by Melanie Finn
Alcohol would kill him soon enough.
‘The boy,’ Mohemedi said. ‘What shall I tell him, Mzee?’
What? What boy? Ah! Yes. Lillian. American. In her thirties. She was really very pretty. She reminded him of Jessica, same tall, slender build, same lethal doe eyes. Reminded him of antelopes. Jessica. Lillian. Deer in the headlights.
Something was wrong. A bad feeling. Cold spot in the room sort of thing. Cold.
Beer.
The taste of beer.
Had improved since the South Africans took over the brewery. Consistency.
Of taste and supply.
The hair on the back of his neck was prickling, bloody hell, why was it so cold? Wind off the bay? What?
But, as he was thinking, or was he saying? Was he talking to Maurice? Before the South Africans you couldn’t be sure. Murky beer, the color of a diabetic’s piss.
Worse sometimes: no beer. Delivery truck broke down in Mombo.
Mohemedi standing, hovering, why—
‘I’ll go and see her,’ Harry at last remembered. He had a method for getting off the bar stool: plant both hands on the bar, move his ass horizontally right to the edge of the stool, right foot down on the floor, then the left, keep hands on the bar, straighten old knees. Dreadful creaking sound. The next part was more difficult: taking a step. He managed. One, two, one, two. A little march, ho hum. Up the steps. Fuck. Why were there so many of them? That time in Uganda. Mountains of the Moon, a wall of mud, climbing a wall of mud, every time he took a step he slid back. It rained every day, never saw the sun, never been so wet down into his bones, seldom so tired. What had he been doing there, climbing those mountains? What madness—woman or money?
The boy was waiting at the top of the steps, framed by the club gate. Illuminated by the only streetlight in Tanga that worked because the club maintained it. Boy, thin as wire, ragged white shirt many sizes too big. Something—something about him? Harry can’t quite put a finger on it, too busy standing up.
And that wave of cold again. Malaria? He shivered. The cold crawled over his scalp with little cold feet.
‘Shikamoo,’ the boy said softly.
Marahaba,’ Harry replied. It was always pleasant, that little bit of respect even to an old soak. He had a parka in the car and put it on. Couldn’t shake the cold.
They took Harry’s car and he mused that the boy had probably never driven in a car before. The jerking of the clutch and the pulling of the torqued axle and the inebriation of the driver would seem normal. As they veered through the dark, following the unsteady beam of his single headlight, the boy told how he had been walking by the house and he’d heard the American mama making a strange sound. He’d been afraid to go into the house so he had looked through the window and seen the lady on the floor. She had a bag over her head.
Harry blinked the sweat from his eyes. He was feeling more sober, which made him resentful and sad and afraid. He did not like to think clearly.
A bag on her head? Mfuko? Maybe a hat that looked like a bag. Maybe a shower cap. No, the boy said, ‘Malbolo.’
Big blue bags with the Marlboro Man. Who made them? How did they get to Tanzania? Why? Or what?
Crikey. What was one on her head for?
Over her head, the boy clarified. Covering her head and her face.
The cold little feet were running down his arms now, down his spine. Like ants, swarming, ice ants. He drove a little faster.
Name wasn’t Lillian. Funny name. Religious, but not.
Reaching the house, Harry parked under the tulip tree and got out. It was dark, no light, no askari. Somewhere he had a flashlight. Under the seat. But no batteries. For a moment he lost track of where he was. Then he remembered the boy. The boy was sitting very still, but he was yearning: Harry could feel it coming off him like lust. Harry got out of the car.
‘Go on then,’ he said to the boy and the boy slid into the driver’s seat, gripped the wheel and smiled. Perfect teeth, white, straight. So many of them had perfect teeth. Half-starved, subsisting on day-old ugali and mangoes that fell off the trees, and teeth from a toothpaste ad. How?
Pilgrim. That was it.
