Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  Now that she had the time to think about it, she and Mukasa had never spent great quantities of their time together. Even back home, after they’d moved in together, she was sandwiched between shifts, meetings, sleep, patients, lectures. Not that she’d minded; attending several of Mukasa’s stuffy work functions early in their relationship had confirmed that she was more than happy to live on the periphery of his work life.

  Now, though, she was starting to wonder how much of a person she could actually know if she only caught him in gaps and glimmers. She began to wonder if the real Mukasa Kiteki was another country entirely, whether what happened between them had always been carried out with the choreographed care and watchfulness brought on by foreign soil.

  * * *

  Ange rolled onto her back and ran her eyes across the bold printed headlines of the Bukedde newspaper. The letters looked the same as in English. It couldn’t be impossible to learn Luganda.

  It wasn’t that she needed to speak her boyfriend’s language. Just that, for some reason, Mukasa had reverted to it. Unless he was addressing Ange, or a hospital supplier overseas, he had barely spoken English since they arrived in Uganda. As a result, he’d rendered her mute in almost every encounter: with shopkeepers, colleagues, the help. Ange would stand to one side, waiting patiently for the interaction to finish, while Mukasa organized dinner, the landscaping, or a hospital night shift. Sometimes Ange caught Lucinda, the housekeeper, glancing at her apologetically as Mukasa held extended conversations with her in their mother tongue.

  Giving up on the newspaper, Ange swung her legs over the side of the bed, slipped her feet into her slippers and padded out to the kitchen. Lucinda was standing at the counter, finely dicing meat on a blue plastic chopping board.

  “Need any help, Lucinda?” Ange asked, already anticipating the young woman’s well-rehearsed reply.

  “No, thank you, miss.” Lucinda didn’t look up from the knife. “The Doctor would not like it.”

  Ange picked up a piece of carrot from a wooden chopping board and popped it into her mouth. “Yeah, well, the Doctor is a pompous arsehole sometimes.”

  Lucinda paused, knife poised above the lamb shank, and turned her head to look at Ange. Their eyes met, and after a moment of silence they both collapsed with laughter.

  “Have you almost finished up?” Ange asked, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Once the stew is on, come drink some waragi with me.”

  Lucinda looked to the door, as if afraid Mukasa would return any minute.

  “He has a late meeting,” Ange said.

  * * *

  Without her headscarf, sitting comfortably on the leather lounge, and with her somber expression softened by half a cup of waragi, Lucinda looked almost as young as Ange.

  “Miss, you are not what I expected,” she smiled, “when the Doctor said he is bringing home with him a wife.”

  “I’m not his wife,” Ange corrected her.

  Lucinda looked genuinely surprised. “You don’t seem happy here. And I thought that if you are not married to him and . . . not happy, then a woman like you would not be staying.”

  A woman like you. Ange set her glass down on the table. She shouldn’t worry about it. Lucinda was just a simple housegirl—Mukasa was always reminding Ange of that. Lucinda didn’t understand Ange’s situation.

  “A long time, I have known the Doctor,” Lucinda said. “My mother worked for his mother in this house, when I was young. We lived out in the back house until the accident. The Doctor . . . even then he could be . . . very persuasive.” Lucinda looked down, into her drink, as if she’d suddenly realized that what she held was a very tongue-loosening liquid.

  The front door opened then. Mukasa stared at the two young women as he quietly closed it behind him, standing in the small entrance alcove that led into the lounge room.

  “Have you not got dinner to cook or something else to do that I’m actually paying you for?” he boomed, taking off his jacket and holding it out to Lucinda.

  The English, Ange realized, was for her benefit.

  “Sorry, Doctor Kiteki. I am so very sorry, Doctor Kiteki, forgive me.” Lucinda scuttled over to take the coat.

  The look on Mukasa’s face was one of satisfaction, as if he relished the young woman’s fear. When he turned and saw Ange watching him, his face softened. Calmness came to his voice.

  “Don’t socialize with the servants,” he said.

  Ange felt sick to her stomach. Servants.

