Borderlines. Michela Wrong

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       ‘The custom, where I come from, is to shake hands,’ is what she says at the time. On his second attempt to get up, the man is careful to place his hand on the ice for leverage. His hands are the most atypical thing about him, she will come to know. They are a peasant’s hands, stubby-fingered and as wide as paddles.

       ‘Oh, I believe in cutting to the chase,’ he replies, then apologises again. And she later finds out that this is not a joke. Just as she has been watching the skaters, admiring their grace, he has been watching her, noting her daily routine, plucking up the courage to introduce himself. He works in the same building.

       They both stand up – she will sport large bruises on her buttocks for weeks. Names are exchanged, the girl, slapping ice dust off her trousers, is introduced. She is Sophie, his younger daughter. So he is older than he looks. Her accent is remarked upon and she gives her usual trite explanation of how a junior British lawyer ends up on Wall Street. Then he gestures to where a figure wrapped in a cashmere scarf, fur hat and gloves stands on the far side of the rink, near the gilded statue of Prometheus, a chilled silhouette radiating boredom. Two glossy pedigree dogs pull impatiently at their leads. ‘My wife is waiting. And so are Laurel and Hardy. We’d better go. Till the next time.’

       A wife, she notes. Why bother with ‘till the next time’? But she will bump into him later, in the ground-floor café of their building. She will discover that he works for a respected firm of architects, then that he not only set up the firm but has a claim on the entire building in which she works. Jake Wentworth is, in a minor way, a local celebrity, the well-liked unpretentious scion of a WASP family that made its fortune hurling railroads across the United States. One day he will inherit the family fortune, but in the meantime he is doing the job he loves, juggling draughtsmanship with a regular arts column and the directorship of a charity for political asylum seekers, funded by Wentworth money. She will meet him on the ice again, alone this time, and neither will get any skating done. Instead, they will talk about politics, discuss the Coen brothers’ latest film, and he will give her a witty-yet-not-unkind potted résumé of twenty years’ New York high society gossip, for these are circles to which his name grants entry. They will both be surprised to find that it feels like a conversation between old friends after a long break, rather than a first exchange between strangers. And soon she will discover, thanks to a personal assistant’s indiscretions, that the impatience she glimpsed in the female figure by the skating rink extends further than irritation at the cold: there are independent bank accounts, solo holidays, separate bedrooms. And the young woman will find herself hoovering up office tittle-tattle with unbecoming greed.

       He has made contact. He has made her care.

       3

      I woke staring at an unfamiliar grey ceiling. A gecko was spread-eagled directly above my head, in unconscious imitation of my position. It skittered away as I reached for my mobile phone blinking on the bedside table: 6:00 a.m. I had slept only a couple of hours since my taxi had deposited me in darkness at the White Star Hotel in Lira but felt wide awake, my body still on US time. I staggered to the bathroom, rinsed my face in water, wrenched open doors giving onto a balcony and stepped out. The street lighting was so sparse that the only detail I retained from the drive in was a giant ‘WELCOME TO LIRA INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND SCIENCE’ banner slung across the airport road. I wanted my first view of the city.

      But there was to be no grandiose panorama. My room lay at the back of the hotel and I found myself gazing instead across a flat plateau fringed by a jagged mountain range over which the sun was rising, thawing the thin layer of frost crusting a russet and dun patchwork of ploughed fields. A gentle wind was ruffling the tawny savannah grass that lapped around the hotel, setting off the rhythmic chirruping of invisible crickets.

      My nostrils crinkled as I caught an unfamiliar aroma – a mixture of chilli powder, cumin and ginger, I guessed, and the scent of roasting coffee. There were other, less appealing, elements: the acid tang of what might be mule manure and petrol fumes from badly maintained cars. So this, I thought, was the smell of Lira.

      I craned across the balcony railing and looked north, registering that the escarpment lay above the cloud cover, which stretched across the horizon like a lumpy quilt, neatly tucked in at the corners. How high up were we, then? Two thousand metres? More? I spotted a hawk fluttering above the plains in the chill layer where a cerulean sky merged with the navy of deep space. There was a giddy feeling of gravity defied: both of us – woman and hawk – were suspended far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.

      Suddenly overwhelmed by nausea, I bowed my head, dry retching as the clot of grief and rage that had stoppered my throat since I’d lost Jake bubbled up. I spat once, took a deep breath and closed my eyes. The cold air was as invigorating as a lungful of alpine oxygen, the sun on my face a caress. Something about being so close to eternity was waking me up. After months of lethargy I felt a brisk sense of purpose. An unfamiliar sensation stirred inside: hope. Like generations of sinners, mavericks and reprobates before me, I’d joined the Foreign Legion, exiling myself from my own. And that self-banishment felt good. Winston was right. I should have done this sooner.

      Extracting a shawl and two thick box files from my luggage, I arranged myself in a tangle of wool at the balcony table. I’d once prided myself on being a meticulously briefed lawyer, but if there was one lesson recent personal history had taught me – and we’ll come to that – it was that you can never really prepare. While serving my notice period with Grobart & Fitchum, I had focused exclusively on mundane tasks: selling the car, notifying my landlord, settling utilities bills. When a package from Winston had arrived, containing a fold-up map, three chunky history books and several files of background information, I had not taken up the proffered invitation. I had a few hours, now, to get some overdue homework done.

      ‘THE PLACE’, someone – presumably Winston – had written in red felt tip on the first file. It began with a photocopied page of a 1999 Bradt guide to the region, one paragraph highlighted in yellow. ‘Sanasa lies slap bang on the border between the tiny state of North Darrar, Africa’s newest nation, and the giant Federal Republic of Darrar, which reluctantly conceded independence after a David-and-Goliath war of secession. There is nothing of any interest here to the ordinary tourist.’

      The next document was a rather florid account by an English writer called Hugh Winterdale, who had toured the Red Sea coast in 2000 as part of a series of travel books baptised ‘Forgotten Places’:

      The port of Sanasa, 550 kilometres north-east of the highland capital of Lira, is little more than a long curving jetty of giant coral bricks, stacked like pink sugar cubes to keep the sea at bay.

      A sultan held sway here for a few hundred years, doing deals with Ottoman traders and Egyptian bureaucrats, and that period left behind crumbling coral ramparts and a few gracious town buildings, whose delicate wooden verandas now slump earthwards. The Italians left behind a delightful openness with strangers and a liking for pasta and strong coffee. As for the British, they only took away, removing anything in the port made of metal, to be used in other, more important, colonies.

      East and west of here lie terminals with ship-to-shore mobile gantries and yards piled high with orange containers. As Africa enters the twenty-first century, these modern ports will come to play a vital role in the continent’s revival. In contrast, Sanasa, which only exists because the coast here – with the help of a little excavation in the 1870s by a Swiss adventurer – forms the deepest harbour for 200 kilometres in any direction, boasts very little in terms of equipment. Things are done the old-fashioned way. Three rusty cranes loom over the harbour, and when a ship docks, they cluster above the vessels’ innards, picking over the cargo like feeding storks. To a chorus of male shouts, СКАЧАТЬ