by Maggie Gee
‘Oh dear,’ says Vanessa, ‘Mary won’t be pleased.’ Trevor has told her the car is Charles’s.
‘She won’t think much of the lion piss, either.’
They are through them, now. They are passing beyond, but the apes turn to watch them, curiously. Vanessa gazes over her shoulder. They look so at ease, like happy campers, on the margin between the farm and the forest. But they’re very exposed, out there in the sunlight. The forest looks smaller, retreating in the distance.
‘Trevor – do you think they will be all right? I thought they had to stay away from human beings?’
‘I’m more bothered about us at the moment. I don’t think this drive will be a picnic.’
Quite soon the little car is lurching over potholes where the rain has sucked the surface of the road away. A tiny tremor of apprehension. He is her hero, but can Trevor do this? ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Vanessa asks him. ‘In a while, if you like, I’ll drive for a bit. As long as there aren’t any precipices.’
‘No, don’t worry, I asked the manager. I told him you did not like heights.’
‘Oh thank you, darling.’ There is a pause. ‘Mind you, on the map, we were surrounded by mountains.’ Another pause. ‘Actually this looks familiar. It looks like the road I came before.’
‘What was that like?’
‘Oh, you know, horrific. One long precipice. Don’t worry. I just think all forests look alike. Are you wincing? Are you OK?’
‘Fine, Ness. Just a twinge in that hip.’
And then the road sinks into a shallow gully, which hems them in. No turning back. And then, imperceptibly, it starts to climb, and now she definitely recognises it, she knows they are driving towards the Rift Valley, and as that recognition settles, like a sudden dark liquid sinking through her veins, the land shears away, this time to her right, the solid land is no longer there, and this time she has no Ugandan driver, this time she has no four-wheel drive, this time she’s in a small, rackety saloon, and she and Trevor are on their own. She closes her eyes. ‘It’s the Rift Valley. Oh God. Oh God.’
‘We’ll be all right. We’re fine,’ says Trevor. ‘Look, you’re going to have to trust me, Vanessa. Say you trust me. Or we’re going nowhere.’
But he doesn’t tell her about the pain in his foot, which has been steadily increasing, a dull throbbing that sharpens every time he uses the clutch. She’s a highly-strung woman. Best say nothing.
‘I trust you,’ says Vanessa, her eyes tight shut.
By morning, the boy-man’s on the Rift Valley road. He has walked most of the night; he is exhausted, but something in his mind has clarified. Like everyone else, he must make for home. Even though nobody will want him. And even if she. The name he can’t say. Even if she will not take him in. Because he has been away so long. Because of all that he has done. He will go home, even if he has to go to prison. He listens to the word. Home. Home.
He is high on the road, overlooking the drop of thousands of feet to tiny fields, the silver river, when he sees three boys fifty metres ahead, on a short section where the road widens, a viewing-place, a turning space, and they are holding out tin bowls of something yellow. As he nears them, he sees it is fruit. They draw closer to each other. He must look frightening.
He points to the fruit. ‘Give,’ he says. They look at each other, silent. Then the biggest one says, his lip trembling, ‘Shillingi bishatu. Three hundred shillings!’ The boy-man raises his hand to strike him, and the seller steps backwards, then senses the cliff and instantly steps forward again. ‘Two hundred shillings,’ he says, very quiet. ‘Give,’ says the boy-man, then changes his mind. He points to himself. ‘No money! Give.’ The three boys look at each other, wordless, then the smallest one takes a fruit from his bowl and hands it over, with some small soft word. The oldest one says something angry under his breath, but a look at the boy-man’s face decides him. He is so thin: so wired with hunger: and something desperate in his eyes. Each of them gives him one fruit from his bowl. He eats, greedily, and spits out the stones. Both acid and sweet. But the sweetness lingers. It is like honey: bees and lemons. He remembers the woman, before, in the Congo, who gave him of her food to eat. Then a strange word comes from his mouth: ‘Webale. Thank you. Webale. Urakoze cyane!’ His mouth wobbles.
By the time Trevor sees the three boys on the corner, waving and holding out their merchandise, the pain in his ankle is changing colour, from a dullish ache to a red alert. How long, he thinks, will this road go on? Because until we’re off it, I can’t hand over to Vanessa.