  “I don’t pay her to be friends with you.”

  She stared at him, lost for words.

  * * *

  Mukasa climbed into bed several hours after Ange did. She lay as far from him as possible, pretending to be asleep, the pillow underneath her head wet with tears.

  “Where are you, Angie? Come over to me.” Mukasa’s drunken fingers fumbled beneath the sheets. She could smell that awful Konyagi rum he’d taken to drinking.

  “I’m tired, Kasa. And to be honest, that is the last thing I feel like right now.” Ange pushed his hand away but it kept coming at her, insistent, annoyed. She rolled over to face him. He wasn’t there, Mukasa. Just a masked man, nothing behind his eyes but urge. He was looking at her face but not really seeing. He climbed on top of her, groaning as he pushed his way into her body. Ange lay there quietly, her trembling body bracing itself against him, searching his eyes for something, anything. Him.

  * * *

  The first time Ange had seen Mukasa naked was in the studio apartment she was renting. It was about six months after that first date, and Penelope and Dean were really starting to rib her about the sex thing.

  Penelope never tired of quizzing Ange about it. “Any action yet? Y’know, I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s a religious thing. Maybe he’s a closet Muslim and you’re gonna have to marry him to see it. Or maybe it’s too big, and he’s scared that you’ll jump out the window when he whips it out. You know what they say about black men.”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, Penelope.” In the beginning, it had been amusing to Ange as well, but she and Mukasa had been together now for almost half a year. Mukasa was always a gentleman, even asking for her permission the first time they kissed. There was no way he could misinterpret her advances, and yet when things got too heated he slowly backed out of the embrace—went to put the kettle on, or started talking about his day at work. She was sure he was probably just being considerate, careful.

  Still, some nights Ange had stood in front of the mirror, staring distastefully at her body. Her legs were thin and lanky. Her slim white thighs were longer than she thought they should be. They’d served her more than amply when she was younger and used to run, but now they were a regular annoyance to her, particularly when she was trying to buy jeans—there was only flatness where the curve of her bottom should be. Her hips were narrow—barely existent, and without the underwired bra she usually wore, she felt practically flat up there. They were almost a B cup, which was something, but she couldn’t help thinking her boyfriend’s reluctance had something to do with them. She thought about the African women she’d met through Mukasa: friends who’d studied with him, or whose families had known his back home. They were mostly built like real women, Ange thought. Their hips curved out from their waists. Their firm thighs shaped upwards into impossibly rounded bottoms. As if the shape thing weren’t enough of a turnoff, there was also the translucent whiteness of her naked skin.

  Then, one day, Mukasa had come over straight from the hospital. They were due at the Theatre Royal at eight. A patient had given him free tickets. Mukasa was completely uninterested in musicals, but Ange had begged him to take her, and he’d eventually acquiesced.

  Full of liquid bravado from the Crown Lager she’d nervously downed while waiting for him to arrive, she opened the door to her tiny bathroom and pushed his discarded work clothes aside with her foot. Through the shower glass she could see water streaming over the shiny mahogany of his smooth, tall body. He turned to look at her, surprised, but she
started unbuttoning her blouse with one hand. She raised the other and pressed her index finger to her lips.

  Three hours later—the musical well and truly missed—they lay exhausted on her bed, limbs intertwined, skin soaked with sweat. Ange was speechless. It was a word used in novels all the time, but she actually couldn’t talk.

  The minute Ange had walked through the salon door the next day, Penelope had looked her up and down and squealed, “Fucking no fucking way!”

  Ange hadn’t even said anything; it was there somehow, just in her walk.

  * * *

  Mukasa was standing over the bed when Ange woke up the next morning.

  “Lucinda’s gone. I dismissed her. From now on, you will do the cleaning and cooking.” He bent at the waist and kissed her on the cheek, then fastened his tie and left the room.

  Ange slowly wiped the sleep from her eyes, sat up in the bed. This couldn’t be happening. It was a dream, all of it. If she closed her eyes, the alarm clock in her and Mukasa’s sunny Strathfield apartment would start ringing, and she’d have to hurry to get to the station in time to catch the 8:10 train into the city.

