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babies’ legs thrashing away through the undergrowth.
    Julia recited the names of the trees and flowers that flourished in the perimeter and gardens of the house. There were neem, mbambakofi and Indian almond trees, as well as the fern-like casuarinas, which grew well in sandy soil. The coral creeper, its warm pastel pink flowers, climbed high into the upper branches of the neem. Three types of palm grew on their land, the golden, lala and coconut palms. Two small baobabs grew on the terraces down to the ocean. ‘It will only take a thousand years for them to mature,’ Julia said.
    She marched behind her aunt, the gold axe of the sun cleaving her head in two. ‘Hibiscus,’ Julia said, pointing to a crimson flower, so bright it almost throbbed. ‘Alamander – that’s the flower that grows through the louvres in the downstairs bathroom.’ They stopped by the cerise desert rose and thin urns containing a narrow-growing plant called mother-in-law’s tongue.
    The showpiece of the house were the clouds of bougainvillea that fell over its white coral walls. It grew in three colours – fuchsia, a deep, rich red and a delicate white. It was these leaves that blew down the night-time corridors of the house to be captured by Grace and her broom in the mornings.
    ‘It’s so fertile here.’
    ‘You can grow anything, but the monkeys will eat it. They trashed the hibiscus last year. Bill had to shoot them away from the golden palm fruit with his air rifle.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘They look tame, but don’t be fooled. They’re vicious.’
    She had seen them in the trees a couple of times already, looking at her with their amber eyes. She didn’t understand how monkeys could be vicious – mischievous, yes. But then she imagined Julia had fought and lost many wars with them, losing papayas left to ripen on the kitchen counter, or cooling cakes uncovered within the grasp of the louvre windows.
    ‘Lucy never took an interest in the garden, and my friends live in the city.’ Julia gave her no sense of how these two statements were related or what had provoked them. ‘They come down twice a year, at Christmas and August.’ Julia looked away, towards the sea. ‘It’s too exotic for some of them. They can’t handle the fact that a plated lizard darts out from underneath the freezer. And lately of course they’re afraid for other reasons. They don’t want to risk running roadblocks.’
    Julia stopped and squinted unhappily at a fern-like plant in a pot whose tips had turned a grainy white. ‘Look, the dudus are after my bonsai golden palm.’
    She thought of the threads of spider webs that parted against her skin as she walked through the house. Spiders wove webs everywhere overnight – on the stairs, in the corners of her room. Morning exposed the overnight missions of ants, who had found mysterious lucre hidden under Julia’s prized goat hair carpet.
    They came upon a cone-shaped anthill of dust. This was the efflux of the white ants that were eating their way through the house, and which were also in the process of shattering Julia’s prized mangrove sculptures and the timber beams, as well as pulverising the thick-spined leather volumes on the bookshelf by the baraza . Thin rivers of ants poured into the house from the garden, everywhere.
    ‘I’ve never seen so many insects in my life.’
    ‘I rub the walls with cloves, that’s the only thing to do, it goes back to the first Arabs who came here,’ Julia said. ‘Ants hate the smell. Still, I wonder if one day I’ll be walking through the living room and I’ll just hear a giant whoosh !’ Julia threw her hands up in the air, startling her. ‘And the house will collapse around me like a piece of scenery.’
    It rained that afternoon. A hush came over the garden. Even the constant sigh of the sea was muted. To quell her restlessness she helped Grace sweep the patio and pull up the weeds that pushed their way through the thinnest of fissures in the tiles. Through