by Maggie Gee
16
Vanessa’s sitting, just after sunset, surrounded by the other writers and a smattering of giant schoolchildren, through an ‘Evening of International Writing’ at the dark, dank National Theatre, which squats, hot and airless, like a square, chocolate brown excretum from the ’60s, slap, plop in the centre of Kampala. Though at first she was astonished not to be on the programme, she soon realises these are mostly second-raters.
This was more or less what Peter Pargeter hinted when she found him to ask about the omission. (And Tadjo, for example: Tadjo’s name is not there.) ‘Oh, you’re reading tomorrow, in a more intimate context. We felt that would show your gifts to advantage.’ He looked uneasy, and then added, with a little flourish, ‘And obviously, someone of your experience will have had many chances to read in bigger venues. Which is not true of all the Africans here.’
But Deirdre Mullins was quite full of herself when they met in the foyer before the event. ‘You aren’t reading? Oh, what a shame ... I expect we’ll be hearing from you tomorrow, then.’
Vanessa looks at her hard. Is she patronising me? ‘Yes, I will be reading with a different group of writers, who I believe include Veronique Tadjo.’
‘Oh no, she’s gone home, haven’t you heard?’ babbles Deirdre, her large plain face glistening with sweat and eagerness.
‘You had better go and practise your reading,’ says Vanessa. ‘I think there are a lot of first-timers, this evening.’
And so it has proved, or if it wasn’t their first time, they had learned nothing, and should soon give up. Yet some of them go on for ever, as does Geoffrey Truman, who has clearly had a few. How the heart sinks when the performer begins by saying, semi-audibly or shouting loudly, ‘I am going to read from four of my books’. One will be sufficient, surely, she thinks.
But a few of them are a revelation. It is galling, yet good for her, Vanessa decides, to find that Deirdre Mullins has talent. When she finishes, Vanessa has tears in her eyes. And one or two others set the stage alight, and remind them all that what they do has a point.
Later she lies contented in her vast white bed, looking forward to her own reading tomorrow. She knows, for some of them, she’s quite a dark horse, since the African writers are franker than British ones, unless you include Geoffrey Truman (‘Vanessa Henman? No, I have not read you.’) A white horse, maybe. A pale horse ... A pale horse running over endless white sheets ...
And her hot little feet start to twitch against the mattress.
But then something wakes her: for it’s death, is it not? She is falling, soundlessly, and then she’s awake. Something about Death on a pale horse. Vanessa still feels young. She’s not ready to die. She’s not going to die for ages and ages, till she’s written her not-yet-written books, and is famous ...
But do I look old, to all these young people?
What worked this evening? The simplest things. Little bits of story that seemed – true. Details. When someone else’s life came before you, bright and naked, saying, ‘Look, I’m like you.’ Even when it was Deirdre Mullins, because the point was, the point was ... She is drifting, but recalls herself, because it is important.
The point was, Deirdre Mullins only looks like Deirdre Mullins, and sounds like her, someone silly and boring, but really, it’s just a façade we wear, our looks, our habits, the things we say. Something temporary, a crude tent for protection. But inside the tent, there is something living. And even that poor woman in the ill-judged kaftan, who talked such rubbish about ‘positionality’. Her body was trying to make contact with us.
So Vanessa changes her mind about her reading. She’d intended to read from her novel in progress, the novel that stalled so long ago, a passage about the self-conscious writer, the doubts and self-protectiveness that cripple you. And suddenly that seems trivial, irrelevant. Real writers try to make life real for others.
She decides, I’ll read a passage about my father. My father and the chickens. About my childhood. From my abandoned autobiography. And if people like it, I will be encouraged.
Because she does need encouragement. The last few years have been tricky. Of course she is happy that Justin is married, but naturally there has been – more of a distance. And Trevor himself ... Dear old Tigger. Fair enough, he has this other woman – though he once lost his temper when she called Soraya that; ‘She is not the other woman, I am living with her! It is thirty-odd years since you threw me out!’ – but why does he have to fixate on Soraya? After all, it was not as though he’d married her. (No, whereas he had married Vanessa.) Yet he made strange complaints about ‘giving them a chance’. He no longer seemed to want their special times together, which had gone on, quite unchanged by their divorce, for decades. Quite suddenly he ‘mustn’t be unfair to Soraya!’ He is so old-fashioned! Yet how she has missed them.
