by Maggie Gee
Now they chase each other, shrieking with excitement, round the room. Then they try to drive Dubois’s new red electric open-topped Volvo, a scaled-down version of the real thing, into the future, with Abdul Trevor’s arm thrown round Dubois’s shoulder, but they can’t both sit down, so they try to stand up, and both of them fall out, eight bendy golden limbs intertwining on the floor, and both of them draw in their breath to cry, but a light touch from Davey stops Justin rushing forward, so instead of howling, the two boys look at each other, surprised by the adventure, and giggle – then get up again, grinning, and start hugging and jostling, forgetting the car, which drives on, gleaming, until it hits two little blonde pony-tailed girls who are peering inside their leotards. A mother bustles up and looks reproachfully at Davey. ‘Did you see what happened? That could have been nasty. They did ask us, guys, to leave larger toys at home.’ (But one glance around the room shows a lot of large toys: cars, motorbikes, dolls’ prams, bicycles, a dolls’ kitchen with refrigerator, and one poor little toddler with cool-geek spectacles is stabbing vaguely at a kiddy computer.)
‘Sorry, Ruth, we won’t do it again.’ But once she turns her back, Justin and Davey chortle. She’s a big-armed, bean-eating, strict type of mother, not the kind the two men know how to charm.
‘Children? Good morning. Let’s get mats! Time to start.’ The calm voice of the (very pretty) teacher. Once the mothers have seen her, they joke that she’s the reason why the fathers are keen to bring the kids to yoga. She’s a bit of a legend, Ella Waddingham. ‘And she got a first in physics, apparently,’ the fathers whisper to each other, awed, and fall over each other to help with the mats, as if the physics is why they admire her.
The class is mostly girls, but there are three or four boys. The girls seem older, more docile, more graceful.
‘Odd thing, they communicate by talking, girls. Not like our lot, who do it by fighting,’ says Davey. ‘I quite regret not having a girl.’
The two blokes are inspecting the inside of Dubois’s car. ‘It’s absolutely brilliant,’ says Justin, impressed, though he’s also thinking, ‘We couldn’t afford it,’ and ‘Isn’t it a teensy bit over the top?’
‘Wish they’d had stuff like this when I was a boy,’ says Davey, proud he can give his son everything.
But Ruth is back, and she’s listening. ‘When you were a boy, David, the planet had a future. I just wonder what messages we’re giving our children. I mean obviously cars do constitute a problem. Adam and I try to be careful. And it doesn’t mean, you know, depriving them. Paloma just loves her little bike –’ She breaks off mid-lecture, spotting that Paloma has given up her clumsy attempts at yoga and is creeping up behind her graceful, innocent friend with a plastic hammer raised to strike. ‘Paloma! Don’t retaliate!’ She is slightly flushed when she turns back to Davey. Paloma too often ‘retaliates’, and other parents aren’t always fooled.
‘You’re right, Ruth, you’re right,’ Davey says, placatory. ‘Sorry, sorry. Boys and their toys. By the way, I love Paloma’s leotard. Obviously in a non-perverted way.’ Ruth buzzes away, frowning, to remove the hammer. ‘I can’t resist winding Ruth up,’ he says.
‘Wonder what it’s like having a girl?’ says Justin. ‘I sometimes think it’d be fun to have lots of children. But Zakira is so busy. I don’t think she’d be keen. And after all, she’s the one who brings in the money.’
‘Time doesn’t stand still though,’ says Davey. ‘Take it from me, you get old before you know it.’
Ella is demonstrating a back bend, young and graceful as a waterfall. One day, she will have children of her own. Till then, all dads and kids may adore her. To the men, she looks like the freedom they’ve lost.
‘Well, you know, Zakira’s in the City. They just make so much money. Golden handcuffs and all that. Too good to give up. But she hates leaving Abdy.’
Davey looks at him consideringly. Handsome boy. Nice smile. But perhaps something slightly unfinished, somewhere ... ‘You could maybe get a part-time job,’ he says, cautiously. ‘Then your missis might be keener to take time off. It’s really why I set up the company. Get in some squids, so I could ease up. I knew Delorice wouldn’t stay home. It’s a snake pit, publishing. She’s good at her job. And I didn’t want to miss out on all this, either –’ indicating the thrashing limbs and laughing faces of the fifteen young lives unfurling in the room; Ella’s laughing too, she’s a stream of sunshine ... Their own wives no longer look quite like that. Yet both of them adore their wives.