  She could walk out of the house now, out of the compound, call a taxi to the airport. All she needed was her passport. She didn’t need to take her things. There’d be enough money in her account to get on the first plane out, or she could phone her parents to wire some. But Ange didn’t want to leave, even now. She loved Mukasa, and she would make it work. She could make it work. She was angry about last night. The memory of Kasa’s body pushing down on her made her feel sick. But it wasn’t his fault. That wasn’t him. She just had to somehow find the man who had walked into Toni & Guy that winter, that caring man she’d fallen in love with. Besides, the thought of returning to her old life—to asymmetrical inner-city haircuts and two-tone dye jobs—made her bored beyond desperation.

  Ange slowly climbed out of bed and made her way over to the large walk-in wardrobe. She took out her navy-blue sweater dress, some sheer tights and her red ballet flats. Mukasa loved the outfit: he’d told her several times that it was one of his favorites.

  After showering, she put on the clothes, dug her curling wand out of the bathroom cupboard and started working on the ends of her hair. Her leaving cut had long grown out. She’d asked Mukasa to let the driver take her to a place in Kampala to get her hair cut.

  “Western hairdressers are hard to find,” he’d said. “I’ll ask around at the hospital and when I hear of a good one I’ll get them to drop by the house.”

  Ange examined herself in the mirror. It was a long time since she’d made this much effort. No wonder Mukasa had started taking her for granted. She didn’t have to let herself go to rack and ruin just because she didn’t get out of the house all that much.

  She smoothed a curl into place, turned on her heel and made her way to the kitchen. The fridge was enormous—a hulking three-door chrome beast of a thing. She’d barely had occasion to look inside it before, because most times she went within a meter of it Lucinda had somehow materialized from nowhere. She opened one of the doors and started pulling out onions.

  * * *

  Ange had always wanted breasts like this—a few sizes bigger, a little more pert, a touch rounder. She turned to one side. Her stomach was starting to swell. She didn’t know much about pregnancy, but she guessed from the end of the morning sickness that she must be about four months along now. Lucky she wasn’t showing yet. She was going to have to tell Mukasa soon. She was waiting just two more weeks, until the tickets for their first trip back to Australia had been booked. At first, not telling him had been about making sure she still made it home for the holiday. Then it had become a whole other thing. She felt stronger, more powerful, knowing she was concealing someone from him. Mukasa still spent twelve hours each day at work and came home to her and told her nothing. She’d been in Kampala for eight months now and the only people she’d met were his work colleagues and a handful of cousins. When she complained, he’d looked her up and down suspiciously. “Who else is there that you want to meet?”

  But now she had this thing he didn’t know about, not only right under his nose but growing and breathing, taking up even more space, drawing ever closer, and he still couldn’t see it.

  Three weeks back, Ange’s passport had disappeared. One day it was in her bedside drawer, the next it was gone. She’d told herself not to panic. Mukasa must have put it in the safe at work in case one of the house staff took off with it, or maybe he’d needed it to get the visa for the trip. She didn’t fancy an argument, so she’d decided not to mention it. There was no malice involved, though, Ange was sure of it. It was just the prejudice she’d been brought up with that made her mind fly to the conclusions it did—her mother’s hysterical voice ringing in her ears.

  Whatever happened, she knew Mukasa loved her. She knew if she waited long enough, showed him that she wasn’t planning on going anywhere, things would eventually go back to the way they were before.

  * * *

  Mukasa made it home for dinner at seven, an anomaly Ange appreciated. The millet bread had come out perfect, on her third attempt. She’d found an old stash of African cookbooks at the back of a kitchen cupboard, and they’d proved a godsend after Lucinda left. Never much interested in cooking, she now spent most of her day preparing elaborate dinners for when Mukasa came home.

  Ange watched Mukasa take his first mouthful of stew, waiting for his nod of approval. He swirled the stew around in his mouth, swallowed it quickly, then broke off a bit of bread. Raising his head to look at her, he put the fork down slowly. “How long,” he asked casually, “have you known you are pregnant?”

