Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa

I lay on my bed one afternoon whispering to the bees, who by then knew most of my thoughts, as they flew in and out of my bedroom,

‘Ja visst gör del ont när knoppar brister. Varför skulle annars våren tveka? Varför skulle all vår heta längtan bindas I det frusna bitterbleka? Höljet var ju knoppen hela vintern…’

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With a teacup in your right hand and one in my left, searchingly as if I didn’t know whether I was to find gold or a land-mine, I probed my way forward one Thursday until I found myself completely lost in love. I wanted to say, but I couldn’t, not yet.

The cracking of denial makes a hell of a noise to one’s own ears from inside the space woven to protect soft-skinned change from prying eyes.

A cat was let out of a bag. Out it jumped, wild-eyed, disoriented, pupils gone mad with darkness. A simple, wild cat really. But smart, oh very smart. Quickly it assesses the situation. Fortunately it has a sense of humour, it can see the tragic, the painful, but also the funny in being a cat let out of a bag. Now let’s watch it. Let’s watch it compose itself, lick its ruffled fur into place. As any cat would, as any cat should really. It is OK that it will eventually utterly compose itself. Soon it is a cat of the world, like it used to be, before this wretched sack business. It might even get a walking-stick.

Eventually the event will be forgotten. Forgotten is the look of fright and panic on its face, forgotten is how terribly savage it looked. A cat of utter elegance with only one subtle fear that nobody knows about any more.

I thought I had everything under control.

A week later, when I went to let you out of my house, I could not look into your eyes. You asked if I was angry with you about something. I answered the next day. I told you that it had been something far worse I had tried to keep concealed that midday. Much worse, in its most ironic sense. Not kept hidden like a present, which only at first is charmingly hidden in a box. A present promises revelation, and the biggest feeling of all; expectation! To be followed no doubt by the clapping of excited hands and a moment or many moments of unfearful gratitude and balance.

I tried merely in the most practical sense to protect what was so naked, pigment-free. An albino emotion, with a desperate need to set out in search for the lightest spot possible.

‘I don’t know what we will let life bring us,’ I said, ‘but until we do I will just clutch this feeling to my chest. Crossed arms, holding it close, keeping it from burning. Telling it to half-close its red tearful eyes. For no other reasons than I selfishly adore it.’

So finally, I let go and told you that I had found Margaret sweeping out the years one morning. That I had woken up that day to wide-open doors and clouds of years being swept out into the morning breeze before I could stop her. I told you to blame it all on my giant maid. You told me you didn’t dare to, so we better just accept it. ‘Until the moment we can be together,’ I wrote, ‘I shall just try to breathe in, breathe out. All in a steady rhythm. I shall imagine my chest as a balloon being blown up by a purple-faced child who doesn’t have the capacity to ever get past that hard point. So it tries again and again and again. Breathe in, breathe out.’

But that all happened much later.

When I was already yours.

I have always been slightly shocked by the dishonest way English people sign off their letters. ‘Yours’ they will write to a person they hardly know. The English have such a rich language yet they sign off letters like this to more or less any kind of person with no meaning to their life. Perhaps they have too many words to appreciate them.

But to me words have a literal meaning. I often signed off my letters to you ‘Yours’. Of course you understood immediately.

‘Don’t you love the expression “to watch one’s words”?’ I wrote to you. ‘I know I have to do that. I line them up with great difficulty. But then if I turn my back for ever so slight a moment (and how can I avoid that?), it all goes horribly wrong. They start running in all directions. I try to catch them but they slip so easily from my grip. “Curiosity” runs in one direction. “Desire” in the other. Damn! There goes beautiful “elbow” as quick and heading in the same direction as “thirst”, already halfway over the hill. They have done it again! All gone, with an exception of some miserable word like “moist”. (Standing big-eyed in front of me pleading to be used.) Of course I am not surprised about their behaviour, they are my words after all. But I have to try to watch them better!’