‘Boys selling fruit’, he says to her. Her face is white, her forehead is clenched, her eyes are crimped shut like the cowrie shells they were selling in the shop at Mweya Lodge. ‘Don’t stop,’ she says. ‘Please. Please. Let’s get this over.’
‘I need a break. Tiny twinge in my ankle from when I fell. There’s a stopping place.’
She moans with fear as he stops and gets out. What if it rolls back down the hill? He buys three bowls at a thousand shillings each. The boys wave after them, noisily grateful, but his foot feels worse after the interruption.
‘I’m glad you did that,’ she says, suddenly, not opening her eyes, but reaching out her hand and patting his thigh, which puts pressure on his ankle and makes him gasp.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. That twinge again.’
‘Buying things. That’s what we should be doing, here.’
‘It is one thing.’
She wants him to admire her, as she admires him. She says, ‘I’m so proud about you and the well. And I’ll pay half, for the collection systems. Or more than half, if you want me to.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s my thing, Nessie. I mean, I can afford it, thank you. There’s bound to be something else you can do.’
He glances sideways at her pale, intense face, the light blue veining of her closed lids, the almost colourless lashes, trembling. ‘I’m glad you said it, though, Vanessa.’
It is starting to rain again, slow and deliberate, the noise on the roof a sharp little knock, saying don’t-relax, don’t-look-back, and it somehow connects to the pain in his ankle; come on, Trevor, you’re not done yet. The rain quickly intensifies, redoubles, veils the windscreen, becomes Ugandan.
Something living, brown, perhaps furry, suddenly shoots across the road, and he brakes, without thinking, and serious pain transfixes him, just for a second, and he gasps so loudly that she opens her eyes, which is why it is Vanessa who sees it first, just a troubling blur in the watery future, but it suddenly resolves into the boy-man, drenched, skinny, half-naked, pitiable, hobbling up the road, very close to the mountain.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘Poor child. Look.’
‘That’s not a child,’ says Trevor.
‘We should give him a lift,’ says Vanessa, suddenly. Yes: she knows this is what they must do. Now it is she who is the good person. Her cheeks flush with the effort of virtue.
‘No. We don’t know who he is,’ says Trevor.
But Vanessa, hyperventilating from her fear of heights, electrified with unused adrenalin, has turned all these chemicals into elation: she is now suffused with the desire to give. ‘Stop when there’s a safe place,’ she says.
‘Vanessa –’
‘Please, Trevor. You know we ought to.’
They pass the dark figure, press him into the bank, and stop fifty metres ahead of him. She watches him coming, in her mirror.
Trevor tries one more time. ‘I don’t like the look of him. Remember, this is not my car.’
‘Too late. He can’t hurt us, he looks like a cripple.’
Trevor winds down the window and bows to her will. ‘Get in.’ The boy stares, stares, stares at him: and very slowly, dripping, panting, hating them, suspecting, unbelieving, gets in.
As he opens the door, the rain comes in with him, a great wild gulp of everything they’re fleeing, wind, water, the unpredictable. Of course she should have expected the smell. Sour and
dark, with an undertow of sweetness. She hopes he won’t leave dirt on the seat. She tries to talk to him. ‘Hallo,’ and in a minute, ‘Terrible rain.’ But of course he sits there saying nothing, just out of their sight, rustling, breathing.
Time limps, crawls, now the boy is inside. Each minute in his presence seems a danger survived. They crawl on upwards, effortful, cautious. Vanessa babbles to Trevor, for reassurance, asserting a bond which might save her skin.
‘So Zakira is getting back this morning, did you say? And Abdy’s definitely off the danger list?’
But Trevor seems curiously unresponsive. He is peering forward, through the veils of rain. ‘I think we’ve got a problem,’ he says.
He stops the car, on an incline so steep that Vanessa moans lightly and clutches her seatbelt, sure they will run back down the hill, will roll for ever; she is sick with fear. ‘Don’t worry, girl,’ he says to her, ‘I’ve just got to do a little reccy,’ and he tries to jump lightly out of the car, partly to impress his youth and strength on his passenger, to show who’s boss, but as his weight lands on the dodgy ankle, something definitively goes; something yields, tears, and the pain is so great he has to cling to the bonnet.
