by Maggie Gee
‘Hold your horses, Mary. I’d like to get a picture.’ He gets out of the car and takes a photograph of Mary as she bargains for a neat mound of small yellow fruit. She comes back a couple of minutes later with a satisfied smile and her hands full of fruit, yellow, delicately wrinkled, scented things which she distributes with an order to ‘Suck’. ‘They are passion fruit,’ she says, ‘but not the usual ones. This is something very special, of Uganda, Trevor.’
Everybody gets sucking as she starts the engine. ‘Ooh,’ says Trevor. It’s stronger than the hangover. He is transported. ‘That’s paradise.’ And he looks at the photo in his digital camera. ‘Very nice, Mary. You look very nice.’
‘Stop,’ says Vanessa, spotting a fruit stall, one of the amazing ones with pyramids of fruit, and they’ve got something yellow that she’s not seen before. She has asked Isaac to stop each time they’ve passed a fruit stall, and each time he has pretended not to hear. ‘No, I mean it. I’m paying for this vehicle! Stop when I ask you!’ She is suddenly shouting. It’s true, she is paying. She will make him listen.
He brakes, sulkily, and swerves to a halt. They are already a quarter of a mile past the fruit stall where she has seen other foreigners parked, and a man taking a photograph. ‘OK, we stop,’ he says, shrugging. ‘You get out here, and take your photograph.’
‘This isn’t the right place,’ says Vanessa, furious. ‘The fruit stall is absolutely miles away.’
‘You want me to turn round?’ He doesn’t mean it, and she doesn’t trust him to turn across the traffic. There is nothing for it except to drive on.
‘Why didn’t you stop when I asked you to?’
He doesn’t answer, but revs back on to the road so fast that the little red saloon from the fruit stall has to swerve to miss them, and sounds its horn. ‘Those people were taking photographs. I saw them.’ The little red car is ahead of them.
Now Vanessa’s desire for local information overcomes her wish to chastise her driver. ‘Why is it always the women selling fruit and vegetables? And often it is women working in the fields. Do the women do all the work, in Uganda?’
He adopts the infuriating, patronising tone she has quickly grown used to when he tells her things. ‘Ugandan women cannot ride bicycles, because they are different in their lower bodies, so they cannot take their produce to Kampala. Ugandan women cannot drive cars. There are many things Ugandan women cannot do, and so they do this easy job, and sit by the roadside. And also, they work in the fields, sometimes.’
‘But I think it was a woman driving that red car.’
‘She was not a woman,’ Isaac says briefly, ‘or else, she is not a normal Ugandan.’
‘It was a woman.’ But she mustn’t be childish. She reminds herself about cultural difference.
‘We shall see,’ says Isaac, and accelerates, grimly, until they are sitting on the tail of the saloon, but the dust is so thick they can only make out the black heads of the passengers in the back seat. The saloon, in turn, accelerates. They scream up to the straggle of huts and billboards that marks the line of the equator in Uganda in a hugger-mugger, undignified race.
Pretending nothing’s happened, they park well apart, in the raw expanse of dust surrounding the buildings, but Vanessa is ecstatic when the driver gets out, and stares across defiantly from 100 metres’ distance, a big-hipped, erect, African woman.
‘See, it’s a woman.’
‘She cannot be Ugandan. In any case, she was a bad driver.’
‘She certainly drove faster than you.’
Isaac stares at her. She is a muzungu. He must be respectful. If he angers her, his friend David will be in trouble. But she is the most irritating of all the bazungu he has had to drive, in his life as a driver. And they have to spend three more days together. He does not like her skin, which is like a plucked chicken, her long thin nose, like the mission teacher’s, her hair like a layer of thin flat straw, her strange expensive flowery smell that is not like any flower he knows, the way she has spread white dust on her face, the way she argues about everything, as if she was a man and an expert, the way she cannot stop asking questions, but does not listen when he tells her the answers. He wants to instruct her, to shut her up. Even better, to leave her here, by the roadside. But he has no choice. It is she who has the money.
‘It is true, Madam,’ he says, and smiles. ‘Over there you will buy presents,’ he indicates a shop. ‘And there is the Equator Experience. And there you can buy coffee. Which will you do first?’