The door to the little round house was open. He was about to call out but he heard it: scuffling, moaning. He went in. He and Gloria used to shag here in their brief shagging days. She’d repelled him physically in the beginning; there was so much of her, so much flesh. But every woman felt the same on the inside, every woman was soft on the inside, and he even began to like her body, how she encompassed him. And it had been nice afterward, a ciggie and a G&T. Gloria certainly had some miles on her. They could talk as equals. Laugh.
In the house now. He could just see, light from the moon. Pilgrim was on the floor. Her head was—
Bloody hell—
Her head was in a malbolo and it was fastened around her neck with duct tape. Her hands and feet were also tied with duct tape. She was jerking like a dying fish, the bag sucking in where her mouth must be.
Harry wasn’t immediately sure if this was happening. Or a dream, a hallucination. He couldn’t be sure these days.
Then he ran and ripped open the plastic.
Her wide eyes. Congo. Pro-Lumumba women put up against a wall to be shot by Mobuto’s lot. CIA-backed jambazi. Nothing he could do to save the women or stop the men. Only keep himself alive. The women’s wide-open eyes, he’d never forget: fear because they still thought they had a chance, still wanted to live, could still think, could still offer their bodies for rape. Their eyes changed the instant the shooting started, shutters coming down, the end of hope, the truth, a kind of relief. For him, too.
He pulled the tape off Pilgrim’s mouth. She sucked in, deep, howling breaths.
‘You’re all right, you’re all right now,’ he said and held her face so that she looked at him. Her lips were blue.
If he’d stayed to finish the beer—
The boy in the white shirt—
Something—
She was coming back to him now, her breath slowing, color coming back. He cradled her head, stroked her hair. He was saying things in a soft voice like, You’re all right, you’re all right, it’s all over now. He took the tape off her hands and rubbed her wrists. Took the tape off her ankles. Her legs were beautiful. Antelope. Jessica. It’s okay now, darling. I’m here.
When she sat up she gripped him fiercely, her fingers clutching his shirt.
‘There, there.’ He kept stroking her hair and then lifted her onto the sofa, put a cushion under her head. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
But first he went outside. The boy was standing by the car, looking at himself in the side mirror. Harry gave him a couple of hundred shilling coins. ‘Off you go now. Don’t say anything about this.’
As the boy turned and trotted off, Harry saw that his white shirt was bloody and agape at the back, exposing a large wound. Even in the moonlight he could determine that the wound was large and very deep.
That it was the kind of wound made by,
say,
a propeller.
The kind of wound from which you could not recover.
Harry felt his knees give and the fearful cold rush through him. ‘Hey,’ he shouted after the boy. The boy turned briefly and smiled, then disappeared. Not around a corner or into the bush. Not a trick of darkness or moon. But disappeared. Stepped back to that other place. Absorbed. Harry steadied himself. It could just be the DTs, or some more permanent dementia.
But in his heart—that rusty old clock—Harry knew who the boy was and why he had come. For years, Harry had been waiting for him, or some other emissary. They had unfinished business.
Oh, he’d seen them before. Saw them all the time. In the shadows, in the evenings, riding bicycles, mingling with the living. Sometimes, they would glance at him, catch his eye in mutual acknowledgement, like members of a secret club. Yes, yes, their casual gaze seemed to say, We know you, you know us. But always they moved on. Their business was not with him.
He’d tried to talk about this with Gloria once and she’d laughed at him. ‘Ghosts? You’ve been in Africa too long.’
This was true. Africa too bloody long.
But the ghosts—shetani, spirits—the ghosts weren’t just here. He’d gone to England a few years ago, visiting his sister. They didn’t get on, never had. Sandra, very conservative. Garden like Legoland, all straight edges. She lived in a modern village in the southeast, least spooky place you could imagine. But he saw a man on the bus. And a child throwing bread to a duck. They saw him, casual nods. Ghosts.
These ghosts, they came and went, back and forth. The other place and here. Maybe there were several other places, like a multi-level parking garage. The universe was an awfully big place and had to be filled with something.
From time to time, he wondered if he, too, was dead—a ghost, and this is why he could see them. But then he would get the most godawful hangover, and he was pretty sure that the dead didn’t get hangovers.
