A Dark Redemption

by Stav Sherez

  Jack wasn’t sure what he was agreeing to but he nodded anyway.

  ‘You have been friends for a long time?’

  Jack realised that if he pretended this was an ordinary conversation, the kind you have on planes and boats, waiting for a bus or in empty cafes, then the fear and chill which had consumed his body might start to fade. ‘Ben and David know each other from childhood. They grew up together. I met them three years ago when we started university.’

  Something in Eye-patch’s expression changed. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, placed it carefully over the edge of the table and nodded. ‘I too once thought I would go to university.’ His voice seemed different now, softer, more resigned.

  ‘What stopped you?’ Jack asked, knowing immediately it was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘When there is a war there is only one kind of studying that needs to be done. There is no use for history or geography. These will not help you in the bush.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jack replied quietly, suddenly aware of how different their lives were, how choice figured so little for most of the world, so he was surprised by Eye-patch’s laughter, a full throaty amusement lodged deep in the soldier’s throat.

  ‘Do not be. Sometimes you find the world and sometimes the world finds you. I was lucky. I didn’t know who I was and I might never have found that person if war hadn’t intervened.’ He put the cigarette back into his mouth, puffing until thick plumes of smoke flowered from its tip. ‘Perhaps you too were on the wrong road and now you have the chance to find the right one. Perhaps it was God who brought you here, or fate . . . if you prefer.’

  ‘I don’t believe in God or fate,’ Jack replied, trying not to think about the gazelle crossing the Jango Road.

  ‘Then I feel sorry for you,’ Eye-patch said mournfully. ‘You come from a place where you celebrate your advances, the progress your race has made, but look at you, you are empty and in need of something you cannot even name. Yes,’ he nodded sagely, ‘perhaps you have truly come here for a reason.’

  ‘We were trying to get to Murchison Falls. We took the wrong road.’ Jack felt the cold snuggle up against him once more, the chill in his lungs every time he took a breath.

  Eye-patch ground the dead cigarette under his boot and reached for a stained brown folder lying to his right. He began flicking through the pages, humming to himself. Next to the folder Jack could see his own notebook lying like an accusatory witness.

  ‘No, I think you took the right road, the road you were always meant to take.’ Eye-patch put the folder down and stared up at Jack. ‘What would you have done if none of this had happened, if you’d boarded your flight back to London?’

  Jack wasn’t sure what he meant‚ but he knew that the longer they talked the longer it would be until the other things, the things that weren’t talking. ‘We’d just graduated; we were going to find jobs.’ He stared down at his bare feet. London seemed like something from another lifetime.

  ‘What kind of work were you going to do?’

  He wasn’t sure if Eye-patch was genuinely interested or whether this was all just a part of his interrogation technique. ‘I told you, I’m a musician.’

  ‘And your friends?’

  ‘Ben’s going to be a lawyer and David’s entering the seminary in September.’

  ‘It seems you have your whole lives planned out in front of you.’

  Jack was about to say something but this time managed to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Then why,’ Eye-patch turned and picked up the notebook, ‘with all this future ahead of you would you involve yourself in spying against Uganda?’ His tone hadn’t changed, nor had his facial expression, but the words came out like hard shards of glass.

  ‘I wasn’t spying,’ Jack protested. ‘I write songs in there.’

  Eye-patch flicked through the pages again. ‘Yet you felt the need to write in code?’

  Eye-patch’s calm tone of voice was exasperating him, it would almost have been better if he’d been shouting. ‘It’s not code, it’s musical notation.’ He tried to think how to demonstrate this, the steady progression of notes and staves, bass clefs and crotchets, but looking at the walls of this abandoned schoolroom he knew that Eye-patch had never seen sheet music before. ‘Look,’ Jack said, leaning forward, gesturing for the notebook. Eye-patch slid it across the table. Jack picked it up, flicked it open, staring at the jumble of his own script. It was hard enough for him to decipher it. He laid the notebook flat on the table, placed his finger at the start of a bar of music and hummed as he traced the notes lifting and falling. ‘It’s musical notation, for a song. I write songs.’ He hummed the melody he’d written three days previously in Kampala. Eye-patch showed no expression but let Jack finish the song.

  ‘I see,’ he said when Jack had passed the notebook back, ‘but you too must see my problem.’ He leant back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest. ‘As I said before, if this were true you would be saying it‚ but if you were a spy and this was code you would be saying the same thing. You see my problem now? How can I tell when the liar and the honest man say the same thing?’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ Jack shouted.

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sing. Sing for me your songs then I will decide if you are a singer like you claim.’

  Jack closed his eyes and dry-swallowed. His heart felt like something alien to his body, too large and too fast, a thing made for a much larger receptacle. His voice cracked on the first note, the words shearing away into silence and coughing. He tried again, focusing on the blue sky of the poster behind Eye-patch, wondering what the rest of the picture held.

  He sang quietly in his chair, the first side of his soon-to-be-released album, then the second. Eye-patch remained silent and still, occasionally nodding his head, which Jack took to mean he was starting to believe him. He ran out of songs and began to sing other people’s songs, songs he’d practised in his bedroom, songs he’d listened to late at night, his ear pressed tight against the radio.

