by Graham Mort
He remembered the smell of the hospital, the self-important voices of the doctors, the bright white tiles in the operating theatre. He remembered the surgeon who operated on him ruffling his hair and telling him how lucky he was. His mother was given ankle splints and a walking frame to heal her broken feet. She’d thrown the bible from the truck window on the first day, her face cut from stone. She never complained about what they had done to her. Whenever he woke at night, she seemed to be watching him, her eyes dissolving in the dimmed lights.
By the time Solomon had wheeled his mother down the high street and around to their flat on the brick built estate, a fierce little wind was whipping the litter down the pavements, shaking the neon sign above the off-licence that flickered at night like gunfire in a silent film. They shared a ground floor flat, part of a pebble-dashed terrace stuck with satellite dishes. Solomon helped his mother from the wheelchair in the hall, folding it under the stairs and unzipping her waterproof coat, making pliers with his first and second fingers. The heating had switched on and the flat was warm. He gave her his arm and supported her as she took tiny steps towards the living room. She lowered herself into an armchair and nodded at him.
– Thank you, son.
They spoke only English now. When he asked her to sing to him, to sing the old songs of their tribe, she refused.
– They would be bitter on my tongue.
When they had named him Solomon, they were hoping for great things. The way parents did, naming their children after kings or political leaders. The way all people hoped for better things for their children. But in the bible Solomon had been denied by God. Then his son Jeroboam took the throne, bringing slaughter, taxing his own people. Names were just foolishness. History itself was the scourge, curling around them like a whip – a scorpion’s tail – to remind them of how little had changed or could.
Now Solomon’s mother fumbled with the TV remote control to watch a gardening programme. A talkative woman with red hair and breasts half exposed was laying out a vegetable garden. Solomon watched from the doorway. He’d carried water for his mother from the river to the village, struggling to lift the weight of the cooking oil tin she’d threaded with rope to make a bucket. She’d shown him how to pour it at the base of each plant, how to water when the heat of the day was ebbing and the sun’s fury was passing. He watched her now, yearning for a piece of land where she could grow tomatoes, beans, a little spinach. Back home she’d considered growing coffee as a cash crop now that the government was encouraging it. She wasn’t too old, even if her feet were useless. Now their food came from the little supermarket down the road that had a green pine tree in a green circle as its symbol. It was special place, a shrine, with its neatly packaged food lying under white light in the fridges and freezers. It was clean, without the red dust that covered everything back home. Dust that his mother swept from the house every morning. Dust that had soaked up their blood and language and history and erased them.
Solomon set about making tea in the little kitchen. He’d been surprised at how difficult it was to do things without thumbs – dressing oneself, washing with soap, wiping himself after defecation, even urinating without splashing everywhere. In England, he had reconstructive surgery, the surgeons working with the remaining muscle and bone. They told him there would be some movement, but little sensitivity. He would have to use his eyes to gauge how and where to grip. He’d been helped by a physiotherapist who taught him to do these things. For a while he’d worn prosthetic thumbs that strapped to each hand with Velcro fasteners and helped him to hold things. They were the colour of white skin, as if that didn’t matter. The rebel commander had been a man of imagination.
Solomon took teabags from the caddy, holding it against his stomach with one hand and pulling off the lid with the fingers of the other, then making the tea in the pot with milk already added. He had to hold the milk bottle with both hands. He could see his mother nodding in her chair in the adjoining room. The woman on the television was flicking out a length of hosepipe and watering a row of plants. Every now and then she looked up and forced a smile for the camera and said something he couldn’t hear above the noise of the kettle. Solomon lifted the teapot and poured the tea, then placed the cups on a tin tray and carried it into the living room. His mother’s eyes were hooded, as if she was almost asleep. Rain was dashing softly against the windows. He could hear music from upstairs where the Polish electrician lived. Sometimes they passed in the hallway, the electrician carrying his bag of tools and humming under his breath in a language where all the words seemed melodious, already joined together as song.
That night, Solomon lay in bed listening to his mother’s breath in the next room. He thought of the sea ravaging the coastline, of Norse raiders in their longboats sculling to shore under the cliffs. As a child, the sea had been hard to imagine, though he’d been told about it, had read about it in books. When they left Africa, they’d flown over Lake Victoria, which had seemed endless, but even that didn’t prepared him. On the lake there were small fishing boats and islands covered in palm trees, but the Mediterranean was truly huge, with an endless depth. Then this grey North Sea confronting them after they flew into Manchester and travelled by train to Newcastle. In the last world war, each nation had a navy and their sailors fought in steel ships. In Africa, they killed each other out in the open, under the sun. Here, there were even ships that sailed below the surface in the cold darkness. All that energy, all that human ingenuity gone into killing each other, the sea blazing with burning oil. Now submarines carried nuclear weapons, patrolling under the ice caps, watching and waiting. A Russian submarine, The Kursk, had become trapped on the seabed and all the sailors died. But not before they had time to write to their wives and sweethearts, feeling the oxygen become exhausted, holding each other’s hands in the dark, dying for the Fatherland. Such thoughts carried him into sleep. He dreamed of the village where they’d played football, marking out goalposts on the barracks wall. He saw the river flowing like liquid metal, the crocodile lurch into its broken light.
