Andrew Brown’s new novel, Refuge, is set to be launched next week at the Centre for the Book. The book “depicts the deceit and violence that characterise the meeting point between ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘law-abiding society’. The stories revolves around Richard, a disillusioned lawyer who is tiring of his criminal practice, his unaffectionate wife and his condescending colleagues. He becomes infatuated with a beautiful Nigerian refugee who works as an erotic masseuse.”
A new work from Brown is always big news; here’s an excerpt from the beginning that sets the story up nicely:
* * * * * * * *
‘Hello, my name is Abayomi. Please come inside.’
With this simple beginning, his world changes for ever. The sound of her voice, so close, makes it irredeemable. As with all deflowering, something fundamental is lost and something sage acquired.
He cannot see her yet. She stands in the shadow of the doorway, shielded by the glare of sunlight off the white walls. His eyes smart as he tries to make out her form. But just hearing her address him, he knows he has embarked on a course definitively contrasting to the one he has followed up until now. The sultry lilt, the suggestion of foreignness in her accent, the undertow of eroticism, all combine in an instant to unbalance him. It brings with it a freshness that unseats him and lifts his staidness. Even if he walked away now, he would have something pure and poignant to recall. He could sit alone, surrounded by bustle and noise, and call on this memory. He could pocket it like a stone and rub his thumb across its smooth form. He could store it in a velvet-lined box and take it out in privacy.
The steps that brought him to this door were small. Simple decisions made, perhaps impulsively, each without moment, but each directing him towards this culmination, or this initiation. The true consequence of these half-conscious acts lies in the doorway, now open, and the in dusky interior beyond. It beckons but is ultimately treacherous. Perhaps his momentum could still be stopped, if he wished. He could retreat, apologise and leave. Or take one more step and enter. A step back, the door will close again and he will have only the glimpsed memory of another world. A step forward, the door will shut behind him and he will enter the whirlwind unleashed to be pushed along its tumultuous path of death and rebirth. Once inside, the street outside is gone for ever; he cannot pass through the same doorway again.
He is described by those around him as dependable, as having integrity – he suspects that these are other words for uninteresting. In their eyes, he knows he always looks the same, mundane and featureless. But they do not know how close he feels to losing control. He fantasises about letting go, just releasing his emotions into open space – like a swimmer suspended in the turquoise light of a deep bay, his arms and legs splayed open, far from the shore. He dreamt once that he was an astronaut, treading with heavy boots on top of his spacecraft. He looked up at the spray of distant stars, utterly quiet. He bent his knees and pushed out, his body drifting away from his ship into unbounded space. When he awoke, he had felt crushed with the weight of sadness.
His life has been an accumulation of regrets – chances that were offered and not taken, moments of opportunity that he was too afraid to grasp. He looks back in mourning. And yet the thought of abandoning his trodden path fills him with panic. He is like a tiler who sees that his pattern has run off line, but who knows that he is unable to go back and correct it, and so doggedly continues, increasingly straying from his chosen line with every tile he lays.
His whole adult life, he has been moving down an island of expectation between lanes of traffic. Some days he plods forward like a blinkered carthorse. Other days he moves like a wounded man, stumbling along his narrow strip, with surging trucks passing on either side. No one can see him bleeding; to them he is walking deliberately, not staggering and thrashing. Small decisions, tiny forks in his road, he knows, have appeared each day and directed his passage. But the deviations have been so minute, he has remained on the same skewed path, as if it were predicted. Fear, familiarity, loathing, these are the untouchable fences that border his route, subtle and unfelt but as strong as cable wire. If he steps off the island, he will strike into other worlds, those that now rush past, inches away, and be sucked away by lives unknown. The possibility scares him – the idea of floating untethered, buffeted by collisions with strangers. But he has reached the edge of his designated space and must now choose to step out or pull back into torpor.
She stands just behind the opened door, hiding herself from the curious eyes of passers-by, waiting for him to enter. With a drawn breath, he steps into the passageway. She has not moved away and is standing close to him now. The passage is softly lit compared to the bright sun outside. It smells of sandalwood, cedar and palm oil. The fragrance reminds him of the beach house where he stayed as a child on the shores of Inhambane. There he sat on the wooden deck with his toes digging into the warm sand, the palm fronds rustling overhead in the afternoon wind. He would watch the bare-chested men pulling the boats along the shallow shore. The bows were marked with peeling paint, red and green and yellow, creosoted sweeps of wood meeting together at a solid keel that scoured a path up the beach. Small fish looped together on knotted ropes, and salt water dripped freely down the men’s muscled backs. The vanilla aroma of chestnuts and cashews roasting on a nearby fire drifted in the air. Behind him on the deck, the young housemaid pounded maize kernels for the evening meal, her dress rucked up on her hips, smelling of cheap soap and hair oil.
The door closes and the lock clicks quietly behind him.
‘Welcome to a Touch of Africa. I am Abayomi. I am your pleasure.’
* * * * * * * *
Book details
Please register or log in to comment