‘Yeah, most of the time it’s good,’ said Justin. ‘I wrote PR copy. I wasn’t half bad. But this, what we do, this is a job.’
‘Telling me,’ says Davey. ‘I’m knackered every day. But I go to bed happy. Well happy-ish.’
And they smile at each other, a complicated smile that says no-one’s ever completely happy. Davey’s been in therapy for five years now, and Justin, of course, had his total breakdown, and in some ways, has not been quite the same since, though he does enjoy the journalism course. They sit in safety, among laughing children, in their rich country, in good, clean clothes, they are healthy, educated, with money in their pockets, and yet they are not quite sure they are happy. ‘It’s rough when they’re ill,’ says Justin, solemnly, and then gets distracted by the sudden brilliance of Abdul Trevor’s yoga. ‘Oh well done, Abdy, what a super Tree! Oh no. Oh Sorry, Ruth. Say sorry to Paloma. No, Abdy, let go of Paloma’s pony-tail. I don’t care, that’s not how you keep your balance!’
‘By the way,’ says Davey, ‘I’m quite surprised so many have turned up today. I heard there was meningitis about. Or was it measles ...? No, meningitis. You know, moan moan in the latte queue. I don’t believe a word of it, myself.’ (There is an upmarket café, near the Montessori nursery, where all the yummy mummies meet to talk mummy-talk and get a blood sugar spike after dropping off their heirs. The two men are regulars, and generally beamed upon, as rare high-functioning and nice-looking fathers.)
‘Meningitis? Nah, it’s flu,’ said Justin. ‘Two-day flu. Little Abdy just had it. Temperature, coughing, kept on waking up. He bounced right back up again. Look at him now! Mind you, that rash is back. Zakira reckons our eggs weren’t free range, whatever the local shop puts on the box. Makes you feel helpless, when they’re ill.’
‘Flu. There you are. The rumour mill.’
They smile at each other: the hysteria of women. It’s good for the kids, to have blokes around.
(Yet the men need praise, and validation, and the women are too tired from work to give it. When the shrewd therapist asked Davey the question, ‘Perhaps you have issues around self-worth?’ he did, as expected, sign up for more sessions.)
‘So you were a copywriter,’ says Davey, thoughtfully. ‘And now you’re doing a journalism course. Does it include TV? I was just wondering ... Let’s fix up a playdate for the boys, maybe tomorrow. You and me could have a little chat.’
20
Around lunch-time, what Trevor feels should be his lunch-time, for his normal working day is punctuated by snacks, by digestive biscuits and his flask of tea, there’s a trading post by the side of the road, a single-storey concrete building hung with plastic mops and buckets and rugs and thin striped mattresses and Coca-Cola signs. He’s missed his caffeine, now he needs his tucker. But he won’t say so: Trevor is a stoic.
‘We are nearly at the village,’ Mary says.
Partly because he’s feeling peckish, Trevor goes in with Mary and pays for the shopping. Groundnuts, white bread, flour, a big kettle she spots and looks at admiringly. He insists on buying it, which makes her smile a little. ‘You are a good man, Trevor,’ she says, grudgingly. Then they suddenly share a real, warm smile. They are over the quarrel. Possibly it was just something to get out of the way, so that he and she could be friends again. It’s a bit like South Africa, he thinks. The whatchamacallit, Truth and Reconciliation business. Things had to be dragged right out into the open. He is in Uganda, and on her ground. She has to let him
know this is not like London – though that doesn’t mean he is going to like it.
Round the side of the building is an open stall where a man in a bloodied white jacket with rolled-up sleeves is selling meat in the flickering sunlight, as cloud begins to stream up over the sun. Dark individual hunks of flesh swing from the roof of the stall on string. The butcher has a giant machete, with which he hacks off great bony lumps of beef to Mary’s instructions, splitting the spinal chord with a practised ‘thuck’. To Trevor, the meat looks almost black in the daylight, and it has an iridescent retinue of fat flies, though a thin child with a whisk is employed to disperse them. Mary indicates ‘More’: the blows keep on coming, the muscular arm hacks the beast to pieces: there are splinters of bone, and brighter blood spattering. She’s buying so much, almost a quarter of a cow. Trevor wonders if they have a fridge, in the village. The meat is wrapped in leaves, a glistening sticky bundle. ‘The village will be happy,’ Mary says to Trevor. ‘Thank you, Trevor.’ So he pays again.
