by Graham Mort
– What you doing, Daddy?
– Nothing, it’s OK. Just checking something.
– Are we going home?
No answer.
– Are we?
– For fuck’s sake Jason, just can it.
The child went quiet, stark with fear. He shouldn’t have sworn. If that got back to Janine she’d go nuts. Col tried to think of anything that might lead them back, but the sand was flat, featureless. It had lost even that vague seam of sky.
Col was sure he’d walked at ninety degrees to the channel they’d crossed. His jacket was covered in seeds of drizzle, his shoes soaked to the ankle. Visibility was about twenty yards. Fuck-all. They began to jog towards the shore, shouting as he went. Jason was laughing with tears on his face. This was all a game. Silly Daddy. They went for five minutes before turning back. Something in Col’s head was jabbering, telling him not to panic. He walked to the left and thought he saw the distant line of the groin. The sea would have covered the tip, shortening it. He steered to the right, rubbing Jason’s legs to put some blood into them. There was a wide section of water and he thought he could see limestone beyond. His feet plunged into a hidden gully and he almost fell forwards. In moments, Col was knee deep in the channel, then thigh deep. He strode through it, dragging his legs against the force of water, hoping to Christ he was going in the right direction.
Jason had gone quiet again. There was a spike of ice in Col’s chest. He was a fucking idiot. Janine was right. He’d put everything he loved at risk because he didn’t sort things out. He hadn’t had his watch mended, hadn’t checked his pockets in the café. He thought of the drive home. How sweet that would be, him and Jason in the car with the heater on and music playing, the windows misting up. 96.9 FM. That stupid tune. They’d be laughing all the way because they were alive. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, he was rehearsing a story for Janine. He stood with Jason on his shoulders, holding onto his legs, the water streaming past them and deepening. He tried shouting for help, but Jason panicked and started jigging up and down, throwing Col’s balance. The current was coming from his right, which must mean that he was facing the sea, that the shore was behind him. It was walk or drown, right now before it was too late. Right or left? Front, behind? He had to decide, he had to go for it. What a cunt he’d been. He turned 180 degrees until the current was pushing against his left thigh, almost waist deep.
Col set off into a brown flood. It was seaming past him, into him with its cold weight. He stepped deeper, then deeper again. Fuck! There was a scream building in his chest. He beat it down like a snarling dog. He took a lungful of pure rage, then three shallower steps, almost off balance, then upright again.
– Daddy, Daddy!
– It’s OK sweetheart, it’s OK, we’re almost there.
He felt a slight breeze on his face. Two more shallow steps onto firm sand, the drag of water falling below his waist.
– Nearly there, Jason, nearly there!
There was a tear in the mist. Suddenly, the groin was on their right, a long spear of stone. They were a long way from where he’d thought they were. He could see the shore now: white rock, a line of trees. He took another step and sank deeper. If he got swept away they’d be fucked. The current had reversed, that’s what had thrown him. The tide was dragging at his waist again. It was only a few yards. He was a shite swimmer. Jason was screaming now, punching at his head. He took another step and another, almost lost his footing and then was across, scrabbling the last yards to the sharp rocks on his hands and knees. Col put Jason down and he was lunging at him, hysterical, punching him, aiming for his balls, screaming.
– You, you!
Col stepped back, feeling his trainers pump out water.
– Horrible! Horrible!
– Hey, hey, it’s OK. We’re safe darling.
His heart was thumping like a fist on a church door. He wiped Jason’s face with his hand then scrambled over the rocks, lifting him and scrambling up behind until they reached the path and then a green metal gate that led onto the road. A magpie flew off as they went through and found the car. His chest was tight again.
They were both soaked, covered in stinking mud and sand. Col fastened Jason into the child seat and found him a half a bar of chocolate, kissing his face. He brushed the crisps from the back seat with his hand and sat with the door open. Then he took off his trousers and socks and wrung them out. A middle-aged couple with rucksacks and walking sticks passed and gave him a funny look. He didn’t give a fuck. The couple stopped and glanced back. The woman said something, touching the man’s arm and they went on again. They looked well-off. Fuck them.
