Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  They stood as the gale buffeted them like stoic statues set against the tempests. There was salt spray in the air and it flashed against their faces as the hulking waves below rolled across the rocks and shattered into droplets and mist.

  ‘Shall I take you home?’ said Thomas.

  For a while neither of them moved. Then Azalea turned and buried her face into his shoulder. ‘Yes please,’ she said. ‘Take me home.’

  16

  June 1992

  The low building that was Pastor David’s house was built in the style of a circular Acholi hut and roofed with grass, but the building material was cinder block and not traditional adobe mud brick, and there was glass in the windows and a concrete yard with a bench and a rocking chair and a cooking stove. Inside the front door was a small anteroom, and leading off from this, two awkwardly shaped rooms like the slices of a pie. One was the room where the pastor slept, and the other was where he lived and conducted his business. Behind the roundhouse was the toilet hole, a rain barrel and a separate lean-to arrangement of corrugated metal sheets, behind which the pastor could carry out his ablutions in reasonable privacy.

  When the alarm bell sounded from the roof of the mess hall, Pastor David had just returned from breakfast and was in his washroom soaping down, and maybe this is why he failed to hear the bell which should have summoned him back to the hall; or maybe – and perhaps more likely – Pastor David was growing a little old and his hearing was not so good. Whatever the reason, by the time he had finished washing, the bell had stopped. Pastor David had no need of a towel. He would dry off in the sun on his porch. He had laboured around to the little concrete yard and was lowering himself into the rocking chair to contemplate God’s glorious creation, when down the path like a pair of cane rats came Anyeko and Azalea.

  ‘LRA! LRA!’ Anyeko was shouting.

  Among the Buganda people, of whom Pastor David could be counted, there was no love for the Lord’s Resistance Army and very little fear of the magic they claimed to perform. The pastor lifted himself back out of his chair, still wet from his morning wash. ‘In there,’ he commanded, and the girls disappeared into his sleeping room.

  The wise thing, now, to have done would have been for Pastor David to have settled once more into his rocker, giving the appearance of a man undisturbed enjoying his morning nap. Instead the good pastor took up a position outside his front door, like a soldier guarding a palace, and this is how the two LRA boys found him when they came running down his path just a few moments later.

  ‘Who are you?’ Pastor David demanded of them in English. This took them aback. It was not a language they could reply in.

  ‘Are you the pastor?’ asked one of the boys in Acholi.

  ‘I am,’ said the old Buganda man, replying in their language. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You are wanted,’ said the boy. He carried a very old rifle.

  ‘Who wants me?’

  ‘Joseph Kony wants you,’ said the boy.

  ‘Why does he want me?’

  ‘To chase away a devil.’

  The pastor looked shaken by this information. ‘Tell him to come and get me,’ he said.

  The boy looked frightened. ‘You must come,’ he insisted. ‘You must come.’

  The second LRA boy, whose gun was equally antique, made for the door of the house, but the pastor blocked his way. ‘Very well,’ said the priest. ‘I will come. Lead the way.’

  ‘You’re hiding someone!’ shouted the first boy in excitement.

  ‘No,’ said the pastor, ‘I am hiding nobody. Now take me to Kony.’

  The first boy hesitated. He was used to taking orders and perhaps, before his own abduction, he may have learned to respect the elders of the church. But the second boy, it seemed, did not share his qualms. He pushed past the elderly pastor, who could do little to stop him, and burst into the house. A moment later he emerged, and at the dangerous end of his gun were Azalea and Anyeko.

  This is what Azalea remembered of that day. She remembered being marched at gunpoint back to the compound. There was a sense of general pandemonium. Kony had left, and the men and boys who remained seemed wild-eyed and unsure quite what they should be doing. There was a lot of shouting.

  It was as well, perhaps, for the delicate psyche of the thirteen-year-old, that Azalea was spared the opportunity to witness much of what followed. She and Anyeko were thrown roughly into the back of a truck, joining Tebere and Kila and Lubangakene and James. She felt a knee sharply in her back, and someone wrenched her arms behind her and pulled a plastic cable-tie tight around both her thumbs. Then she was shoved aside like a bag of cassava and with a jolt the truck was off, bouncing down the potholed mission drive.

