Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  In two days he would be in Nairobi, in a week London. Ralph thought of home, now close enough to imagine.

  *

  Elanza was sitting outside by the pool when Nels came, listening to the birds. Her hearing seemed to have improved as her sight diminished. She’d never noticed before but now she could pick out hundreds of different bird sounds. Loud rose-winged parakeets squawked, announcing someone’s presence.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  A voice answered her when very close.

  “Me.”

  Without warning Nels slapped her hard across the face with the back of his hand and Elanza, startled, screamed. Tears ran down her cheek from shock and anger.

  “You bastard!” she shouted.

  Elanza tenderly touched the side of her face and could feel it swelling.

  “Is that it?” she sobbed. “No chit-chat first? Is that Nels’ foreplay?”

  “Shut up.”

  Nels went to strike her again. She instinctively flinched and he stopped his hand short of her face.

  “Where’s Ralph?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” she cried, frightened and fearful of what he could do to her.

  Nels knew that Ralph was heading to Nairobi but he didn’t know how or when. He didn’t believe Elanza would know either but he thought he should try.

  “What are you going to do?” she screeched. “Rape me?”

  She started sobbing again.

  “Well, let’s just get it over with.”

  Nels looked at her shaking, her hair a mess, her body very thin, her bones prominent at the shoulder and neck, the skin tight and greasy over a skeletal face. He would go and find Snyman’s wife. Danelle’s frivolous and vacuous playful teasing was more tempting to him than Elanza’s whore-like submission.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to rape you. I don’t go for blind girls. I like girls to watch as I rape them.”

  Elanza wept as he left her, sobbing with fury and rage – at him for his foul maliciousness and at herself for the injustice of her pitiful condition.

  *

  Angel had left Nairobi with a mental map of his route, mumbling the names of the towns he’d pass through: Kikuyu, Naivasha, Gilgil, Nakuru, Kericho, Kisumu. At a viewpoint on the ridge road the Rift Valley spread below him – Africa. He looked at his hands on the steering wheel and, not for the first time in his life, wondered where he belonged.

  He stopped at a roadside market near Kericho, unable to resist the opportunity to talk a Nilotic language. The people there hadn’t been Maasai; they lived further south along the Tanzanian border; and the Maasai’s close relatives the Samburu, hair dyed red from ochre, were much further north. Both Maasai and Samburu were nomadic Rift Valley plains pastoralists and didn’t live this far west. Kericho was still too far from Lake Victoria for the market traders to be Luo, who were predominantly fishermen and easy to identify. The Luo were one of only a few tribes that didn’t circumcise. Instead, six front teeth in the lower jaw were removed on reaching manhood. At the Kericho market they had to be Kipsigi, highland pastoral peoples. They would talk Kipsigis, a form of Kalenjuns, a tonal language of the Nandi cluster.

  From a Kipsigi herder he’d bought the goat, a brown nanny with short horns, ripped ears and a curly white tufty beard. He’d paid too high a price but considered it had been worth the money.

  Angel pulled the red pickup truck, faded with age, to the side of the road outside the Kenyan border town of Busia. It was dusk, as he’d planned, but Angel wanted it to be fully dark. He looked behind him at the goat, now quiet, lying tethered to a bar in the back of the truck. The goat and his new clothes had been two expenditures he didn’t anticipate his boss at the National Intelligence Service would agree to reimburse. The clothes had been a rational purchase in Nairobi, the goat an opportunistic addition he’d made en route, an inspired improvement to his cover story.

  Angel got out and looked around at the border town of Busia ahead.

  “So, goat, do you speak Lugandan?”

  “In Lugandan we do not say ‘Good morning’. We say, ‘How was your night?’”

  “Wasuze otya?”

  “To which you reply ‘Gyendi’, ‘I am OK’.”

  “Okay? Kale?”

  “I am, nze, a goat, embuzi.”

  He stroked its head.

