Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘And the people you are worried about?’ Cameron asked. ‘The danger the policeman came to try to warn you about? Do you know what that is all about?’

  ‘They don’t want me to testify,’ Mutoni replied. ‘I have testified at one trial and I am supposed to be going back to Tanzania to testify at another one. The first one ended badly for a man who was responsible for killing many people, and there are people who want to stop me from going.’

  ‘Dangerous people?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Their friends are on trial for genocide,’ Mutoni replied. ‘They will have been involved in the killing themselves. They have stopped other people from testifying. I think that probably means they are dangerous.’

  Ask a stupid question and get an eminently civil answer – but that didn’t stop it being a stupid question. Cameron lapsed into silence, feeling admonished by the care Mutoni had taken to respond to his question as though it wasn’t stupid.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it one day,’ Mutoni volunteered after a minute or so, ‘but not today, if you don’t mind. Today is my little girl Amhoro’s birthday. And I must go soon.’

  Wherever Amhoro was, she wasn’t with Mutoni. Cameron felt a sudden rush of tenderness for this woman, so far from her home on her daughter’s birthday. Of all the many bad days in Sheffield, Hilton’s, and particularly Nicky’s, birthdays were the worst. Tenderness wasn’t a feeling he experienced very often these days.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to stay here for a few days, or at least tonight?’ Cameron asked. ‘I have a sleeper couch in my study and I hate to think of you having to sleep in that shed.’

  ‘That is very kind of you, Cameron. Thank you,’ Mutoni replied. ‘But no, thank you. I want to get out of Sheffield for a few days. I have a friend who lives in Leeds who I will go to. She has been away in London for a few days, otherwise I would have gone sooner.’

  ‘Please let me know if I can ever do anything to help,’ Cameron said. ‘I know what it is like to be watched and followed, and to have powerful people with guns threatening to kill you.’

  ‘I would like you to tell me your story sometime,’ Mutoni said, standing up and pointing to a table in the corner of the room. ‘Before I go, please tell me what that is over there.’

  ‘I am playing a game of Go,’ Cameron replied. ‘It is a war game that came originally from China but was taken over by the Japanese. It is about capturing territory by surrounding it with the black or white stones. I am playing with the black stones. The stronger player always plays with the white stones.’

  ‘Who are you playing?’ Mutoni asked. ‘Does somebody come here to play? It doesn’t look as if you could move the board around without all the stones falling off.’

  ‘I am playing on the internet,’ Cameron replied. ‘But I always lay the game out, move by move, on my board as well. I find it easier to think about my next move when I can see a real board. I don’t know anybody in Sheffield who plays. I never know exactly who it is I’m playing, as we tend not to use our own names. My opponent in this game is someone I often play with, he calls himself Carter George – I say ‘he’ but it could quite easily be a woman who is calling herself that.’

  ‘What name do you use?’ Mutoni asked.

  ‘I call myself Chris Barratt,’ Cameron replied. ‘That was the name I used when I escaped from South Africa in 1985.’

  ‘It looks a very interesting game,’ Muthoni said, ‘a bit like Igisoro, our game played with a board that has four cup-like holes on each side and 64 seeds, you might know it as Bao.’

  ‘A bit like it,’ Cameron agreed, ‘but Go is very much slower. I’ve watched people play Bao so fast that I have found it impossible to work out what is going on.’

  ‘The funny thing about this game,’ Mutoni said, ‘is that it looks as if more than one game is going on at the same time, on two opposite corners of the board.’

  ‘It is unusual for the fighting to get so intense in the corners at this stage of the game,’ Cameron said. ‘The game is usually much looser. Carter George usually seems to like moving from skirmish to skirmish. He is a better player than I am – perhaps he has more time to think about each game – but when I beat him it is usually because he has been distracted by a fight in one corner and spent too much time focusing on that fight rather than staking out territory more widely.’

  ‘How many stones are there on each side?’ Mutoni asked.