  In the annals of human recklessness or stupidity, what happened next might well deserve an entry. Despite his undertaking not to engage in heroics, Ritchie Lewis, now outside the mission compound and on the road to Langadi township, had struggled against this irregular instruction. When Luke had thrown his devil act, Lauren had grabbed Ritchie’s wrist and had marched him firmly away from the compound. But it felt wrong to Ritchie. No sooner had they escaped from the confines of the mission than Ritchie dug his heels in. ‘You go,’ he told Lauren. ‘I might be needed.’

  ‘Needed! How?’ Lauren demanded. But there was no restraining Ritchie once his gallantry had been awoken. They crept to the roadside a short way from the mission gate and concealed themselves behind a makote tree.

  ‘Get down!’ Lauren commanded in a stage whisper. ‘They’re coming.’

  The truck carrying Joseph Kony and his henchman came barrelling out of the compound, flying past them in a dust cloud.

  ‘You know who that was?’ Lauren said. ‘That was Joseph Kony. The most dangerous man in Africa.’

  ‘We don’t know that for certain,’ Ritchie said.

  ‘I’ve seen his photograph,’ Lauren hissed.

  ‘In that case,’ said Ritchie, his mettle wholly undented by this possibility, ‘they need us even more.’

  ‘What are you intending to do?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ said Ritchie. He pulled Lauren towards him and, on impulse, kissed her firmly on the mouth.

  ‘Is that in case we die in the next ten minutes?’ Lauren asked. But the kiss had robbed her of some of her resistance.

  ‘We won’t,’ Ritchie said reassuringly. And if the possibility of mortal danger had failed to occur to Ritchie before the kiss, it seemed even more remote after it. They crouched down and watched the road.

  ‘What can you see?’ Lauren whispered.

  Ritchie was peering through the undergrowth. ‘I think they’ve got the kids in the truck.’

  ‘What? All the kids?’

  ‘No. I think they just have four . . . or five. I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘Azalea’s with them.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’ said Lauren. ‘Don’t do anything rash, Ritchie. There’s nothing we can do. They’ve got guns.’

  ‘They’re coming,’ Ritchie said suddenly. He scrambled to his feet.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going with them.’

  ‘What? Are you mad?’

  ‘I might be able to help,’ Ritchie said. ‘You stay there.’ He stepped out from their hiding place behind the makote tree.

  ‘Ritchie – you idiot.’

  He was standing now in the middle of the track. The second LRA truck was on its way out of the mission compound heading towards them.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Lauren was on her feet too. ‘You’d better kiss me again, you cloth-head,’ she said.

  They kissed, and less than two minutes later, with cable-ties around their thumbs, Ritchie and Lauren were in the back of the pick-up with Azalea and Anyeko and the rest of the children.

  They drove for perhaps four hours, possibly five. The captives lay, tied and uncomfortable, on the floor of the truck, while an assortment of LRA soldiers sat on the wing plates with their guns, enjoying – it would seem – their appeara
nce of gangster-like intimidation. When they pulled up at their destination and all the soldiers had whooped and jumped clear, a man who had the appearance of a senior commander came to inspect the catch. He was visibly disturbed by the presence of Azalea and the VSOs. ‘Muna muna!’ he yelled with some alarm. A crowd of armed and thin LRA conscripts and soldiers swarmed up to the truck. There were loud exchanges of view. Azalea’s command of Acholi was fairly good. To her ear, the commander – or whatever his designated rank might be – was terrified that white captives would attract the attention of the Ugandan army. A welter of opinions and suggestions was forthcoming from the other LRA men. One suggestion was to shoot them right away and dump them on the road, but the senior man, to his credit, could not see how that would help. It would only enrage the army more. A suggestion that drew more support was to demand a ransom. The LRA were not proficient kidnappers – not for money, at least – but the idea clearly had some merit. Ritchie was identified as the spokesman. ‘Are you British?’ the LRA man demanded of him in Acholi.