Lots of things you get used to in Africa. It’s the most honest place on earth. Why should the dead simply be dead? Or go to heaven? Rubbish about being reincarnated into beetles or Egyptian princesses. The dead were here, among the living. Side by side.
Harry turned and went back into the house. He found the light switch. What comfort electricity offered, to enter a cocoon of man-made light scooped out of the infinite dark. What it was like for villagers when they could afford a kerosene lamp. The reassurance, even, of a cheap Chinese flashlight.
Light.
The kitchen wasn’t separate, just around the corner from the living area. He found the kettle, filled it up, turned on the stove. He noticed then that the water still seemed to be running. As if the overflow in the loo was broken. He glanced over at Pilgrim. She was curled up on the sofa. She was in shock. But she’d be okay.
Harry went into the bathroom. It was brightly tiled, the shower in the corner. And under the shower was a middle-aged white man in a raincoat. And an awful lot of blood. The blood was still oozing from his wrists, but Harry knew enough about exsanguination to know that it was very nearly over. He turned off the shower and put his fingers over the man’s carotid artery. Yes, nearly over. He looked into the man’s eyes.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll just stay here with you until you go. Better not to be alone.’
He sat with the man, holding his hand, the blood thick and dark now, almost black like sticky tar. The kettle began to whistle and he tried the man’s pulse again. There was the faintest flutter. He gave it another couple of minutes, and then, when there was nothing, got up and washed the blood from his hands. He turned off the kettle. He found some mugs and teabags. He went over to Pilgrim. She was looking at him, not his face but his shirt and shorts. The blood. As if he’d just killed a pig.
‘Ah,’ he said, handing her the tea. But her hand was trembling so he put it down on the floor. He took a sip of his own tea. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had tea. A beverage that was hot and bereft of alcohol.
Imagine if he’d finished his beer: she’d be dead.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what’s going on. But I’m supposed to be here. I was brought here.’
He couldn’t tell if she understood. I’m supposed to be here. Because he didn’t finish the beer. Because of the boy.
She was still a little floaty, but he got her to drink a bit of the tea. He told her he’d be right back and went to the bathroom and let the water run over the dead man until it ran clear down the plug. He rinsed out his shirt. He went out to his car and got an old tarp from the wheel well. Why it was there he couldn’t recall, but it had been there for years probably, taking up the space where a spare tire should have been. He wrapped the dead man in the tarp, heavy as a sack of hammers, and worried for a moment that he’d put his back out. Who’d ever heard of a knight in shining armor with a bad back?
He dragged the body out the bedroom door but when he tried to get it into the car the tarp kept falling off. The man’s limbs protested as if he were still alive, catching on the door jamb, the bushes. Like a drunk who did not want to leave the bar. Who had clung to the stool in The Muthaiga Club, The Mombasa Club, The Tamarind Bar and Grill, The Juba Press Club, The Sheraton Kampala poolside bar; clung to the railing, to a tree even, as others had removed him. He recalled his fury, turning like a bright pinwheel in his chest: the unjustness of the assault! All he had wanted to do was drink.
Covering the body again, he glanced inside at Pilgrim. She lay very still, her eyes open, blinking from time to time. He wondered what she was seeing. He found his mobile phone, dialed.
‘Gloria. I’m at Raskazone. Can you come?’
She’d started to give him gyp. She was expecting the kids in the morning, she was tired, it was late. He cut her off: ‘I need your help. I need you.’
Twenty minutes later she drove through the gate. She got out of her car, left it running, the headlights blazing. ‘What the fuck?’
He gestured down at the body. ‘Help me get him into the car.’
Gloria hesitated, and he was sure she’d refuse, like a stubborn old mare. But instead she bent over, pulled the tarp back to reveal the man’s face, blanched in the car lights. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Oh, shit.’
‘You know him?’
She made a face, as if she was chewing the inside of her cheek. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Shit.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s from Switzerland.’
Harry waited. Gloria took a deep breath. ‘He came to see me. He was looking for Pilgrim.’ She stalled again.
‘Come on, old girl, out with it.’