No Tigger and no Justin. The house has felt empty. There was a brief fling with a mature student, but too much to explain, too much to unlearn, and she realised how long it would take to train him. Whereas Trevor, well, he was already trained. (‘I am not a dog,’ he had told her, once. ‘Though you can be a bit of a bitch, Vanessa.’ And when she was outraged, he only laughed. ‘Don’t talk about having to train me, then.’)
It was almost as if he didn’t care any more. As if he didn’t care about Vanessa. Yes, she is always busy with her teaching, but teaching writing doesn’t feed the soul. And perhaps the house has felt a little empty, with Justin so busy, and Trevor away.
Of course there is little Abdul Trevor. Her grandchild, when she sees him, is a total joy. (‘They’re the meaning of life,’ she’d once said to Fifi, which was ill-advised, since Fifi has no children. Yet Vanessa does believe it, in a way. Fifi has her cat, Vanessa has Justin, and Fifi’s always seen the two things as the same, but she has no equivalent for Abdul Trevor. And it’s through little Abdy that life goes on.) The way he pretends to read a book to her, with great expression, but upside down, the little gifts he thrusts into her hand – a spoonful of rice he doesn’t want to finish, a squashed leaf he has kept in his pocket. And once he drew her: an enormous sun, or it might have been a collapsing balloon, with lots of straggly rays coming out, or perhaps they were legs, and she was a spider. ‘It’s lovely, darling. I will keep it for ever.’ She feels faint at the thought of Abdy ill or unhappy. If he is all right, the world is all right. If he is not, it cannot be borne. Like the time when he caught an infection from the pool, and his temperature shot up to 103 ... Abdul Trevor must live for ever. And her thoughts circle back to Mary Tendo, and her little girl, who must be Abdy’s age.
But it’s too painful to think about Mary: the demolished hotel: the gift still in her suitcase, in its pretty paper, with its pictures of storks, for the child whose features she will never see.
With an effort, she drags her thoughts away. She must just do her best, with the work, and with people. She gets things wrong, she can’t deny it, but she tries, she tries, she makes an effort.
And falling asleep, powerless to edit, agnostic Vanessa half-smiles, half-snuffles as her thoughts slip away into green valleys among flocks of drowsy, browsing sheep ... I hope Someone Up There notices. I hope I’ll get a bit of credit.
PART 3
The Fountain of Life
17
The President has not slept well. There is the problem of the incident on Lake Albert, whose waters are shared between Uganda and Congo. Ugandan soldiers have been killed, so though Kabila assures him it’s a misunderstanding, there must be apologies and reparations, and punishment if they are not forthcoming.
There is oil under Lake Albert, oil all along the rich, hidden border regions of Congo and Uganda. There is oil and gold and diamonds, no-one knows how much. Peasants pan for gold in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest; just a very little, a little at a time, in the dappled shadows, when no-one is looking. But foreigners are interested in the gold: for medicine, for technology, for fairy-tale wedding-rings, for ingots, the safe place to keep your money. Foreigner
s are interested in the oil. Foreigners are interested in the diamonds. And the oil price is going up. It is well over 100 dollars a barrel. Uganda is sitting on lakes of money, compared to which the revenue from tourism is peanuts. Peanuts for monkeys and gorillas.
So Museveni tosses, restless, in his enormous bed. Uganda must get hold of it before the foreigners! Uganda etekwa okweyongerayo mu maaso nate nesubi! They have to move forward, they have to think boldly, move boldly forward or they will slip behind. They will fall behind DRC to the west, and the savagery there might spill across the border, and the LRA, some of whom are hiding in Congo, might come back in triumph to murder them all, and abduct their children, as they did before, and turn the Ten Commandments into rape and murder. Uganda will fall behind Kenya and Tanzania in the east, and Museveni will not be asked to lead the new East Africa, which, as a great statesman and war hero, he deserves more than any other leader.
Compared to him, they are all midgets. Yet all he gets is criticism.
