Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  *

  When Nels walked in to the darkened room from the light of the River Road he noticed a smell, a Nairobi smell, an overpowering bitterness that caught in his throat like acid. Yellow eyes slouching around the walls followed him, while half-naked sickly thin girls with stiff hair rubbed themselves against him and stuck like leeches. Nels scowled into the gloom. It wasn’t the sight of the dregs of Kenya deposited like sediment in the bar that upset him, it was the smell, a stench of hopeless worthless lives. It reminded him of what he despised and why his country needed to keep fighting, to stay strong. Nels hated Africa.

  A man larger than the rest unstuck himself from the wall. A burn on the side of his face extended from above a closed and weeping eye to one side of his mouth, stretched by scar tissue into a lopsided leering smirk. He stood in the open doorway to the street, blocking more light, filling the room with his dark shadow.

  Nels waited, calmly as though fishing, and looked at the burnt man. He didn’t think there would be any point in talking to him. The big ones were always stupid. He needed a rat that could think.

  “You want a girl?”

  The voice came not from the burnt man in the doorway or the wall of staring faces in front of Nels but from a whiskery man with big gaps in his teeth leaning against a red and yellow oil drum used as a small table. He slurped at a glass bottle. Nels smiled at him, the buck rat among his mischief.

  “I’ve got a girl I know you’d like.”

  He put down the bottle and licked his lips. A large medallion on a thick gold chain, too fat for his thin neck, clattered against the oil drum. Nels moved towards him and the big man in the doorway stepped back into the room.

  “You want to check a few over?”

  He flicked his fingers and two sad and unsmiling women lifted themselves reluctantly from a low wide couch, while a third sat on its worn armrest, her knees far apart. Nels looked at them coldly.

  “Keep the girls,” he said. “I’m looking to do some other business.”

  The man at the oil drum didn’t seem disappointed.

  “Business is my name. Mr Business.”

  Mr Business looked up with undersized eyes.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You want someone taken out.”

  Nels said nothing.

  “I know. Your wife. It’s always the wives. Or the husbands,” he chuckled.

  “It’s a boy,” said Nels. “A white boy.”

  Mr Business looked at him with respect.

  “A boy. How interesting. I’ll give you a good deal if it’s only a boy.”

  “I don’t know when. If I can find out I’ll let you know. Otherwise just watch…”

  Mr Business nodded to the burnt man and interrupted him.

  “How about a little distraction, before we talk business. On the house.”

  The burnt man came back with a girl in a short tight dress. She leant against Nels’ arm and looked at him through faraway eyes.

  “How old is she?” asked Nels.

  “Does it matter? Sixteen probably.”

  Nels looked at the girl, her skin stretched smooth and shiny, her lips still thin and tight.

  “She’s not fourteen,” he said.

  Mr Business shrugged and looked around.

  “Something else?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Nels. “Something younger.”

  *

  The Protestant Mission at Vigosi had been difficult to find. For a start, Ralph couldn’t find the church. He had expected a church, preferably with a large illuminated cross on top of a tower and the sweet song of a gospel choir filling the neighbouring streets, leading him, showing him the way. Instead he stumbled in the fading light down suburban roads full of potholes and across hard bare earthen yards until a faded hand-painted sign pointed to a collection of block and tin bungalows.

  Behind a low wall of rough red brick, rusty iron bars sticking through the top, lay a long narrow building. A track led to it, and across the path bed sheets hung like sails put out to dry in a calm.

  The door of the building opened like a hatch in a boiler. Light and smoke and noise spilled out into the yard.

  A large man, bare to the waist, came out and urinated steamily into a bush.

  Ralph waited then walked toward the door. Chickens disturbed from their roost screeched at him.

  The man turned at the noise and peered into the gloom. He said something that Ralph didn’t understand. It might have been Dutch or German or Russian.

  “Hi, sorry to bother you. Is this the Protestant Mission?”

  The German looked at him. In the light from the door Ralph looked young, pleading and weak. His only serviceable shorts were an old pair he’d had at school for sports when he was thirteen. Although he’d lost weight they were tight around his brown legs. His blond hair had become wavy as it had grown long. College girls in Muenster would pay a lot of money to have it look so good.

  “I’m travelling through and I wondered if you might have somewhere I could stay.”

  “Fuck off.”

  A woman came to the door. She had a cigarette in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. She spoke French to the German. His name was Rainer. What the hell was he doing out there with the door open? The room would be full of bugs. She’d had dengue fever once. If she got bitten again she would probably die.

  She saw Ralph standing outside, his rucksack at his feet.

  “Oh.”

  “Bonsoir,” said Ralph.

  Rainer grunted.

  “J’ai demandé en ville. Au bar,” he explained. “J’ai besoin dormir.”

  “Stop.” The woman held up her hand and looked at him. “This is too painful. English. Please.”

  “Thanks. Well, as I said to this gentleman, I came up the lake and I’m trying to get through to Nairobi.”

  The German filled the door. Ralph looked at him.

  “Is it Rainer? Well, Rainer was just giving me some advice.”

  Rainer laughed and went inside.