Vanessa has never seen such a smile. Though the muscles move, they move over a void, like bright water over a crocodile. She sees terrible depths of humiliation where things with teeth are hiding, waiting. His eyes are dog-like, but the pupils are stones. The effort of it all leaves him heavily sweating. She can smell him, suddenly. Does he smell her?
She is swept with fear. They are alone together. She is thousands of miles away from home. They have to get on. ‘May I buy you a coffee?’
She sits outside the café at a plastic table, drinking milky coffee in solitary state and eating a packet of chocolate biscuits. Isaac has accepted a Coca-Cola and gone off to drink it with ‘my friends over there’ – he has ‘good friends’ in the souvenir shop; she has strict instructions to come and buy gifts when she has finished her coffee. She watches, from a distance, the people from the red saloon having their Equator Experience. She sees, with mild interest, it’s a mixed couple. The black woman’s with a middle-aged white man; they are bending over something on a table. It’s some tourist thing, but Vanessa thinks, I’ll do it, whatever tourists do in this invented spot. But not with other tourists; I’ll do it on my own. She has given Isaac money to get credit for his phone. She will text Justin to say she’s at the equator.
Soon she’s in the shop, to be greeted by Isaac as if they had never had a quarrel. He is clearly in cahoots with the woman by the till, and herds Vanessa anxiously from corner to corner, penning her in next to the most expensive items.
It’s mostly tourist tat, she thinks. Terrible souvenirs ‘From the equator’, thermometers or eggtimers or paperknives, things that nobody uses, and nobody needs. There are soapstone statues and crude wooden carvings. She enjoys not buying them, discriminating, not loading herself up with useless objects. Travel light is my motto, she thinks, proudly (though somehow she always has a lot to carry). But Isaac is hovering. She takes pity.
‘I want something for my grandchild.’ She feels pride as she says it. It’s like a statement that she is a good person, the fact she has a grandchild, and cares for him.
‘Yes, there are toys for children,’ he says eagerly, driving her towards a stand of wooden animals. ‘These are very cheap. You can buy many. How many grandchildren do you have?’
‘Oh, one,’ she says, and is slightly ashamed. ‘I expect I will have more, I am still quite young.’ He looks at her, amazed at this. After a pause, he says, ‘Yes, Madam, you are still young.’
In the end she buys a small wooden lion. Isaac’s disappointed, but time is getting on. ‘For my little grandson,’ she says to the woman, who smiles at her.
‘The last customer also has bought one for his grandson,’ she says as she wraps it. ‘They are popular. But he bought a male one, you bought – Madam, I do not know the word for this.’
‘Lioness,’ says Vanessa, pleased with her knowledge.
‘Yes, thank you, a lioness. You do not have lions in the USA?’
‘Oh no, I’m from England,’ Vanessa says proudly. ‘How funny that we both bought one for our grandsons.’
‘And now, the Equator Experience,’ says Isaac. As she comes out of the shop, Vanessa sees in the distance the American man getting back into the red car, and the black woman’s still in the driver’s seat; they are talking and laughing: then the driver gets out and beckons three Ugandans in country clothes, walking back from the café at a stately pace, who must be the other passengers: then the whole group poses for photographs. They’re a long way away, bu
t she can hear their laughter. Vanessa thinks, they are having fun.
But I am having fun as well, she reminds herself. And suddenly, she is having fun. War and flood have receded in the distance. Ugandan life is going on as normal. The sun is shining. Her blood sugar’s back up. She pays ten dollars and receives a certificate to say she has been to the equator. She watches the wonder of water being poured into a yellow tin basin on one side of the equator, running down counter-clockwise, a swift rope of water twisting down into the dark, and then walks three feet to the other side and watches the water unravel, twist clockwise: it must be a trick: she pays another ten dollars. But it’s fascinating. She stands and stares.
Does she understand anything? No, not much. Is there time to learn?
Oh try, Vanessa. But there’s not much shelter here: a deaf wind blows.