  ‘Very good,’ Eye-patch interrupted after a couple of hours, passing Jack a glass of brown water. When he moved forward, Jack caught a glimpse of the poster behind him and it was as if a door had been opened, letting in a fan of fresh air. Eye-patch sat back, repositioning himself so that Jack could now see the whole poster. The blue canopy was only a small part of the image, the rest was covered by a gleaming white mountain ascending towards the sky. He focused on the clean white planes of the mountain as he continued singing, making up songs, doggerel, ad jingles, whatever came to mind.

  Every time he stopped, Eye-patch barked a single command – ‘Sing!’ – and he began again. Occasionally he was given water as the room filled with cigarette smoke and night. He sang through the dark and into the day, light leaking through the cracks in the schoolroom walls, singing beyond tiredness and fatigue, his voice a small cracked thing and each time he stopped there it was again: ‘Sing!’

  He concentrated on the poster of the mountain and thought about Ben and David. He wondered where they were right now; they could have been two doors down and neither would know; they could be dead; they could be free. The thoughts paralysed him, brought the cold rushing back in, and he focused on the mountain. If he squinted hard enough he could see two or three tiny blue dots halfway up the face. He imagined himself one of these, a climber on his second day in, slowly making his way up from base camp, and as the songs fell out of him, songs he didn’t remember he remembered, songs he swore he’d never sing again, he saw the blue dots making their ascent and he did his best to follow their careful progress.

  ‘Enough!’

  He’d been singing all day and most of the night. Every time he opened his mouth, his lips pulled away from each other taking layers of dry skin, his throat so desiccated he could no longer swallow without an immense act of will. He stopped in the middle of a Will Oldham song he barely remembered. He stared down at his feet and watched the roaches scuttl
ing across the concrete.

  Eye-patch pulled something out of the top drawer of the desk and laid it on the table. ‘You now have to make a choice,’ he said. ‘You have to decide whether you want to help your friends.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Jack croaked.

  ‘Then tell me who you are spying for, sign this paper and I promise all will be well for them.’

  ‘I’m not . . .’ and then he stopped, knowing there was no point any more. He understood that there was only one way to save Ben and David and that all options had narrowed down to this.

  ‘I was spying for England.’ He thought it would be harder to say but the words came out as if he were reciting his name.

  A long smile cracked Eye-patch’s face open, revealing the buckled teeth and wet pinkness of his tongue. ‘Good. That is good,’ he laughed, ‘but we already know you are spying for England, this is not news. You want to help your friends, you will tell me what this book says, what you have already sent back home to your employers.’

  Jack stared at the poster but he could no longer see the blue dots. Had they achieved the summit? Were they now on the other side making the dangerous descent? ‘You promise my friends won’t be hurt if I tell you?’

  It had been his decision which road to take, his idea of going to Africa in the first place. If it wasn’t for him Ben and David would never have been in this situation. The logic was inescapable.

  He gave Eye-patch details and information, motives and reasons, map coordinates and targets. He didn’t know what would happen when the soldiers discovered he’d been making it all up but he never got the chance to find out.

  The door crashed open, sending searing sunlight into the room, making Jack’s eyes squint and water with tears. Two soldiers entered, agitated, both talking at once to Eye-patch, both running their words together, their eyes flicking wildly. Eye-patch listened, nodding his head, then pulled out a thick wooden stick from his belt and smashed the younger soldier over the head with it. The boy collapsed to the floor and Eye-patch leant over him, coiled and ready to strike again, then put the stick back in his belt. He left the room, the upright soldier helping his comrade up, blood pouring from his head filling the air with a hot salty tang. A few minutes later Eye-patch came back, his face tight and contorted as if his skin had been shrink-wrapped to his bones.

  ‘Get up!’ he shouted at Jack, the genial tone of earlier now gone entirely. Jack tried to do as he was told but fell to the floor. He hit the concrete full in the face and saw two of his teeth skitter out from under him. Before he could move the soldiers were lifting him and dragging him out of the room.

  The sun was worse than the cold floor, exploding like a poisonous flower in his head. He wanted to wilt, fall back down, let the earth cover him, but the soldiers kept frog-marching him past the barracks, the schoolyard, the playing grounds, and finally back out into the bush, the camp a misty haze in the distance. They dropped his body to the ground and disappeared.

  He waited for several hours for the bullet‚ but no bullet came. He waited for men to come out of the reeds with machetes and smiles on their faces‚ but no men came. He waited for some animal to smell his fear and blood and come stalking out of the bush, but no animal came. He waited for Eye-patch to return, tell him that he was sorry but there was only one punishment for spies, but he would never see Eye-patch again.

  He lay face down listening to the reeds part as the footsteps of the soldiers drew nearer‚ but it wasn’t death that was coming.

  They dropped him next to Jack, dust rising in the air as the soldiers left the clearing and headed back towards the camp. Jack turned to see Ben’s torn and bloodied face, a huge purple swelling under his right eye. He felt for Ben’s breath but there was none. He looked around the small clearing but there was no one there and he began to scream. The hours and minutes inside that small room burst out of him like some well dug deep into his soul and then he heard something move and he stopped.

