My Driver

by Maggie Gee

  And yet a small tear creeps down Vanessa’s cheek, which she dashes away quickly before anyone sees. ‘I think I’ll close the window, the air is so dusty,’ she says, and it glides like a veil over the day, and she polishes the instant of grief away, but she is thinking of the package at the bottom of her case, nicely wrapped in silver paper with a pattern of balloons. It’s a carefully chosen present for Mary’s baby. Not a baby any more: Theodora must be three. Not so very much younger than her own Abdul Trevor.

  ‘Those storks are amazing,’ says Bernardine, and Vanessa half-registers them, lined up like sentries, along the high roof of the Parliament Building, listening, perhaps, to the speeches inside.

  The little book, for Mary’s Ugandan baby, cannot be recycled for Abdul Trevor, because Vanessa has already given him a copy. It is Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. There is a picture of two tall storks on the cover, looking out on the world with intelligent eyes.

  ‘I think I like animals better than humans,’ says Vanessa, suddenly, with conviction, which just for an instant, silences the minibus.

  ‘Odd woman,’ hisses Deirdre Mullins to Bernardine, as they get out and troop across the car park to the social club where this session will be.

  ‘Oh I quite like her,’ says Bernardine.

  14

  Trevor has the warm, sticky child in his lap, and is feeding her another piece of banana. The maid is watching him, amazed, between her fingers. Omuzungu munyumba yaffe! Ate ali ngomulalu! A muzungu in the house! And he is crazy! Theodora will put food all over his clothes. But she’s looking with new respect at Mary, who can order a muzungu about with such ease.

  ‘You can pick her, Trevor, she will not bite you,’ Mary said, almost as soon as Trevor arrived, and though the maid thought Trevor looked faintly grumpy (but all bazungu look faintly grumpy), he had put down his cases, and picked up the child.

  And now Theodora’s face becomes congested and she makes a curious straining noise that Mercy has come to know only too well, and she looks at Mary, and makes to rush forward, but Mary casts her a repressive glance, so the child is still squarely planted on Trevor when a warm, sweet, sickly smell fills the room.

  ‘Ah Trevor, sorry, welcome to Uganda,’ says Mary merrily. ‘Help him, Mercy.’

  Trevor is glazed with tiredness, and everything feels dreamlike. He would happily drop out of Mary’s trip to the lake, but she looks at him sternly, her head on one side and a particular teasing, assessing air that he knows of old when she worked for Ness, and says, ‘Trevor. I know you are not old, or tired. I think you are ready now to drive to Lake Victoria?’ And somehow, he hears himself saying ‘Yes.’

  But he knows he is not quite the full ticket. As they bucket along through the centre of Kampala, with Mary braking sharply as she throws out information at him in intensive bursts that feel like morse, he tries to focus, and he fails.

  ‘And so this is Parliament Building, Trevor. Built to mark independence, in 1962. After which we were governed by the murderer Obote, because he had done a deal with the British, which is also the case with the murderer Mugabe, who also did a deal with the British in Zimbabwe, although now they pretend that he is an example of how Africans cannot rule their own countries ...’

  He finds it impossible to concentrate. ‘Those are bloody big storks,’ he interrupts her. They perch along the top of the enormous modern gateway that’s meant to mark the start of Ugandan democracy. In a minibus that’s battling with Mary for the road, he sees that the passengers are also staring. The windows are dirty, but he gets a little jolt as he spots a thin blonde with pale hair, neck straining. She reminds him, sharply, of Vanessa, but sadder. Of how Vanessa might look when she’s older. He is just about to point her out to Mary when the traffic moves, and Mary guns the engine and pulls past the minibus, still talking.

  ‘That woman was a bit like Vanessa, Mary,’ he says, but the moment has slipped into the past.

  ‘Trevor, I hope you are listening.’

  ‘To be honest, Mary – I’m trying, but I was on a plane all night, last night, I grant you in a bloody great comfortable seat and being waited on hand and foot, but I’m not in the best state to learn Ugandan history.’