  “Nkwagola, I love you. Maybe not.”

  “You are a kirabo, a gift.”

  “Do you understand? Otegeera?”

  The goat stood and urinated.

  “Ah. I’ll call you Oku as in Okufuysia, which means ‘to allow urine to flow from the bladder out of the body’.”

  “No. Your name should be Ekibi, bad. As in a bad smell.”

  He looked at the truck. Urine ran out of a small drain hole in the bed of the pickup and down the number plate.

  He would have to change them from Kenyan. He’d steal some number plates and switch them. With stolen Ugandan plates it wouldn’t stand scrutiny – he had neither useable personal identification nor any vehicle documents. If challenged he’d have to rely on his cover story and something to divert people’s attention. Ekibi the goat seemed the best he could hope for in Uganda.

  The White Nile from Lake Victoria ran through the country and made it one of the best watered areas of Africa. It should have been the Garden of Eden. Instead its recent history was one of violence and anarchy headed, firstly, by Milton Obote and five years of military law. This was followed by more of the same from Idi Amin, his protégé then rival. Amin had gone and Obote was back in power. Not much had changed for Ugandans.

  Uganda was complicated – a classic divided kingdom. Obote was of the Bunyoro tribe from the north. The Bunyoro were a Nilotic tribe, pastoral and nomadic because the north was dry. They were poor, and put upon with slow and bad decision-making by elders as was the traditional way.

  Amin, however, was Bugandan and from the south. The Bugandans were Bantu, and agricultural rather than pastoral thanks to the Nile waters. It had made them prosperous compared to the north. Colonial development had concentrated on the richer south of the country. Here were the railways, the seat of government, cash crops like cotton and sugar and tea, and missionary education.

  The brutal medieval infighting between north and south had ruined the country and terrorised its people, yet it didn’t need to be this way. Ugandans were not naturally barbaric, but industrious and innovative. In the fourth century the Bantu people had perfected the art of smelting iron in a preheated force draught furnace to make carbon steel. Siemens didn’t do that in Europe until the nineteenth century.

  The survivors of Amin’s genocidal purges against Obote’s Bunyoro people in the north were now armed and in uniform, conducting similar actions against Bantu-speaking Bugandans in the south, for whom they felt no empathy or pity.

  Angel crossed from Kenyan Busia to Ugandan Busia in the predawn darkness. The town straddled the border but only the main road from Kampala had a customs post. The border was porous. Just a short way from town one of many dirt roads allowed vehicles to go around the border-crossing inspection point and rejoin the main road outside of Busia town.

  It was a gamble. The border crossing from Kenya to Uganda at the town of Malaba further north had a busier road, but the crossing itself was a river bridge and impossible for Angel to circumvent. He could only hope that Ralph hadn’t come that way.

  Outside the town Angel found what he’d been looking for, and his Hilux soon wore new registration plates. They were still three letters and three numbers but they started with a U not a K.

  Angel’s plan had been simple. With the Kenya to Tanzania border closed the only route available to Ralph coming from the south was through Uganda, and all routes through Uganda went through the capital Kampala. He would retrace the main arterial road from Nairobi to Kampala and make enquiries al
ong the way. There were unmeasurable risks. Of all the places on the continent of Africa that an employee of the apartheid South African National Intelligence Service would be most in trouble if discovered, Kampala would be near the top of the list. Angel had travelled into Kenya on his British passport, as South African visitors to Kenya needed a visa that entailed a day in the Pretoria High Commission being glared at in disgust. He’d hidden his passport with his Western clothes and dropped it in a left luggage facility at Nairobi’s domestic terminal, sanitising himself of all identification before entering Uganda. He’d put his long hair on top of his head, under the kofia.

  Blend in, he told himself.

  It would have been safer to drive on the many unpaved roads. Of all the roads in Uganda only seven per cent were paved, just two thousand kilometres out of twenty-seven thousand. There were very few random roadblocks and security searches on dirt roads and, although slower, the opportunities were limitless in every direction.

