Read Online Full Circle by Davis Bunn - Free Book Online Page A

of water from Europe don’t come through. Our office has its own filtration system, and then we boil the water hard and use tea to mask the flavor.”
    She stared at the rear window and the tiny walled garden beyond. The intensity of Adam’s gaze sent her soaring away, back to a world of yellow heat and eternal dust. She was there, and yet intensely here as well.
    â€œKayla.”
    She started. “Sorry. I was . . .”
    â€œAway. Tell me what you are seeing.”
    â€œEast Africa is in its third year of drought. The lack of rain dominates everything. All the trees around the cities have been chopped down for fuel. There is electricity a few hours each day, but the poorer families can’t afford to use it, especially for cooking. The pennies they earn go for food. If there’s any money left over, they send one child to school. Sometimes the eldest, sometimes the brightest. Whoever is lucky enough to shine. The others work. Everybody works all the time, and hopefully there’s food to eat and money left over for the one lucky child to study.”
    She saw herself walking the yellow road from the compound where many of the Europeans lived to the project’s offices. The compound was on the airport road, about a mile and a half closer to Dar es Salaam than the offices. She often walked the road in the cool of early dawn. If she missed her walk, it meant no exercise that day, because later the heat grew overpowering. The hour between night and day was very special. There was little car traffic, but the road was nonetheless very full. Children fortunate enough to go to school walked with their books and wooden tablets, for no family could afford the luxury of writing paper. The children who herded goats or the family cow watched the students with carefully blank faces, revealing neither envy nor the hopelessness of a life forever denied them. The dust was not so bad then, and the sky was awash in a gentle light. One of Kayla’s tenets was that every family involved in her project had to place all their children in school. She was very strict about that. It meant she could walk the road and smile at the children, and feel that she was making a difference in other small lives.
    She heard herself say, “The youngest children gather fuel. But as I said, there aren’t any trees left. So they gather animal dung and thornbushes. And old bones. There are bones every-where now. The fields are full of dust and animal carcasses picked clean. Fires of cow dung and thorn brush and dried bones give off an amazing aroma. I know it sounds horrid. But the smell is like some exotic spice. This morning I finally got round to unpacking my suitcases so I could give everything a proper wash. The smell took me straight back. It is in everything. Even my hairbrush.”
    Kayla stopped then. The words dried up entirely. For she had another image, one of Geoffrey entering the offices. He had always taken a taxi from the hotel where he had lived to the project. Geoffrey liked to say he wasn’t above helping the unwashed masses, but he needed a proper start to the day. He was fastidious in his dress and almost foppish in his manners. But his smile and his charm and his incredible looks had been enough to mask the distance from which he had viewed life in Africa. Or so it had been, until that morning.
    Kayla blinked and slowly came around. Adam watched her with an impossible patience. Impossible that a haircut and some new clothes could change him so much. His face looked leaner, his manner more polished. She felt a sudden desperate urge to claim he was just another thief, just another liar. Just like all men were bound to be.
    Because to do otherwise would be to accept what her heart now whispered. That Adam was not merely different. Nor was he just a friend. The way he looked at her now invited Kayla to bridge the impossible divide and enter the forbidden zone. The zone beyond the walls that, up to now,