EBOLOWA 6

6

Chicago, Wednesday

         Candace had retched twice jogging on the shore and looked round to make sure no one had seen her, but at least she was beginning to feel better.  Her eyes were sore, her head still throbbed and her mouth tasted like mildewed oats.  She hadn’t been able to face breakfast.  The thought of eggs had been enough to make her stomach heave so she’d just nibbled on dry toast and wrapped her hands round a mug of hot black coffee. 

         She dialled the number on autopilot and waited.  Thankfully Dana picked up.  She didn’t think she could cope with anybody else: they’d just be too intense when all she wanted was a familiar voice and no interrogation. She didn’t want to tell them about Annie.  Not yet.

         “Candace - - you all right?” 

         Dana’s drawl was sharpened with anxiety and Candace remembered leaving a message on the answerphone at a bad time.  She took in a deep breath and tried to smile.

         “Yeah, yeah, really,” she said, “thanks.  You know, one of those super bad nights when all your demons turn up - - ”

         “I know those, you poor kid.”

         Dana was the founding member of the team and nearly sixty: old enough to be maternal as well as a matriarch.

         “Yeah.  The worst.  Horrific.”

         “You sounded in bad shape.”

         “I was.  Can you erase it for me?”

         “I already did.”

         The soft smile in Dana’s voice was enough to make Candace’s eyes prick and suddenly she was pitching in with the whole story, the words tumbling out about what’d happened to Annie and how she needed that leave she’d never taken when her mother died even though everyone told her she should - -

         “What a nightmare,” said Dana.  “You poor thing, no wonder you’re all in.  I insist you take the time off.”  

         Candace blew her nose as if she had a cold.  “Thanks Dana, I know I’ve being overdoing it.  I just thought it would be best to work through it, but this was the last straw - - ”

         “You need a total break, somewhere in the sun.  As much time as you like.”

         “Thanks.  Really.  I feel bad leaving you in the lurch.”

         “You’re not and anyhow you always pull your weight.  I wish everyone did.  The only condition is you send us a picture postcard.”

         The word postcard brought on a wave of associations, a delayed reaction as well as the king-sized hangover.  She marvelled at how her mother had put herself through it, day-in day-out, and swore she’d never go near another Bourbon for as long as she lived.  She showered and put on loose drawstring pants and an aubergine coloured sweatshirt softened by years of wear and washing.  It was her secret Linus blanket.  She made another pot of coffee and looked out at the dark clouds gathering over the lake.  Spring was slow in coming.

     She tore open the Shultz envelope and shook the last set of photos onto the table.  The editor, a young blond woman called Sophie, had bunched them together with rubber bands into five stories with numbered yellow stickers and a separate sheet with notes on what she guessed was going on.  Candace spread the first one out, a collection of a good-looking man with a beard and thick dark hair handling a variety of wild animals from snakes to small monkeys.  The notes said: “Gerald Durrell, brother of Lawrence, out there collecting animals for private zoo, wrote a book about it, My Family & Other Animals.  Good intro to the British Cameroons.” 

     She’d never heard of it but somebody had given her one of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet, which she hadn’t been able to get through.  She glanced through the photos and hovered over a close-up of a snake before concluding that there was something to be said for a cold climate.

The second stack was a rag bag of subjects titled “Village Life”:  girls with braided hair looking into the camera with huge eyes; a voodoo man brandishing a chicken and a knife; a drummer with action so fast his hands were just a blur; a colossal man in traditional indigo robes measuring out a glass of palm wine from a gourd as if it was a vintage Margaux; a collection of wooden masks, and finally a kneeling woman blowing on the coals of a small cooking brazier.  The notes just said “unknown locations”.

     The next, “Marches & Vigilantes” showed a political demonstration of Cameroonians carrying UPC placards under attack from white men with clubs and baseball bats.  It looked as bad as the American South and some of the whites had been caught on camera beating up guys pinned to the ground.  One man in a blood stained shirt was receiving first aid and one youngster pulled his sweatshirt up to show the flesh torn by a dog.  There were shots of gendarmes, black and white, standing by and doing nothing, and a further sequence of a terrace café crammed with jeering whites throwing bottles at cowering marchers.  They could’ve been in the Klan but the notes just said that Annie had been shooting with a zoom.

     Candace sighed and sipped her coffee.  She knew what Annie wanted and remembered her saying that Cameroon had been perfect.  Memories invaded Candace’s mind, a jumble of random fragments of a childhood with a big sister before the images dissolved into one long memory of them looking through a back number of Life’s coverage of the D Day landings.  The sea was thick with drowning men, floating bodies and the debris of war and she remembered Annie saying how hundreds had drowned weighed down by their gear.  Candace had wondered aloud how photographers could just take photos and not help - - and Annie’s response came back to her, still hurtful after all those years, “because their job is to record events, not rescue people”.  That night Candace wrote in her diary: “BIG row with A.  Have decided to be a medic when I grow up.” 