  Mary drives on in silence. He scans her profile; she has a thoughtful look that he knows might mean trouble. Quite soon, as they draw up at some big metal gates and a security guard comes strolling towards them, she turns towards him with an enigmatic smile. She’s a beautiful woman: mischievous, intelligent. He takes in her pink gums, her strong white teeth, her brown amused eyes with their slight look of mystery, her oiled black hair in serried coils like the sea. Her shoulders are broad: her arms are well-muscled. In a fight, she’d knock the socks off Soraya or Vanessa. He tries not to think about women fighting. Naked women rolling in a sea of mud. He would have to go in and rescue Vanessa ... He finds he is dozing, on the hot plastic seat, as Mary gets out briskly and slams the car door.

  She’s suddenly grinning in through his window.

  ‘So, Trevor, I see that you heard nothing at all. This is not Ugandan history: it is British history.’

  The guard, who is waving his rifle as casually as a boy with a switch for cattle, comes over and tries to collect a fee, which Mary refuses indignantly. ‘Where are the receipts?’ she asks him, frowning. ‘Show me your receipts, and I will give you a fee.’ (‘He is a crook,’ she explains, aside, to Trevor. ‘He is a crook, and he thinks I must be rich, because I have a car and a muzungu boyfriend, though of course, Trevor, we both know you are not my boyfriend.’)

  And he finds himself wondering, in the daze of heat as they walk into a wide expanse of green grass, and some big dark trees, and scattered, empty tables, and beyond it, beauty – a wide flowering lake, stretching out as far as the horizon, as blue as the sky except for islands of flowers, white blooms like stars on great rafts of fresh leaves – he finds himself wondering, as the dream continues, and Mary walks ahead of him, her powerful hips swaying, round surging mounds in the unreal sunlight, and a stream of words blow back at him like music, though he can’t catch any of the individual notes – What would it be like to be Mary’s boyfriend? He tells himself sternly not to be a fool, but for the last six weeks, with things breaking down, Trevor has not had sex with Soraya. Naturally his thoughts might be, well, untoward.

  In his next coherent memory, he is sitting at a wooden table, on a wooden seat that is hard on his bones, with Mary opposite, the lake behind her, like a vast silver frame in which she glows darkly, and she is still addressing him about crime.

  ‘And so, Trevor, this is Ggaba Beach Resort. It is just along the lake from Ggaba fishing village. It is a nice place. But unfortunately, as I told you, it is guarded by criminals, like those who are everywhere in London. I fear that we also have them in Uganda.’

  Now Mary is ordering, from a child who is surely too young to be working here. Two enormous, dark red fish are delivered, all eyes and spines and heads and bones, and two plates of chips, while Mary harangues him and he’s lulled by the sound of the waves and the leaves, the distant sound of some children laughing, and faint cars, like the sea, on the road to Entebbe. Did he really only arrive this morning? Mary’s moved from history to biology. Meanwhile, in the background, the silver is darkening: the lake-light is streaked with gun-metal. And the sun: the sun is flickering.

  ‘And so, your impressions of the lake are good.’ He has said something praising to fob her off, so he can concentrate fully on the pleasure of the chips, which neither Soraya nor Vanessa ever cooked, because they were always putting him on diets. ‘Ha! That is what I expected you to say. So now, Trevor, I have many things to tell you ...’

  And she does; as he eats and shifts and dozes, as the branches of the tree above them start to stir, as the heat increases and the sky blackens, and across the paradisal floating tapestry of flowers (‘It is water hyacinth, Trevor. It’s a weed’), which is still crystal-bright in the afternoon sun, an astonishing purplish blue storm comes bellying,
so very slowly growing, thickening, quickening, now eating the horizon, and the breeze tastes different, it is cooling as he listens, listens without hearing, as he watches her dark cushiony lips moving, and the air on his own lips freshens with rain, and Mary goes on talking and talking. She has waited for this chance for a very long time. It is her turn, at last, to explain her country.

  And Trevor sits mute, in the meniscus of the moment, protected by jet-lag from this onslaught of fact. He is very happy; he is here; he is well. So this is Kampala. This is Uganda. I’m nearly 60, and I’ve come to Africa. Well done, old son, he says to himself.