And then there are those, the NGOs and all those troublesome women who send emails and petitions, who want to stop Ugandans from developing their forests. Who say that the government should not be allowed to put banana plantations in Mabira Forest! He thinks, the bazungu do not want us to develop. They want us to remain at their feet, like children. They want us to retain our monkeys and our forests so we stay for ever at a lower level of development. But he is forward-looking. He will not do it. He will lead Uganda into the future. Perhaps, in the short term, this will mean war.
Another new day: hard times, for a leader.
Mary Tendo and Trevor are on the road! Mary is shouting at Mercy, who is in the back seat. ‘Tomanyi kulabilira mwana oyo ...!’ It goes on so long, and at such high volume, that Trevor, whose ears hurt, finally asks, ‘Everything all right, Mary?’
Mary turns and flashes him a smile and says, in a quite normal voice, in English, ‘I am telling the maid to wipe Theodora’s face. She leaves her like that, covered in breakfast,’ before continuing to shout like a banshee.
They’re en route, in theory, to Mary’s village, two hours north-west of Kampala. But at 10 AM, they are still bogged down in a stop-start tour of the city’s shops. Mary Tendo has bargained for epic quantities of household goods, for rice and potatoes, for sugar and tea, for salt and soap, for cooking oil and paraffin. At last she has settled on a rough-and-ready store where the answers she’s got seem to satisfy her. Now the shopkeeper is sorting out boxes and bags, and scribbling figures on a scrap of torn paper.
‘Mary, I need a newspaper.’ Trevor has never been the type to like shopping. Besides, a man has to keep up with the news. He thought he saw a headline about trouble in Congo. Which is right next door. Trevor needs to know.
‘Trevor, I will need you here in a minute.’
But his wish to have something he can call his own, that will tie him back to the habits he likes, to a rectangle of world where Mary isn’t talking, makes him shrug her off. ‘Back soon,’ he says.
And on Kampala Road, the great thoroughfare that plunges through the chest and the bowels of Kampala, past the towering banks and the red-roofed posta where refugees go to pick up their parcels, past the bare wires and joists of half-built hotels and the pleasant coffee-smells of Steers’ and Nando’s, past the white metal chrysalises of briefly-parked taxis and the workmen urgently repairing the pavements – on a section of pavement that’s not yet been repaired or cleared of its multi-coloured lichen of sellers, spread out on the concrete, legs flat in the heat, offering matches and lighters and sugared nuts, and chewing gum, biros, pencils, wallets – he finds, where he remembered seeing her, a thin, pretty woman selling newspapers, and most of them, he sees, intrigued, are old, single copies of magazines and weekly papers, some of them American or British, a Time magazine dating back to August, an Economist forecasting a hot, dry spring, although it is already autumn – but she also has a small pile of today’s New Vision.
He pays, uncomfortably lordly from above, but as soon as he clutches the thin paper, he feels better, a man with the world between his hands, and everything, therefore, back in order, though the news is once again about the Congo. MUSEVENI TO SORT DRC. Which means, he presumes, sabre-rattling.
He ambles back down the sunny street, which is certainly an improvement on London. Yesterday everything had felt unreal, with the nine-hour flight and then the trip to the lake, and in the evening, in order to be polite, he had sat up talking to Charles and Mary (in fact Mary was doing most of the talking) until he actually fell asleep, his head sinking slowly on to the table, and Charles had escorted him to bed, although Mary seemed a little disapproving, as though he was failing in his essential task, which was to learn everything there was to know about Uganda. In particular, where Britain went wrong. He is used to Mary: he’s fond of her. He doesn’t mind listening while she talks, though he would like a bit of a rest now and then. But he doesn’t suffer from the Guilt of Empire. If that’s what she wants, she has got the wrong bloke.
When he spots the car, Mary is back inside, and the boot is bulged open by the stuff she has bought. But he hears Mary’s ringing voice through the glass, and in a second, poor Mercy gets out, with a long trailing piece of dirty cloth, and proceeds to use it as makeshift string, tying the lid of the boot roughly to the bumper.
As she works, doggedly, eyes down, the instructions continue from the body of the car. ‘Be careful that you do not damage the handle. Be careful that you do not damage the bumper. I have promised Charles we will cherish his car. You are doing what? Are you cherishing?’
