has come for cover here. To swim, to eat mandazi (which we buy from a mama who arrives bearing them in a bucket on her head) and mango for breakfast, fish and chip and too much Heinz tomato sauce for lunch, to sleep, to read, to lick our wounds or count or blessings or simply to watch the sea. My children’s dad grew up on the same verandah I sit on now. He played cards where we do every evening. Transient African lives – for the nomadic spirits here touch all our souls – need anchors. I think this is ours.

And our responsibility.

I know nothing about marine conservation. But those who do are willing to share their knowledge. It’s about communities and sustainable fishing and education, they say. It’s about reminding visitors that spangled lime-green and fiery-orange star fish as big as dinner plates will not look like that once plucked from their ocean beds and displayed on mantelpieces back home. Death will dull their brilliance. And make them smell awful, I add. Visitors drop their quarry quickly then, and sheepishly.

Are you using a spear gun? I demand of a young lad who dives beneath the surface after a furtive glance around.

Yes, he admits.

Not here, I say and I indicate two buoys, not between those, I gesture.

What did you tell him Mum, demands Amelia who urged me forth (taunting Call yourself a conservationist?!) and then dove beneath the surface before I opened my mouth. Marine protection is all very well providing it’s not some woman spelling it out to a fellow teen who may just guess she’s your mum.

Go mama! She says once we are safely out of earshot of anybody in the sea.

I walk later on a beach ironed white smooth by high water, white smooth and perfectly clear of the flotsam and jetsam tossed up by waves. No bottles or plastic bags, no discarded thong-less flipflops or old rope.

Just new jam.

Sally Worm

Tomorrow at dawn, I will put Hat on a plane to London.

This will be the first time she has flown alone.

And the first that I have had to say goodbye to her for more than a few brief days.

Nineteen sleeps. That’s what I have told her. Told myself.

She is going for a school reunion: to put real life smiling faces to the names she has grown to know across the ether, to meet the children that match the personalities which have become familiar in her virtual classroom.

She is excited. And happy.

She has packed and repacked and sorted from her outpost-warm wardrobe one that will suit chillier England. She is going to stay with my mother. With cousins. She is going to go to Tesco as often as anybody is prepared to take her.

I, despite the welcome company of her older siblings and her dad and the distractions that outside-outpost living will bring in the coming weeks, will notice her absence acutely. She has become my shadow. And I hers. My conversation over breakfast. My swimming and walking and watching telly companion. Her gentle presence is much bigger than you imagine.

Next week we will be an unfamiliar, too tidy, four. We normally number almost half a cricket team. We will pile into the car for an outing and I will say – before I remember that she is on the other side of the world – ‘Where’s Hat?’ We will sit down for a meal and I may stop myself just before I holler, ‘Come on man Hat, it’ll get cold’. And her siblings will be given rare opportunity to win at cards.

This, this gentle exercise in encouraging her forth is because I know she deserves the opportunity to shed outpost shackles. To have her own small adventure. To meet her peers so that she can really know them and not just their voiceless, faceless names across a void.

My conjecturing is being put to the test. This plan was hatched last October. Things are always easier In Theory. I am determined not to cry though. To dampen her enthusiasm, to dilute her joy.

I am tentatively standing at the coop door and reluctantly, anxiously, ushering the last of my brood out a little, just a little. And I am resisting the almost impossible urge to go after her, to shuffle alongside my smallest chick, ruffling my feathers importantly and bossily clucking instructions.

She will manage. She is composed. She has proudly packed her passport and ticket and the paperwork that denotes her as Unaccompanied Minor into a small bag purchased especially for her expedition. It is red velvet, with sequins and gold tassels. She chose it herself. And it is a perfect.

When my children were young and obliged to be separated from me for any reason, I constructed for them a Sally Worm. Each segment of her – usually flamboyantly coloured body – was a paper cut out, perfectly round for the tumbler I had used as a template. The segments were taped together and numbered for the days. Each evening, I told my children, they were to rip off the segment at the end furthest from her head. As we grew closer to our reunion, so the Sally Worm got shorter and shorter and shorter until, finally, happily, gloriously, the night before I got back, all that remained was a single circle with big eyes and a broad, broad smile.

Hat made me my own Sally Worm today.

Nineteen circles and a huge yellow face.

With an impossibly big grin.