by Maggie Gee
‘It’s OK for you to say that now, Zakira –’
‘I said it yesterday. I did.’
‘In any case, he had a playdate.’
‘YOU had a playdate with your mate Davey. Take him today, for goodness sake.’
‘Fridays everyone goes to the doctor.’
She stares at him, furious, his sulky face, that look of premature defeat. Why did she marry him? He’s hopeless. ‘Take him to the doctor or I’ll never forgive you.’
‘Don’t threaten me!’ He is suddenly shouting, and Abdul Trevor starts to cry in earnest, instead of just grizzling in his mother’s arms.
‘Don’t shout. You’re a bully. You’ve made Abdy cry. You’re a dreadful father.’
‘You’re a hopeless mother. I do everything! You’re never fucking here!’
She shoves the child at him, like a stone or a weapon, eyes flashing with fury. ‘I hate you! That’s IT!’
She is grabbing her coat, her laptop, her blackberry, her chic little chocolate Chanel suitcase. She’s going. Justin is gripped by panic. Abdul Trevor is sobbing, ‘Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, Mummy don’t go,’ in a hiccupy, snotty stream of sorrow.
‘I didn’t mean it, sorry, Zakira,’ Justin pleads. It’s their worst-ever row. He has never called her a hopeless mother. But I do do everything. It’s true, he thinks.
She returns, briefly, to kiss the boy, who has wandered away to the television, but she stares at her husband, disliking him. The mortgage on the flat is huge: the jeep isn’t paid for: she’s the only one earning. She feels afraid of everything. ‘You fucking get a job,’ she says. ‘You do something, then I can be a mother. And in the meantime, fucking keep him warm. Can’t you even do that? Can’t you do anything?’
‘Is that what you think? I should kill myself.’
‘How dare you say that in front of Abdy! I’m not going to listen to this shit.’
The unthinkable happens: she slams the door. She’s gone, without them making up, without kissing him, without taking back the cruel words he heard her say. She doesn’t love him, or care about him. What’s the point of his life? No-one loves him.
It’s not as if Abdy appreciates him either, for now his son has started to cry. ‘Where’s Mummy?,’ he calls from the other room. ‘I want MUMMY!’
So do I, thinks Justin. But we can’t have her. I’m all you’ve got, so be nice to me. He is tempted to put out his tongue at Abdy. He does, and feels better. Then he feels guilty, goes through to find him, picks him up, sighing. Abdy’s almost too big to pick up: not a baby any more, a big heavy boy who will be starting school in less than two years; yet today he feels limp, and damp, and hot, suddenly like a much younger child. Is he shivering? Yes, he is. But he can’t be cold: he is wearing a jumper. ‘Mummy,’ he whimpers, in a heartbroken voice, then just as affectingly, ‘Daddy’.
Justin suddenly thinks about his own mother. He wishes she wasn’t so far away. She can be a terrible pain, of course, but she’s also a useful source of advice. After all, she had raised him without killing him, whereas he and Zakira are both amateurs. She’s not been in touch. She’s abandoned him. Because he’s a fuck-up. All women leave him.
28
Vanessa has seen her driver before!
Their greetings, in the half-dark, were perfunctory. He’s smallish, youngish, and he smiles. ‘Great Gorilla Safaris, Madam,’ he says.
‘Vanessa Henman. Dr Henman,’ she answers. She peers at him. A suspicion strikes her.
But she’s kept him waiting, so explains about the power-cut: ‘It was, frankly, impossible. The power only came back ten minutes ago.’
He looks at her blankly, eyes half-veiled. His room does not have electricity. One day, he thinks, I shall have it too.
As they bump through two blocks of early morning Kampala, Vanessa stares fixedly at the driver. Yes, she knows where she’s seen him before.
‘You’re the man who drove me from the airport,’ she says. ‘When I missed the bus, so I had to use you. You said you had no money for breakfast.’ So I paid for it, she thinks. Too generously.
The man looks vague. ‘It is possible.’
‘Your name’s Isaac, isn’t it?’
He denies it. ‘My name is Mutesa Isaac.’
‘I was told I would be driven by a man called David. A graduate of Makerere. Their top driver. That’s not you, is it?’
