The Drying Rooms - Chapter Seven

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Khartoum, 1964 - in the garden

Audio version of Chapter Seven

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I’m home. In the garden. After bedtime.  Brightly coloured light bulbs are strung in the trees and tucked into the dark foliage climbing the high wall. Not the tiny white and gold fairy lights of now, but glass spheres the size of squash balls: bright blue, green, red and yellow, turning the heady jasmine-scented heat into a blazing paradise.  

The garden is crowded. I can see me, moving with a round tray in my hands between the standing groups of grown-ups. Men’s shoes buffed to a shine; stilettos in danger of sinking into the grass.  The soundscape is continuous inaudible grown-up chatter, overlayed with bursts of laughter, guffaws and shrieks, ice tinkling in tumblers of gin and tonic and whisky soda; my mother’s instantly recognisable loud voice, my father’s distinctive delicious laugh. And I am happy. I feel free and safe and home.

I am holding a tray of coloured Cocktail Sobranie gold-tipped cigarettes – the turquoise, magenta, violet and yellow wrappers more enticing than sweets. My head is meeting starched shirts, black lapels and whiffs of glamorous scent on satin dresses. My hair is occasionally stroked by manicured tanned fingers.  I am looking up with a cheeky, precocious smile on my face, offering the tray to laughing heads above me, willing them to look down and notice me. Two – or is it three? — weeks of holiday stretch before me. The departure dread is ages away. My mission is to do my job as a cigarette waitress to the best of my eight-year-old ability. 

I reach the group that contains my dad. My head is just above his waist. He’s in the middle of a funny anecdote or maybe something clever and political. I hold up the tray and gently kick his leg. He immediately stops talking, looks down and smiles.  He takes a cigarette and introduces me to the shining faces grinning down at me. I know he’s proud of me as I politely answer the questions about school and last night’s flight from Heathrow to Khartoum, my first as an ‘unaccompanied minor’. 

My brothers, who were teenagers and very much alive then, and to me were on the same par of hero worship as George Harrison or Mick Jagger, had also flown in from their public school (I now know their headmaster went on to Eton, where he masturbated while caning boys in his study). 

My brothers are not joining the cocktail party. They are in their bedroom playing records. What records? I see stacks of singles, dropping down with a clunk on to the turntable, one after another. The soundtrack to my brother-worship. 

I remember fragments of our old favourites

Elvis’s rich, sexy voice 

Well, since my baby left me
I found a new place to dwell
Down at the end of Lonely Street
At Heartbreak Hotel
I'll be so lonely, baby
I'm so lonely
I'll be so lonely, I could die

The dancey bounce of Buddy Holly 

Well, that'll be the day
When you say goodbye
Yes, that'll be the day
When you make me cry
You say you're gonna leave
That'll be the day
When I die

Lonnie Donegan. His high slow start

Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Poor boy you’re bound to die

Before the jaunty country rhythms crash in

I met her on the mountain, there I took her life
Met her on the mountain, stabbed her with my knife

Where is Lonnie Donegan’s mountain? 

When this song floats in now it’s folded into later formative memories: flashes of shallow jade-green rivers surging through the empty mountainous valleys of north-western Iran and eastern Turkey.

Hang down your head and cry. I can conjure up my brothers in that bedroom: eyes shut, heads swaying, singing along with Lonnie Donegan. But I also see them silent, absorbed. Listening. Staring at the floor. Smoking.

There is a hazy friend in the room with them. Another school holiday teenager. It’s only now that I think, yes, of course, his parents would have come to the cocktail party, brought him along. My feeling of certainty that this other boy was there in this bedroom scene with my brothers is because I am performative and slightly flirtatious. 

My brothers’ bedroom is off the garden, past the guava tree, round the corner of our large white house. It’s out of sight, with French windows leading on to a hidden corner of garden. The windows are open. It’s dark but it’s still hot. So hot. I think their room has a ceiling fan. 

I have taken the remaining Sobranie cigarettes to them. I am the bearer of forbidden fruit. They take the cigarettes from me and smoke them, expertly, coolly, and I have a go at smoking one too. I don’t remember what must have been instant coughing and spluttering, but I associate the disgusting taste and the swirling nausea with savouring the privilege of being in my brothers’ inner sanctum and with the carefree ease of being home. 

My bedroom was far from theirs. The other side of the house. On the second floor, off a large shaded veranda. I can hear the faint slap-slap-slap of my flip-flops running up the white marble staircase. 

It was a large, dull room. Bleak and empty.  In the daytime the shutters were half closed to shut out the heat of the sun. At night any sounds were cut out by the churning of the big air conditioning box badly fixed through the wall. I see discoloured drips of stale water hanging on the sharp metal corners.

There is a dissonance rising up in me at the memory of that bedroom, a slightly fearful loneliness settling about me. I can’t reconcile this feeling with what I know is the joy of being home. But the joy is not quite cast iron. For this bedroom was not joyful to me. It was slightly scary, and I was alone in it. In the dark. 

But sometimes, wonderful times, beds were made up for us on the metal bedsteads on the flat roof. The cosiness of being under a thin blanket with mum and dad in the beds next to me. The awe of staring up at the huge night glittering with stars.

And then the moment of waking.

My eyeballs are slammed up against a blazing wall of shimmering crimson. I can hear a chatter of birds. Little birds, fluttering and alighting on the end of our bedsteads. Bulbuls. We definitely called them bulbuls. In my mind they’ve always been sparrow-like but with little black crests. But now I know this word means nightingale. Was I really woken by a chorus of nightingales?  

The metal bits of the bedframe are already boiling. The cool of the night is over. I shake off the blanket. I pull the sheet over my face. It’s another hot day.

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