The white-bearded, dignified Ugandan in charge of the Equator Experience urges her to sign the big leather book she had seen the couple in the red car sign earlier. She thinks, I suppose they want our addresses so they can ask us for money. Oh well ... There’s a new page: she puts some of her details: not her email, not her phone. But she enjoys writing ‘Dr Vanessa Henman’. It still means something, at the centre of the world. When she feels very small, that ‘Dr’ makes her larger. She’s just about to flick idly back through the pages, to see who has been to the equator before her, when her driver calls her, pointing to the sky. ‘We should leave, Madam. It will rain, later.’ A surge of anxiety. She comes at once.
In the car, she borrows Isaac’s phone. She sees with surprise it is more up-to-date than hers. ‘Am at Eqtor! Very exciting! Driving to Gorilla Fst Cmp tonight! How r u and Abdy and Z?’ (She hates text language, but it’s quicker.) ‘Bought A a present. Did u put out my bins? Be well! Mummy’. She presses ‘Send’. The sun disappears as the message goes.
30
In London, Justin realises that Abdy’s been asleep for nearly two hours. It’s been blissful, actually, just watching television, his son sweetly comatose on the sofa, and sleep, after all, is nature’s medicine, but why has the doctor not rung back?
He goes over to the sofa and strokes Abdy’s head, gently. He’s lying face down on the sofa cushion. It’s hot, but as usual, Zakira’s overdressed him. Justin remembers the row with shame, as he lifts the child back to vertical. He will ring her in Brussels and apologise. Abdy is bound to be better by then.
But he seems to be surfacing from very far down. His lids lift and fall, and his eyes aren’t focused. One hand gropes vaguely at the back of his neck. Then Justin sees that the sofa cushion has left red marks all over his face. Indeed, the white is so rare that it’s almost as if the pattern is reversed: it’s white on red. Then he sees the rash stretches down both sides of Abdul Trevor’s neck. He’s had nothing to eat, so it can’t be an allergy.
Then Justin remembers what Davey had said, about an outbreak of meningitis. What were the symptoms? He has forgotten. It’s Zakira who is expert at diagnosis, hunting down diseases on the internet, consulting her friends in the Health Food shop. What’s happening? Suddenly he’s choked with panic. And Abdul Trevor is asleep again.
He rings the surgery. They’re just closing. When he describes the symptoms to the doctor on call, he is told to go straight to hospital. Calling an ambulance would take longer. He enters a dream world of haste and terror. The jeep, which was serviced last week, will not start, but Abdy’s already belted in in the back, awake, crying quietly, hopelessly. Justin leaves him sitting there and runs into the house, to phone his father, who he knows will come, wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, who would come from the ends of the earth to help him. He calls his father: there is no answer. Only Trevor’s usual, cheerful message, designed to reassure people facing flooded bathrooms or collapsing ceilings. But to Justin it sounds cruel, maddening. By now Zakira’s on the Eurostar: being carried away from him, into the tunnel, beyond contact, beyond helping. His mother’s text arrives, from Uganda. He reads it, sobbing. Now they’ve all left him.
But his son is still here. Justin must save him. There’s a ring on the door. It’s Davey Lucas. ‘Why’s Abdy out there in the jeep, crying?’ He takes in Justin’s wet terrified face.
Soon they’re driving to Central Middlesex Hospital in Davey’s ecologically-friendly car, his horribly slow and cute little car, which could park on a sixpence, but can go no faster.
In Mbarara, the place of cooked meat, where the smell of charred pork is sweet on the air, where the sellers surround the queues of cars with trays of succulent cheeks and knuckles, as red as plums, things fly apart. Vanessa and her driver, having eaten, uncompanionably, silently gnawing on the stubborn bone, take the left road towards Kisoro and the Congo: while the red Toyota with the white man in the front is borne away from her, right, towards Mweya.
Goodbye, Trevor; goodbye, Vanessa.
In fact, he says a fond goodbye to Mary, who has to be back at the Sheraton tomorrow. Via her friends in Sheraton Travel, she’s made all the arrangements for him at Mweya. She is taking the bus back to Kampala, and spends the last half hour that they drive together rattling off a list of instructions about Charles’s car, for the benefit of the man from the village who has been selected to be Trevor’s driver. ‘The engine is good, but you must not rev it. If someone tries to pass you, let him go.’ (Trevor thinks, Mary has not taught this by example.) ‘Do not put fish or chickens on the seats. Or other live animals,’ she says sternly.
