The Gloaming Read online

  Praise for The Gloaming

  • Shortlisted for THE GUARDIAN’S NOT THE BOOKER PRIZE 2015 •

  “A paean to a magical continent of silent forests, slow, dark rivers, wild green mangroves; a world populated by child ghosts, haunted whites, and AK-47-toting rebels. It is through this heart of darkness, a landscape rich in possibilities, that Pilgrim stumbles towards the light.”

  New Zealand Herald

  “A thought-provoking novel… deftly set in a world of mercenaries, philanthropists, and witch doctors in polyester suits, the book asks how one atones for atrocity.”

  Tatler

  “Full of empathy and intelligence… The ending is startlingly optimistic and very moving.”

  Sydney Morning Herald

  “Compelling.”

  The Australian

  “I rarely get as invested in the outcome of a novel as I did reading The Gloaming, but the empathies that Melanie Finn evokes in this powerful and unpredictable book are not casual; these traumas could be our own. These characters could be us. And so, the themes are familiar and unyielding: Pain. The past. That flyspeck point of convergence where they meet. The regrettable inevitability of everything that passes after that. And shame. Her prose is hypnotic and knife-precise and at times so beautiful it’s unnerving. I didn’t read this book so much as I experienced it and it will haunt me for a very, very long time.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

  THE

  Gloaming

  a novel by MELANIE FINN

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  The Gloaming by Melanie Finn was published in slightly different form as Shame, in 2015 in Great Britian by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, an Hachette UK Company.

  Copyright © 2016 by Melanie Finn

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-937512-47-7

  ISBN Epub: 978-1-937512-54-5

  Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

  Author photograph: Britta Jaschinki

  Cover image: from Ladies’ Home Journal, 1889, Newell Convers Wyeth

  No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in Canada

  For Matthew

  Table of Contents

  The Summer Before

  Magulu, April 27

  Magulu, April 28

  Magulu, April 29

  Arnau, March 12

  Magulu, April 30

  Bern, March 13

  Magulu, May 1

  Arnau, March 14

  Magulu, May 2

  Arnau, March 15

  Magulu, May 3

  Magulu, May 5

  Magulu, May 7

  Arnau, March 17

  Magulu, May 8

  Arnau, March 18

  Magulu, May 10

  Magulu, May 12

  Arnau, March 19

  Magulu, May 15

  Magulu—Butiama, May 16

  Arnau, March 20

  Tanga, May 21

  Arnau, March 21

  Tanga, May 22

  Tanga, May 25

  Arnau, April 17

  Tanga, May 26

  Geneva, April 18

  Tanga, May 28

  Tanga, May 29

  Tanga, May 30

  Arnau, April 19

  Tanga, May 31

  Arnau, April 21

  Tanga, May 31, 8:13 p.m.

  Arnau, March 12

  STREBEL

  HARRY

  GLORIA

  DOROTHEA

  STREBEL

  MARTIN MARTINS

  Acknowledgements

  THE

  Gloaming

  The Summer Before

  We were living in Geneva, the high, light apartment on Rue Saint-Léger. We had just come back from two years in East Timor, and we reveled in the cleanliness of Europe, how easy it was to buy what you wanted: a certain kind of shampoo, books, fresh asparagus, Italian shoes. We went for weekends to Paris or Amsterdam or Berlin or to the country house of some new, interesting friends.

  At such a house we met Elise. I’ve considered that it’s possible we met her before but she was simply so forgettable that I didn’t remember. Even this particular time, I recall only certain details.

  It was early June, a heat wave. The house was on the far side of Lac Léman, right on the water. Tom and I had the attic bedroom and we jokingly called it Manila, it was so hot and humid in the small room.

  Elise wasn’t staying at the house, she only came for lunch on the Sunday. She was an odd, little mouse of a person with sharp, almost twitchy, movements. She didn’t say much. But she was sitting next to Tom at the table, and he spoke to her, engaged her, as he did everyone. Even a little mouse.

  After lunch, Tom and I napped, and, waking bathed in sweat, took a cold shower. We made love. It was reflex, turning our bodies without thought or premeditation, the way I might twist my hair into a chignon or Tom would button his shirt. I took for granted that sexual ease, believed it sufficient. ‘Let me look at you,’ he said, taking. ‘Love, love, love,’ he whispered, and the holding, and how it always felt, the slow belonging to.

  When we came downstairs, the host suggested a walk. About seven of us went. Along the lake edge, a well-worn path, the day still high with solstice heat and bright summer light. It was too hot to hold hands so I let go of Tom. I walked ahead by myself for a short while. I’d had enough conversation, and I wanted to watch a flotilla of sculls and their lovely rhythm, the oars pawing the sun-tinted water.

  The group was behind me, not far, so that I was aware of their murmuring and bouts of laughter. I looked back. Tom was talking again with Elise, bending slightly to hear her, for she was not only a small person, but she spoke softly. The breathless air held everything in place, like a still life; any movement seemed amplified, impulsive: a swallow dipping against the water, a shiver in the long grass of an unknowable creature. Elise’s hands fluttering up to her face as she laughed at something Tom said.

