Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

chapter 16 (1) 

"Is that it?" Alex stood and stared at the baby, wrapped in a blanket in the settee. It was very small. He'd seen few babies -- the ones he'd had -- he'd never paid any attention to them.

"Four weeks old. Born the 1st day of July. I sent you a birth announcement."

"I was off in Maiduguri, trying to clear my final papers, get the gratuity, exit visa and ticket. It all took time. I never got any letter. I had a hard time getting out."

Alex had been tense from the pressure of trying to get the paperwork done and get up to England. He'd lost his temper with the military at a road block going to Kano, had almost blown it.

"Bature, why are you so nervous?" one had said accusingly. "Because my wife just had a baby," he'd blurted.

"Where, in Nigeria? My wife had six of them," the soldier'd laughed.

"In England and I didn't get a letter," he tried to explain. It meant nothing. They'd delayed them an hour going through his bags, reading every piece of paper in his handbag, looking at each picture in the packets of photographs he had, checking everything. And Kano airport had been hell too with all the soldiers exerting their new power and influence. He had tried to get out, tried to be there.

"My parents came to the hospital with me. It was really quite easy, you know. She almost popped right out. I had five stitches though. I named her Anna, after my grandmother."

"Should I hold her?"

"You have to watch her head. Here, hold her like this. Be very gentle."

Alex took her and put his palm under the back of Anna's head and held her on his lap like Elizabeth had demonstrated. Anna looked wide-eyed at him, seemed satisfied, then closed her eyes and cried. "Does she do that all the time?"

"Only when she's hungry. Here, you can give her to me." Elizabeth brought her up and plopped out one breast. It was bigger than he'd remembered. The baby fed and then flopped asleep and she put in a cradle and gently rocked it.

Elizabeth looked haggard. Her hair was in disarray and she had put on weight. She was still in her nightgown and it was past noon. Alex felt guilty, wondered if he should have gone over and kissed her or something. It was strange. He hadn't seen her in six months. And the new baby -- his. He needed time to adjust. An hour taxi ride and six hours on a 747 and he had been transferred from one continent to another, from one world where he'd lived on and off for four years and adjusted to, to this world.

He had been looking forward to Elizabeth's flat with its plants and artwork and white-washed walls. He had been dreaming of her bed, the brass one she'd inherited from her grandmother and her clean fluffy pillows and soft comforter. Looking forward to her beautiful body and the refuge from the chaos of traffic and honking car horns and dust and heat.

Things are never the same in a place as you imagine them, once you actually get there. Here was Elizabeth, her body out of shape from carrying a baby and delivering it, couch now strewn with pampers and blankets and her kitchen, where she'd made tea, now changed by the presence of baby artifacts -- bottles and vitamins. The smell of urine and baby powder permeated everywhere. There were intruders -- the baby into this world as he had remembered, he, into a mother-child world. He had left a certain freedom in Africa, came into a dream with new roles of husband and father thrust upon him overnight. They all felt the difficulty, the crisis of adjustment.

The summer passed. He learned the things he was supposed to, helped Elizabeth. And it was his baby, so he didn't mind so much staying awake. He hated to hear it cry. They were new parents, over reacting to every choke, every little movement Anna made. It created tension. There was little relaxing, not much time to talk about their own relationship, to renew and develop it. They both tried to live with the change though. It was a good sign. Anna's needs held it together, bonded them, gave them little time to think about anything else. Far back in their consciousness, they had been both brought up to accept responsibility, to persevere at tasks.

After almost two months, Alex's contentment ebbed. Anna, the baby, was still up half the night. He wasn't used to the constant demands of parenthood. It was a shock.  He had been living in a war zone. It was difficult to settle into a routine. The novelty was over, his patience expired. Elizabeth watched and listened for Anna's every move in the cradle beside the bed. He and Elizabeth had no privacy, no relaxing intimate moments to share. He finally went out and bought a two-way monitoring device and insisted they move Anna into her own room.