  “Pardon?” She chewed the meat slowly, stalling.

  “Well, have you actively been keeping it from me, or are you really so stupid you haven’t even realized it? That’s what I get for marrying a fucking hairdresser.”

  “We aren’t married.” The heat rose in Ange’s face before she realized how angry she was. Once she started speaking, though, there was no checking herself. “You hear that? We’re not fucking married, Mukasa. And even if we were, that wouldn’t give you the right to treat me like shit!”

  Rage was written all over Mukasa’s face. He picked up the bowl of stew and threw it across the room. She saw his hand coming before she heard the bowl land, but she didn’t have time to move. He reached out and wrapped his long fingers around her neck, jumping up from his seat so fast her whole body was lifted from the chair. The other hand came for her, fist crushing into her back.

  Ange lay on the ground, gasping for air. Mukasa leaned down and grabbed her by the hair, bringing his face close to hers. She could smell the rich spices of the groundnut stew coming off his hot breath.

  “You just remember,” he spat, “who the fuck you are talking to here.” He let go of her hair. Her head dropped suddenly, thudded against the polished wooden boards of the dining room floor.

  Ange curled around her stomach, terrified he’d come at her again. Through the blur of tears she watched Mukasa’s polished black shoes walk from the room. The front door slammed, and his car started up in the garage.

  Behind her closed eyelids, Ange could see the outline of the African continent. She still looked at the map most mornings, made a game of memorizing the geography. Now, she traced the borders of Uganda in her mind, shutting out the dull ache at the back of her head, the shooting pains in her stomach. This country was crouched deep in the Nile Basin, sloping its way down into the wet marshes of Lake Kyoga. On the other side, it curved back up to the green giant, Mount Rwenzori. Uganda was locked by land. South Sudan, Rwanda, or Tanzania were the farthest she could run. Every escape would be ever more foreign soil.

  Shu Yi

  KELLYVILLE VILLAGE was made up of a bizarre assortment of dropout hillbillies, market gardeners and young one-income families. The center of village life was a short strip along the main artery of Windsor Road featuring ten or so locally owned businesses and small-goods shops and
the public school, the prominent red-and-black emblem—a kookaburra on a shield—fixed to the front gate displaying the motto PLAY THE GAME.

  It was typical everyone-knows-everyone-else’s-business-and-can-I-borrow-a-cup-of-milk-for-the-kids’-breakfast-please suburban blond-brick Australia. The white-picket-fence dream was alive, kicking its calloused toes determinedly against apathy in rubber Franklin thongs. In summer, sprinklers rotated perpetually on lush front yards. Swimming-costumed children skylarked beneath the cool spray. Doors were left unlocked for neighborhood children to come and go as they pleased, and the dinnertime call from mothers was often boomed in a succession of megaphone-volumed reminders from a front step or porch. Extra table settings were standard in every household. If you played your cards right you could have dinner and dessert three times a night.

  Nineteen ninety-two was the hottest summer on record, at least since I’d been born. Salt-N-Pepa were all over the airwaves. In our tiny suburb, between crimping bangs and rearranging fluoro bobby socks, all the other grade-three girls were singing “Let’s Talk About Sex,” too young to realize the real revolution wasn’t bumping and grinding at eight and a half, but two unbroken young brown women giving the finger to the world on Video Hits.

  Forget talking about it, I didn’t even really know what sex was. Most of all, though, I didn’t want a bar of Salt-N-Pepa, or any of their black-as-me friends. I hated my brother’s MC Hammer flattop (lopsided, with a two-blade undercut) and happy pants, and my sister’s hyper-color bodysuit and British Knights shoes. Mac Daddy from Kris Kross did not make me want to jump crazy up and down in high top shoes.

  The real Aussie girls crimped and permed to get frizzy post-eighties Afros, but I was busy begging my mother for hair extensions, or saving up for Soul Pattinson’s straightening goo. My blackness was the hulking beast crouched in the corner of every room, and absolutely nothing was going to make it seem cool.