The Underneath Page 15

  “It’s okay,” she began.

  “Is it?”

  “We were at Crystal Lake and they swam out of bounds. They ended up on some rocks on the other side of the lake.”

  “The other side of the lake, for Christ’s sake, Kay, that’s at least a mile.”

  “No, not the complete other side, just across from the beach. It wasn’t that far.”

  “And Freya led the way in this exploit?”

  “I think it was a game and they just got carried away.”

  “So they swam past the safety buoys and out to the rocks, and Tom did that, Tom was able to swim that far? He couldn’t even get to the buoys that time we went. He was afraid.”

  “Yes, they swam, both of them, they were obviously exhausted.”

  Michael stopped. He looked away from her, as if he couldn’t walk and think at the same time; the thought was so big and so important. Then he turned back to her.

  “Where were you, Kay? Where were you?”

  She now noticed the corner cupboard, the laundry basket askew, the door cracked open. She was certain she’d closed it, clicked the latch.

  “What was that?” she said to Michael. “You dropped out.”

  “I said, ‘Where were you when all this was going on?’”

  “Asleep. I was asleep, fast asleep.” Then she shifted the phone so the single bar disappeared, and Michael was gone.

  *

  Kay watched her children sleeping. Children grew in their sleep. They were growing now, bones lengthening like bamboo. If she could affix a time-lapse camera, she could see her babies growing. They would not be contained. They would make their way to adulthood. Freya’s eyes were closed, her pupils shifting back and forth. Dreams were upon her. The dark lake moved beneath her. She looked back to shore and saw her mother was not watching but sleeping; her mother was not attending, she was never attending. She was in Djibouti or Mombasa, and she pushed on, she tried to blot out Tom’s tedious whines: I’m tired, Frey, I want to go back, I’m scared, Frey, and how his voice looped into fear at the receding shore, how far out, how very far out she’d come.

  *

  Later, as Kay locked the door, she thought of herself with the hammer in her hand, all that pooling anger, and had she somehow transferred this to Freya? As if anger might be a black stone that you passed from person to person—impossible to destroy, you could only get rid of it by handing it on. And what of Michael? How reasonable, how moral the face he showed. Had he stood over her as she slept one night, a pillow in his tensed hands?

  35

  Our house in Nairobi was on the other side of a gate, manned by armed security guards. I hate to write “gated community” because that suggests a modern construction of cluster housing surrounded by a uniform wall; this, on the other hand, was a collection of old colonial houses connected by a rambling series of lanes. Once open bi-ways, these were now controlled by armed guards at sturdy gates. All the short-cuts and pathways working-class Kenyans once took to get to their jobs and their buses and their homes had been barricaded by high-voltage fencing.

  Racism had given way to classism. A decade ago, as long as you were white, the guards would raise the gate. If you were black, you had to answer questions. If you were black—even if you were driving a late-model Mercedes, the guards would write down your license plate and name. By the time we had moved in, the guards stopped any car that didn’t have tinted windows and government plates. Kenya had, at last, become a post post-colonial country.

  I’m certain—now—that it was this equal-opportunity deterrence of the less well-off that allowed Michael and I to stomach living there. We excused ourselves because so many of our neighbors were wealthy black Kenyans, far wealthier than us. Others were Somalis, rich from piracy. Or bankers from Lagos, investors from Johannesburg. We excused ourselves because we wanted to sleep well at night—who doesn’t? We wanted our child to play safely in our large manicured gardens. And in the very back of my mind, I had the idea that being a journalist was a civic duty, I was doing a service. These were the calibrations, the calculations I made, as a white person, living safely, warmly, sybaritically. They were my justifications.

  Which isn’t to say that reportage isn’t important, that I was never brave: it is, I was. The world must know the truth, must be given the details, and I took the trouble to do my job with care. As for the civic impact of what I wrote, well, it’s an individual choice—one of the few we genuinely have—whether or not you turn away, or if or how you incorporate the suffering and violence of others, often others who are far away, into your own life.