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea – I’ve never counted them,’ Cameron answered. ‘There are always more than enough.’

  ‘Would it be possible for me to take two – for luck?’ Mutoni asked.

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ Cameron replied. The request was surprising, but there were more than enough stones. ‘Why do you think they might bring you luck?’

  ‘I remember my grandmother telling me a Kinyarwanda folktale about two young women going on a journey,’ Mutoni said. ‘Along the way they come across two small grinding stones fighting each other. One of the women, called Nyabwangu, asks them to stop fighting – “grinding stones are for grinding not for fighting” she says – and tells them that it is customary to separate two fighting parties. She intervenes and separates them, but as soon as she has done so one of the stones says, “You, young woman, will not live long! You found us playing and separated us without being asked to. You’ll have to let us start playing again so that you can continue on your journey. Do so quickly, or else you may as well just tell us that you are tired of life”.’

  Mutoni stopped talking and stood gazing silently down at the board.

  ‘The story often came back to my mind during the weeks of the genocide,’ she went on. ‘It didn’t seem right that it could be stopping the fighting that might lead to Nyabwangu’s death.’

  ‘It does seem counter-intuitive,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Counter-intuitive?’ Mutoni asked.

  ‘Perverse; not what one would expect,’ Cameron replied. ‘How did the story end?’

  ‘Yes, of course, sorry,’ Mutoni said quickly. ‘This bit wasn’t actually at the end of the story, which goes on a lot longer. But Nyabwangu said, “My dear grinding stones, restart your play so that I can go.” She had to say that several times but eventually the stones started fighting again and the two young women were able to continue on their journey. These stones fighting on your Go board remind me of the grinding stones – and of my grandmother. I would love it if you gave me two of them.’

  Cameron took a stone out of each of the two bowls, and stretched his hand out towards Mutoni with the black and white stones on his upturned palm.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Mutoni said with her hands clasped together in front of her, not reaching out to accept the stones. ‘But would it be possible to take two black stones rather than one black and one white? Grinding stones are part of black culture, not white culture, and I’m sure the grinding stones in the story would have been black rather than white.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Cameron said, returning the white stone to its bowl and picking out another black one. ‘But the black stones on the board are fighting with the white ones, not with each other. Isn’t taking two black stones, rather than one of each, a bit like stopping the fighting?’

  Mutoni paused for a few seconds to think about that before stretching her hand out to take the stones and turning away from the table towards the door.

  ‘No, I think taking two black stones is good,’ she said. ‘The fighting during the genocide was between black people, blacks weren’t fighting whites, and the fighting stopped some time ago. These two black stones will remind me of the story and of my grandmother. They will remind me of your kindness in giving them to me. And lying side by side in my pocket they may come to represent a lasting peace between Hutus and Tutsis.’

  ‘I very much hope so,’ Cameron said, showing Mutoni to the door. ‘You are very welcome to them. I hope they do bring you lu
ck. Hamba khale!’

  ‘Hamba khale? I don’t know that greeting,’ Mutoni responded, looking up and down the road in both directions to make sure there was nobody waiting outside for her.

  ‘An isiZulu farewell,’ Cameron explained. ‘It says: “go well”. Go very well Mutoni, and take care.’

  ‘Goodbye, and thank you again – for the breakfast, and for your kindness, and for my grinding stones,’ Mutoni said as she turned to go.

  Mutoni looked very vulnerable as she made her way down the road in the April sunshine. The sunshine wasn’t going to last. A bank of storm clouds had rolled over from the West while they had been inside, and rain could already be seen smudging the nearby hillsides. At home, storm clouds as dark as that would have brought thunder and lightning, and probably hail, but here there was never much by way of thunder. Cameron missed the transient violence of those thunderstorms.

  It wasn’t the approaching rain that was making him feel apprehensive.