But it’s all too late. They are leaving the centre. They have joined the endless caterpillar of white Toyota taxis, each segment jostling independently from one side of the city to the other. She is stuck on a conveyor belt with the wrong driver.
‘I am a top driver,’ Isaac explains. ‘But David cannot come. His friend is sick.’
‘That’s really not a very good excuse,’ says Vanessa. ‘You can’t just not do things, because your friends have problems.’
The man shoots a look at her, surprised, but he does not want her to be angry. She has a thin, spiteful face, this muzungu. How is he to know that she is just frightened?
‘I think he has broken his arm, and legs,’ he says, eventually, to calm her. As they leave the city, the mist is lifting. Isaac is happy to be going to the country. He has business to do along the way. Besides, he has never been to Bwindi. There are deals to be done, money to be made. The rich muzungu will probably tip well. ‘David is my cousin, I am doing him a favour.’
‘Are you insured to drive this car?’
Isaac doesn’t answer. He smiles at her. ‘I will start to explain all places of interest,’ he says, keenly, as the buildings thin away and the early sunlight falls on bright green vegetation stretching out to the horizon, heavy-headed plants, taller than a man, papyrus plants, but he doesn’t know the name. ‘Now we are entering the swamp land. The swamp land is very interesting.’
Justin sinks into paralysis. It is pulling him down, sapping his will. It seems he can’t get Abdy to the doctor. At 8.29, he is on the phone to the Health Centre: the maddening voice of the answering machine, which asks him to wait to be put through, so he waits, and pays, for their phone bill’s enormous, until they cut him off, without warning, and the cycle repeats, he keeps ringing and ringing (thank God Abdul Trevor is watching TV), it’s 8.45, it’s 8.47, then suddenly there are only five minutes left, his fingers hit the ‘repeat call’ button faster, more angrily, God help me, why is this happening to me, it’s 8.58, there’s no time left – it’s 8.59 when he gets through, and a real voice answers, thank God a human, but she says, ‘Oh no, you’re too late for today.’ All appointments have gone. He’s failed. That’s that. He’s a hopeless father. He can’t do anything. All Zakira’s words come back to him. He sits there, paralysed, cursing himself. Then he slouches through to the sitting-room. Ah, that’s why Abdul Trevor was quiet. Curiously, he has gone to sleep, which is quite unusual when he’s watching television. But at least it gives Justin a little respite.
He plonks himself down by his son on the sofa, and although he knows there’s a lot to be done, the breakfast dishes, the rubbish, the washing, Justin watches the Tellytubbies; lost to time, he joins all the babies in La-la land, swaying to the music, chewing his fingers, sucking the comforting pad of his thumb. Yes, she’s abandoned him, just like his mother. And Mary, too. And where is his father? Usually he rings up every few days. They’ve all gone gallivanting off, like Zakira.
29
‘Trevor, you deserve a holiday,’ says Mary, sounding very loud and cheerful, to Trevor, whose eyes and ears seem too sensitive, today, as if the whole world is shouting at him. They are driving down a long straight road, but the slightest bump makes his head lurch horribly. Here, only thirty minutes from the village, you would think last night’s rains had never happened. Lorries and coaches thunder past. She is driving him away, away ...
‘So is this a holiday?’ he asks. All Mary has said is that they’re going on an outing. His tools, his possessions are in the boot.
‘I am driving you to the equator, Trevor. This will be very interesting for you.
And then I think you should go to Queen Elizabeth Park. There is a nice hotel, it is called Mweya. I saw you have brought your American Express card. It was lying on the mattress beside your shoe.’ (This she says quietly: there are people in the back, and you never know who is listening.) ‘The bazungu always go to Mweya. Lions, hyenas, crocodiles,’ she continues brightly, but Trevor’s not encouraged.
‘I thought we might just go back to Kampala,’ he says. ‘You know, a bit of the old civilisation.’ He thinks, Charles and Mary’s place is not the Ritz, but at least there are cold bottled beers in the fridge, there are newspapers, I’ve got my own bed. Whereas in the country ... it’s all so different. I’m a city boy, I can’t get my head around it. When that hut fell down, the village people just laughed. Che sara, sara, kind of thing, I suppose. (Being that laid-back didn’t help with the well ... )
But now he is infected with the same spirit. When Mary announced they were going on a trip, he didn’t argue, he just packed his things.