  It’s easy to conclude that mere awareness of suffering does absolutely nothing to change it. And therefore, what’s the point of making anyone aware of it? Suffering is everywhere, every day; what is gained by knowing how people are dying in Palestine or the torment of starving zoo animals in Aleppo?

  Michael and I were surely among the most aware in the world, and yet we were not prepared to surrender our comfort. We didn’t encourage poor families, refugees, desperate single mothers, teenage prostitutes to live with us, to camp on our lawn. We kept them on the other side of an electric fence; in fact, further: on the other side of town. I argue now that our knowledge perhaps made us more complicit in suffering because we could switch it on and off; we knew, and we turned away when sushi was served, when a dusky French cabernet was opened. We were complicit because our professions had sheen, we weren’t accountants or plumbers. We were journalist and filmmaker, we were glamorous. I liked that glamour, it was important to me.

  Recently, in London, I met a young woman who had never given a thought to the life of a woman her age in South Sudan or rural Tanzania. She lacked the imagination—let alone the empathy—to not only see her cohorts’ wretchedness, but their blamelessness. Surely, their own bad decisions had led to their living in a refugee camp, this young woman seemed to insist in her argument about free will: “It’s all a choice.” She couldn’t comprehend being pregnant from rape at 14. Couldn’t these women, these girls just go to the doctor for their STDs, their fistula, get some therapy, go to school? I exaggerate, but not much. Her ignorance was stunning, made insurmountable by the self-help jargon she’d stuffed in her head instead of actual knowledge. I told her stories, dealt out statistics, maternal mortality, infant mortality, she was unmoved. By the end of our conversation, she had not changed at all; but I—oh, I felt infinitely superior because I knew—I knew—the real world.

  That night in Nairobi, we had friends over, cocktails on the veranda—this would have been daringly colonial if our guests hadn’t been a mixture of races and sexual persuasions, a gay Nigerian couple, a Maasai businessman from Tanzania and his Venezuelan wife. Ice cubes clinked in our glasses. The evening light flashed on the bright feathers of the sunbirds feeding on hibiscus and lily. The Venezualan was an artist, she took found objects and turned them into masks, humorous and terrifying. She preferred to scour the slums for her materials.

  And Freya was playing with their children, a posse of varying color. She was barefoot, as always, sun-browned, her hair a tangle of blond. Freya was a happy child. I am aware of that now. I took her happiness for granted with my coming and going—she loved her nanny, she went to daycare, she was self-sufficient, a natural loner. I wonder what it was like for her to lose that, as suddenly as she did. A month later, you see, we moved to London.

  Unusually, both Michael and I were home from our wars. I was pregnant with Tom, my third trimester. The sun was slipping behind the Ngongs, our cook was serving around some canapés he was particularly proud of, and I noticed one of our night watchmen—Josiah—hovering on the edge of the scene like an uncertain stage hand. When he caught my eye, he beckoned.

  “There is a man here for you.”

  “Let him in.”

  “No,” Josiah said. “He is not a guest.”

  “What sort of a man?”

  “From another country.”

  “What does he want?”

&
nbsp; Josiah didn’t know; but he was unsettled. The man was “not regular, not a regular man.”

  I excused myself from our guests and went to see this irregular man.

  He was very dark, and I guessed immediately that he was from South Sudan. He stared at me through the gates, the whites of his eyes flaring in contrast to the dark of his face and the cloaking dark falling around us. He shifted into a deeper shadow and all I could see of him was those whites. I stepped through the gate, into the street.

  “Can I help you?”

  In Africa, you get used to people asking you for help—total strangers requesting that you send their children to school or buy them a cow or give them your shoes. And you become accustomed to stares—you are a minor celebrity merely because of your skin; in far-flung towns children gather to watch you walk across the street, you hear them narrating your every move. “Look, the whitey is taking out her phone, now she is dialing it.”

  But this man regarded me blankly. “I have a missive for Kay Ward.”

  “A missive?”

  “Are you Kay Ward?”

  “I am Kay Ward.”