  Magulu, April 27

  The sound of it, metal squealing, torquing: the sound of it pounces.

  The glass, tinkling: the sound snow might make, and how it fell with just that grace and beauty.

  Even with my eyes open. Even in daylight. Even in another country. A faraway country where nothing is the same, not the light, not the faces. The trees, even, are a different green.

  I force myself to look at the trees.

  Baobabs, figs, acacias.

  We pass a man in a pink shirt on a bicycle. He wobbles slightly, for the road is narrow and uncertain. The road lacks confidence. It changes tack, only to veer back again; it widens and then contracts. Should it be here? Or over there?

  A woman with a red bucket balanced on her head turns down a path and instantly disappears into the bush. Thick bush, a tangled, knitted green stretching over the earth, a hot wool itching with insects, snakes and birds.

  I look at the green. The leaves are stitched together with sunlight.

  ‘Jack, you gotta stop,’ says Bob. His wife, Melinda, has her hand ov
er her mouth. Her eyes are panicky. Jackson stops. Melinda opens the door, leans out, retches. She’s been vomiting for the last two hours. When she sits back, I hand her a bottle of water.

  We are in the car driving to Magulu where there is a government clinic. The hotel manager suggested Melinda call in the flying doctor. But she told him her eldest brother died at Dunkirk. Her mother is 101. If the government clinic is good enough for Tanzanians, then it’s good enough for her.

  Melinda was horrified by the beggars in Arusha, by everything since—the huts people live in, the scabby dogs, the waiters at the hotel who make less in one month than she and Bob have spent for one night in the room. She’s talked a lot to—at—Jackson about civil rights in America. Which he knows nothing about. He’s never even heard of Martin Luther King.

  Bob says, ‘It must have been the fruit salad. Everything else we had was the same.’

  I say, ‘I had the fruit salad.’

  Bob glances at me. He’s secretly annoyed. He likes to be right. But it’s also very important to him to be polite. And protective, paternal in an old-fashioned, vaguely chauvinistic way. He insists on buying me a cocktail every evening. On holding open every door. He’s probably my father’s age, but nothing like him.

  This was supposed to be a private safari, just Bob and Melinda, touring the Tanzanian bush. But at the last minute I arrived and the safari company added me. Melinda made Bob agree because it cut their cost by a third. She’s very conscious about money—about the guilt she feels in having more in her wallet than any black person out the window has in a lifetime. I think Bob is just an old-fashioned cheapskate.

  In the buffet queue at the last hotel in Serengeti, I overheard him grumbling to Melinda about Jackson’s expectation of a tip, as politely suggested by the tour company. Haven’t we paid enough for the safari, Bob asked. Isn’t it the company’s responsibility to pay their employees sufficiently? It’s just a show of appreciation from us to him personally, countered Melinda, you know, for the extra effort he’s put in. Oh, said Bob, and just what would that be? Slowing to fifty so we can catch a glimpse of a lion? Apparently, he went on, we should have stayed home and watched the Discovery Channel if we actually wanted to see the animals as anything other than a blur.

  Melinda is slim and fit for her age—late sixtyish, and neatly attired in a khaki ensemble. I imagine her speedwalking around her neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In her tanned and weathered hands she will hold little weights, and these she will swing vigorously to tone her upper arms.

  Bob has the expensive teeth of a much younger man. He tries to keep pace with Melinda, who is relentless in her forward momentum. Even standing she tilts forward by degrees. I’m sure she senses the decay that awaits Bob, who does not exercise and eats and drinks too much. It will be a stroke, a heart attack or cancer. In only a few years, Melinda knows, she will become a caretaker, ferrying Bob to a series of specialists, keeping track of his oxygen intake, counting out his pills.

  Contained in a car for six hours a day, Melinda maintains checklists of birds and animals. She asks Jackson about trees, grasses, the weather, geology. His answers are usually vague, even plainly wrong, and I often see impatience glance across her face; for the money they’re paying she expects more. But this is always replaced by genuine sympathy—and perhaps the strong desire for Bob not to be right about the tipping issue. It isn’t Jackson’s fault he’s black and uneducated and born in Africa. He must be so grateful for this job. She’s read that the average employed Tanzanian supports forty unemployed relatives.

  I am being unkind in how I describe them. Tom hated my sarcasm. ‘Poor man’s wit,’ he called it. But I never had another kind of wit. And Bob and Melinda’s Americanness comforts me. They are familiar. I can understand them, not just the words but the motivation and the culture behind them. I have been away from America for so long. I like that Melinda isn’t afraid to ask questions. She doesn’t worry that her curiosity will be taken as ignorance. As an envoy of her country, she wants to be kind and strong: give me your poor, your unwashed. And even Bob, when we finally stopped to watch a leopard sleeping in a tree, sat very still and whispered unashamed as a child: ‘Goddamn, that’s a beautiful cat.’

  There are more huts, closer together, and gardens containing crops. Children in rags scatter and cluck like chickens, waving at the car or running from it.

  ‘So many children,’ Melinda says. She has statistics for this too. Seventy-five percent of the population is under fourteen.