‘Charles expects us to be in the village for a week, but you have finished the job already. Now I think you deserve to see Uganda. There is more to Uganda than a hut which falls down. It is very beautiful, western Uganda.’
And the road leads west: straight to the west. Charles’s red Toyota bowls along at speed. Mercy and the child have been left behind, so Dora can get to know her cousins in the village. They will travel back to Kampala by bus. Mary’s aunt is in the back, and the neighbour, for both of them have errands on the way to Mbarara, the other side of the equator, and the neighbour’s brother is going also, a skinny, smiling man called James. ‘You will pay him, Trevor. He will drive you to Mweya.’
Out here, Trevor thinks, a car is a business. It’s a business opportunity, a car journey. Whereas at home, a car is just another car. Every bugger’s got one. We don’t think about it. Travel’s easy, for us. We just set off and go wherever we want to.
‘I hate to leave the country when he’s poorly,’ says Zakira, ringing from the Eurostar platform. ‘I’m so sorry I shouted at you, Justin, it’s just ... you know ... it makes me so uptight ... I said terrible things. Awful things. Can you ever forgive me?’
‘It’s OK,’ says Justin, but his voice is dead. He can’t forgive her at this moment. He’s pulled himself together, and left an urgent message with one of the Health Centre’s Indian receptionists. She seemed to understand him. Now it’s up to fate. But they’re going to call back; he can’t talk now. Half of him longs to leave like Zakira, walk out of the door, take a plane or train. Half of him is terrified, and wants Zakira here. A little voice inside him is crying, pleading: ‘Help me, someone. I’m only the father.’
‘You are taking him to the doctor?’
‘No, but the doctor’s going to ring. I’ve done my best. Don’t criticise me.’
‘Do you know I love you?’
‘Uhn,’ grunts Justin, and then he relents, just a second too late, and tries to mumble ‘I love you too,’ but she’s getting on the train, they are cut off.
Do something, Justin. Instead, he just sits there, slumped on the sofa, and thinks of his mother, who told him the sofa was bad for his spine.
Vanessa sits in a hot, metal box (where she cannot do so much as an ankle circle, though she desperately needs to do Salute to the Sun, and her back’s crying out for some Pilates), chained to a monomaniac who is bouncing them both through the dust of Uganda.
‘It is the fault of the First Family,’ says Isaac, for the umpteenth time. He is pointing out the lack of trees on the hilltops, whose clear, rounded outlines Vanessa had admired. ‘They cut down the trees to make charcoal.’
‘What, personally?’ asks Vanessa, sarcastically. ‘Museveni’s wife comes and cuts down the trees?’ She’s kept silent for hours, in the face of his obsession, but it’s hot, in the car, and the dust blows through the window, and her blood sugar is low, because she didn’t eat breakfast, and Isaac is certainly not the man she wanted. Everything’s the fault of the First Family. Malaria, AIDS, deforestation. There must be other things to say about Uganda.
He does not respond. He has not understood her.
‘I was told my driver would speak eight languages,’ Vanessa remarks to the air, indignant. ‘I was told he was a fully-fledged professional driver.’
‘I am fledged,’ Isaac remarks, after a little pause. ‘Of course, I am professional. I am a good driver.’
‘I was told I would have a driver-guide,’ Vanessa says, with heavy emphasis. ‘Someone who knew about the country.’
‘I know about it,’ the man insists. ‘For example, I know about the equator. It is the middle of the earth. We will be there, soon.’
‘We have made too many stops already,’ says Vanessa. ‘Or else we would have been there sooner.’ In fact, she is anxious about time. They must get to Bwindi before it is dark. She explains to him that the British Foreign Office advises its nationals not to drive after dark. In Bwindi, after dark, she thinks, anything might happen.
But the British Foreign Office does not impress Isaac. He simply says, ‘Do not worry, we will get there ... And you asked me to stop, so you could photograph tomatoes,’ he adds, indignant, taking his eyes from the road so at the last moment he has to wrench at the wheel to stop their jeep hitting a stationary taxi. The passengers, some getting off, some climbing in, crowd at the roadside, black in the sunlight, and gaze up at them, surly, as they go past: one goes on staring as they zoom into the distance. Bazungu go too fast: for them everything is easy. No waiting at bus stops by the dirty road.