  He removed a cheap pay-as-you-go phone from his shirt pocket, handed it to me. “The General requests you, Kay Ward.”

  “I know several generals.” But I knew which one, there was really only one.

  “Instructions will follow.”

  Then he turned, slipped into the darkness between the security lights. Only then did I wonder how he had gotten past guards at the gates.

  General Christmas wanted an interview, an exclusive. If I got myself to Obo in the Central African Republic, he would make arrangements to get me to Gol, which was otherwise inaccessible. Even MSF couldn’t get there.

  “Who even cares?” Michael responded when I told him.

  “This is a major scoop!” I retorted.

  “You’re just giving him what he wants.”

  “And you’re certain you know where the line is between covering a story and creating one?”

  “Jesus, babe, you’re seven months pregnant. The airlines won’t let you travel.”

  “The airlines? I’m going to take an airline?”

  He looked at me. He rolled his eyes. “Forget it. You’re not going.”

  I began to put some clothes into my travel bag.

  “If anything happens,” he said, “I’ll never forgive you.”

  36

  THE DAY BEGAN.

  “Thanks for coming.” Ed jerked his head toward the barn. “She’s in there.”

  They crossed the muddy yard to the barn, ducked into the dim, looming interior. The radio played a country song, a man with a phony twang singing about beers and barbecues. Ben privately noted the irony of singing about hamburgers in a cow barn.

  Ed kept it the best he could, only 30 head now, milking, mucking, feeding by himself since Border Patrol had rounded up all the Mexican illegals working the dairy farms. Pablo and Leandro, they had been hard workers. They were good with the cows, good to them.

  “She went down last night,” Ed sighed. “Been trying to treat her for mastitis, but I just couldn’t get ahead of it.”

  The cow, a soft-eyed Jersey, lay half in the drain, half in her stall. Her head was low, she barely acknowledged them, even when Ed kicked her in the haunches. “She was one of my best. Three hundred goddamn dollars in antibiotics.”

  Ed had already maneuvered the tractor into place, the forklift resting six inches from the cow. Now, he got on board and started the engine. The cow looked startled, tried to stand with the last she had in her. Ben jerked a feed bag over her head, blocking her vision, calming her, and Ed moved quickly, sliding the forklift under her as Ben held her tail and her ear, pulling them both toward him. Within seconds, Ed had her hoisted into the air, faceless, her legs dangling, her swollen, wretched teats on display. Like a rabbit in the clutches of a bird of prey, she did not struggle, the loss of the tethering earth rendering her immobile. Ed backed up out of the barn, and Ben watched him drive out across the muddy yard, until a stand of beech trees obscured his view.

  37

  An empty wine bottle lay on the floor beside her. The broaching sun turned the low mist pink as the hued interior of a rose. The air was cool through the open door. For a moment, Kay thought she must have spilled the wine—she didn’t remember drinking the bottle, didn’t remember lying down on the sofa. But the tinny taste of tannin in her mouth was an unavoidable fact. Her tongue, dry as a lizard’s, slipped out and scraped over her parched lips. Her skull seemed to have shrunk around her brain, pressing down mercilessly on the soft tissue. She acknowledged that it was dawn.

  Slowly, deliberately, she levered herself upright, though this was no better. The wine in her stomach sloshed to a new position; the effort of putting her feet on the floor made her eyes ache.

  She got up. Obediently, she laid the table, filled the water bottles, folded towels with the swimsuits. Tom’s shoes gave off a powerful cheddar stink and she dowsed them with baking soda.

  At breakfast, Tom wondered, “Mum, how many different types of caterpillars are there in the world?”

  Kay put on the kettle. “Five hundred and sixty-seven thousand million.”

  “That is a lot!”

  “She doesn’t know,” Freya declared. “She’s just making it up.”

  Vaguely, Kay became aware of a burning smell, similar to the smell of fires in urban slums, the distinct tang of melting plastic.

  “Mum!” Freya shouted and Kay was up, across the floor to the stove where the electric kettle was beginning to slump and bubble on the gas burner.

  “Fuck fuck fuck shit,” she yelped.