Col was sobbing quietly, feeling a great bubble of relief break from his chest. They could have been dead by now, face down in the water. There would have been an inquest, a few lines in the newspaper. His fingers were numb as he dressed himself, fumbled with his shoelaces. He pulled off his watch and flung it over the wall towards the sea. Fucking thing. He thought of his phone, tucked behind the salt grinder in the café, of the woman with the broken arm fumbling with the sweet jar, Jason’s big eyes following her.
He’d explain it all to Janine, somehow. He’d unbuttoned her pyjamas and kissed her, sliding his hand over her belly. She smelled of shampoo, her hair shiny and soft, her mouth wet and yielding. She’d made him feel he existed. There in that hot little bedroom in a nowhere town in the northwest of England, somewhere in the Universe. He’d say he was sorry. What else? It’d all got messed up.
Col checked that Jason was alright. He was asleep in the back seat, his head lolling. There was sand in his hair. Col fished out his lighter and an unopened cigarette packet from his jacket pocket, picking off the cellophane. They were still dry. Janine hated him smoking near Jason. His lighter wouldn’t work so he lit the cigarette from the gadget in the car. He remembered when uncle Pete had got one of those. He thought it was the dog’s bollocks back then. Col leaned against the hatchback, blowing out smoke, picking specks of tobacco from his lip.
There was a gap in the clouds over the bay and light bore down through it, glittering on the sea. It looked like the scales of a huge serpent. It’d turned on them, but they’d survived. What was he going to say to Janine? What would Jason say when she gave him the third degree? It was a mess alright. But they were alive and that was all that mattered now. Other things would matter later, the usual crap. But this was life, for fuck’s sake, life. He flicked the cigarette stub away, watching it hiss and extinguish in a puddle, staining with water, sucking up darkness. He should give up.
When he got in the car and switched on the engine, Bay Radio was playing. 96.9 FM. Col glimpsed a white house though overgrown trees. There was a man in a blue jumper putting the lead on an English sheepdog. Then black and white calves glimpsed in the fields. Jason was still asleep in his harness. Col drove slowly, his hands still gritty with sand. He looked in the wing mirror and the black ribbon of tape flickered from the cracked glass. He changed gear, glancing at Jason as they reached the dead end where he’d turn the car around to head for home.
SOLOMON
‘Whereas my father laid upon you a heavy yoke, so shall I add tenfold thereto. Whereas my father chastised you with whips, so shall I scourge you with scorpions.’ Kings 1, 12:11
A wave hit the pier and exploded, hurling a plume of foam against the sky and chasing it down the stonework to collapse into the sea. They came in succession, sideways to the pier and the lighthouse at its tip, huge columns of spume that hit with a deep, dull thud that was part sound, part vibration. There was a rusted tramway set into the stone. The old iron was flaking away under salt water and salt air. Opposite this arm of the harbour was another pier with an identical lighthouse. There would be identical tram tracks, the same decay of iron and stone. What had once been becoming what is.
A series of archways cemented into the cliff on the harbour’s north side had been colonised by seagulls and rock doves. A small hawk with barred plumage and one tail feather
missing hunted over the scrubland above, its wings quivering against the sea-wind, its head swivelling from side to side. Slim-winged gulls with forked tails and black caps sidled into the wind then dropped to the waves as if entering slits. A pied duck bobbed with its head tucked between its shoulders, seemingly asleep. In the village there had been hammerkop birds that built big unruly nests in trees near the river. The village kids sometimes put a piece of red cloth on a nest and the parent birds would exhaust themselves scooping water from the river to put out the fire. That was cruel. There had been crested cranes, even shoebills, treading the marshland where the river widened.
A team of women wearing yellow life vests was launching a rowing boat in the harbour, laughing as they struggled against the swell that wrenched them off balance. On the horizon, almost lost in bands of grey where sea and sky merged, a car ferry was heading for Norway. Behind them was the town with its blackened church spire and pubs and charity shops and ex-servicemen’s club and empty days where people carried on somehow.
Solomon bent down to his mother, touching her shoulder. As he stooped, he noticed that one of his shoelaces had frayed.
– Enough?
She didn’t speak.