  It might just be superstition, but Cameron would have much preferred Mutoni to accept his offer of two grinding stones that were still fighting. She would have been better to take a black one and a white one. Instead she had intervened to stop the fighting – and the grinding stones hadn’t wanted their fighting stopped.

  Chapter 3

  When Cameron’s friend Brian arrived at the pub two days later, Cameron was already sitting at a corner table nursing a glass of alcohol-free beer – his back to the wall as usual. If Neil had asked him why he preferred to sit with his back to the wall the answer would, again, have been ‘just in case’. Brian looked around, spotted Cameron’s wave and the pint of real ale already waiting for him, and made his way across the room.

  As always, Cameron saw heads turning to watch Brian as he negotiated his passage between the crowded tables. With his six foot six height, his shock of silver hair well down over his collar, and his contrasting Henry Ford line in wardrobes, Brian was nothing if not noticeable. ‘Any colour as long as it is black’ somehow managed to avoid looking funereal on him. It probably had something to do with the high-voltage energy with which he moved and talked – an energy that his sombre jeans, shirts and pullovers struggled to contain.

  ‘I don’t think you should publish it on its own,’ Brian said, as he sat down and put a brown A4 folder down on the table between them. He had never been one to beat about the bush.

  ‘Why not?’ Cameron asked. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘I think it is excellent,’ Brian replied. ‘It is well researched, well written, and a very good example of the post-9/11 overreaction your book is about (The draft of Cameron’s account of Forest Gate discussed here will be found in the Appendix.) But if you publish it on its own in something like the New Statesman you are going to piss off the police big time. Publish it as one chapter in a book titled The Age of Overreaction and people will be able to read it in context – particularly the context of a discussion about what you mean by “overreaction”. Publish it as an article on its own and it is likely to come across as a deliberate provocation.’

  ‘How many members of the local constabulary do you imagine spend their time reading the New Statesman?’ Cameron asked. ‘And, even if they did, how could they possibly dispute that Forest Gate was a perfect example of overreaction? You get a phone call from someone who says he thinks a chemical bomb of some sort is being made in a small terrace house in London. So you declare an air exclusion zone for five miles around the property and send 250 police officers off to sort it out. Just in case it isn’t a chemical weapon but a nuclear warhead that is being put together in someone’s kitchen, fifteen of those 250 are dressed in full Chemical, Biological, Nuclear and Radiological suits, which require two pairs of gloves to be worn. One can never be too careful. After they have smashed the front door down, the leading member of the specialist firearm team, the ultimate experts when it comes to handling weapons, heads up the stairs pointing his Heckler and Koch MP5 carbine in front of him with the safety catch off and, unsurprisingly, encounters someone coming down the stairs to see what the hell is going on. So what happens? Our firearms expert shoots him through the chest because he can’t feel the trigger of his gun through the gloves, and apparently doesn’t even know he has pulled the trigger.’

  Cameron’s voice had risen several notches as he spoke and Brian had begun to make ‘lower the volume’ gestures.

  ‘The people at the tables around us are beginning to take notice,’ Brian said, barely audibly, ‘I don’t think it is a good idea to attract too much attention.’

  ‘It’s about bloody time the people around here started to take notice of what the police are doing,’ Cameron replied. But he turned the volume down as requested. Brian somehow managed to be a calming influence in spite of his own high-voltage energy.