  “Swear word, four swear words, four dollars!” Tom burbled.

  “Nice one, Mum,” Freya snorted.

  Kay grabbed the kettle with her hand, her reaction time so numbed and slow from the hangover that it took her complete seconds to realize her hand was now melding into the kettle’s handle. She let go. By now instinct kicked in, and she stepped back quickly as the melting kettle hit the floor, spewing near boiling water into the air.

  Tom and Freya were howling with laughter. She saw them, hooting like monkeys, their mouths open, half-eaten cereal visible. Her hand sizzled and seared.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed.

  Tom kept laughing, mistaking this for another dollar. But Freya’s mouth snapped shut, and with a swish of her pony tail, she turned her head away from her mother. Kay grabbed the back of her chair, jerked it around.

  “You little bitch. You just sit there looking down your nose at me and everything I do is wrong or stupid.”

  She heard herself, she heard the word bitch, she could have chosen any other word—brat, princess—but bitch had risen to the surface first, bitch had the most buoyancy. Bitch had been waiting. Her daughter looked back at her. Kay watched her brows furrow. There could be no sorry, I didn’t mean it, honey. Bitch was a hammer blow.

  And Kay did not feel sorry. She was angry. These children—these interlopers—had colonized her life, infested it, altered its form so completely she had become someone else, a bloated, slow-moving host, who fed and watered and cleaned and tended and found lost shoes and endlessly, endlessly cut the crusts off the bread.

  “Get in the car,” she said. “We’re late for camp.”

  38

  “TIME TO GET UP.” BEN stroked the boy’s head.

  Jake was a small, warm animal in its burrow. A child could sleep no matter what. Ben had slept in cars, in closets, on the bathroom floor. Sleep, like a metal shutter, came down between you and the world.

  But waking to the bold light, the hard fact of a new day, Jake startled upright, staring at Ben without recognition. And then, Ben saw fear; the steadfast, trained-in fear flashing across the child’s face, his pupils dilating, his eyes wide, mouth opening to increase his oxygen intake. Ben recognized the fizz in his blood, how he might even feel his muscles responding to endorphins, his body preparing to flee. Jake coiled and crumpled
the blankets up to his chin.

  Ben stepped back. “We’ve got to get going, bud. Breakfast is ready.”

  In the kitchen, he found Jake’s lunchbox. It was empty, so he set about making a PBJ sandwich. Deep in the fridge was a bag of baby carrots he’d bought just for Jake, unopened. In the cupboard, he saw all the snacks he’d bought, Goldfish and granola bars, fruit roll-ups: all un-opened. What—exactly—had Shevaunne been putting in her son’s lunch all these weeks as she handed it to him with a smile? Nothing, he realized. Not a fucking thing.

  He glanced over at her asleep on the couch. Under her skin, buried inside, was some other Shevaunne, who she might have been, shiny and clean, and he should feel sorry for her. She’d been 11 when he’d met her at the Baileys’. Stories had already circulated—her abuse was legendary, even if only half of it was true. “How does a grown man even fit his dick inside?” Frank had wondered. Ben hadn’t been able to look her in the eye; all he’d seen was a naked girl and some old man’s rubbery penis looming into view. Her father, his brothers, cousins, the stories claimed, the postman, the road foreman, the mechanic. After a while she expected it. You can train a dog to think being kicked in the head is completely normal.

  Jake rubbed his eyes and sat to eat his cereal and toast, and Ben drank his coffee. He could hear the clunking of machinery—Ed was cutting the hay after all that rain—and he opened the door. The smell of the sweet cut grass soared across the field and into the kitchen, this bright, hot Cheerio morning, and in the midst of such summer, winter could be forgotten, the sleet and snow, the wind punching down from Canada. Winter was six months, the dark drilling down and down into your skull. By March you were gasping for sun and heat, the thin jackets, thin cotton socks, the boots duct-taped against the wet snow, the cold like iron nails in your bones, and that was the one good thing about motels—they were warm, and you could press your body hard up against the radiator.