– Enough, now, eh?
Then, almost whispering, her lips dried by the wind.
–Yes.
Then, half rising and sinking again to find some comfort.
– Enough. Let us go back.
Solomon lifted his mother’s twisted feet back onto the wheelchair’s swivelling supports. Her legs were like wood. He checked her hands for warmth and felt her veins ebbing there. He tucked the blanket around her legs and tightened the strings of her anorak hood.
They’d beaten her feet with rifle butts, flames pouring from the thatch, sparks spiralling upwards in a stink of kerosene as the circle of huts collapsed. Doves panicked from the schoolhouse roof as smoke coiled and flames crack-cracked like pounded grain.
She nodded. Her eyes were dark. Their pupils merged into the irises, the colour of old passion fruit. Her face still had the light skin and fine bones that had made her beautiful. She nodded again. Enough. Solomon helped turn the wheelchair around as she pushed at the wheels, tilting it backwards to steer. They set off along the sea front, past the old swimming pool with its rusted railings that were painted white, where it was safe to swim in seawater. Past the ruined abbey that Norse raiders had sacked. Past the beach with its café and cuticle of pale sand. There were surfers in dark wetsuits bobbing chest-deep in the breakers like seals, waiting for a wave they could ride to shore. The clouds on the northern horizon boiled, gaseous and volatile behind the white spire of another lighthouse. It had been a treacherous coast, a coast where wreckers and raiders had used the sea against the men of God, against the poor in spirit who succumbed, defenceless.
Solomon reached to check his mother’s body heat again. Her hands were folded on the chequered blanket, the knuckles swollen. He should find her some gloves. As a child she’d shown him how to split jackfruit with a machete, laughing at his efforts. She’d taught him how to throw a mango against the wall of the barracks so that it softened and the flesh could be cut from the stone at its centre. How to thresh grain from wheat stalks in the little granary in their compound. She was a foreigner in the village but she didn’t care, laughing at the local people when they ignored her or made remarks about her accent. The soldiers paraded in their uniforms and maroon berets and black calf-length boots and the boy, Solomon, watched them with sweet mango juiced dribbling onto his shirt. At the weekends they’d used her as their whore, throwing thousand shilling notes onto the bed or paying her in beer which she could sell afterwards. He’d learned to be quiet, to become invisible. That’s how she’d paid his school fees. Selling vegetables at the market, cleaning or cooking for the soldiers. She’d thank them as he watched through the dusty curtain that divided the house. Then she washed in the bucket of water drawn from the standpipe. Then she prayed, always mentioning his father’s name before she finished, pressing her hands to her face like the open leaves of a book. His father had gone to Congo to find gold, back to his own father’s land.
Solomon wrapped his fingers around the wheelchair’s handles, pressing his palms to their butts to push, trying not to lose his grip. The gush of shame that memory brought drenched him. Even here, where the wind was hurling off the North Sea. Even here, near those ruins of an ancient war that told him what history was and what it would be. For evermore.
He’d led them to the other boys, to where they were hiding in a crook of the river. Where the bank was licked away by its brown water and they could crouch underneath. Where they’d played hide and seek when they were kids. They’d seen a young crocodile there once, lying out in the sun. It fled into the water at their approach, its eyes just broaching the surface as it drifted downstream with the current. It became a legend of their own daring, how they drove it away. A crocodile! Back then all they had to hide from was each other.
After Solomon betrayed them, that August day, they were rounded up and marched to the village and stood in a circle with their hands on their heads like kids in school. Then the rebel commander hacked Solomon’s thumbs off on the chopping block where his mother killed chickens. It was a warning. Two soldiers held his mother back with their rifles, fencing her in. He was fifteen. He didn’t feel anything at first. Just the thud and shock of the blade. Then sheared bone and flesh and thick, oozing blood. He remembered a day when his mother took a white hen and struck off its head with one blow, letting its blood spurt into dust. Flies darkened the severed head with its scarlet comb, the beak gaping, the eye shuttered by a white membrane. If you pulled the tendons that trailed from its neck, a dead hen’s beak opened and closed in a silent cry.