Then you would ring me to ask for words for your paintings and I would ring you and ask for pictures for my words. ‘Turn on a penny, staccato on short legs,’ were my words for a buffalo painting. And the pictures you gave my words came wrapped in things like an ever-flowering gardenia, giant palm leaves shimmering on one side, like mother-of-pearl and other images I had never seen before. Like ‘the configuration’, as you very seriously called the large cluster of freckles I have on the back of my right leg. I was born with this mark, yet you were the first person ever to find it. When I was a shorts-clad child, in pale Swedish summer nights, grown-ups would occasionally catch me as I ran by, to brush off what they thought was dirt from the lawn or from a tree. As a hunter in shorts, in Tanzania, my friends in the bush always seem to think I have walked into a cloud of giant pepper-ticks. To everyone it always looked like something that should be brushed off or pulled off with tweezers. Yet you, you as the first and only person, were seriously surprised that I had lived with this for thirty years without realizing the obvious truth about the skin on the back of my right leg. The ‘right-in-your-face, can’t-miss-it-obvious’ truth. To you, this thing that all my life I had so ignorantly disregarded simply as an odd and rather ugly birthmark, was a drawing. Very clearly a drawing of a lion, a bicycle, and a nondescript character riding the lion. I had to lie on my stomach on the blue sofa one afternoon, as you sat on the floor with a torn-off piece of newspaper, a black pen and your nose about one centimetre above the mark, trying to keep me from twisting and turning too much, in laughter or curiosity to see.

The relief, to finally have found the person who thought the same things important and worth attention. For the first time we were sharing the world of unimportant things that the uninterested call ‘details’, and arrogantly discarding things that we had both been told were important but had never felt were so.

You never told me I split hairs. You understood I didn’t. I just needed to tell the stories exactly, exactly as I felt them. Or understand the story exactly as somebody else felt it. What is the point of words if we don’t try to use them carefully, precisely? How are we to say that we understand each other then? There aren’t enough words as it is.

You have to try to get to the core, to the marrow in communication and in life. Blood buzzing in the fingertips is the whole point.

It wasn’t that I had never loved before. I had. We both had. Past love wasn’t a lie, not at all, I just had never expected to find you, my love. I thought people weren’t meant ever to feel so fulfilled by one person.

When I was a child I had accepted that nobody would ever be able to understand me fully and that I would perhaps never understand them fully either. Always slightly on the edge of any social group, my closest friends were my dog and a particular tree. To them I would talk to for hours. I was never sad or angry about being slightly outside, I accepted it as my fate and made it into my strength. But now that you are gone, my love, I feel loneliness spreading through my body, I watch it stretching out its little crooked arms inside me. Like the globule of ink on my desk that was contained in its own perfect voluptuous circle until just a moment ago, when a drop from under my teacup fell right on top of it and made it run in all directions.

I wake up at night with nowhere to go, no promises to keep and no whispers any more.

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The first time I heard the whisper was when I was about six years old. I remember it very clearly.

My parents had gone away. I would guess they had driven from our home in Blekinge in Sweden, to Sealand, Denmark. Perhaps to visit one of my grandmothers or perhaps they had been invited to a dinner or a shoot somewhere. I love to imagine my mother wearing her red silk dress with white squares on it as she jumped into the Range Rover just before leaving. My mother’s hair at its bounciest, my father’s at its flattest. Scent and kisses.

I was to stay with the gamekeeper, Mr Persson, and his not-quite-wife Mrs Svensson, who helped my mother in our home. This wasn’t the first time I had stayed and I would have waved my parents goodbye thinking, that I might, if I was lucky, already this afternoon start indulging in the culinary advantages there were for a six-year-old staying with Mr Persson and Mrs Svensson. White bread baked with syrup, Bob’s divine apricot jam in a jar big enough to lose your knife in. And hopefully, very hopefully if I was lucky we might get crispy pieces of fried ham with apple sauce for supper, things I would never get at home. The mere luxury of eating pork as opposed to some kind of deer meat from the estate was something I only experienced very occasionally; at school, at my grandmother’s house and at the gamekeeper’s. ‘Fläsk’, as it is called in Swedish, in little square pieces, fried hard and golden-brown.

There are some particular moments that I carry with me from my visits to their little red house that smelt of frying pans and geraniums.

I remember being told that Mrs Svensson’s eldest son P had once fallen into the nettles outside their house and had been stung all over his back. I considered him a hero because of that.

Summer afternoons in their garden. Sneaking a spoof lump of sugar into Mrs Svensson’s coffee. We were seated on the lawn just in front of all her nettles, and I told her to watch the surface of her coffee (a moment later a tiny plastic figure of a naked person would float to the surface and I would laugh hysterically).

Then there were the dirty magazines in their loo.

