Free The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

it up and lets it trickle into his open mouth.
    How quickly one reverts.
    He makes himself a cup of instant coffee and then pours into it two fingers of whisky. What he’d really like is a bottle of wine. The satisfying pull of the cork, the guarantee of a long evening suffused in an alcoholic glow. He settles on the couch, takes a cushion from one of the other chairs and places it behind his back. But the inertia prevents him even from reading; instead he stares at a spot on the floor and sips his drink. It is not quite eight o’clock. The evening rolls out ahead of him, like an unlit road.
    A knock on the door. The laundry man delivering his clothes. At the third knock Adrian levers himself to his feet.
    On the doorstep is Kai Mansaray, dressed much the same as before, only this time he is holding a glass-covered wooden board.
    ‘Sorry, I thought it was somebody else.’ Adrian steps aside to allow him inside.
    ‘Oh yeah? Who do you owe money?’ Kai laughs.
    ‘No. Just my clothes back from the laundry, that’s all.’
    ‘Well, if that’s what you have to look forward to, it’s as well I came around.’ He steps forward and places the board on the coffee table.
    Adrian can’t remember when he last saw a Ludo board. The one Kai sets on the table carries with it the taste of tomato soup, the scent of wax crayons, the rubber-and-sweat smell of the school gymnasium. This is the game he has seen grown men playing in the street, on outsize boards decorated with photographs of footballers and actors.
    Adrian pours Kai a tumbler of whisky. They open with the best of three. Kai wins easily and challenges Adrian again. Adrian, who has watched Kai’s strategy closely, has worked out a thing or two, takes the fifth game and the sixth as well. They play double colours. Blue and green: Kai. Red and yellow: Adrian. Adrian mixes the whisky with water to stretch it. Kai plays intensely. Adrian is grateful for the company. In the kitchen he finds a packet of chocolate chip cookies. The cookies are soft and dusty. The chocolate has melted, seeped into the stratum and hardened. They eat the cookies in place of supper, washing the taste away with whisky.
    Six sets later, Adrian concedes and leans back in his chair. Fleetingly the events of the morning come back into his mind. For a moment he considers raising the subject of the deaf boy, but chooses not to. If Kai had been a European, it might have been different. Conversation here can be challenging, language is a blunter instrument, each word a heavy black strike with a single meaning. To say exactly what you mean, to ask precisely the right question, this is what has to be done. For the bluntness of the language doesn’t mean people speak their minds. Rather, they use the spaces to escape into.
    Besides, he is enjoying the sense of oblivion seeping into him, a result of the whisky and the pleasing monotony of the board game. He feels as close to content as he has done since he arrived. He pours more whisky. The bottle is almost finished.
    For a while they sit together in silence. Adrian leaves the room to use the bathroom; when he comes back Kai is leafing through the papers on the side table. He does this in an entirely natural way, unperturbed by Adrian’s reappearance. He extracts a sheet.
    ‘Yours?’
    Adrian nods.
    The sketch is of a songbird, made by Adrian the previous day. Since he came here he has resumed this schoolboy pastime. Among his junior-school friends, in that fleeting phase of boyhood when the tide of energy is still displaced into the wholesome, while his friends collected football cards and stamps, Adrian drew the birds he saw from his window: sparrows, blackbirds, crows, thrushes, robins at different times of day, weathers and seasons, in all their moods and guises.
    The birds here are extraordinary, even the ones that sit on the telegraph post visible from his window: sunbirds, flycatchers, shrikes, kingfishers, pied crows. In the distance kites and the