Alex did enjoy taking her in the pouch for walks to the parks though. She slept mostly. One time her arm had got caught in the sling and he didn't notice until her wrist turned blue. It was not an easy job taking care of a newborn and Elizabeth wanted him to take more responsibility. She was quite irritable from lack of sleep. It was a hard time. He tried to adjust, but still blamed her for making the mistake of getting pregnant, though he didn't say it out loud.

Elizabeth's father had worked as a high-ranking civil servant, having gone on scholarship to Cambridge and then done a graduate degree at the London School of Economics. Her mother had been employed for years as an editor for London Lifestyle. They'd instilled and pounded high achievement standards in Elizabeth and the mother had cultivated in her daughter the suppressed artistic pursuits unfulfilled in herself. They lived comfortably in a single family dwelling in a uppity neighbourhood in Hamstead, where old houses projected stability and tradition.

Elizabeth had attended one of the colleges at Oxford and then on to do her Doctorate in Art History. She'd passed her orals, the thesis and dissertation remaining. She would be frustrated if she didn't finish it; her parents would view it as a failure. They kept their distance, having been disappointed, almost shamed, that she'd become pregnant and suddenly married a Canadian whose family they knew nothing of. Granted, he was an engineer, but everyone in North America went to college. Even complete idiots could get hockey or football scholarships. Alex was a bit rough for their tastes, a little wild they surmised. After all, he'd gone off to Africa like a young VSO with no plans for the future. In England, one had to be organized, be educated at the good schools to get anywhere, be stable, have good family references. Alex had none of those things going for him. They suspected he couldn't get a job.

"You don't care for my parents, do you?" Elizabeth accused.

"I don't mind them. I doubt they like me."

"It's just your manners Alex. They think you're from the bush -- Australia, Canada -- it's all the same. You have to understand them, let them get to know you."

"I can excuse them -- their antiquated British mores -- but you people just have no openness, no sense of humour."

"Just try to be a little polite -- then they'd be happy. They're really quite kind you know."

"Probably. I wouldn't know. If they'd cut through all the fancy manners and be more human, quit looking down their nose ... they hate Africans, think they're better than everyone."

"Well, with all the racial problems in London nowadays, its no wonder."

"They should have thought of that before they colonized all those countries, turned them into semi-British citizens. They moved whole peoples all around to work on plantations in the colonies and now they have to pay for it."

"My parents didn't do it."

"I know. But now they have to live with it though. And they better get used to these things, to people who are different and quit trying to change them."

Alex had made his point. He doubted Elizabeth's parents would ever accept him until he spoke and acted British. He saw hints of it, latent in Elizabeth's too, that molding of him into an image she had of the way she'd like him to be. And even then, as she accomplished her small aims, new ones would appear and she would never let up, never be satisfied that he just wanted to be himself. Elizabeth was a perfectionist, would always try to shape him.

Sometimes, he felt like he was in prison, having others to tell him what to do, exerting total control over him. He had been thrown in jail once, caught for impaired driving in college and he'd beat on the bars all night, making a fool of himself, yelling for them to let him out. He should have laid down and just slept it off. But he couldn't take it. He'd felt like a wild animal trapped in a cage, screaming, clawing to get out. Cages kill birds that aren't raised domestically.

Freedom. He'd felt freedom before. Frying fresh mackerel in buttered tin foil on the head of the Slant-6 of a beat-up half-ton on the way back from The Island. It was summer and he and Dave Bulmer had gone over to see a couple of girls working at a motel at Cavendish Beach. There was no place they had to be. And in Africa.  Sitting beside his motorcycle in the shade of a baobab tree in the edge of the desert, the road stretching out to the horizon. Riding for hours along a ribbon of asphalt past the grey rock hills of Gwoza, the endless small villages breezing by his eyes at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour flat out, his wrist steady on the throttle, leaning ever slightly on the curves, through blasts of hot air and up into the mountains.