  The woman didn’t answer. This sort of thing seemed to be happening more often. The mission wasn’t there for the benefit of kids whose parents could well afford to support them while they had their little travelling adventure. The real work needed to be helping the local children. You helped one or two of these teenagers as they passed through, and then without knowing it you were in some guidebook as a free place to stay and they were forever knocking on the door. The mission was being taken advantage of. The mission should be a Good Samaritan, but more selective, helping the truly needy. Wout would have to decide.

  “You’d better speak to my husband. Come in.”

  She turned away.

  “And shut the damn door,” she shouted at Rainer’s back.

  Rainer didn’t turn. He lifted one arm, his back to both of them, and they followed him into the room.

  *

  It was a narrow dining room with kitchen facilities at one end, Ralph assumed for church functions where they broke bread and ate little fishes after Bible study. A red and white checked plastic tablecloth covered one end of a long table, set for four.

  Rainer sat down at the table next to a dark-haired girl with shiny olive skin. Ralph wasn’t looking but he thought it may have been recently oiled. She wore a white top with very short sleeves that slightly pinched the soft paler flesh under her arms when she stretched to tap her cigarette against an ashtray on the table.

  The woman who had let him in went and talked in a hushed voice to a thin bald man preparing food, cutting a dusty shrivelled sausage into thin red and white marbled slices. He wiped his hands on an apron and held her by one shoulder, looking into her eyes as he quietly talked.

  Ralph looked around the room, then at his feet, then the ceiling – anywhere other than the table and the dark-haired girl. Her beauty made hi
m stumble like a clown and he knew he would be inarticulate should she talk to him.

  The thin man came over to him from the kitchen, still wiping his hands.

  “Welcome.”

  He paused and looked at him with his head tilted.

  “Phillips. Ralph Phillips.”

  “Ha ha ha.”

  Rainer started laughing and the dark-haired girl smiled at him.

  “Like Bond,” laughed the German.

  Ralph flushed.

  “Welcome, Ralph. My name is Wout. I believe you’ve met Rainer.”

  He nodded toward the table.

  “And my wife.”

  The woman walked over and shook his hand.

  “Margaux,” she said and looked at the floor as if ashamed.

  “And this is Azzurra. Dr Azzurra,” said Wout.

  Ralph didn’t want to glance at the table. He bent to look at something on the top of his rucksack, an irritating loose strap. He’d been meaning to fix it for a while and now seemed the perfect time to attend to it. He realised too late that it must have looked as if he had made a stiff little bow. His scalp started itching. Azzurra smiled at him and sipped her wine.

  Wout turned back to the kitchen.

  “Eat with us.”

  Ralph hesitated.

  “Oh, um, that’s fine. I’ve eaten.”

  Wout poured steaming pots onto serving plates.

  “Ralph. The best thing about having an Italian friend is that she always knows where to get good food.”

  He put dishes on the table. The food smelt of flowers and lush grass in warm sunshine.

  “Azzurra brought salami and pasta. Eat with us.”

  Azzurra picked at a thin string of pasta falling off the plate and tilted her head back, stretching her neck. There was a bone just below the triangle of her jaw. Ralph wanted to ask her what it was called, to touch it with his fingertips. It wobbled as she caught the yellow ribbon of food on her tongue.

  “They are gifts from my family in Torino,” she said.

  Azzurra looked at Margaux.

  “And I have this.”

  She held up a long triangular-shaped chocolate wrapped in gold foil, isosceles not equilateral, like an upside-down boat. Margaux screeched.

  “Gianduiotto. It’s the best,” said Azzurra. “Much better than Belgian.”

  Margaux feigned shock.

  “That cannot be true. But I am happy to try.”

  Wout smiled. He came from Bruges, Flemish and Dutch speaking. Margaux was Walloon and very French. In the end they were both Belgian and sorted out problems in a Belgian way, with discussion and compromise. It had been the strength of both their working lives and their relationship. That and their love of the church.

  Ralph thought it safer looking at Wout.

  “This is good of you. Giving me a free place to stay would have been enough.”

  Margaux peered up at him.

  “It won’t be for free,” she said.

  Rainer waved his knife in Ralph’s direction.

  “You can paint roofs?”

  Rainer put a rough Westphalian hand on Azzurra’s fine Torinese wrist.

  “How are your little people, Azzurra?”

  Ralph wasn’t looking. He didn’t really notice how she slid her hand from underneath Rainer’s to push a coil of hair, like an upside-down question mark, away from her eyes. They were pale blue. Azzurra.

  “Azzurra works with the Twa,” he explained to Ralph.

  Ralph concentrated on a fork full of firm pasta, slippery with butter and with shavings of soft cheese. He had no idea that butter and cheese could taste so good, so delicate.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  Rainer stared at him.

  “You know all about the Twa of course.”

  Azzurra watched Ralph eat.

  “You like the pasta?”

  Ralph nodded and something caught on the end of his chin. He rubbed at it as inconspicuously as he could.

  “It is called Tajarin. It’s just lots of good egg yolks and the right sort of flour.”

  “It’s delicious.”

  “The cheese is fontina. You should buy it in the summer, when the cows are moved to the mountains. When you cut it you can smell the rich herby pasture the cows were eating and the clean Alpine air.”