With another breath, she obliged. ‘He came to see me. He was looking for Pilgrim. She killed his child.’
‘She killed his child?’ Harry was incredulous. ‘Pilgrim killed this man’s child?’
‘A car accident. Three children altogether.’
Harry was starting to understand.
‘Oh, Gloria,’ he said softly.
‘He just, he just,’ she spluttered. She was going to cry. She pulled out a cigarette, but didn’t light it. ‘He just, you know—’
‘This is about James, isn’t it?’
‘Koppler knew what it was like to, to—’
‘—to lose a child.’
‘It makes you crazy, Harry.’
‘Did he tell you why he was looking for Pilgrim?’
‘No.’ Then she shook her head. ‘And I didn’t care. I don’t care. About her. People like her.’
‘People like her? She’s just anyone. Anyone at all.’
‘You’re on the outside.’
‘Of what? I’m on the outside of what?’
Gloria lit the cigarette. A moment passed.
‘I’m quitting.’
‘Those kids have AIDS, dear. They’ve been abandoned by their families. It doesn’t matter if you smoke.’
They stood there while she smoked. Finally, Gloria said, still not looking at him, grinding the butt into the sandy earth: ‘You want there to be retribution. For someone to pay. Like a sacrifice, I suppose. It doesn’t matter who, you can pile all your anger on anyone. He…’ she bent down and pulled the tarp away from the dead man’s face. ‘He deserved justice.’
Harry grabbed her. He felt very sober, as if someone had pulled the plug and all the alcohol had drained right out of him. ‘Listen, listen, so you get it right. Not just translated through your grief, it’s like a bloody echo chamber. Will you listen?’
Gloria did not move away. So Harry said, ‘She’s just a person. Not a monster. She’ll wake up with an image of those dead children every morning for the rest of her life.’ His hand softened on her arm, almost a caress. ‘I’m so very sorry for your pain, Gloria, love, with everything that is left of my heart. And I’m sorry for his. But maybe it’s a mistake to go around comparing pain and trying to make it match up.’
He helped himself to one of her cigarettes, lit it and inhaled savagely
. ‘Only bloody thing I ever managed to accomplish.’
Gloria looked away, out at the dark sea, the star-seeded night. ‘Is she all right?’
‘Just a bit shaken up.’
‘We’ll have to clean this up. If the cops—I’ll never get my kids. Oh, God, Harry, I’ll never get my kids.’
‘The cops? They don’t need to be involved. This is a private matter.’
Suddenly, she reached out and put her hand on his gnarled old wrist. He renegotiated the movement, so that he held her hand. They held hands. Gravity is different in a place like Tanga, he thought. People fall together who normally would not. You and I, Gloria, trailing the dusty, wrecked caravans of our lives, have fallen.
Together.
‘Take her, get her away from here. Take my car,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll deal with him.’
‘No.’ Gloria knelt to touch the dead man. ‘Let me take him. We understood each other.’
* * *
By dawn Harry and Pilgrim reached the ferry at Pangani. Harry loved how the great walled buildings crumbled under the weight of thick webs of vines. Once, centuries ago, Pangani had been a major port. Now, huts grew like shy mushrooms among the ruins.
He almost laughed out loud at the idea of progress.
There was a decent guesthouse for smugglers, because Pangani was—still, after dusk—a port; and the same goods came down the slow, dark river that always had: gems, ivory, slaves, illegally harvested hardwood. And the same goods went up it: guns. Though drugs now, too, and counterfeit electronics from Dubai.
The ferry was on the other side of the river, a small collection of cars and trucks loading up. Villagers with bicycles and children and baskets of fruit, someone with a goat. Always someone with a goat. The sun, popping above the far horizon of the ocean, illuminated the river. On contact, the surface of the water ignited in sparks. The shadowed portions rippled like yards of lavender silk. Harry marveled at how the river had come all the way from Kilimanjaro. He’d done the stretch from Boma ya Ngombe to Nyumba ya Mungu in a wooden canoe. About a thousand years ago, when he was a young man and big herds of elephant still came down to the river, back when the whole country was just animals and bush.