  ‘Everyone who hadn’t been shot,’ Cameron continued, ‘including all those in the house next door, was carted off to the nearest police station, most of them having been beaten up – presumably because they had made the mistake of not being born white. The house was searched for seven days, which involved tearing the walls down and taking the doors out, among other things. It took two months to get it back into a liveable condition. The owners of the house it shared a wall with suffered the same fate: their house was practically destroyed as well. And what did they find at the end of all that? Sweet bugger all, nada, nothing, zilch. If they were surprised not to find anything they certainly shouldn’t have been. The supposedly reliable source of the information they acted on turned out to be a criminal with an IQ of 69 who was said by his own defence lawyer to be an “utter incompetent”.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Brian said, tapping the folder with his forefinger, ‘I know all that. I’ve read the chapter, don’t forget. But I still don’t think it is a very good idea to send it off for publication on its own. You’ve published articles about all the major headline miscarriages of justice in England for which the police were responsible since the 1970s – the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven. There will no doubt be an Eight, a Nine and a Ten to be uncovered in due course. You’ve written dozens of letters to the newspapers about Hillsborough. The Sheffield Star and the Sheffield Telegraph must both have files of your letters an inch thick. Almost all of them, at least the ones I’ve seen, have been highly critical of the police. That means that the police will have a file two inches thick. They don’t need to boast a Sherlock Holmes or John Rebus in their ranks to conclude that you have a bee in your bonnet about the police and to feel mightily pissed off about it.’

  ‘Getting a bee in one’s bonnet sounds pretty random and accidental,’ Cameron said. ‘It’s also sexist: men tend not to wear bonnets. My view of police is neither random nor accidental. In South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s we used to hold the British justice system and its police force up as examples for South Africa to follow. How bloody ironic was that: the beatings meted out to the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six to extract false confessions in 1975, the year before the Soweto uprising, would have done the South African Special Branch proud.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Brian. ‘There’s no question that during the Troubles the Irish were treated by the police in England in pretty much the same way black people in South Africa were treated by the Afrikaner police.’

  Brian paused to allow half his pint of beer to lubricate his vocal chords. The conversations at the nearby tables were back in full spate. Cameron caught a tempting whiff of chips as a bowl arrived at the nearest table.

  ‘You’ve told me about the surveillance, and the harassment, and why you ultimately had to leave,’ Brian went on. ‘I know you are still suffering from PTSD, and I fully appreciate why you might feel less than kindly towards police in general. But isn’t it more logical, taking all that into account, to try to avoid pissing them off unnecessarily? It probably wouldn’t be as easy now for them to do to you what they did to the Irish people they framed in the 1970s
, but, given what we know about Hillsborough, I wouldn’t put it past them to try. We can be quite sure that in the thirty years since 1975 they will have been working on developing subtlety, rather than undergoing a series of road to Damascus conversions.’

  ‘It won’t have helped that I had a go at one of them about Hillsborough on Sunday,’ Cameron said. ‘He was obviously a bit taken aback. He hadn’t come to the allotments to beat anyone up, but had come off his own bat, or so he said, to warn Mutoni that the police had learnt that she might be in danger.’

  ‘I hope she isn’t,’ Brian said. ‘I’ve only met her the once – that time when I was helping you to reroof your apology for a shed – but I really liked what I saw of her. She wasn’t a bundle of laughs, but she exuded a kind of quiet dignity. I wondered what had happened to leave her with that nasty dent in her forehead.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cameron said, ‘she hasn’t told me. I took her back to my house for breakfast on Sunday but she was very edgy and clearly anxious to get out of town. She already knew she was in danger; she didn’t need to be told that by the police. She is convinced that there is someone watching her. She is apparently due to testify in Tanzania at one of the International Tribunal trials of those accused of being responsible for the genocide in Rwanda. She thinks there are people in UK who want to prevent her from testifying.’

  ‘If there is someone watching her,’ Brian observed, ’it probably wasn’t the brightest thing you have ever done to take her back to your place for breakfast. They might well have you in their sights now too.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure we weren’t followed on Sunday,’ Cameron replied. ‘I have had more than one lifetime’s worth of being watched and followed, and I would still back myself to spot anyone tailing me – even if I haven’t had much practice lately. Speaking of which, if it is still parked halfway between here and my house, I will be taking a very good look at a white Volvo S40 I walked past on my way here. The man sitting behind the wheel was wearing a flat cap and turned his head away from me to watch the passing traffic as I went by, so I couldn’t see his face. There wasn’t any passing traffic.’