Whenever, later, in faraway London, Trevor tries to describe his arrival in Mary’s village, he is never sure that he is believed. And he also wonders: did it really happen like that? He thinks it did. Yes, he is sure. The kneeling women. The children flocking. The way they stared at him between their fingers.
After the trading post, they lurch on to the track that veers off at ninety degrees from the main road to Kampala, and are soon rocking like a ship on the sea, swaying helplessly from side to side as the track rears up and dips down underneath them, its ruts deepened to potholes by long-ago rain. Behind him he hears the maid laughing as she’s thrown about as if riding a donkey, a happy memory from her lost village childhood, and soon Theodora starts laughing too, and he realises: that child never talks. Not like little Abdy, babbling away.
This road is a joke. Trevor thinks about the weather. If this is the only way in and out, they could easily get cut off, in the village. The rains, everyone says, can last for weeks (and last night Charles was so sure the rains were coming. ‘It can rain any day,’ he had said, laughing with the huge good temper life seems to have inspired in him. Did he have any worries? Trevor doesn’t think so. How pleasant it must be to be Ugandan! The pace of life is so different to London – though it can’t be a cinch, living with Mary ...)
They are slowing to a halt outside a bleak concrete house. Mary says, ‘I think this is my brother’s house, because I know he built it near the path that leads to the mango tree where we children told stories. My brother’s wife is expecting us.’
And, hearing the engine, people come from the house. A thin man, not young, in pale shirt and dark trousers, then children, running, in ragged clothes, jumping and laughing, then suddenly shy, one or two of them hanging back and staring. ‘My brother Jacob,’ says Mary softly, turning off the engine, ‘but he has grown old.’ It is nearly a whisper. Trevor sees that her lips are moving in silence and is touched to realise Mary is praying. But it’s only a second: with a powerful movement, she’s out of the car and hugging her brother.
Jacob comes across and pumps Trevor’s hand. ‘Welcome,’ he says. His eyes are bloodshot, and milky, but his smile is wide, showing strong white teeth. ‘You have come to help us in the village. Thank you.’
Two other men come and shake Trevor’s hand. ‘My neighbour. And this is my uncle, the village councillor.’
‘An important man,’ says Trevor, politely, and is rewarded with a laugh of pleasure.
‘You are very welcome to the village,’ says the man. Then he embraces Mary Tendo, and they have a short conversation in Luganda from which Mary emerges looking displeased, but there isn’t time to think about that, because now the women come from the house. Jacob introduces a queenly figure, taller than Mary, nearly taller than Trevor, in a wide-sashed dark red printed dress down to her ankles, with big puffed sleeves, and a square neckline that shows off her elegant neck and high cheekbones, but just as he is thinking, ‘She looks like a duchess,’ and wishing he weren’t wearing a sweaty t-shirt, she sinks to her knees in front of him, in a fluid motion, bowing and smiling, clasping her hands together in what looks like prayer. ‘My wife,’ says Jacob, looking proud.
‘No need for that,’ says Trevor, touched but alarmed, and takes her by the hands, and pulls her up again, which causes a wave of surprised laughter. And then two golden adult daughters come from the house, and again they sink down, like trees bending in the wind, and come up again, gracefully unbroken, and he thinks, ‘I could get used to this,’ but he catches Mary Tendo looking across at him with an ironic expression, and as they follow the family into the house, she hisses in his ear, ‘Do not be mistaken, Trevor, I will never do that to you.’
‘I know that, Mary. It’s OK.’
‘It is not OK. But they are village people. My uncle said I had come back too late. He does not understand, life is hard in the city, and hard in UK, and I tried to send money, and I am very sad that my parents are dead, but I have been sad about it for a decade, and I paid for their drugs, in hospital, and it-hurts-my-heart-that-I-could-not-come-sooner.’ This she rattles off rapidly, sotto voce, and Trevor pats her on the arm as she stares at the ground, and in a second, she’s herself again. Then a sister arrives, a cross-looking sister, and squints at Mary, and smiles at Trevor, but another sister, she explains, is away, and Mary translates: ‘Trevor, you will stay in the house of my sister, not this sister but the sensible sister’ (her sister looks at her suspiciously) ‘who has taken her daughters to boarding school, so you will only meet this other sister, and her silly daughters, who are worse than their mother. This is Martha.’
