Free The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna Page A

occasional vulture spiral down on currents of air above the city. Birds that would have been buried treasure to his thirteen-year-old self. He fumbled through the first sketches, frequently flexing his fingers, knowing enough to keep adding lines, resist the eraser. Gradually his talent has grown back. He wants to buy some paints. Yesterday he saw a bird whose wing feathers were of a near neon orange. He would never have believed such a colour existed in nature.
    Kai replaces the sketch in silence and picks up a photograph in a green leather frame, of the kind that close upon themselves, a travelling photograph frame. A gift from Lisa. ‘This your wife?’
    ‘Yes,’ replies Adrian. ‘Lisa.’
    A pause. And because he is trying not to show how discomfited he is by Kai’s lack of niceties and because the notion that a conversation is a continuous act is bred into his bones and silences like nudity should be covered up lest they offend, Adrian asks, ‘How long have you worked here?’
    Kai puts Lisa’s picture back upon the shelf. ‘Four years. Something like that.’
    ‘And before?’
    ‘There was no before.’ He cranes his neck sideways to read the titles of the books on the shelf; his back is to Adrian, who persists. ‘You were studying?’
    ‘Yup.’
    ‘Of course. So where did you do your medical studies?’ Adrian expects Kai to name an overseas university, in the United States or Britain, possibly one of the former Soviet bloc countries.
    ‘Here.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Yup. Local boy.’
    ‘The whole lot?’
    Kai nods.
    ‘So you’ve never visited Britain?’
    ‘Nope.’ Kai accents the word, shaking his head, turns and places his whisky glass on the table.
    Why this is such a surprise Adrian cannot quite say, something in Kai’s manner, he struggles to put his finger on it. ‘Have you ever been outside the country?’
    Kai shakes his head. ‘Leave? When we have so much here?’ He laughs and drains his glass.
    Adrian pours the last of the whisky, leaving the empty bottle on the table. He takes a sip, and then another, pacing the drink. The whisky has gone to his head. He remembers he hasn’t eaten properly and closes his eyes. Behind his lids the blackness turns liquid. He wonders if he doesn’t feel faintly unwell. He opens his eyes, feels the stab of light against his retina before his pupils have time to contract. Coffee is what he needs. He rises and makes his way to the kitchenette, tinkers with the kettle and cups. It is later than he thought. Outside invisible dust thickens the air. Tomorrow the hills above the city will have disappeared from view. He remembers the flight across the Sahara, watching the dust rolling across the dunes, gathering force and height until it extinguished the view from the window.
    When he returns Kai is lying with his head back and his eyes closed. Adrian stands with the two cups in his hand. There is something compelling in looking at a sleeping person. In the early days he would watch Lisa asleep, right up close, feeling her breath on his face. If she woke up, when she woke up, their eyes met. She didn’t start or flinch. And so with strangers, even a stranger on a bus, there is a shadow of that same intimacy. Something in the freedom of the gaze, to look without being seen, a kind of power, a stolen intimacy. Kai’s skin, bright and unblemished. Unshaven; the hair grows on Kai’s face in sparse, erratic bursts. He wears his hair in an unfashionable style for the times. In contrast to the cropped or smooth-shaved heads of many black men Kai’s hair grows thickly and tufted to an inch or two.
    The beard and the hair conceal his youth; he is much younger, Adrian thinks, much younger than at first imagined. This makes Adrian by far the senior. He realises why he was surprised to learn Kai had never left his country, never left Africa. It is the worldliness he carries with him, all the more noticeable now for being momentarily dissipated.
    On the arm of the settee a