The Night of the Cobra - Chapter 8

Chapter 8

For two days after she got home, Nina slept, drank and slept again. But rest evaded her. Her dreams were mosaics of terror and she woke sweating and once screaming.

Sometimes he was shot again. Sometimes, she was hit and she woke paralyzed with fear. Once she dreamt she was with him in bed again. They made slow love like they had not yet done and she could feel his lips on hers even when she woke up. She smiled until she remembered and then the pain was so awful, she wailed into her pillow.

Tim called every day. He was finally coming home tomorrow, a week after she had left. The ceasefire had held and food supplies were getting to the people huddled in every available space in Monrovia.

“I can’t wait to be with you,” he breathed down the satellite phone. It was all she could do to murmur “me too”. In truth, the thought filled her with despair.

In her solitude, she could just about deal with her pain. Tim’s presence would add guilt to her burden and it might be too much for her.

She had tried to tame her grief by breaking it down into its crudest elements. She had met a man. She had been unfaithful. Once. She had wanted more from him and had started to wonder what this meant for her marriage, which until now had been happy. Then the man had been killed. What now?

Could she put the whole incident behind her? Could she mourn in secret and keep her marriage together or was she destined to lose Tim as well?

She tried to avoid imagining what could have been. Whenever she felt her thoughts drifting that way, she switched on the television and forced herself to focus. More often than not, the images started to float in front of her eyes as she cried.

One day, Emmanuel came to see her. It was early afternoon, but she had just risen. She had taken to sitting up half the night watching television in an attempt to avoid the horror of her dreams and her dark musings on mortality.

Shaun’s death had sharpened the impossible questions that used to leave her clammy and confused when a teenager and know left her gasping for breath, swamped by the knowledge that one day her mind would cease and yet the world would go on without her consciousness – a terrifying thought.

When night began to lift and the hoopoes began their soft “hoop, hoop, hoop,” she would lay down on her bed, staring through the mosquito net into nothing until heat and exhaustion knocked her out.

Emmanuel found her sitting on the terrace, a whiskey bottle in front of her and a cigarette in her hand.

She was glad to see him but felt aggrieved at having to pretend. At least when she was alone, she did not have to lie to herself and justify her breakdown.

“Ah cherie, you look terrible,” Emmanuel said as he kissed her. She smiled wryly.

“Have you come to cheer me up then?” she asked.

“Seriously, how are you?” he asked. “I’m okay,” she said, taking a sip of her drink and realizing as she did that she was already a little drunk. “I just need some rest. I was working too hard anyway.”

There was a pause. Emmanuel seemed uncomfortable. “It was a terrible tragedy” he said finally.

She gritted her teeth but said nothing.

She wanted to scream. To berate the gods of luck who had so maliciously struck at Shaun’s life, at her life. Who had used them as playthings to be abused and discarded.

“Do you want to talk about what happened?” Emmanuel’s voice was hesitant.

Suddenly, she wanted to laugh. She shook with hysterical giggles and covered her mouth with her hand. It was not enough, her laughter shot out, unpure and somehow sacrilegious in the heavy quiet of the garden.

Emmanuel looked alarmed.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Nina breathed when at last she had regained control. “It’s just … there is so much to talk about and nothing I can say. Not now and maybe not ever.”

She fell silent, fearing she had said too much. Emmanuel’s eyes raked her face, seemed to find what they were looking for and retreated to the table.

“I see,” was all he said. But he reached out his hand and took hers and held it for a long time.

Later, he wrote her a prescription for sleeping pills and left saying: “I know you don’t believe this now but take it from an old man, things will get better. And you will have to go on living.”

Tim arrived the next day. She heard the day guard pull open the heavy iron gates and then the roar of his jeep pulling into the garage. She steeled herself and fleetingly wondered how on earth she was going to live with this man if she had to be constantly preparing herself to lie.

She banished the thought as she fell into his arms, burying her head in his shoulder as if to silence the voices in her head.

“Darling, are you alright” he said.

“I’m fine. A bit tired but fine,” she replied smiling. She suddenly realized she felt glad, genuinely glad to see him and in that moment she decided to make deception her ally. She would not lose Tim. Not now.

She needed him too much. He was her best friend as well as her husband and only he could help her get through this. He could only do that if he did not know and so she would bury her pain, and the memory of Shaun.

It would be her secret – a terrible, shameful and beautiful secret.

They sat down on the sofa with their arms around each other. He kissed her head.

“Me too. I’m so glad to be home and out of that hellhole.”