  He turned quickly, expecting more soldiers, but instead he saw Ben shuffling and moaning on the floor next to him.

  For a moment they looked at each other like strangers caught face-to-face in a lift, and then they began to laugh, hugging each other in the thick wet grass. But just as suddenly as the laughter had started it was gone.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Ben looked away, shook his head. Jack grabbed him with all the strength he could muster, the buried rage of the last two days burning through his fingers.

  Ben pulled free, his hand shielding his face. He turned and vomited onto the ground, a deep tumultuous wrenching that continued long after there was nothing left to expel.

  ‘We need to go back and get him.’ Jack looked around the clearing, saw the spire of smoke from the camp a few hundred feet away. He started to get up, a swooping dizziness exploding behind his eyes.

  Ben grabbed his leg, his fingers gripping tightly. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘He’s gone, Jack.’

  ‘Then we need to find him.’ Jack tried pulling away but Ben’s grip was surprisingly strong.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Ben let go of Jack’s leg and turned away, unable to face him. ‘David’s dead.’

  30

  Photographs.

  Black-and-white, colour, sepia-tinted. Sun blanched, faded, and creased from too much folding.

  Photography as the persistence of memory and metonym of a life.

  A face, a body, a pair of hands in close-up. Some so clear it was as if the person depicted therein was actually in the room while others were so faded it was impossible to tell what they represented, as if the paper itself had forgotten the image bestowed upon it.

  A whole arc of history from black-and-white schoolyard Polaroids to digitals so sharp they looked as if they couldn’t possibly be real. Photographs laid out side by side on the table in front of them. Every photo different but with one constant.

  Grace.

  They were in the incident room, eighteen hours after the discovery of General Ngomo’s body, still sorting out his treasure chest of memories and eating Chinese takeaway from silver boxes. Ngomo’s flat had been searched but they hadn’t found Grace’s computer or any other evidence linking Ngomo to the crime scene. All of Ngomo’s personal possessions had fit into two cardboard boxes which now lay at their feet. Geneva was sorting through the photos as Carrigan stared at the cross-hatched scars on the table, rubbing his head, feeling the past invade him like some foreign entity. The memory of seeing Ben again in that wet jungle clearing was still so fresh after all these years, the joy followed by the bitter realisation.

  He unsnapped two paracetamol from the foil and dry-swallowed them, then went back to the layout of photographs, picking one up, examining it then replacing it in its rightful place, a chronology of Grace from birth to death. He looped some noodles onto his chopsticks, feeling Geneva’s silence behind him, the hard warm shadow of her presence.

  She hadn’t said much since he’d told her the story on the way over from Ngomo’s. It was a story he thought he’d never tell again‚ but once the initial words came out everything else seemed to follow as if a plug had been pulled and the words were water rushing down a drain.

  ‘You’re eating too fast.’ She looked up from her box of noodles. ‘You’ll get stomach ache.’

  Carrigan nodded but didn’t slow down. ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he said, remembering how when he’d told her the story of what had happened to him in Africa it was as if he were confirming something she’d already known.

  Geneva sipped her Coke and stared down at the kaleidoscope of images, trying to make sense of it all: Grace staring back at her from her high-school graduation, Grace about to board an aeroplane, Grace in a white dress holding a bottle of beer somewhere in the jungle. She’d only just begun taking in what they’d seen in Ngomo’s upstairs room when Carrigan had finally told her what had happened in Africa.

  ‘That stuff in Uganda, why didn’t you mention it before?’ She tried not to sound accusatory
but there was no other way to say it, and besides she felt, if not a little betrayed, then something close; they were supposed to be partners on this case.

  He turned so quickly that he sent some of the photos flying to the floor. She was about to pick them up but then stopped.

  ‘It had nothing to do with the case.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ Her voice sounded brittle, like metal scraping against metal.

  ‘I just know.’

  She saw his face stretched long and thin, the sleepless nights and early-morning calls and wondered what he’d been like before Africa.

  ‘Explains that twitch every time Uganda came up.’

  He put the last photo in its place. ‘You noticed?’

  ‘Hard not to, though I’m sure everyone would just put it down to too much coffee.’ She picked up a photo of Grace with an older woman, both elegantly dressed, standing in front of a white church with an impossibly tall spire. ‘Did you ever find out what happened to David?’

  It was suddenly there again, the darkness in his eyes, the sense of a locked room inside his head. He looked down at the table as if the answers were inscribed on its knotty surface. ‘The embassy tried locating the body after we arrived in Kampala but it was a war zone up in the north; no one wanted to go there to search for one corpse. We buried him in an empty grave in his father’s church. There’s not even a coffin, only a damn stone.’

  Geneva caught the bitterness in his voice and pushed aside the noodle box, reaching inside her pocket. She took out the newspaper clipping she’d found at the library and silently handed it to him.

  He wiped his hands on his jacket and took it from her. He smoothed out the folds and stared at the badly reproduced black-and-white photo. At first there was nothing and she watched as he brought the clipping closer, squinted, and then, all of a sudden she saw it in his eyes.