  ‘And so they are stealing the water of the lake. Museveni, you see, is not patriotic. He is building a new dam to make electricity, and yet it will not be for the people of Kampala, he will sell the power to whoever can pay. And believe me, at State House the lights never go out. But the rest of us often do not have hot water, though the level of the lake is always going down. So they have to build new jets, in Ggaba fishing village.’

  ‘Jets? They build jets? That can’t be right ... I thought you imported planes from America? ... Oh jetties, I see. Yes, you mean jetties.’

  ‘They build new jetties, as I said, Trevor.’ She stops and looks at him very sternly. At times she reminds him of Vanessa. ‘And still the catches are going down. And because of the Nile Perch, which you have just been eating – are you awake, Trevor? I hope you are – did you enjoy the fish you ordered?’

  ‘Very nice, Mary,’ says Trevor, docilely. It seems uncontroversial, liking the fish, but no, the glint in Mary’s eyes sharpens.

  ‘Because of this fish, which you like so much, which is not Ugandan, but has been imported to please the tourists, and to send to London, and other rich countries, and which eats all the food in this Ugandan lake, there is nothing left for Ugandan speeches.’

  This astonishing non sequitur wakes Trevor up, together with a faint pattering somewhere, a sound like a thousand ball-bearings falling, silvery, firm, a vast machine coming closer and closer, bearing down on them like the end of time. And something is draining away the light.

  ‘Ugandan speeches? Nothing left, how so? I mean, Mary, you’re not exactly silent ...’

  But Mary rushes onward at her audience. ‘Ngege, and so on, which the village people ate.’

  ‘Oh species, Mary, Ugandan species ...’

  But all further speech ceases as, with a sound like thunder, the storm sweeps over them, rattling the plates, deafening them both as they run blind for cover.

  By the end of the day, Vanessa’s exhausted. She has listened to speeches, both dull and impassioned, about ‘Dis-covering the Outsider in Heart of Darkness;’ ‘African Publishing: a Contradiction?’ (‘When will we African publishers come in from the cold? Your British bookshops do not welcome us, and yet Heinemann has closed its African list ...’). She has nodded, to show enthusiasm, until the dry vertebrae of her long neck ache and click with empathy. She has scribbled furious notes on them all. She has asked questions to encourage the speakers. She has made little statements in support. She does her best to be a good International Delegate, partly so the British Council will ask her again, but partly because she is still indignant about Peter Pargeter’s vision of the future.

  It’s not just that he saw her as old-fashioned, last night, her and Geoffrey Truman and all the British team. It is that so many writers are assembled here, eager Africans from all over the continent, all of them in love with books and writing, all aware that the colleges or schools where they teach are tragically short of books, pens, notebooks, all hoping something good will come from this conference (it’s Heather, she sees, who is the force behind it), all longing for contacts, a leg-up, an audience, the opening of a door into some magical universal library where luckier, richer writers come and go at will – they are all here, intelligent, hungry, but Peter Pargeter sees them as ‘the old model’. They won’t get books, they’ll get graffiti workshops. He’s already looking over their shoulders at teeming millions of younger customers.

  There’s a lunch-time session of rap and beat box which Vanessa rather enjoys, in fact (the real Banga is quite sweet and cuddly, and forty-two if he is a day, while the beat box rhythm has her clapping along) – and Peter is there, on his feet near the stage, making sure he is included in all the photographs, loosening his tie to get down with the beat, though at the end, as the cameras flash, he laughs so stagily, one arm round Banga, that an opportunistic bluebottle flies straight down his throat, and he stumbles from the room, grinning, waving, choking. ‘Ah, sorry,’ says a kindly poet from Makerere.

  In the afternoon, the rain pours down, and they all get soaked between the bus and the hotel where the last two papers are scheduled to be held. Both of these, as it turns out, are by British academics. In the crammed ballroom at the Sheraton, Vanessa finds herself dozing off. The first paper’s on ‘The Lonely Modernist’, by a man who draws a brave arc of exclusion from Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner to Sebald and Coetzee. Vanessa is expecting to like this one. But she finds herself thinking, are they really outsiders? They have all managed to be rather successful. There are other writers the man could have mentioned. Herself, for example. But people are myopic. It doesn’t matter, her star is rising (though as always, when she’s with other writers, a small worm of doubt wriggles up into the light. Perhaps she should have, well, written more books. Then the fact of her exclusion would be indisputable ... With a huge psychic effort, she squashes down the worm, and imagines her future in two stages. First, she will be recognised as an outsider. Then, she will be brought in from the cold in triumph – no-one wants to be an outsider for ever.)