The rebel soldiers left, driving the village children into exile. His mother bathed his hands, weeping, tearing an old gomesi to bind them. There was nothing to stay for. Even the soldiers at the barracks daren’t return. Solomon and his mother set off for the trading centre where there was a dispensary, following the river to stay hidden, then finding the road. That’s where he went to school, staying over, returning only at Christmas and Easter and for the long summer holiday. His mother hobbled with a stick for a crutch, a machete hanging from her waist. For two days they walked down the dirt road, eating cold cassava, sleeping under a coffee sack with nothing to keep the mosquitos away. They got to the school at dawn on the third day, watching it drift on the early mist like a mirage. The market stalls were deserted and the people had left. A starved white dog wandered in and out of the empty compounds. The head teacher, an Irish priest, cleaned up Solomon’s wounds as his mother watched. Father Brian. His English was soft, liquid, like first rain when it patters against earth and darkens it. Here is Solomon in all his glory. That was his joke if he was late for Biology lessons. The other teachers had escaped, taking their pupils into the bush, making their way to the town.
They stayed with the priest for one night. He showed them the deserted schoolrooms, the empty dormitory where Solomon had slept with five other boys. There was a fish tank, green with algae, in which five dead goldfish floated belly up, stinking of slime and death. It had been Solomon’s job to feed them from a special packet of food. It lay burst open on the floor and a line of ants was carrying it away, grain by grain.
In the dispensary, Father Brian soaked off the bloody bandages and dusted Solomon’s wounds with antibiotic powder. They were black and swollen where his thumbs had been. He swabbed his thigh with alcohol and gave him an injection of ampicillin, patting his shoulder. Good boy, good boy, now. Solomon had never seen a white man cry before. He’d wanted to talk, the priest, telling them about the north of Ireland, where he’d grown up in a small village, before the seminary, before Africa. There were woods that he played in as a child, with trees that shed their leaves in winter then grew them again at another time. There was a flower called the bluebell that came in April or May, like faint mist covering everything, he said. Like morn
ing mist, when roosters woke the village. He scratched at the grey stubble on his cheeks, leaving white track marks.
Father Brian shuttered the windows to hide the light of the paraffin lamp and then made them a meal. They sat at a table with a tablecloth and cutlery. They were served rice and beans and Solomon’s mother fed him like a child with a metal fork. His hands throbbed with pain that was so constant he had to shut down his mind to close it out. He remembered those days as dull and grey and heavy with an underwater slowness, even though they were bright with sunlight.
The dog yelped in the night where Solomon lay awake on a mattress in an empty dormitory. His mother stayed at the priest’s house, sleeping in the only bed. In the morning they were woken by pied crows calling. No voices or engines. The rebel soldiers had swept through days before, driving away goats, tying the legs of chickens and slinging them from their truck. If they caught you, they cut off your ears and lips. Children were forced to kill children. That way they could never leave.
His mother brought him black tea, holding the cup for him. They breakfasted on cold chapatti and leftover beans. Then Father Brian drove them south, the Toyota with its dusty windows rocking and creaking until they reached a metaled road. Then he paid a lorry driver to take them into the next town, away from the border. Father Brian gave Solomon’s mother a tight roll of money, a packet of white tablets, a bible with a maroon cover. In the town they found every language. Solomon spoke in English to find a lorry that was going south. Then two days of driving, one night sleeping sitting upright in the cab like a row of dolls. The lorry driver was a tall Tanzanian who wore jeans and a torn vest. He spoke Swahili and was carrying sugar cane to the refinery built by the Chinese at the edge of the great lake.
Solomon had blanked out the pain in his memory. What he remembered was the traffic in the city, swirling in all directions. Matatu, boda boda, bicycles, cars, buses and trucks; the myriad blue windows of a tall concrete building winking in the sun; traffic lights that changed colour as a matatu driver took them to the University hospital. A small man with missing eyeteeth, he’d refused the money they offered, calling his mother Sister, showing them the kindness of strangers. At the hospital Solomon had two operations on his hands to cut away the damaged flesh and bone. Gradually they healed, leaving uneven stumps. His hands were like those of some human prototype. Unevolved. Primitive.