‘How do you do,’ says Trevor.
‘Do not bother, Trevor, she does not speak English.’
And then Jacob’s younger children are introduced, and their clothes are smarter than the clothes of their friends, and they stare at Mary for a long time, as if they have heard a lot about her, and five minutes later they reappear, having shucked off their smart outfits and got back into their shorts. There is much exclaiming over Theodora, and Jacob picks her up, and the daughter wails, and Mary removes her from her brother, irritably, and says, ‘She is not used to the village yet,’ and puts her back in the arms of the maid, who nobody at all has greeted. But some part of every child understands the country, and soon the little girl, despite Mary’s protests, which become increasingly half-hearted, has shed her cardigan, her socks, her pretty dress, that fairy-tale cloud of pale pink nylon, and is running round half-naked in a conga of children, a joyous, noisy, animal procession, and all the adults are smiling at her. The maid, meanwhile, whose face has set like stone, is to be seen through the window with a giant pestle, thumping it, thud-ah, in a crude wooden mortar. Trevor asks if she’s all right, for she’s only a girl, could he help, could she use a bit of muscle? – but Mary tells him she’s just grinding groundnuts. ‘No, she enjoys it. Do not bother yourself, Trevor. We will have our food today with groundnut sauce.’
Mary has other plans for him. ‘You will go and get the things from the car, now, Trevor.’ He does her bidding, helped by several boys who are much stronger than their fragile limbs suggest.
The rice, the flour, the soap, the oil, all the big packs of foodstuffs are received without comment, as if they were expected, and almost insufficient, but some cans of Coca-Cola, three plastic footballs and two packs of biros are exclaimed over. The clothes are certainly the star of the show: Jacob takes some shoes, and tries them on, appreciatively, slowly, watched by his family, and the uncle is delighted with his grey zipped jacket. He zips it up: he zips it down. Then Mary shows the meat, and everyone laughs, and the women of Jacob’s family take it and disappear behind a thin red curtain that divides the kitchen from the living space.
‘You have done well,’ says Mary Tendo to Jacob. ‘This house is larger than our parents’ house.’
‘Our parents’ house was large,’ Jacob comments.
‘That is what I say. You have done well.’
Tre
vor looks around him, but notices absence, despite the wealth of smiling faces, the children peering in through the windows. Yet Mary Tendo thinks they have done well. No carpets: just a stained concrete floor. No curtains. The sofa is a skeleton, brown upholstery worn through to the wooden bones. There is a table, and a tablecloth, but only two chairs for all these people. No pictures on the walls. No papers or books. Another neighbour has arrived to join them, and they stand, awkwardly, looking at Trevor.
But in a second, Mary’s brother is showing him a book, a battered paperback, a textbook, which he keeps in a place of honour by the sofa. ‘Macmillan Schools English,’ he says, smiling. ‘We are all learning it. My children study. I am a teacher at one of the schools.’
‘There is more than one school?’
‘There are two schools. But there are many, many children.’
Trevor looks at the shabby, dated textbook, and doesn’t know what to say about it. ‘Are your children clever?’ he asks Jacob, adding hastily, ‘I wasn’t, myself.’ The older daughter brings him a Coca-Cola, which he doesn’t really like, but accepts, gracefully.
‘They are average,’ says the father. ‘They do not try hard enough.’
‘That’s what my father used to say,’ says Trevor. ‘But it didn’t stop me being good at my job.’ The daughter smiles at him, gratefully, and disappears again behind the curtain.
‘You are a builder of wells,’ Jacob says, respectfully.
‘Not exactly,’ says Trevor, before Mary can stop him, but she comes in swiftly, ‘Yes, he is. He is an expert on every aspect.’
‘Well, not every aspect, Mary – that’s going it a bit.’
‘You should not be modest. Or else’ (and she is looking at him meaningfully) ‘I would not have brought you to the village, Trevor. Before, Trevor was the Queen’s Engineer,’ she explains to the villagers, whose smiles have briefly stalled. ‘Royal Engineers,’ Trevor protests, ‘I was only in the Territorials,’ but Mary ignores him and presses on. ‘In London, rich people all want Trevor to work for them.’