  She looked at Rainer.

  “They are called Batwa, not Twa. There are three groups of Batwa, depending if they fish, hunt or make pots. I work with the Impunyu, the forest dwellers. Hunter-gatherer Batwa. I’m worried they will soon completely disappear from the forests of Burundi.”

  Rainer smiled at her.

  “Then no one will know about the Twa, Rainer.”

  It was only slight, just a twist of her upper body, but she had moved away from Rainer. Ralph ate the tajarin with fresh enthusiasm.

  “The Pygmies of the central African Great Lakes area were the original peoples of this country. The first people in the world. Now it’s easier to get funding and support for panda bears than it is for our own descendants.”

  Azzurra put down her fork and poured Ralph more Barolo. It was the Cannubi vineyard’s Barolo, the light-coloured but rich and powerful wine with complex and exotic aromas from Piedmont. Had Ralph known about wine he would have considered putting Azzurra and Barolo together to be an entirely appropriate pairing. She looked at him, held his eyes with her own. Ralph couldn’t breathe.

  “They are not considered citizens by most African states. They are kept as slaves from birth by other Bantu. They don’t have identity cards, deeds or rights to land, no healthcare other than what my organisation can provide, no schooling. Their home is being cut down or turned into ‘national parks’ that they are not allowed to access. Soon they won’t have a home. They will live exploited by all on the edge of their forest.”

  Rainer leant across the table, his knuckles white around the wine glass.

  “What do you think about that, Ralph?”

  Ralph thought of Captain Winston on the bridge of the Independence sailing up Lake Tanganyika, of listening to his talk of Marxist political theory while losing at chess.

  “I think that above all else we should always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.”

  He looked at Rainer and thought him brutally ugly, like a dog bred to fight.

  “You know all about Che Guevara of course.”

  Check. But not yet Mate.

  Ralph looked at Rainer, not at Azzurra, but he was certain that she smiled.

  *

  Margaux smoked a cigarette and watched Ralph on the roof. He’d been busy. She could see a tell-tale trail of glowing red paint snaking up the hill, ending where he sat on the top of the furthest bungalow. As usual, Wout had been right. Ralph had turned out to be rather a deep-thinking character. He’d been quiet and respectful. He’d done dishes without being asked. He’d made very acceptable, possibly excellent, omelettes for breakfast from eggs he’d got up early to find. He’d kept the local kids busy playing soccer in the dust while they’d been in conference with the Anglican bishop, making them scream when he’d pick up the ball and run with it rather than kick it to them.

  She loved Wout for his faith in people. Wout had always been a good man, one of the rare ones that saw good in others. Ralph hadn’t exactly been robbed on the road to Jericho though. She watched Ralph go back to his work, pleased that Wout had agreed that Ralph should pay for his keep. There wasn’t much more to do. She’d pick some grapefruit and squeeze him juice for when he finished.

  *

  Ralph sat on the roof wondering what time it was. He put his fingers together like a salute and held them at arm’s-length, trying to measure height above the lake. His mind felt slow and muddled, the day still hot. Five fingers together w
ere fifteen degrees. One hour of arc. He drank some water.

  It wouldn’t work. He needed to be at sea level looking at the ocean. The ocean was away to the west, over Tanganyika, then over two thousand kilometres of scrub and brush. The surface of Lake Tanganyika must be at nearly eight hundred metres elevation. And he was higher than the lake, looking down on it from the mission. Plus the height of the roof he was sitting on. His height of eye above sea level was… He gave up trying to calculate the geometry.

  Azzurra came for him when the sun blazed two hands above the horizon, hanging immobile over the Congo. The arrangements had been vague. Ralph had listened dumbly to her over dinner. She might be able to give him a ride to the Rwandan border when she visited the Pygmies. The roads were atrocious. They’d need to travel in daylight. Perhaps he could help her with something in return? She needed to make arrangements. It would take a few days.

  Most importantly, and for four hot and happy days on the mission roofs Ralph had thought of little else, she had left after dinner alone. Rainerless. Sans Rainer.

  Checkmate.

  *

  In Pretoria, Angel walked as unobtrusively as possible up Paul Kruger Street towards Church Square. He kept his head down and stayed on the edge of the pavement, ready to jump into the road out of the way of other whiter pedestrians. He turned left before the central post office down the quieter Pretorius Avenue heading toward Princes Park. His colour meant he wasn’t allowed in but he knew that if he entered in the south-west corner and went straight to the river no one would see him. It was noiseless in the park, mid-afternoon and too late for the lunchtime crowds. He sat peacefully, his shoes off and feet in the cool river water, pushing gravel around with his toes. He needed to think.

  David Mwansa had called from Lusaka with disturbing news.

  “What do you mean it’s closed?” Angel had asked.

  “It is impossible to cross from Tanzania. The border has been closed by the Kenyans. Kenyatta was a foolish Western puppet and Moi is just as bad.”

  Angel hadn’t wanted to discuss the politics.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, Angel, that if your English boy took the Tanzam train all the way to Dar es Salaam he could not then get further north; he would have had to return to Lusaka. Unless…”