by Maggie Gee
The Catholic school is near the well, and also has a collection system for rainwater. The Protestant one has zilch: nothing. When the well is working, the Protestant children come in their lunch-hour to get a drink of water, if they have the energy, which most of them don’t. It takes them twenty minutes there and back. If they don’t come, they don’t drink all day.
‘You mean there’s no water at all at the Protestant school?’ Trevor had said to the teacher, incredulous. Our little tykes wouldn’t put up with it, he thinks. Nothing to drink all day, in this sort of heat. They don’t know they’re born, British young people.
Mary has boiled up water for African tea in the beautiful new teapot. (And in two days’ time, Trevor has promised, there will be water from the well again, clean sweet water! A miracle!) It is strong and sweet, with milk and ginger. She is very happy. The news is spreading. The muzungu has come and worked his magic. Her brother’s wife is killing a chicken for dinner! Trevor has proved his worth. She smiles upon him.
And she thinks of the prayer she first heard in London in the cold English church near Vanessa’s house, where the vicar was kind, the Reverend Andy, though she did not like his sermon about television, since she did not watch TV in Vanessa’s house. The second time she went, the Reverend Andy’s sermon was about a nun who lived sealed in a wall, in the east of England, many centuries ago, and who wrote the first book by a woman in English. Mary liked her strange name, Julian of Orange, and wrote it in her notebook, when she got home. Julian’s wonderful words have come true today, and Mary imagines them in golden orange, glowing in the sunlight of late afternoon: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Amen.’ ‘Amen,’ Mary now says aloud, and Trevor is startled, but she pours him some tea, and smiles and smiles. Trevor has done it!
(But after the service, in cold distant London, there was coffee and hard biscuits in the hall at the back and she told the Reverend Andy about Jamil, because she saw that he understood sadness, and he promised he would pray for her. His prayers were not answered. Do not think about that. Of course, he has many people to pray for. Perhaps Jesus has forgotten her. Do not think about this, do not think about this. Today is a time for happiness. Mary leaves her sorrow in the sealed chamber where Julian prayed for years and years.)
Mary has other business to sort out in the village, people to see she has not seen for decades, stories to learn, hurts to soften, the quarrel over her sisters’ children, the sadness over their parents’ death. But first, most important, the story of the water.
Mary has invited the reproachful uncle to come and listen to Trevor’s conclusions. The uncle and Mary are friends again: she has tried to explain her life in Bungereza, the efforts she made, the sorrow she suffered; besides, he is very pleased with his jacket. At the end, he called her ‘Daughter’, and stroked her hair, and although Mary Tendo is no-one’s daughter, this uncle is very important to her. Not just because he is a councillor: he is the oldest man in the family.
‘So Mary, it’s simple,’ Trevor says. ‘What your brother’s school needs is another collection tank, as big as possible. With a filtration system. Depending on how much rain you get, that ought to keep them going all year.’
The uncle is listening. He says nothing.
‘I’ve been working it out. You need a 10,000-litre tank. That should supply 300-odd children, with maybe a bit over for other people. I mean, it’s a long walk, to the well.’
The uncle nods, but still says nothing. ‘What do you think, Uncle? It is a good idea.’
But the uncle says something to her in Luganda. Mary’s face falls. They talk for a while.
‘He does not want to say this to you, but the school has no money to buy this tank. The school has no money for salaries, because the government sends everything late. Jacob has been waiting two months for his pay. The school has no money, for doors, or windows, as you have seen yourself, Trevor. But my uncle thanks you for mending the well.’
‘Thank you for the well,’ says the uncle, in English. ‘Jacob’s wife will prepare a chicken.’ He smiles at Trevor: his smile is forgiving. How can this white man understand the village? They already know about collection tanks, it is an old idea, okulembeka, though this Patcher thinks it is his own invention. And it has its drawbacks, with irregular rainfall.
‘They aren’t expensive,’ says Trevor, embarrassed. ‘The other teacher said the small-size tank was less than a million Ugandan shillings. That’s three hundred quid, isn’t it, Mary?’