  ‘Tell him “Ee”,’ said Azalea in a whisper.

  ‘Ee,’ said Ritchie, uncertain what he was saying, or why.

  The soldiers conferred.

  ‘He asked if we were British,’ said Azalea. You said “yes”. They respect the British more than some of the others. Also they think the British would pay a good ransom for us. And they are scared that if they hurt us, then the British might come and track them down.’

  After quite a bit of shouting, orders were given to unload the captives from the truck. As this happened it looked, for a moment, as if the St Paul’s orphans might be going somewhere else. Azalea seemed emboldened by the success of their first intervention. ‘They stay with us!’ shouted Azalea, in Acholi. A stunned lull in the bedlam greeted this declaration. ‘If they don’t stay with us, then the British will send planes to cut you all down!’

  Eyes turned to the senior soldier, who was clearly the only man capable of making such a serious decision. He rolled his eyes and responded with a curt flick of his gun, and that appeared to be an instruction to keep the group together. Still bound at the thumbs, all eight of the prisoners were jostled off the tailgate, roughly herded underneath a jacaranda tree and ordered to sit in the dust.

  ‘You can cut these things off our thumbs,’ shouted Azalea, her belligerence waning.

  ‘I really don’t think you should upset them,’ said Lauren.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Azalea. ‘They won’t dare hurt us.’ She turned to a round-faced boy who seemed to have been ordered to watch them. ‘And you can bring us some water!’ she yelled.

  The boy trembled. Then he shouted something over his shoulder and two girls came running with plastic water bottles. One girl held the bottle out to Azalea.

  ‘We can’t drink these with our hands tied,’ Azalea said. She turned again to the trembling boy. ‘Cut these ties from our thumbs,’ she repeated, ‘or I will speak to Joseph Kony. I’ll tell Joseph Kony that you refused to let your British guests go free.’

  At the mention of Kony’s name, the boy shook even more. He relayed the threat back to a larger boy and the message was passed to the senior commander, who came over to investigate. He barked something at Ritchie.

  ‘Talk to me,’ said Azalea. ‘Those two are just tourists.’

  The commander looked anxious again. Taking tourists could be a dangerous gambit – even by the standards of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He stared at the willowy girl wearing nothing but a nightdress, who seemed to be shouting instructions at his men. ‘You know Joseph Kony?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I know Joseph Kony!’ Azalea snapped. ‘Do you?’

  The two held each other’s gaze for a long moment. Azalea, who might not normally have counted herself a good liar, felt quite justified in her claim. Hadn’t she been the first to see Kony at the mission, standing alone in the driveway as breakfast ended?

  The commander looked away, apparently convinced. ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘First, get your men to release our hands,’ said Azalea. ‘Do you have any idea how uncomfortable this is? Then we want clean water and a hut. We won’t run away.’ She stared obstinately at the man. ‘And bring us some bananas, we’re hungry,’ she said, ‘and a melon.’

  The commander was breathing heavily. Once again he gave a flick of his gun, and a boy ran up with a long cane-knife to cut the cable-ties from their thumbs. To assert his authority the commander took the knife from the boy, and, holding it up against Azalea’s belly, he brought his face very close to her face and shouted a stream of Acholi words. Then, for good measure, he turned and did the same to Lauren Marks. Lauren, to her credit, had now learned from the sangfroid shown by Azalea. She kept her composure as the LRA man finished his tirade and stalked away.

  ‘What did he say?’ Lauren said to Azalea.

  But Azalea, despite her bravado, had been shaken by the outburst. She shook her head, and for the first time there were tears emerging in her eyes. ‘He said we must stay here,’ she managed to say. ‘We shouldn’t try to escape.’

  But what the soldier had really said was later told to Lauren by Anyeko. And what he said was, ‘Set one foot out of this camp, muna muna girl, and I’ll slice you from your little white pussy to your little white neck.’