He paused. He would tell her about the things he had seen, the people living in roofless misery under Monrovia’s driving rains, standing in line in the football stadium for food, children hit by bullets in hospitals without painkillers, the elderly scrabbling for food in looted warehouses, the kids high on a cocktail of drugs, leering maliciously at roadblocks. But not now.

Now he just wanted to hold her and feel their togetherness wash away all the brutality and meanness of the outside world.

“I’m more worried about you,” he said after a few moments. “Have you managed to get much rest?”

“Yes, yes. Don’t worry. Emmanuel prescribed some pills for me so I feel a bit better.”

She felt she owed him some kind of explanation. She knew he suspected there was more to the tragedy, some deeper dimension he hadn’t yet understood.

She took his hand. “I’m sorry I fell to pieces over there. I think Shaun’s death just triggered something that had been building for months. Fatigue, all the exhaustion from the past year. I hadn’t realized how much of a strain it is living here. Not knowing what will happen next in this war, dashing off to cover others, all the misery everywhere, all the time.”

She knew she was babbling but she kept going. It wasn’t really lying. It was all true. The last year had been gruelling. Not just the work but the strain of living in a city where rumours of coups were a weekly occurrence and where every excursion meant crossing several roadblocks manned by police who were apt to turn nasty at the slightest provocation.

“And then Shaun was a lovely bloke. He had so much life left to live.” Here, her voice trembled but she dug her nails into her palms and went on.

“And it happened right in front of me. I mean, one minute he was standing there and the next he was dying. That’s all it took. One second. One stupid bullet fired for no reason and it was all over. It seems so senseless, so wasteful, so stupid.”

She was crying again now, but softly as Tim stroked her back tenderly.

“It could have been any of us and for what? Is any of it worth it? I mean, what the hell are we all doing here playing at being heroes in wars we don’t understand.”

“I guess it does put it all in perspective,” Tim agreed quietly.

“It’s different for you though,” Nina continued, wiping her eyes. “You have a purpose, a sensible role to play. You help people.”

“Well so do you. You tell people what is going on and that helps them make decisions and that brings in the money that we need to do our jobs. Information is key, you know that.”

It was a discussion they had had several times, usually after Nina’s just-below-the-surface sense of the futility of her job was sharpened by several large beers. But now Tim’s tone was patient. She saw that he really did want to understand what she was going through.

“I suppose.” Her voice sounded a reluctant tone. “But is that enough to justify a man dying? Like that?”

“No, but what can ever justify death? What can ever be worth it?” Tim said wearily.

They sat in silence.

“How about a break?” he said suddenly, eagerly. “Let’s just go somewhere quiet and be by ourselves for a while. Quality time as the Americans say.”

She could tell that he was glad to offer a practical solution rather than just sympathy. Tim needed to be active. He needed to feel in control. It sometimes grated on her nerves but she was old enough to acknowledge that that was only because she too had that habit.

He was uncomfortable just offering sympathy and not being able to tackle the root causes of her unhappiness. And it was not a bad idea, she had to admit.

She needed to get out of West Africa now for a while, put some distance between her and her doubts, her questions, her pain.

“We could go to France, stay in Jim’s place.” Tim’s brother Jim owned a second home deep in the Drome countryside in central France. It was a stone house with a red-tiled roof, surrounded by gently swaying austere cypresses and set among fields of lavender.

Tim and Nina had stayed there for a week before moving to Africa. They ate simple food in the big, stone-flagged kitchen, sat on the first floor terrace and watched the sun set and the purple night move in, and strolled hand-in-hand across the fields, drunk on the rich smell of the lavender bushes.

It was a good time. It could be good again, Nina thought as she nodded.

“That’s a great idea. Is it empty now?”

“I think so,” Tim was already reaching for his phone. “I’ll check right now.”

Twenty minutes later, the question was settled. They would leave in a week. Tim had already called his colleagues. They were sympathetic and with new staff now on base in Monrovia, he could be spared.

The ceasefire had allowed more relief groups to access Liberia and aid was now flooding in as were trained personnel. The crisis was under control for now.

Nina’s bosses had told her to take all the time she needed. She said she would call them when she felt better.

“So that’s settled.” Tim was delighted. “You’ll see. Things will look different after some time away.”

He gave her another hug and headed for the shower. She flicked on the television, but her mind ached with questions.

How could she plan a holiday now? Was Shaun’s death to be so diminished? She wanted to scream out that this was the only way to keep her mind intact and start the slow process of salvaging her marriage.

If she stayed, she would break down. She would confront Tim and try to ease her burden by confessing. And that would kill their marriage. Of that she was sure.

They might have survived infidelity. But this was infidelity and tragedy and unanswered questions that would weigh on both of them forever. She must bear the burden alone. She would go to France and try to start again.