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from outside herself she asked
Caribe to leave. He threw out his hands in a gesture that could
have been annoyance or supplication then shrugged and pulled on his
jacket. It was an expensive jacket, made from white pigskin, and
soft as kid.
    “ You honestly didn’t expect me to give up my life, did you?”
he said. “I can’t exist like that, Lay. I’d die of boredom in a
week.”
    Then he was
gone. The sound of the closing door filled Layla with a kind of
dull exaltation but in the days that followed she was disturbed by
how much she missed him. Not so much Caribe himself as his body,
his defiant way of handling her, the release of sex. Sometimes she
would wake in the night, longing for him so savagely she found
herself chewing her knuckles to keep from crying.
    She longed to
talk to someone but there was nobody she felt she could confide in.
The girls at the Minerva seemed to change boyfriends on a weekly
basis, emerging from each new breakup furious but apparently
unscathed. Layla could not bring herself to believe that they would
have any real insight into her feelings.
    About a week
after it happened she called in sick and took the bus out to Tsokla
in search of the old woman. Even as she stood waiting at the bus
stop she knew the chances of finding her were all but non-existent,
that she had no reason to believe the old hag lived in Tsokla or
anywhere else. It was just a hunch she had, the belief that if Iona
was right about her mother’s family being from Tsokla then the old
woman also must have grown up thereabouts.
    In any case,
it was all she had to go on and she was desperate. But it was a
sordid place, a rotting hive of crumbling tenements and boarded up
strip malls, and as she passed from one rubbish-strewn parking lot
to another she began to wonder what had possessed her in coming
here. She knew that ordinary people lived there, that many of the
dock workers and office cleaners, the women who worked in the
Premier canning factory and the Soyinka paper mill all came from
Tsokla, but in the middle of the day the place had a disused
quality, a sense of dusty abandonment that Layla felt as a nagging
unease that pricked at her sinuses and made it feel as if she had a
cold coming. She kept expecting something bad to happen and when
nothing did it was almost worse. She ended up back where she
started, at the bus stop on Elias Road outside a foreshortened
terrace of five-storey tenements. The last house in the row was a
ruin, its end wall fallen away almost entirely, though the lower
rooms were clearly still occupied. Washing fluttered from the
ground floor windows like the remnants of bunting from some
long-ago fiesta. There was a smell of guano and rotting timber.
    The houses
opposite had once been grand, but the misfortunes that struck the
district had reduced them first to lodging houses and then to
bedsits, four to each floor. She wondered if her mother had grown
up in such a house, a slip of a girl with scabbed knees and coarse
dark hair as unruly as her own. She stared across at the houses,
able almost to convince herself that if she imagined it clearly
enough one of the doors would open and the girl would come out. She
didn’t, and the street remained empty. When the bus arrived Layla
boarded it quickly and did not look back. As they re-entered the
city proper she thought for a moment that she saw the old woman,
coming out of a grocery store just below the entrance to the bird
market, but when she looked more closely she saw it wasn’t the old
woman at all but a young girl, her closely cropped hair sprayed
silver and pushing a baby buggy.
    Nonetheless
she had the feeling that the hag was watching her. She got off the
bus at the main depot, pushing her way through the crowds of early
shift workers to the exit. Her feet ached. She wanted only to
return to her studio and lie down. She thought of John Caribe,
prepared for the dull explosion of pain that normally accompanied
such mental probing, but her centre