  Angel saw the police car as he came up to the road junction, seventeen kilometres inside Uganda from the border. It was exactly where he would have put a roadblock. The traffic from Busia slowed as it came through a forest and a lorry parking area by the side of the road gave a wide pull-in area. A rough sign advertised the Garden Pub Hotel and Accommodation. Angel wasn’t sure when they might last have had guests.

  There were three of them, unarmed. Angel wasn’t nervous but curious and interested in what might be the right price. Too big a bribe invited suspicion, too little might show a lack of respect. Both showed no local knowledge, and that might lead to annoyance and aggression. It depended on the time of the day. It was early morning, which Angel thought should help him. They might be hung over but not drunk, and with the whole day ahead they might be lenient as there would be plenty of earning opportunities still to come.

  Angel also considered his cover. He wore his kanzu, his formal clothes, on the way to his brother’s wedding. Slightly too high a bribe might be safer and just reflect his good spirits and wish not to be late. His cover story was that he worked in Kenya. It gave him good reason to have dollars, and at a black-market exchange rate of twelve times the bank rate it would have made it cheap for Angel and attractive to the soldiers. It may also have made them curious. In the end he decided to use local currency and he picked a figure that he estimated to be the price of a three-course meal at an expensive hotel in Kampala, the Apollo or the Speke or the Imperial.

  Angel put both hands on the wheel as the Toyota stopped. He pitched his Lugandan with a hint of Kikuyu to show he’d worked away from home, a plausible excuse for any tonal mistakes he might make.

  It had been technically quite interesting. Some quick thinking on his part had been required when passing his bribe, as the Lugandan system of cardinal numbers was quite complicated. Twenty to fifty were expressed as multiples of ten, but sixty to a hundred were numerical nouns in their own right. He’d very nearly asked them if ninety shillings would be alright by telling them he had nine tens.

  He hadn’t needed to explain that he was with the groom’s family, that he’d missed the kwanjula, the day a bride introduces her future husband and the people who will escort him, because he’d been working away. He hoped that his goat would help with the mutwalo, the bride price. He’d do what he could as the girl was already pregnant. He smiled then but the soldiers didn’t. They took his money and waved him through.

  Angel drove down the road and laughed.

  “Ekibi, you stink, but you are the best damn goat I’ve ever bought.”

  Angel had noticed two things as he’d driven toward Kampala. In the countryside there was no wildlife, and in the towns there were mostly kids and sick people.

  From where he’d been stopped to the town of Iganga, and again through countryside to the Nile crossing at Jinja, he’d seen no animals except dogs. There was nothing left. Amin’s soldiers, hungry for hard currency and armed with automatic weapons, had exterminated elephant, rhino and other big game for ivory, horn and skins. In ten years, Uganda’s herd of forty thousand elephants had been reduced to 1,500. White rhino didn’t exist. In some areas the carcasses and bones of elephants littered the ground where they’d been gunned down in groups of up to a dozen at a time.

  In the towns there were different visible reminders to Uganda’s chaos. Its people were dying. The government spent just two dollars per person a year on healthcare, and it clearly wasn’t enough. Angel saw untreated ulcerated tumours on the face, neck or jaw of children suffering with Burkitt’s lymphoma, a malignant cancer of the lymphatic system common in malarial areas.

  Other people were anaemic or suffering from whooping cough. Many were severely malnourished or dying from diseases simply unknown to health officials. A new disease was spreading in sixteen to forty-year-old men, and women, by heterosexual contact. They called it Slim. Angel guessed it to be a local name for Elanza’s illness.

  Angel noticed the children of Jinja, orphaned by war and the death of parents from disease, living on the city streets in unsupervised small groups. There was an estimated one and a half million of them throughout Uganda, ten per cent of the population. Several thousand of them had attached themselves as young boys to the Ugandan Army and become kadogos, child soldiers, and were now destined to remain on the periphery of society for the rest of their lives.