     The next collection was of a rusting old cargo ship in the docks.  She got out the other photos and checked: it was the same one they’d been loading bananas into with the young guy joking around on the quayside making an ass of himself.  There wasn’t anything special about it: she guessed it was sea worthy even though it looked wasted.  The paint was peeling and the name was barely legible.   A very faded GDANSK was written across the stern and a ragged flag was flying.  The notes said it was a flag of convenience.  Panama.

     The last set startled her.  She noticed the title, “Mile 12 Beach”, and her hands trembled slightly as she pulled the photos free.  She spread them out: huge gnarled trees, hard hot sun you could almost feel, and lots of white families sitting under parasols with coolers and bottles of wine and women in bikinis getting a tan.  There were hardly any black figures: a nanny rocking a baby in the shade of the jungle, a young kid in shorts twice his size trailing round the parasols with a bucket of soft drinks, and a couple of older guys in pressed khaki uniforms serving food as if they were in the Ritz.  Kids were splashing at the water’s edge and a couple of adult heads bobbed further out where the profile of an island cut the horizon.  The notes said it was “Fernando Po, a Portuguese possession.”  There was no mention of the rip tide.

     Candace leant back and took a deep breath, waiting for a reaction.  This was where Annie had drowned - - or was murdered and thrown into the ocean like a bag of garbage.  She put the photos together to get a sense of the panorama, tracking the people from the bobbing heads to the playing kids and indolent families and their cars all parked up by the dirt road.  Two sets of tracks, Harry had said, there would’ve been two sets of tracks if anyone else had been there - - she jumped and sat up straight - - exactly, there must’ve been two sets of tracks!  Stupid damned idiot, why hadn’t she thought of it before - - why hadn’t she asked him in the bar?  There had to be two sets of tracks - - so what the hell had the cops been doing - - and come to that, what the hell had he been doing not telling her? 

     She’d been too much in shock to think straight, and the Bourbon hadn’t helped.  She got up quickly and then cursed out loud: he’d gone already, probably half way across the Atlantic and they hadn’t even made a firm arrangement to keep in touch.  Idiot.  She looked at her watch and dialled the office but Sal wasn’t there and she got their answering service instead, a nice friendly woman she could hardly bawl out so she just left the message for Sal to get back to her as a matter of urgency.      

*   *   *   *   *

     The hair of the dog: that’s what Mom called it and Candace knew she was giving in but surely a glass of wine with her food didn’t amount to a total failure.  She pulled the cork on a Californian red and took some blue cheese, crackers and gherkins out of the fridge.  She loaded a tray and went through to the spare room where the removal company had stacked the boxes.  She took a record at random and put it on, a Sinatra collection it turned out, and left the door open so she could hear it. 

     Empty moments like these were lonely, times when she missed the phone ringing even though she knew it would only be Mom, and for sure, these were the times when she lapsed into feeling sorry for herself.  She called Karen, wondering how she was dealing with her newfound freedom but there was no answer and she put the phone down before she got the answering service.  She took a bite of the cracker and savoured the salty cheese and crisp gherkin and scanned the boxes for one marked AF, the stuff they’d packed up in Douala and put on some tub of a cargo ship for the US.  By the time it reached Chicago her world had changed.  She put the rest of the cracker in her mouth and munched.

     Damn.  The box was heavy and tipped off the top nearly falling on her but she managed to half hold it up before it slid down sideways.  She opened the Stanley knife and cut through the packaging.  She was breathing a bit heavily from her struggle and her heart was thumping inside her ribcage.  She put a hand under her breast: Jesus, what was her blood pressure?  The last time she checked it was way up.  She started counting to ten very slowly and breathing from the bottom of her diaphragm.  Get a grip for God’s sake - - there was totally nothing to get freaked out about - - just a box of old clothes and a few fragments from way back. 

     She bit into another cracker and nearly choked with fright as the phone started to ring - - jangled - - and she nearly knocked over the bottle of wine getting to it.

     “Candace.”

     “My God Karen, you scared the life out of me!”  She was trembling.

     “I bumped into Dana at the supermarket.  She told me.“

     “Oh - - “

     “I’m coming round.”

     “Great.  I could do with your company.”  Her heart crabbed and she couldn’t keep the croak out of her voice.   “Really.  I was just about to go through Annie’s things.“

     “You what - - ” Karen’s normally calm delivery exploded into a squawk.  “Just you wait right there, girl.  Watch TV or something.  Anything - - I’m on my way.”