  A boy runs right at the car, banging it with his hand. I feel my stomach lurch. Is that what it sounds like—a child hitting a car? The sharp, sudden thud, the quick release of the sound?

  The car, so large, absorbs the impact and continues on, effortlessly. I turn to look over my shoulder at the little boy. He’s chasing after the car, laughing, and then he vanishes in the dust. Eclipsed, as if he was never there at all.

  Then I correct myself: the sound I’m trying to place isn’t a child hitting a car. But a car hitting a child. Hitting children. Smashing into them. Children who didn’t run away, laughing. They broke open. They stained the asphalt.

  ‘These children,’ Jackson says. ‘They are very bad.’ These children, these children. I move my head on its axis, casually, slowly toward Jackson. I appear completely normal.

  ‘What kind of a future are they gonna have?’ Bob shakes his head sadly, angrily. ‘No land, no jobs. No Serengeti, that’s for damn sure.’

  ‘Are we any better off?’ Melinda valiantly battles her nausea to score a point. ‘Texas has the highest rate of child poverty in America. And some of the richest people.’

  Bob scowls, ‘You read too much.’

  How does she stand him?

  Jackson doesn’t participate in these conversations. Either he genuinely has nothing to say about the current state and future of his country, any other country, the entire world; or he doesn’t want to express his opinions. I get the feeling Jackson is like a train on a single track—one of those airport monorails. He goes around and around, the doors opening and closing, people he doesn’t know and doesn’t care to know getting in and getting out. He drives the same routes, Manyara, Ngorongoro, Serengeti, stays at the same hotels, answers the same questions, points out the same lions, turns around, drives back, gives the same smile whatever the tip.

  Now he grips the wheel, as usual driving too fast, hunched forward. Is he even looking at the road? Or at the end of it? To the bustling capital of Arusha where he lives: the bar, the girlfriend, the blessed silence or the loud music—anything but the ceaseless chatter from the back seat, what’s that, what’s this, does an elephant, does a giraffe, where is, how is, when is, what, what, where, how, I specifically asked for the vegetarian lunchbox.

  ‘Oh, God,’ says Melinda, and this time she just pukes out the window.

  Bob says, ‘This is no joke, sweetie. We should be going to a real hospital. Not some quack shack in the middle of Tanzania.’

  A grand roundabout heralds a town. A town of sorts. The cement structure at the juncture of two dirt roads comprises a series of flying arcs. But I’m unable to interpret the artist’s vision as a large section has crumbled, revealing a rusting rebar skeleton. Perhaps there was supposed to be a fountain, but the cement floor has cracked wide open. Instead of sparkling, glittering water, the roundabout holds all manner of trash, which is picked over by chickens and children.

  ‘Where are we?’

  Jackson slows momentarily to avoid a goat. ‘Magulu.’

  ‘Magulu, Christ.’ Bob peers out the window. ‘It’s goddamn Splinterville.’

  ‘What comes after Magulu?’ I ask Jackson.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s a dead end?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It is a fully dead end.’

  ‘For God’s sake, sweetie.’ With his bandana, Bob pats away the spittle on Melinda’s face, ‘We have good insurance, we’re fully covered for evacuation.’

  Low-
slung breeze-block buildings extend beyond the roundabout. Small side streets drift off between these buildings to mud-and-wattle shacks. But beyond them, Magulu loses interest in itself. The thick, knobby bush resumes, relentless, interminable, muttering on until the sky. The rolling geography of the land means the horizon could be anywhere. Am I seeing a hundred miles or twenty?

  There’s a bar with four breeze-block walls and blue UN tarpaulin for a roof. Inside I can just make out a pool table, red plastic chairs, men peering at us. Outside, a duck with a broken wing pecks at an old corn cob.

  Jackson stops in front of what must be the clinic. The whitewash is fresh, the door marked with a painted pale blue cross. Perhaps this is a good sign: someone, after all, cares.

  Three women and their babies sit on a wooden bench under the overhang of the tin roof.

  Bob swats at a fly. ‘We should just turn around and go back to the hotel. Get the flying ambulance like the manager said.’

  ‘We’ve come all this way,’ says Melinda. ‘At least let’s see if this doctor can help.’

  When Jackson is out of the car, walking up the steps, Bob says, ‘You know Africa is where all the pharmaceutical companies dump their out-of-date stock and all the crap they can’t get past the FDA.’

  ‘For goodness sake, Bob, dear, let’s just see.’

  Jackson comes out of the clinic with a small, odd woman. She wears a beige polyester trouser suit, high heels and a badly fitting wig. The wig is cut in a pageboy style, black with garish blonde highlights. It’s the kind of wig a prostitute might choose. Yet, she is wearing a white lab coat. The overall effect is confusing, and I wonder for a brief moment if she’s a tiny transvestite. I’m certain she’s a woman, but that’s the feeling: of disparity, of pieces that don’t quite fit. She is oddly and overly dressed, yet her features are neat, naked of makeup, and her dark brown eyes are quick and clever.

  ‘Hello.’ Her gaze moves from one to the other of us in the car. She smiles. ‘I am Doctor Dorothea. I am here to help you.’ She speaks with the faintest of lisps.