The uncle speaks to Mary in Luganda. They look at each other, excluding Trevor.
‘They cannot afford it,’ Mary says, briefly.
And at that point, something speaks through Trevor.
Surely not his own voice, for back in London, he always holds out for his call-out fee on top of his charges, he always gets VAT, he isn’t a mug (except for the very occasional old lady he doesn’t like to see in a state, so naturally he has to sort her out): ‘I can afford it. It’s not a lot of money. Mary, you tell them not to worry about it. I’ll see to it all. Patchett will pay. The 10,000-litre size, while I’m about it.’ He likes the sound of it; Patchett will pay.
He goes to bed blissfully smug and drunk. The local beer (at least, he thinks it is beer, though it tastes like no beer he has ever drunk, and someone tells him it’s made from bananas: ‘Banana beer?’ he asks, and everyone laughs) is red-hot stuff, the chicken is accompanied by freshly slaughtered goat, chewy but tasty, roasted on the fire, and there is rice, and matooke, and sweet potatoes, and twenty-odd villagers show up. He’s eaten everything except the special delicacy, enswa, en-sway, it sounded like: giant fried ants. (Bloody insects, I ask you! He’s open-minded, but he has his limits.)
There are speeches, in both English and Luganda, and most of them, he thinks, are addressed to him. ‘Patcher! We have written a song for you. It can be translated, “The Bringer of Water” ...’ Just once in a while, it is good to be feasted. In England, plumbers aren’t exactly princes (no wonder: no-one goes thirsty for hours, or pants for water in boiling heat). Course, they’re keen to get hold of him in their hour of need, when the tank has just burst or the radiator’s leaking. They might offer a backhander to jump the queue, which Trevor has to explain is offside, because even plumbers have their sense of honour. But this is different. They make him feel special. The skills he takes for granted really mean something, here. He’s never felt proud to say he is a plumber (and Nessie, he thinks briefly, was ashamed of him; she always thought he should have bettered himself; always thought he had no ambition). But today Trevor Patchett is ‘the Bringer of Water’. He wishes his ex-wife could hear them sing his praises.
Mary is translating the councillor’s speech. ‘Now he’s saying omugga gwamagala, you are the Fountain of Life, Trevor –’
‘Fair enough,’ says Trevor, drinking deep of the beer.
‘– and referring to the fountains you built in London, the ones by the lions in Trafalgar Square –’
‘Bloody hell, Mary, that was over-egging it –’
‘And now he is saying that you are a lion.’
‘Bloody good!’ says Trevor, and raises his glass in the direction of the councillor, who is winding down. ‘I’m with Winston on that one. The old British lion.’ He sinks the last of it, and burps gently. It’s all slightly crooked: the faces, the fire. But he is a man: this is his moment.
‘Trevor,’ says Mary. She is staring down on him, which means he must be on the floor, and although they are all laughing, she speaks quite strictly. ‘How much have you had to drink, Trevor?’
He is disconcerted. It’s a funny angle to be looking at Mary Tendo from. ‘Itsh the heat,’ he explains, but it comes out wrong. ‘Didn’ wear m’ hat. Only had two pintsh.’
‘Two pints of waragi? Poor Trevor.’
But they are all helping him to bed in the hut, although he would like to drink more, hear more praise, stay longer.
26
That night, the floods come to Uganda. Torrential rains hit in the east and the west: thirty inches of rain fall in an hour. Roads wash away. Bridges collapse. Only a few drops of rain fall in Kampala. But the rain pours down: the rain pours down; the rain pours down over most of Uganda. Museveni receives bad news, in the morning. The floodwaters are rising in many regions. In only two days, the UN will declare Uganda, yet again, a disaster zone.
Trevor sleeps like the dead until 4 AM. He wakes up to hear the rain thundering down like an endless landslide upon the roof: like the end of the world: like the end of this hut, for somewhere a soft pat-pat-pat is starting. Then a loud hissing voice is saying his name.
‘Trevor, let me in, it is me, Mary.’
In fact, she is in, she is tapping his leg, it is Mary, as well as the rain, pat-pat-patting.
