Epilogue
Maharaia Rawiri and the Royal Marines who had taken him with them on the rescue mission flew the women along the coast to the assault ship that had returned them and their equipment to the former colony in the darkness ready to dip their toes back into this particular savage war of peace.
Their appearance, literally from over the horizon, which was where they had been lingering since a politically expedient withdrawal, had nothing to do with the small personal ordeals of two women, British or not. It was part of a hastily planned joint assault with the South African mercenaries and the hard-pressed Nigerian troops that was given the go-ahead following the mutiny of most of the government army and its sudden pragmatic alliance with the rebel forces in the city. The President, trapped in his residence, had been 'extracted' by British Special Forces, according to the newspapers, although this was neither confirmed nor denied by the Ministry of Defence in London. Farzaneh’s rescue was a by-blow to all of this and she remembered very little of events over the next few hours.
After getting out of the helicopter on the deck of the assault ship, she was separated from Mrs Kabba, who went straight down to the ship’s medical facility to receive the treatment that saved her life. Farzaneh was transferred almost at once to another ship, a fleet auxiliary, where she too received the attentions of a doctor and then, in short order, was given a shower and put to bed. She stayed there for two days receiving antibiotics, a course of pre-emptive treatment for infestation with malarial parasites and countless mugs of very hot, very strong, very sweet Navy tea. She was also given a radio so that she could catch up on the news, which, her profession not being a secret, it was thought she would wish to do. She never once switched it on.
She was very quickly put in contact with her father and, as well, received calls from the Foreign Secretary in London and the Minister of Defence. Peter Earle also telephoned. He wanted copy. He begged for copy. Farzaneh declined. She was no longer reporting the news. She was part of it. On the third day, or perhaps it was the fourth, she was flown to the airport, now under the control of the British, and thence, by military aircraft, to Banjul from where she travelled back to Stansted on an all but empty commercial charter. The violence up and down the West African coast was bad for the tourist trade.
Her mother and father were waiting for her as she was brought through Immigration, her passport still on the sands out at the Point or else washing around with all the other flotsam just offshore.
Driving home to Leicester, she had very little to say. Her mind kept fishing up – she smiled at the aptness of the metaphor – a single image, something she had seen from the helicopter as it lifted her away from the beach: Mrs Kabba’s severed arm and hand, half-floating in the waters of the rock pool into which it had, by chance probably, been tossed. Like some lovely white sea tuber, Farzaneh thought all the way home.
All the way home and not for a long time to leave it. There was a great deal of interest in her to begin with, but she had no interest herself in saying anything to anyone, except perhaps the one who could not say anything to her. Mrs Kabba's return to England came about because she was in no condition to resist it. She spent many months in the Leicester Royal Infirmary.
Farzaneh was not allowed to see her at the beginning of her stay. It was only later, and with the approval of Mrs Kabba’s sister Harriet, that she began her visits. Harriet was everything that Mrs Kabba had said she was: a crotchety old maid who railed at Farzaneh about Sib’s – she used the old familiar name still – refusal to co-operate in her rehabilitation. Farzaneh liked her immensely. Her complaints, more often than not, masked fear for her sister’s future and concern for her present, as well as a real affection.
And it was not true that Mrs Kabba was stubbornly resisting those who wanted to help her. She was, when her general condition had stabilized enough, fitted with rudimentary prostheses. In not too long a time, she had learned how to manipulate a magic marker and a small whiteboard. The first time Farzaneh saw her with these, Mrs Kabba managed to write the word “Jimmy” on the board with a crude but recognizable question mark after it. Farzaneh shook her head. Reverend Father James Conteh remained unaccounted for, along with several other African priests who had gone missing during the short but almost unbelievably vicious occupation of the town by rebel forces.
After she had given this news to Mrs Kabba, Farzaneh watched her struggle against the instinctive spasms of her facial muscles as tears welled in her eyes. She hit the white board with her marker and then indicated the eraser for Farzaneh to wipe out that name. She wrote a second name, “Ousman”.
Again Farzaneh shook her head. She had not even thought to inquire about the stewards, any of them. But Mrs Kabba grew more agitated, scrawling lines under the name she had written, banging the white board and then she began gesturing towards herself with the marker and in particular her mouth, her other arm. Then Farzaneh understood.
She understood and what had happened made sudden sense to her. “He came for me, didn’t he?” she said. “He was one of them already or else he joined with them and he came for me, didn’t he?”
Mrs Kabba made her clean the board again and then doggedly formed what for all it’s crudity could be seen as a human head in a bag. Farzaneh did not need the abbreviated form of the word grandfather to know whose head it was or where it had been brought to.
Farzaneh watched then as Mrs Kabba wrote three more words on her board: "like", "my" and, at last, "son".
The muscles in Mrs Kabba’s face began working again and this time she lost her battle to control them. The tears that had already formed and hung, some of them, on her lower lids fell now, and as they fell, Mrs Kabba let go a pitiful howling from out of her ravaged mouth.
On her way home, Farzaneh wondered who or what it was this fat white woman had wailed for. Herself? For what had been done to her? For Father Conteh? For the old man who had served her so long, so faithfully, so patiently? For the young man who had butchered her, her second lost son? For the country and the continent that had contained her and so many of her conquests and that she was unlikely ever to see again?
Farzaneh did not know. “I know nothing,” she said to herself and then again, in a silly Spanish accent, “Hi know naatheeng.”
Mrs Kabba died, of complications following a stroke, some three years after she was taken out of Africa. She lived through her last days with Harriet in the house where they had both enjoyed their quarrelsome upbringing, the house to where, one weekend long before, their brother Tony had brought home with him a fellow officer on leave, a black man, an African.
Farzaneh was also still at home then. She was not working in any sense that her parents could understand but they seemed increasingly less anxious about her apparent aimlessness as the months passed. She attended the funeral and went back, afterwards, with Harriet to Langton Parva, where she stayed that night, sleeping in the same room, the same bed, that John Kabba had slept in. She left the following morning, after promising to keep in touch, a promise she intended to honour.
It was a Bahá'í feast day and that evening there was to be an act of worship in the local centre. Farzaneh, outwardly at least, had become an active member of the community again, although her father, a man who believed as ardently in his daughter as in his God, could not fathom the true feelings of her heart. This time, she excused herself from attending, telling her mother she wanted to have a little while by herself. Then she said, “No, really, I just want to watch telly, if that’s all right.”
But she did not watch television. Once she was alone, she went upstairs to her room and sat down in front of the computer her father had bought her when she first came home and made it clear that she would be staying. She started it up and, when she could, opened a document file. She immediately clicked the “Save” button and typed the four words she had last scrawled in her all too decipherable shorthand on a yellow pad one hot afternoon in Africa, “The Fat White Woman”.
She typed a chapter heading, “Arrival” and then took a pile of carefully written note cards from out of one of the pretty green folders she had brought back with her from Tokyo. These she began to arrange on the top of her desk just to the right of the computer’s keyboard, as if dealing a hand of patience.
Once this was done, she picked up one of the cards, read it and at once began the first sentence of the first paragraph of what she thought, she hoped, would eventually be a book, a long book. “When Farzaneh Jamshidi flew from London to the Gambia on the west coast of Africa her fellow passengers were elderly for the most part, pensioners off for a final frolic in the sun."
It did not seem odd to her that she referred to herself in this way. She had done so throughout her childhood and beyond, although not always using her own name. Sometimes it would be that of a character from a book she had been reading. But now and for all the time it might take to tell Gwen Kabba’s story and her own small part in it, it would be Farzaneh.
finis