With wooden shoes, and a sponge of a mind, I would sit quietly and rather longer than expected on their loo and discover the secrets of the adult female body as it, literally, unfolded in front of me.

But one of the things I remember most clearly was the ‘whisper’.

Mrs Svensson had put me to bed in one of their two bedrooms. The room that used to belong to P and T–her sons. They had both left home by now and I could pick either bed in which to sleep. I chose the one next to the window. It was only glass, wall and a few steps away from the owls my father had put in a huge aviary behind Mr Persson’s house. In the evening I was put to bed, and eventually Mrs S and Mr P switched off all lights and went to bed upstairs.

I had been fast asleep hours later, when suddenly I woke up.

I felt a hand caressing my cheek ever so gently. It was obvious to me that nobody was in the pitch-black room, but I wasn’t afraid. It was natural and very loving. Then a whisper in that particular tone and voice. ‘Anoushka…’ said in an urgent way, as if to say, ‘Look here, here I am.’

That was the first time I heard it. From then on I would wake up about three times every year to that urgent whisper. Never the touch again, but the word and the whisper that followed me until I was about thirty and a half.

The last time I heard the whisper, it came from your lips. I had never told you about it. I don’t think I had ever told anybody about it. It was just one of those things that was in my picture of reality because I had heard it the first time at a stage of my life when the world to me was so full of incomprehensible things anyway and I had been taught by grown-ups to believe them whether I understood them or not. It had followed me since I was six years old, I didn’t think about it. Not until I picked up the phone a few days before you died and heard you say it. The same particular way of saying it, the same whisper. Now it is about six months since you left and I haven’t heard the whisper again.

I wake up at night with nowhere to go, no promises to keep and no whispers any more. The night has gone solid and when I stretch in the mornings it is to push the walls away.

Clip, clap, clippedy-clap, I miss my wooden shoes.

I had hardly had time to fall in love with you before you had swallowed my soul. My reaction time was longer than yours–I was always catching up–so seeds we planted in me keep growing now, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. The weather is gone but my season cannot be halted. Leaves keep unfolding for us, all in vain, like fair hair that keeps growing on an ever-stilled head.

I had tried to resist our love at first, tried to push it away it was so much larger than me, so out of my control, I did all I could to make myself stop it all, but I knew.

I knew when I woke up with you sitting on the floor next to my bed. You had brought sushi to my house that evening. Flying-fish eggs like pieces of sand inflated far beyond solidity, millions of tiny ‘pops’ waiting to happen. We drank sake and discussed your ideas behind the paintings you were going to start making. Your photographs of Kenyan butcher-shops lay spread all over my buffalo table. I drank far too much sake, we both did, but I wasn’t as accustomed to it as you were, and a few hours later I ended up almost falling asleep on the blue sofa. I don’t think I had done much more than just closed my eyes for a little moment, when you lifted me off the couch and put me to bed. I remember saying ‘sorry’ when you put the blanket over me and then I fell fast asleep. It was several hours later, when I opened my eyes for a moment and found you sitting on the floor beside my bed still. You were holding my hand looking at me. For two or three hours you had sat next to me on the floor holding my hand while I had been sleeping and when I opened my eyes for that short moment in the middle of the night you saw it and said, ‘Look at me, I am on my knees. Don’t you see? I love you.’ As if you had been waiting all night to throw that sentence in when a gap appeared. At that instant, between sleeping moments, when there is no resistance at all, you threw the message in, and it went straight through all the burning loops to the bottom of my heart without any hindrance.

When you had said what you had waited to say, you left.

I wrote to you the next day. ‘Now it’s said, there it goes, off it buzzes. In the shape of a fly. Afraid to get lost and later trapped in dark gaping mouths or blind clapping hands. With only one weapon to protect itself: the skeleton on the outside, skin, intestines, heart and soul on the inside. A fly could never be squeezed slightly, it is either perfect or crushed.’

It was perfect, then we were crushed, not it.

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It was April in Sweden when I returned for my yearly visit. Six months after I saw your face for the last time, in reality. This time I wouldn’t really have called it a visit, it was more of a journey to the surface for a fish living in dead water. It was more the hope that a bit of oxygen would be found outside my own element.

I don’t know which was the loudest in my sister’s garden that month; the sound of buds cracking under the violent hammering of spring, or the creaking of small children’s bones eager to evolve.