فصل 17

Chapter seventeen

A box of photographs

Joyce stopped the taxi in Mungwi at the corner of Kasama road and got out. She wanted to make the last part of her journey on foot. She’d hardly recognised the centre of the village. Tall new buildings stood where the old market place had been, and the old school was now an Open Education Centre. But along her road things hadn’t changed so much. The houses looked smaller than she remembered and the street was narrower, but she’d only been an eight-year-old girl.

It was the end of the rainy season and the road was dry. Joyce walked on to number 46. The curtains were closed. She took the metal key out of her bag and opened the front door.

She walked into the hot dark living room. Her grandfather’s bedroom was off on the left, and the kitchen and her room were at the back. She opened the door into her grandfather’s room. The bed was made and the curtains were closed. It was tidy, too tidy.

She shut the door quickly and went through to the room that had been hers and, before that, where her mother and aunt had slept when they were little girls. There were two narrow beds. Joyce sat on the bed that had been hers. She remembered the nights she’d lain there while her grandfather watched the old television in the living room or listened to music. No arguments, no shouting. Just her and her grandfather. She realised that here she felt at home.

Was it the only place? She thought of the sunshine coming through the windows in Taka’s flat. No, now there was somewhere else, someone else. But it was still good to be here.

She sat and looked around the room. Boxes were piled up in a corner, covered in dusty plastic. She pulled the plastic back and looked at them. Some were dated. The dates went back over sixty years. Joyce picked up as many of the boxes as she could carry, took them outside and sat on the old wooden bench behind the house.

It was a long bench - when she was a child she sometimes used to lie there and sleep in the hot afternoon. The bench had been very old even then. Joyce remembered how her grandfather had mended it when it had broken. Now, twenty years later, it was broken again. But it could be mended, thought Joyce. The mango tree still stood at the end of the yard, ready for little children to climb.

She put the dusty boxes on the seat beside her and cleaned her hands on her jeans. She opened one box. It was dated 2010. It was full of photographs: colour pictures of Mungwi brides and bridegrooms from forty years ago. They would be middle-aged now. Few of them would still be here in this small town - like her family, they would be living all over Africa, all over the world.

She looked at the dates on the other boxes: 2012, 2007, 2002. One box was undated, but on it was written ‘England’. She opened it carefully and took out a collection of large, black and white pictures: a girl in a church, looking at a tombstone; a girl with straight dark hair, a pointed chin and very pale skin. A Japanese girl. Then a picture of an African man, sitting on a wall in front of a big old house.

There was a sign on the wall. Oak Road. She looked carefully at the man. Who did he remind her of?

Then a small colour photograph dropped out onto the floor, face down. There was writing on the back. She picked it up and read it. Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, April 2000. Fifty years ago. She turned it over. The African man and Japanese girl were standing together in a big square. Joyce looked closer, and then she was sure. It was her grandfather, not grey, heavy and lined as she remembered him but young and slim. He had a camera in one hand and he was wearing a red jacket. His arm was round the dark-haired young Japanese woman and their faces were shining with happiness.

Joyce looked back in the box. In the bottom there was one more black and white photograph. Joyce picked it up. It was the Japanese girl, but this time she was wearing summer clothes and sitting on a bench outside a house. Was the girl looking older? It was hard to tell. The pointed chin and dark eyes were the same, but in this picture her eyes were not laughing. For a moment Joyce felt as though they were looking at her. The girl was sitting on a wooden bench which looked almost new. On the ground in front of her there was a suitcase.

Joyce turned to look at the bench she sat on. It was the same bench that the girl in the photograph was sitting on. The window behind it was the window of her grandfather’s house. So the Japanese girl had been here. And her grandfather had been to England. He’d never told her about any journey to England or any visitor from Japan. She wondered who the girl was, how they’d met and why they’d parted. She wondered if she’d ever know the full story.

She sat there for a time in the sun. Then she picked up her video-disk and pressed a button. She spoke softly. ‘Hi. I’m in Mungwi. I’m just outside grandfather’s house.’ In the screen she saw a man’s face, young, with dark hair falling over his eyes and a pointed chin. His eyes looked out of the screen from the other side of the world. She continued speaking. ‘I’ve got something to show you… but not on the video-disk. I’d like you to come here, Taka.’

‘I’ve got something to show you too, Joyce,’ he said. ‘Something you have to read. And I’m already on the plane. I’m coming.’

Joyce put the photos back in the box. She’d look at the rest later. She sat and looked around her. There was a lot of work to be done on the house. It was a crazy place for them to make their home, a thousand kilometres from the sea. But a place where perhaps something had ended too soon. A place where something else could begin.