But Trevor was not in the Territorial Army for nothing. He takes the pain, and limps forward, and sees that what he was afraid of is true: a third of the road has fallen away along a section of about thirty metres. It looks as if a giant has taken a bite. What is left is surely not quite wide enough, and great cracks like tree roots run across it. There is nothing for it but to reverse, but if they back down this road, Ness will have a breakdown. And then he looks down, down into the valley where the road they have come along winds and climbs, and he sees that lorries of soldiers are following, still small, still tiny, maybe half an hour away, but gaining on them: growing. Mud-coloured, grinding. And who the hell knows whose soldiers they are? He tries to limp back, and now he cries out. It can’t be born. His only way back to the car is to hop.
‘I think I’ve sprained my ankle,’ he says to her. ‘Ness, we’re in trouble. The road has gone. And I can’t manage the brakes with this foot. I’m very sorry. You’ll have to drive. I think we’re going to have to go back down.’
‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’ Her face is white, her pupils are pinpricks. ‘We’ll have to sit here until help comes.’ They stare at each other: terrifying knowledge.
Both of them jump and clutch each other when a voice suddenly comes from the back. It sounds rusty, more of a croak than a voice, something harsh and powerful, a caw, a crow sound, but what’s more surprising is, the voice is English. ‘I,’ he tries. Then, more clearly, ‘I will drive. I can see the road. I know I can do it.’
‘No,’ says Vanessa. Then: ‘You speak English?’ He sounds English. It is surreal. But no stranger than everything else that has happened.
‘Can you drive?’ asks Trevor. ‘Have you passed a test?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right then. There’s nothing else for it.’
‘No,’ says Vanessa. ‘No, please.’ But Trevor is already opening the door, and then the smell of death is getting in beside Vanessa.
‘Come on, Ness. We’ve got to trust him.’
She shrinks inside herself. Death is so near. They will fall and be crushed. She knows it is over. But some tiny part of herself sees something different. They want to live. This might be a way.
‘All right,’ she says. Her voice is almost a whisper. Then once again, she thinks no, this is madness, but before she can get out, the boy is gunning the motor, and she closes her eyes and hides her head in her hands, because this will be like flying, and she cannot fly the plane, and Trevor, behind her, takes her neck between his fingers, her thin bony neck under her nest of pale hair, and pats it, strokes it, kneads her shaking shoulder as the engine catches, roars, takes off, and she screams as the boy revs madly on forwards up the stretch of road where she has seen the long cracks crawl out black as night across the sun-bleached surface, spread towards disaster like great forking tree-roots, drawing on nothing, sucking in blank air, breaking up like dust on a cracked cusp of nothingness, spilling down the thousand-metre drop into the Rift Valley
how strange, they will die where life began
and they tilt, right themselves, tear on
and Trevor in the back is letting loose a great chain of expletives, one after the other and the sickening, yawing, jolt of their motion makes Vanessa drive her nails into her forehead for comfort yet she also feels Trevor’s fingertips, pulsing and they have been doing this for a lifetime until, desperate, she half-opens her eyes and she sees to her horror they are only half-way but she also notices the ultimate madness: as they jerk wildly forwards, both men are laughing
45
In Kampala, it’s hardly rained all week. In the flooded parts of Uganda, some mutter that the President has done a pact with the devil and sent all the rain to them instead. The storks chatter and stretch their wings in the sunshine, and eat the rubbish, as they always do, and listen in on the doings of the humans.
Mary Tendo is on Kololo hill, buying mangoes and spinach for Trevor and Vanessa, who should be back from Bwindi today. Trevor’s phone call has galvanised her. Poor Trevor, having to save Vanessa! And the Henman will have spread her messy things in Charles’s car. Still, she’s glad nothing bad has happened to her. Ah, Vanessa. But Mary’s smile is gentle. She enjoys shopping at the end of the day, still wearing her Sheraton uniform so the stallholders treat her with proper respect. In this market, many of the customers are house servants from the embassies, girls and young women that Mary Tendo pities, for their job is nameless, their prospects non-existent. She would never slave like that for the bazungu. At the Sheraton, she has power, and status. She smooths the golden sleeve of her jacket, and smiles at a young girl buying cassava. She is looking forward to seeing Trevor, and even the supposed ‘international writer’. The light on the trees of Kololo is golden, and children play football on the green of the airstrip.