When he woke, Solomon experienced a little spasm of surprise as he tried to close his hands around the sheets to throw them back. It was easier to think about the sea than to think about the future. The future should have run ahead of him like a road or a track clearing tangled bush. It was hard to walk that road when there seemed to be nothing there. The future, he’d realised, waking in the hospital with bandaged hands, his mother watching him from her chair beside the bed, was more than events that happened and days that dawned. The future was something you imagined in order to live. A promise you made to yourself against the curse the past had pronounced.
When the rebel soldiers came, he was with a group of younger boys in the centre of the village, playing under the jacaranda tree. Its purple flowers spilled onto the dirt. It was where the village elders held their meetings, where the government soldiers paraded to show the villagers how safe they were. It was where they had their primary school lessons – when the teacher wasn’t drunk on waragi, or sleeping it off. Education is light. That’s what he’d told them on his better days, smiling foolishly with perfect teeth, struggling to muster pencils and notebooks, propping up the blackboard in the decayed schoolhouse where termites ate the desks and floorboards and roof beams, where the rotted thatch let in snakes and rain.
Education? Light? That had been about the future. Solomon knew that now. Education was about acquiring wisdom. To know about the world was to know how the world had been and might be. History made the future. Suffer the little children, to come unto me. The rebel leader had quoted Jesus, gripping Solomon’s arm, his eyes jumping like sparks, his uniform smelling of smoke, sweat and ganja. His fingers were hard and the vein on his forearm stood out, darkening the skin.
They’d been playing soccer with a ball made from banana fibre tied with string and Solomon was been in goal, laughing as he caught shot after shot. He’d been placing the ball to kick it out when he heard the silence and l
ooked up to see a line of solders in rag-tag uniforms. They wore necklaces to feed a heavy machine gun and carried AK47s. The brass cartridge cases glittered in the sun as they closed in. The younger kids had already fled, but Solomon was trapped against the wall between the goalposts. And he couldn’t leave his mother. So he’d been captured. There were reasons. The garrison at the base had gone out on patrol that morning, and those left – the fat quartermaster and cook – were shot down as they tried to escape. Two bursts on an automatic weapon, the crack of single shots, a chemical smell of spent cartridges dispersing. The rebels dragged their bodies into the village and laid them up against the jacaranda tree like a couple of drunks who’d fallen asleep against each other. The rebel commander wore a pair of women’s boots with a leopard fur trim. He’d put his arm around Solomon as he led him to the chopping block, the way his father might have done.
Father Brian had given them the address and name of a contact in the city and they were taken in and cared for by a European charity. A journalist visited, scribbling in his notebook, setting off a flash camera. They’d been featured in the newspaper as an example of what the rebels did to innocent citizens. A cause célèbre. When it was clear that Solomon needed treatment that couldn’t be given at the local hospital, they were asked if they wanted to go to Sweden or the UK. Solomon remembered Manchester United. He’d seen them play on the television set that ran from a stinking generator at the local bar. He knew nothing about Sweden, except that the people there had white hair, like albinos or ghosts.
Visas were arranged, the airfare donated from a UK charity, and they were taken to the airport. It was at the tip of a finger of land that jutted into the lake. From the porthole of the plane, between wing and fuselage, the lake passed under them like varnished copper. They were heading northwest, over deserts and mountains into Europe. It was strange how the desert seemed to have been shaped by water, with valleys and gullies wrinkling it. Solomon watched the outsized plane on the electronic map, nudging over Libya, Italy, Germany and France towards the small island of Britain. When their meals arrived in little plastic containers with foil covers, the airhostess helped him to open them. He’d grasped the fork as if it was a trowel. She was a beautiful girl in a cream suit with red lipstick and caramel skin and she was trying not to look at his hands. His mother told him how she had once been on an aeroplane to Nairobi, when she’d worked for a Muslim businessman before she’d met Solomon’s father. They’d gone there to buy fabric for his clothing business. Aigh! she said in English, shrugging into the thin blanket the airline issued, We will survive. Solomon asked what happened to the businessman. His mother shrugged. He had disappeared in the civil war. What had happened to his father would have to wait. He wanted to know, but he daren’t ask in case his mother knew, had really known all this time.
The cabin lights dimmed and the aeroplane droned on, hardly seeming to move, yet its airspeed was hundreds of miles an hour. His other life felt like the memory of something now, the way we remember a dream that has never happened, the way the mind can think anything, but can’t unthink it.
When his mother was safely in bed, Solomon took the laptop computer into the living room and switched it on. He was taking online courses in English, Accounting and Computing and he’d been lent a machine to practise on. When they returned home he would be able to earn his living. They’d build a house with a veranda where his mother could sit out of the sun. They’d have a little ornamental garden and a shamba to grow food and a fishpond, all in a compound with iron gates.