  And so, back to Langadi for the scene that Azalea was spared. We need not dwell too long on it. It was, after all, an episode, like the slaughter of Lester and Monique Folley and their son Lester Folley III, that does not call for embellishment. This was 21 June 1992, ten years to the day since Marion Yves was abducted from a fairground in Devon. And what transpired at the mission was indeed the violent shooting of Rebecca Folley, the second of three mothers that Azalea would learn to love. But in one important respect it was not quite the slaughter that Azalea had always imagined.

  When the trucks left the compound taking with them Rebecca’s only daughter and five of the orphans she loved, Rebecca’s world fell apart. The lioness in a snare, say the people of West Nile, will devour her own leg to reach her cubs. The pandemonium that had greeted Azalea and Anyeko as they were tossed into the LRA truck was, for the most part, caused by Rebecca. As the truck carrying Azalea and the VSOs and the orphans bounced out of the mission, Rebecca broke free from two of the young soldiers who were restraining her and she ran after the truck with her arms waving. We will never know what she hoped to achieve by this. Probably she knew that the gesture would be futile and dangerous. But what is a lioness in a snare to do?

  The boy who shot her was no older than August or Tebere. He wore a bandana on his head, like a South American freedom fighter, and a faded T-shirt with Dennis the Menace and Gnasher on the front, with red and black stripes like Dennis might wear. On his feet he wore sandals cut from an old car tyre. He was a thin boy with a lopsided face and one eye that looked the wrong way. We will never know his name or his story. Somehow, somewhere he had found himself enslaved to the cruel despotism of a mad preacher who swore to protect the Ten Commandments, and who did this – who still does this today – by abducting, mutilating and raping young children. Had he, the lopsided boy, like so many children, been kidnapped from his village by raiding militiamen? Had he been snatched from the fields, perhaps, or dragged out of a school? Or had he, like many abandoned children in Uganda and Sudan and Congo, simply drifted towards the LRA camps looking for food? We will never know. This was not a killing that would unravel in front of a jury. No laboratory would examine the bullets. No doctor would dictate a report. Only one journalist would ever come this far, and, crucially, he would get the story wrong.

  When Rebecca ran out after the truck, the lopsided boy simply squeezed the trigger on his gun. He looked as much in shock as Rebecca when the shot sounded. Perhaps it was simply a nervous reaction, his finger already on the trigger, his nerves already frayed; we can speculate on this because the boy dropped the gun the second after the bang, put both hands on his head and wailed. Probably the boy knew he would face p
unishment for this transgression.

  Rebecca toppled forward like a tree.

  In panic now, in absolute alarm, the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army fled towards the minibus and tore out of the compound.

  When the reporter from the Olsen Press Agency arrived a day and a half later, the crime scene had been cleared by the Moyo District police. The new man in charge of the mission was old Pastor David, who could be found sitting on the red cement floor of the mess hall with his head deep in his hands. The reporter had driven all the way up from Kampala and was anxious to get back to a decent hotel in Gulu before nightfall, before the last ferry made its languid way back across the Nile. He spoke to one of the nurses and a big Acholi man who was the cook. There was very little to photograph; just a poor mission compound in a poor corner of a poor country. The reporter took a self-guided tour of the mission, and on the desk in Luke Folley’s office he came upon a family photograph – Luke, Rebecca and Azalea standing outside the mission hall. He slipped the photograph into his satchel. On the way back to Gulu he wrote his report. He would stay a few days at the Acholi Inn in case there were any further developments in the incident. His report would be wired back to his news desk in Nairobi. The reporter was an old hand at this. He would stay by the poolside in his hotel for two or three days until the story subsided. If there were other reporters there, they could share a few beers, play a few hands of poker, swap details of the story.

  The story that the reporter sent, while colourful, was not wholly untrue – at least in its conclusions, although it did mislead in its particulars. The reporter built his story around the photograph. Rebecca Folley, he wrote, had died in a hail of gunfire. Luke Folley and the couple’s teenage daughter were missing, presumed dead. Five orphans were missing. The story failed to mention the VSOs, and this was because no one in the compound had thought to mention them. No one had seen them being bundled into the truck; the last that anyone had seen of Ritchie and Lauren was their hurried escape from the mission, en route – everyone would have suspected – back to Britain.