  The second paper’s on – but what is it on? It is almost impossible to be sure. The title is ‘Positioning the Outsider: a Semiotic Reading of Acts of Exclusion,’ and the author is a young, fierce-looking woman, though she wears a kaftan with a dizzy plunge, revealing two round, jaunty breasts all set to break out and make a dash at the audience. ‘Who is the Outsider?’ she asks, rhetorically. Vanessa is galvanised by the question, which seems to slide straight into her soul: I’m here, she thinks: why can’t they see me? All round her, the audience is sitting up, encouraged, but the second sentence makes them slump again.

  ‘One is tempted,’ the lecturer continues, ‘when contextualising the oeuvre of the postcolonial writer per se, to neglect the fundamental importance of positionality in any historiographical act. In considering one’s object, which is also one’s subject, one must not beg the question of what, in this discourse, postcoloniality really might be.’ Then she looks at the audience over her glasses, challenging them to disagree. In fact, as she continues in the same contorted style, throwing up great long earthworks of defensive abstraction before revealing the smallest glimpse of her message, eighty-five per cent of them are stunned into sleep, once the first fascination with her breasts is over. In the middle of the lecture, someone slams the door loudly, and Vanessa wakes up with a start, thinking ‘Someone has summoned the courage to leave.’ She turns her head to see, but is just too late.

  (In fact it was Mary: Mary Tendo, standing quietly at the back, dark in the glare of fluorescent light. Having driven back from the fishing village, she has left Trevor sleeping in the red saloon outside, and come in to the Sheraton to see if she has any last messages. Remembering, in passing, the Writers’ Conference, she’s popped in briefly, curious. The room is full, and very stuffy. She stands at the back trying to pick up the thread. But there is no thread: just a series of knots, getting larger and larger, woollier and woollier, tying up the poor speaker in worse and worse nonsense. Besides, the woman looks like a prostitute. Yet the International Writers all sit there docilely, probably thinking her a genius ... Mary cannot see that most of them are sleeping. She’s glad that it’s rubbish, since she wasn’t invited.)

  15

  The boy does not know who he is any more. He has no idea where or when. He lies on the ground, sodden, head spinning.

  Once he was a chi
ld. He had two parents. He loved them both. He lived in a city.

  There was milk and cake. His bed was warm. He had colds and coughs, but never this sickness. His mother was working from morning till night, but whenever she could, she brushed his hair, and cut his nails, and made him wash, and talked to him as she cooked the food. She taught him rhymes. She read to him. But she always hurried, and had to leave. His father was home, behind a closed door.

  If I cried, he would come out and look at me. His face was puzzled, but he did not hate me. He was looking for something – was I like him?

  All that time has become like a dream.

  I thought that they would always be there. Then my mother started to shout at my father

  everything changed he took me away

  But now I am entirely alone. I can never go back. They could never forgive me. I made wrong choices. I went the wrong way

  yes I am Cain, in the Bible story every man’s hand is against me, for ever

  if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off If thy right eye offend thee, cut it out

  we cut off ears, and lips, and noses and worse things too I can never be forgiven I should be cut into tiny pieces then scattered like dust where no-one will find me

  My life ended, and I lived in hell

  it hangs round my neck it has leather wings

  I poke it forward but it’s gripping, flailing

  Above him, the sun moves briefly behind the thick leaves of a Cassipourea tree, and for ten minutes, his mind steadies.

  There are ten commandments. He has broken them all. They start to seem useless, like rusted iron. They clank behind him, they groan in the night, the sound of torturing instruments. He has used those too. He has done it all. He is damned for ever. He can never go home. And the sun moves round, the sun moves on.

  God’s eye is in the tomb with me