The screen lit up slowly and he typed in his password. He had a Facebook account and was gradually collecting friends. Some in the UK, some in Africa – even America and Canada. It was exciting to check his email and find a request to confirm someone as a friend. Someone he’d never meet, but who smiled out at him from their photograph. Then there were friends who knew friends and so the network grew. Sometimes he chatted to them about football, the premier league; usually he had little to say. He followed Manchester United; he lived with his mother; he was studying to be an accountant. He tried to type with all his fingers as he’d been taught, but it was hard. It was hard to do things in the correct way when he was no longer correct.
He had a bank account into which a monthly allowance came from the charity. He spent very little, even saved a little money, so sometimes he shopped online for small things. A tee shirt. A pair of jeans. Music for the Ipod he’d been given. There was no room for a garden in the little flat, not even a window box like those he’d seen in the town, so Solomon sent away for a fish tank. It arrived in a great cardboard box packed with polystyrene. Aigh! his mother had said, frowning, What have you bought now? But Solomon had shaken his head and said nothing, smiling and placing one finger flat against his forehead, the way she’d shown him to keep secrets as a child.
Tonight, as she was sleeping, he went shopping for goldfish. Amazingly, they could be sent through the post. Quality English-bred pond fish delivered to your door. The tank came with a packet of gravel and water conditioner and a special bag of plastic pondweed to plant it out with. There was a little filter that you plugged into the electricity to freshen the water. You added a fish food and let it decompose to make bacteria, then after a week or so, you could add fish. He remembered that from Father Brian’s lessons.
Solomon chose three goldfish – Comet Tails, three to four inches long – entering his credit card details carefully with the delivery address. They would arrive the day after tomorrow. Not long. He thought of the fish being chosen for him from hundreds of possibilities, one almost indistinguishable from another. The way they wouldn’t know anything about it, because they had such a short memory span. Three seconds, they said, then everything was lost to them and began again. That was a myth of course, but they’d laughed about it with Father Brian when he teased someone for not paying attention. The next day was Thursday. Then Friday, when his English language assignment was due.
On Thursday afternoon he asked the woman in the supermarket about bluebells. The one who smiled at him and placed the coins so carefully into his hands. In her strange accent she told him that they grew in late April, that there was a famous bluebell wood just a few miles from town. In the spring he would take a taxi and drive his mother there to see them. They hadn’t promised Father Brian anything, but they owed him that, at least. When they returned home to Uganda, they’d take some of those blue flowers in a box, their bulbs nested in damp cotton wool in a plastic bag in the darkness of the aeroplane’s hold. One day, in the little house with its veranda and garden, he’d dig them into a shady place. Transplanted, they would have a new life, a new home.
On Friday morning he was downloading some free software in his bedroom when the doorbell rang. He went to the window before he went to the door. There was a white van parked crookedly on the pavement. On the doorstep a small man with tattooed arms checking a hand-held electronic terminal. He pronounced Solomon’s name awkwardly, apologetically. Scottish. Cattle raiders. Another of Father Brian’s jokes. The man fetched a small cardboard box from the van and jammed it under one arm, scanning a barcode on the label, holding the terminal steady for Solomon as he scratched his name on the screen, making a fist to grip the pen. The driver handed over the box, it had a shifting weight in it, slipping weirdly from side to side.
His mother called from the living room as he took the box into the kitchen, but he ignored her. It was to be a surprise, after all. His father told him how they had netted river fish in the Congo as a boy. He remembered that. A line of boys waded out barefoot, drawing the net tight between them and feeling the fish strike it, becoming lodged by their gills. His father ended the story like that, on a dramatic flourish: What should have helped them breathe killed them! Afterward they pulled the leeches from their legs and skewered the fish over a campfire, taking the rest home to share out in the village. He left when Solomon was eight years old. And, yes, he was called David. David Patrice Kubamba. The night before the box was deli
vered Solomon heard his mother talking in her sleep in a language he didn’t understand. Perhaps she was talking to his father in his own tongue. She never spoke of him now.
Solomon took the box to the kitchen sink and found a kitchen knife. He had to grip the knife with both hands, carefully cutting though the tape that fastened the box. Inside was a plastic bag full of water and when the light entered the three goldfish in the bag exploded, making it jump and thrum. Solomon closed the lid quickly, pulling the delivery note from inside the box that told him to open it only in dim light to avoid shocking the fish. His heart had jumped and it was pounding now. There was a word for such situations, when you tried to do something good and something bad resulted. The fish had travelled in a complete absence of light, feeling the box lift and sway, then drop and lift again. Then the van’s engine throbbing through water. All the time, seeing nothing. That was how the Russian sailor must have felt as power on The Kursk failed and they faced death, writing letters to their mothers and wives under dimming torches. Dying one by one with their memories in the face of the only certainty. The goldfish had travelled towards him in their own element, their gills kneading oxygen from water, touching against each other in liquid darkness. Solomon let the box stand with the lid half closed. Then, when they were used to the light, he took the knife and the box and carried them to the front room where his mother dozed and the fish tank stood on a low table.