‘Mary? What’s the matter? What’s going on?’
Wind whistles and screams through the straw of the thatch, and the rain pounds on, inexorable. It sounds like the headache he will have in the morning, although at the moment Trevor still feels drunk, blood roaring in his ears as he lurches upright. He can only see her in silhouette, blurred by his mosquito net. He wishes, deeply, he were still asleep.
‘I have come to see that you are all right.’ Her answer comes after a curious pause.
‘Why shouldn’t I be? What’s happening?’
‘I am very glad you are all right.’
There is another pause. Mary isn’t moving. ‘Mary, what is going on?’
‘There is nothing in your hut?’
‘Like what, Mary? Stop talking in riddles.’
‘Trevor, I will sleep on the floor of your hut.’
For one dim moment Trevor thinks, she likes me, but then common sense reasserts itself. ‘What will the village have to say about that?’
‘It is not a question of the village.’
Now she’s settled on the floor, with much sighing and wriggling as she wangles her way under his mosquito net. He hopes no mosquitoes will come in with her: he hopes the net is big enough for two. Mary Tendo is not a small woman. She’s very near him. She smells sweetly of sweat. She wriggles so much he starts wondering again. If she does like him, he’d better not ignore it. Maybe the feast in his honour has turned her head.
‘So what is it, Mary? Were you, uh, lonely?’ He gives her shoulder the lightest of squeezes.
She sits upright with furious energy, imperilling the net, but she doesn’t care. ‘Trevor, there must not be a misunderstanding!’
‘All right, Mary, relax, no problem.’
‘You remember that Vanessa used to keep frogs?’
‘I remember, Mary. You hated them.’
‘You remember when I saw them I chased them with a broom.’
‘Yes, and Vanessa was not very happy.’
‘In fact, I chased them because I did not like them.’ There is a pause, then she starts again. ‘Perhaps I was afraid of them, although in general, I fear nothing, Trevor.’
‘I believe you, Mary. Um, go on.’
‘Now the house where I was sleeping is full of big frogs. I woke up to find them chirruping like birds round my bed. I did not have anything to chase them with. They have come with the floods; Bibi nyo! They are filthy, disgusting ... Trevor, please save me from the frogs.’
She has never asked him to save her from anything since she was young and a stranger to London, nearly twenty years ago when she cared for Justin, and Vanessa couldn’t seem to stop criticising her. Poor kid. He had tried to stand up for her. The new Mary always seemed so strong, so confident ... In fact, in the past week he’d slightly gone off her. But now she needs him. Trevor is touched. Mary is a woman, and he is a man.
‘You have this mattress. I’ll get down on the floor.’ His brain knocks hard against his skull as he moves, but it still feels good to make a manly sacrifice while Mary compliantly takes the mattress.
‘Thank you, Trevor. You have excellent manners.’
They lie side by side while the storm rocks above them. Outside, a plague of fat bullfrogs passes by, chirruping loudly and insolently, a coarse, fat, farty, squelching sound. Mary prays quietly. They do not enter.
The roof starts collapsing twenty minutes later.
By 6 AM, when the sun comes up, Mary and Trevor are half-sitting, half-crouching in a corner where the mud and thatch still hold together. He has taken his possessions to the brick-built house, but Mary Tendo refused to go back, and he could not leave her there all on her own. They have their arms around each other. They fell asleep talking about lost sons. Before that, there were other, more intimate discussions, and a resolution in the tender dark. As they wake up to a riot of birdsong, first Mary and then Trevor smiles.
PART 4
Do-si-do
27
Vanessa wakes up with a shock of terror. 5 AM on the dreaded morning. It’s here: the day she must go to Bwindi. Switch on the light, switch off her phone alarm. She lies for a second, stomach clenching. Should she call it off? Is she going to die?