  After Jinja, Angel drove through square tea plantations and entered the Nabira Forest and the town of Lugazi. He’d been driving for nearly three hours and was becoming increasingly nervous about Ralph’s safety. He was only forty-five kilometres east of Kampala.

  *

  The Somali driver pulled into the petrol station for fuel at the same time as an army Land Rover. It passed slowly alongside the lorry and parked across the forecourt exit to the road, not blocking it but restricting the space, making it difficult for a lorry and trailer to leave suddenly. There were three soldiers inside wearing big red berets, too big for their heads, as though a quartermaster had made fun of them. Folds of woollen material bunched up on the top and then fell over the side, covering one ear. They looked like clowns. Ralph smiled at them, resisting a temptation to laugh.

  The lorry driver nervously wound down the window. All three soldiers had guns on slings over their shoulders, the barrels pointing forward and down. They were lean and unsmiling.

  Ralph’s door opened. A soldier wordlessly motioned for him to get out of the lorry, then pushed him into the middle of the forecourt.

  The driver had a discussion in a language that Ralph couldn’t understand. The third soldier brought Ralph’s rucksack and dropped it at his feet.

  “Sit down.”

  Ralph looked around at the dusty stained concrete and sat on his rucksack. A soldier pulled it from under him and Ralph sat down angrily, cross-legged on the ground.

  The soldier talking to the driver stepped down from the truck window and looked at Ralph curiously. With a hiss of brakes the lorry pulled away and slowly wound around the Land Rover onto the road. It headed east, changing gears quickly, east towards Kenya.

  “Oh, that’s great,” said Ralph.

  He tried to recall the next big town along the way, the next opportunity to get a ride. Was it called Ginger or something?

  “What are you doing here?” the soldier asked.

  All three stood around him, their guns now off the shoulder and held with two hands. Before Ralph could answer, he shouted again.

  “What is under your shirt?”

  “It’s my wallet.”

  “Take it out.”

  Ralph pulled it out from under his shirt. It hung around his neck.

  “Open it.”

  Ralph hesitated.

  “It’s just some money,” he said.

  The soldier stepped forward to see.

  “Open it,” he commanded.

  Ralph did as he was told. A single US dollar bill was the
only thing inside. A fifty-dollar bill.

  The soldier stepped back. He looked at the others for guidance, reassurance, or in disbelief at their good fortune, Ralph wasn’t sure which.

  “You are a spy.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You are a spy and we arrest you.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m not a spy. I’m just travelling through to Nairobi to catch a plane. Look, I have a ticket, here.”

  He reached for his rucksack but a soldier kicked it away.

  “You are a spy. If you give me the money I will let you go.”

  It was a game, thought Ralph. A stupid game with pretend soldiers in silly hats.

  “No. I’m not a spy and you can’t have my money. It’s all I have.”

  “Take off your shoes,” he shouted.

  “What?”

  “Take off your shoes.”

  All three lifted their guns. They rattled and clicked as they put them to their shoulders. The foresights on them had a round protective cover, something that flipped up with a green dot on it. The barrels were very close to Ralph’s head. He could see them clearly. The outside of the very end of the barrel was threaded for screwing something on, the threads filled with grey mud. Ralph wondered if he should say something.

  *

  Lugazi town straddled both sides of the Kampala to Jinja highway. On the outskirts Angel saw a dusty beat-up ambulance, donated jointly by a Rotary club in England and a charity in Germany. It seemed the only asset of the Kawolo Hospital, that and a line of homemade incubators for premature babies heated by domestic lightbulbs.

  Further towards the centre of town Angel slowed as he approached the bus station and then stopped. A line of people were watching an army vehicle at a Total service station on the opposite side of the road. The green Land Rover had parked at an angle, an attempt to block the exit rather than take fuel, its passenger door left wide open.