But her tone to Trevor is affectionate. ‘Thank you, Trevor,’ she says, simply. ‘I will not forget what you did in the village. And what you have promised to do, also’ (just a hint of a reminder: don’t let us down. But she knows that Trevor will not let her down.) ‘I am sorry there was a small problem with the hut ...’ (and now her voice is bubbling with laughter, and he interrrupts her: ‘If you ever see Vanessa, for heaven’s sake don’t say a word, Mary. You know she would go clean round the bend.’) ‘... And now you will be happy, things are fine at Mweya.’
‘No frogs at Mweya, then, Mary?’ he asks.
‘If there are, they will chase them. But look out for lions.’
The skies are darkening, filling up, getting heavier. In Juba, the peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan Government are going nowhere. A message of no comfort has been sent to the Congo, where Kony and his henchmen are hiding out. ‘No deal on the International Criminal Court indictments for war-crimes, but if Kony gives himself up, there will be amnesties for others.’ But the LRA are still in thrall to Kony, who kills his lieutenants when they step out of line. Kony says he is full of the Holy Spirit, which he inherited from Alice Lakwena.
What Spirit is it? Hard to tell. At first Kony said his rule was based on the Ten Commandments. But in fact, he commanded his men to kill all who got in their way, all who stole the ancestral rights of the Acholi: they would take Kampala, and drive out Museveni. Actually the LRA stayed in the north, in charge of an army of abducted children, and many of the children are Acholi, the same people whose rights Kony claims to be protecting, though Acholi parents are left despairing. Then Kony announced he had become a Muslim. Kony’s Spirit, whatever it is, Christian or Islamic, or perhaps Satanic (for he fears no-one) remains horribly strong, despite the ceasefire. Perhaps if they kill him ... But his henchmen do not dare to do it. He has such eyes. He has killed so many.
Besides, how can the LRA trust the Ugandan Government? The LRA are all northerners, while President Museveni comes from the west. They believe he means to drain all power from the north, which supported his predecessor, Obote. The war with the LRA has been useful: Kampala has grown richer, the north poorer. For the ordinary Acholi, the north is now hell. Thousands of people have been forced to live in camps – miles of identical small metal huts – where the Ugandan Government promised to protect them from rape, kidnap, torture, murder. In fact, they were prisoners, with nowhere to go. The camps were protected by Ugandan soldiers, but rape, kidnap, torture have continued. It’s the usual pastime of
men without women, even when they are meant to give protection. Children have been born who do not know their home. Old people have died without seeing home again. How can the International Criminal Court help with this?
The LRA take part in the peace talks, they agree to each stage except the final signature. But why should they trust the peace process, why should they yield to the ICC? If they lay down their arms, Kony will be arrested.
The people of Uganda have a different story about how the long war can be brought to an end. Funded by international donors, soft-spoken delegates have been touring rural parts of the country. Local leaders are being asked, what is more important, justice or forgiveness? How can these two essential things be combined?
But the people of the north are very tired. Their sense of what is essential has dwindled. It has no glory now, no magnitude. The questions seem too pompous, too abstract. Their answer is simply, we want an end to the war. We do not mind if there is punishment or not. We want an end to war, and we want to go home. Perhaps if there is punishment, the war will continue. And so most of the people vote for forgiveness. Maybe there could be traditional justice: ceremonies, reparations. It’s a good idea, but no-one listens.
The Prime Minister of Belgium gives an interview: what Kony has done is ‘a stain on the soul of humanity’ (though the Belgians themselves have never been punished for what they did for decades in the Congo: the rape, kidnap, torture, murder). And another ICC signatory state, America, joins in. ‘Make peace quickly or we’ll be coming after you, US tells Kony,’ is this week’s headline in the Kenyan paper, The East African, which also claims they will send in the marines (yet the Americans have not been punished for their own war-crimes, which they are still busily committing in Iraq). They all feel better for holding the line. They puff up their chests and mouth their mantras, the war against terror, the rule of law; the ICC indictments must go ahead.