When he’s almost there, he hears the maid whispering something ferocious under her breath as she struggles to pull the metal maw together, but Mary Tendo continues, regardless. ‘Have you finished yet? Have you broken it?’
‘Let me give you a hand,’ he says to the girl, and she yields to him, grateful, with a sweet, liquid smile. ‘Put a sock in it, Mary, I’ve sorted it.’
‘Sock?’ Mary is calling from the car, suspicious. ‘Have you washed the sock? It is for what? Is it to protect this valuable car?’
Now the maid returns to her seat in the back, where the exquisitely dressed daughter is sitting on her lap, in a pink shiny party dress, that looks too hot, and little sandals made of pale pink jello. Clearly they don’t go in for child-seats, in Uganda. The rest of the back seat is piled with sacks of rice. Trevor gets into the front, beside Mary, who averts her face, with a disapproving air, and makes a great show of looking in her purse.
He decides to ignore it. Women are a mystery. In fact, most of them are clean round the bend. He wants them on the road, so he can read his paper. ‘Are we ready for the off?’ he asks Mary.
‘Yes, we are ready.’ But she goes on searching, probing her purse for invisible money. ‘We need other things, also, but it is better if you buy them outside Kampala.’
Did she say ‘you’? He will not ask. But the business with the purse is hard to ignore. And the frown, pleating her usually serene eyebrows. ‘What’s the matter, Mary? Did you get a good bargain?’
‘I always get a good bargain, Trevor. Except of course it was all very expensive. It is expensive with extra guests.’
He waits. Clearly there is more to come. A stork parades past them, small head aslant, its eyes sharp and amused, as if it is listening.
‘And so the guests must be entertained ...’
‘Yes. I think I see what you are saying, Mary.’
But Trevor is getting fed up with this. He is still slightly jet-lagged. He wants to read his paper. ‘Well. Let’s get going, in case it rains. Charles said to me the rainy season’s coming early’.
‘Charles? He knows nothing about the weather. He pretends he can feel the rain in his bones, but Uganda does not have a rainy season.’
Trevor won’t encourage her to criticise Charles. Men, he thinks, have to stick together. ‘Now I am going to read New Vision ... find out about this hoo-ha in the Congo.’
She is starting
the car, but the lectures are not over. ‘To Ugandans, DRC is not ha ha. It can turn out to make very bad trouble, about gold, and oil, and we will have another war, and we have enough wars going on already.’
‘I didn’t say that. You misunderstood me –’
‘And because you had to buy your paper, because you think it is good to read about war, you went away without paying for the shopping, but it is OK, you can pay me later. I know Vanessa often tried to pay me later. I think it is an English habit. I think you had to pay for the empire, later.’
Right. That’s enough. Trevor has had it. He likes women, he’s a gentle soul, but Mary has managed to get his goat. His goat is got. He won’t take it lying down. And as she drives aggressively out of Kampala, klaxoning the horn on principle, whizzing through tiny gaps in the gridlock, Trevor gives Mary a history lesson, too, and for the maid in the back, who speaks hardly any English, but is strong on non-verbal intelligence – who cowers before Mary as before her God, since Mary has replaced her mother and father – Trevor Patchett begins to emerge as a hero.
‘OK, Mary, it’s my turn now. So maybe the village will have to entertain us. But I will be building them a well, don’t forget. And so I dare say they’ll be pleased to see us. But if you need money for the food, just ask.’
Trevor’s a calm sort of bloke, but he isn’t a mug, and he’s not going to let Mary piss him around. He’s stumped up 400 pounds just to get here, yes, partly because he felt like an adventure, but mostly because he is fond of Mary, and he’s throwing in tools and labour for free, and he’s short of sleep, and he can’t read his paper because ever since he got it, she’s been bending his ear, like a giant Queen Bee trying to nest in his earhole, being busy and buzzing and bossing him about and wiggling her bottom as she does it, all woman, and huffing her bosom right in front of him, and maybe that might be part of it ... But he brushes it aside. She’s just annoying. Mary wasn’t as bad as this in England. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to read my paper.’ He hasn’t really finished: he is building up steam, he has a few things to say about the empire, but he’s blowed if he’s going to be put off his read.