But she can’t call it off. She would look silly. She has told so many people she’s going to Bwindi. She shoots out of bed, and starts checking the essentials, which involves unpacking most of her rucksack. Money, camera, notebook, good. Malaria pills, sunhat, pen. Glasses, contact lenses, sunglasses. Phone! It’s been on all night for the alarm, so she must recharge it! She plugs it in. She’s just standing up again when the lights go out. Shit! But it’s fine, she tells herself, the electricity always comes straight back on, at the Sheraton. A beat, then another. Dark. Silence. Nothing happens. She starts sweating. Why hasn’t the generator come on? Why else do people stay at the Sheraton? And why does it have to happen this morning?
In the dark, on her own, she feels totally helpless. How can she assemble her possessions? Without her possessions, she cannot go. If she could find her torch, that would be something. She starts feeling with her fingertips, but things slip away, twist out of her reach, are not where she thought, elude her, betray her, crash down into chaos. They’re suddenly useless, all her possessions.
Shaking in the dark, she’s an unshelled crustacean.
The boy-man is happy. The rains have come! He is soaked and filthy, but his lips are moist. He could have drunk it for ever, the sweet clear rain, sucking it from leaves, from twigs, from his hands, but he remembers you must not have too much. He learned many things, while he was in the army. Were they an army? They were all that was real. They had taken his life, and consumed it all. Now all that remains to him is water. He has no possessions but shirt, shorts, boots. Each item was stolen from someone else. But now he has water. He laughs. He drinks. For the first time, he dares to think he might live. Is it possible he is near the border? The water sinks through him, cool, thrilling.
Not until later does the hunger begin.
He stays low in the bushes. It’s mid-morning. He sees the woman clearly, through his mask of leaves. She is slender and tall. Perhaps Rwandan? Perhaps a Munyankore. He listens: he could be anywhere, still in DRC, already in Uganda, or even Rwanda, there is no way of knowing. She is talking to her child as she does her washing. The child is naked: playing in the mud. She has some blue soap: a rich woman. Three dresses (he counts), two pairs of men’s shorts. He needs those trousers, civilian trousers, but even more, he needs what she’s eating, he can’t see clearly, some kind of grain cakes, maybe baked millet. And she has sugarcane for the baby. How old is the baby? He’s forgotten such things. All he knows is, the child is too young for the army. He knows he should strike, take what he needs and move on, quick, before other people come to the river and all of them turn on him and kill him.
For what he has done he can never be forgiven. It is the one thing he knows without question.
But what is she doing? She slips down her robe. A breast appears, round and beautiful and terrible, not long starved sticks like the breasts he has been seeing. He is stirred and afraid. He must not see this. He does not know what it will make him do.
But she casually picks up the plump, calm child and suckles him, talking to him softly and sweetly, while she squeezes out the washing, the drops of water falling like gold in the sunlight. He pinches himself, hard. Why is he paralysed? The sun moves an ingot of heat on to his head. He will have to make his move. The cover is pitiful.
What happens comes so quickly that he is left gasping. She puts down the child, and it runs straight up to him. Stares through the leaves, bright-eyed, unafraid. The child is smiling and pointing at him. He cannot understand what the child is saying. Everything is over. He clutches his gun. But the child is smiling. The child is smiling. Split-second decision: his grip loosens. He pushes the gun away behind him. He gets up, slowly, in the full dazzling sunlight, and the woman is startled, and hides her breast quickly as she calls the child to her. She stares at him.
He points to her food. His mouth is watering. He points to his lips, he rubs his belly. Her eyes run over him like water, his thin corded legs, his knobbed shoulder blades, his ribcage protruding like an empty basket, his whipcord muscles, his eyes, imploring, his eyes which are those of a boy and a man.
She says something he cannot understand, but he knows at once it is full of pity. She strokes her own boy as she offers him food, the starving creature who came from the forest. As he gnaws and gulps, she looks more closely. Where did he get those wounds, those scars, those ridges and valleys by his eyes, his nose?
‘He’s still very clingy,’ says Zakira to Justin, her voice sharp with anxiety.
Justin and Zakira are up too early: the markets are jittery, and Zakira has got to go to Brussels after all: that’s stressful enough without Abdy being ill. Zakira tries not to think, it’s bad timing. But it’s cold, so cold. Soon the clocks are going back. ‘You should have taken him to the doctor yesterday.’