She stops, for a moment, and watches them, and the familiar sadness catches her heart, the sadness she will have to live with for ever. And yet, she is glad to have read in the paper that war has just moved further away, so there will not be sorrow for thousands of mothers. Life is sad: yet Mary Tendo will be happy, she tells herself that she must be happy, because she has a job, and a child, Theodora, and a husband she loves, even though he is small, and because they will have a feast today. A boy scores a goal: cries of jubilation.
She is in her kitchen, making sure that Charles has put enough beer in the fridge for Trevor, when she hears a car slow up outside. She straightens her hair, removes her apron. ‘Charles,’ she calls. ‘I think it must be Trevor. At last you will have your car again! And it smells as though the chicken is nearly ready.’
‘I have forgiven you for lending my car. I am sure your Trevor has looked after it. And tomorrow, I have a surprise for you. It is no good asking, I will not tell you. Truly, your chicken smells delicious ... but why isn’t Mercy doing the cooking?’
‘I said she could have some time for her lesson. In fact, she can have some time each day, to improve her low level of education. And in any case, she is not so bad. Simubi nnyo. Ndabye abamusinga. I have had worse maids, as you know, my love.’
He thinks, Mary is strangely sweet today, and then he remembers how she used to be: how he had once loved her for her cheerful sweetness. Perhaps there is something in this church business.
He peers through the window: a little down the road, there is the red of his Toyota. Thank heavens, the bazungu have returned it. ‘I will go out, my love.’ He picks up Theodora, and sighs as he does so: his beautiful, mute, un-mothered daughter.
But Mary smiles. ‘Tujja kugenda ffena. Charles, we will go out together.’
Inside the car, Vanessa’s weak with relief as the strange, stinking boy, at Trevor’s instructions, passes one of many small brick bungalows, then stops. ‘You’re sure that was the house?
’ she asks Trevor.
‘I’m sure, Vanessa.’ He adds, ‘My darling.’
‘You got us here. Thank you,’ she says to the boy. ‘Thank you. You drove so well. You seemed to know Kampala.’
‘Now I must go,’ says the boy, shrugging, but she thinks she glimpses the hint of a smile. She has learned the hard way to praise the young, for Justin complains that she rarely praised him.
‘Hang on a sec,’ says Trevor, patting the boy’s arm, and as he bends closer, the sweat is overwhelming, there is dirt but also the sharp sweat of terror. ‘We owe you a lot. Don’t you need a feed?’
But the boy is fighting his way out of the car, fumbling and tripping in his panic. Trevor catches his sleeve, and he snatches it away. ‘Get off me, fuck off,’ he shouts, desperate, and limps blindly away from them, back down the road.
And walks head on into a smart woman, their foreheads banging, bone on bone, head to head, making her stagger back, winded.
Mary Tendo shouts at him, furiously, this rough dirty boy who has no manners – ‘Obadde okolaki mumotoka y’omwami wange! What were you doing in my husband’s car?’ – Have Vanessa and Trevor gone mad? she thinks.
The boy looks back at the shouting woman, briefly: looks back, gapes, crumples in an instant. Now he’s on his knees; he begins to cry, like a hurt crow keening, harsh, painful, his voicebox breaking, barking with sorrow, and she clutches her breast, she screams like a banshee, tears at her heart as she falls like him, they are both kneeling in the dusty road, crawling towards each other like children, open-mouthed, gasping, the tears spurting, scrambling over the dust and stones until Mary can seize him in her arms, and Charles, not understanding, scared, says, ‘Leave her alone!’ and thrusts the boy away, but his wife encircles her wounded son, her strong arms enfold his thin shaking body, his cheeks are scarred, his neck is scarred, one eye is reddened and half-closed, he smells of excrement, earth, decay, but the curve of his mouth she knows so well – she looks up at her husband, face streaming with tears, and gasps, sobs, ‘It is Jamil. It is my Jamie. My Jamil.’ And to Vanessa: ‘You found my son. God be praised, you have found my son.’ And then she turns to Theodora. Her tongue loosens, she speaks to her. ‘Laba, Dora mwana wange. See, my Dora, my darling girl. Mwana wange omwagalwa! It is your brother. It is Jamie! Wuuyo mwanyoko Jamie!’ And after a while, she embraces Vanessa. Through their thin clothes, they feel the hearts thudding. Through tears and tiredness and the limits of skin.