‘You actually only stopped once for me. Mostly you refused to stop for photographs. You pretended that I asked too late. You have stopped to see your friends, and do deals,’ she says. ‘You stopped to get fuel, because you had forgotten, because you were not organised.’ She’s aware she sounds miserable, and petty, but she feels dreadful: she’s got prickly heat; her eyes are watering; this man is a chancer. Why did the proper driver’s friend have to break his arm? Why didn’t the safari firm cancel the trip? Or at least delay it until after the floods, and after the war, and after the Ebola – for today’s Monitor, which Vanessa bought through the car window as they rocked through the streets of early-morning Kampala, was almost comically full of bad news. Each story she read made her heart sink further. The floods are getting worse. The war is imminent. An outbreak of Ebola is reported in Congo. Of course, Congo is a big country. But Vanessa feels fate is picking on her, as surely as she was once picked on at school. Her luck has turned, or she’s pushed it too far. Now she’s being driven, unstoppably, towards a constellation of disasters near Bwindi. The world beyond the window looks bright and heartless, flashing past too fast, as if she’s saying goodbye.
‘My phone,’ she says suddenly, to no-one. ‘My phone. I have to ring my son.’
And as soon as she has said it, she remembers. She has left it charging, in her room. It was the fault of the power-cut, the rush, the panic, this stupid driver, the Sheraton ...
‘I’ve forgotten my phone!’
Is Isaac smiling? ‘I am sorry,’ he says, but she can see his mouth twitch. He’s definitely smiling! She is furious.
‘I am upset,’ she says, childishly. ‘I don’t feel safe without my phone. And I have to ring my son. My family.’ There is a pause. She stares at his profile, impassive now, a mask of wood outlined black against the sun. ‘It would help if you were sympathetic, honestly. I’m sure you drivers are supposed to be helpful.’
‘I am sympathetic,’ he argues, self-righteously. ‘For example, you can use my phone. You must give me some money, so I can get credit. I am sorry that you have forgotten your phone.’ Now his mouth seems to be twitching again. ‘I am sorry you were not organised.’
Trevor thinks: this road is pretty bloody good. Straight to the horizon, like a Roman road, like a road made by people who are heading for the future. Most of it is tarmacked. It’s in much better shape than the rutted, pockmarked roads of Kampala. Last night’s water h
as run off and lies in dark strips along the edges. His hangover is loosening, lessening. The matooke plants stretch away in neat rows. He’s starting to change his mind about Ugandans. Maybe they are quite organised. Every so often, by the road, there is a group of trestle tables selling fruit and vegetables. ‘Look like altars, don’t they?’ says Trevor. ‘I like that. Looks like they’re taking trouble over things.’
‘What you do not know, Trevor, is that these stalls are alive. They are bark-cloth trees. You plant a stick in the ground, and it grows, and then you put another, and so on.’
‘I’ve got just one thing to say to you, Mary,’ says Trevor. ‘Uganda is a bloody fantastic country.’
The fruit are beautifully arranged in neat little pyramids, tomatoes and potatoes rising up like offerings, as if each thing people have grown is precious: which it is, he reflects. But they’re lucky, here. Ugandans haven’t built over all their land. What would we do, back in England, without imports? We’ve grown fat and lazy. We can’t feed ourselves.
The bright reds and yellows look glorious to him, beside the dust of the road, like displays of jewels, as they zoom past yet another row of stalls. Food was precious to us, after the war, in the fifties, he reflects, when I was tiny, and everything was rationed. We knew what was what, in England, in those days. My grandpa got a pineapple, down at the pub, and my mum said I mustn’t tell my teacher. It was a great day when we had two bananas. Here there’s so much, but they still show it to advantage. Yams and breadfruit and bananas and marrows, and those great rough greeny-golden numbers Mary despises –
‘What were those big green things, Mary?’
‘Those? They are just jackfruit – for poor people and children. You would not like them.’
But as they pass a new stall, she spots something different on offer, and screams to a halt at the last moment, causing shrieks of laughter and protest in the back seat. ‘It is a special kind of passion fruit,’ she says. ‘I will take some back for my family and Mercy. And perhaps you would like to try some also, Trevor. You must have the best that Uganda has to offer.’ She is smiling at him with tender humour.
