The Last King of Scotland (1998)

by Giles Foden

  “This one, she was a bad woman. See how she has used cream to change the colour of her face and her legs and her arms to look white while other parts of the body remain black. See how she looks as if she has been suffering from leprosy because of this cream. See how unnatural she looks, how like a half-caste. See the judgement of Allah on a Christian woman.”

  It is difficult for me to recall all this, not just because of the horrific nature of what I am describing. My journal is confused, almost cryptic on these matters. Even I myself find it hard to decipher.

  27

  Later that month, one Wednesday evening, I went to collect the van from a garage on the outskirts of the city, where I’d taken it to be serviced. It wasn’t ready, of course (you couldn’t really find a decent mechanic once the Asians had left, and most places had simply been boarded up), so I went for a walk while they finished it off.

  The sky was gun-metal grey, and my spirits were low: on account of the Kay affair, obviously, but I was also feeding off a more general depression that sometimes settled over Kampala evenings. You had a sense of people not having got what they wanted during the day. The street vendors, for instance, with all their scraps of food, square tins of paraffin (Shell, Agip), pear-shaped plastic mirrors and crumpled boxes of cosmetics.

  One vendor always sat directly under a poster advertising part of his stock, Envi body cream. As I walked past I found myself humming the tune to the words on the poster, realizing that it was a jingle I’d been hearing on the radio:

  She’s got the looks

  She’s got the style

  She’s got the kind of skin

  That drives ‘em wild

  Hey what she got?

  SHE GOT ENVI!

  Then I remembered what Amin had said over Kay’s body, and felt sick with myself. I walked on quickly.

  Not many cars were about, just the odd army vehicle growling by, the scut of its bad diesel puffing out behind. I watched my feet and the small economy that thrived around them. So much of it, so much of life in that part of the city, was down by the kerb. One vendor had a piece of plate glass over some tired-looking covers. The front page of an old London Times, yellowing. And Drum: Africa’s Leading Magazine, with a picture of a woman in a leopard-skin coat.

  Farther along I saw a kid standing in the gutter in a pool of brown water. He was clad only in shorts, and his bellybutton stuck out like a press-stud. He looked up at me.

  “Muzungu,” he whispered, staring: not a greeting, not an invocation or an appeal or a protest. Just a statement. He repeated it – “Muzungu” – and I walked on. Past a lone petrol pump with a padlocked handle, past a woman sitting on an up-turned plastic bowl, with another in front of her full of feathers and a dead rooster laid at her feet.

  Night was falling. I reached Namirembe market just before the darkness became total. The traders were gathering up their wares under the tents and lean-tos, chatting to the remaining bunches of shoppers. At one place, a man in a Robin Hood hat was frying chicken over a brazier, tossing it with a spatula. The smell and the noise made me hungry.

  Elsewhere in the market, with a little group swaying and murmuring around him, a man was scratching at a one-stringed Baganda fiddle. I walked on. Several of the traders had lit small oil lamps which they hung in front of their stalls. These glinted on stacks of hoes and pangas. When I had passed, and I looked back behind me, it was only the flickering lights that I could see, as if they were suspended in the darkness.

  Now I was in the heart of the city, where street lamps gave out a different sort of light, as did the few shops that kept their displays illuminated. I stopped for a second outside a haberdasher’s: razor blades, sewing needles, perfumes, and two pyramids of soap – Cus-son’s Imperial Leather, with its red and gold livery, and coarse green blocks of Palmolive. Next door was an electrical shop, its window totally bare except for a single television. Amin was on the screen, giving a speech. I watched his movements, the hands gesturing. Chopping. Lifted up on either side. The baton finger of some point or other, strenuously made.

  Elsewhere a prostitute approached me, heavily made-up with purple lip-gloss and wearing a brown leather jacket. I declined, but she insisted on following me for several hundred yards. Having thrown her off, I walked past a few more shops and into a park which skirted the gardens of the Imperial Hotel. The path I was taking ran close by the diamond-net fence and through its triangles I could dimly see a couple of the guests sitting at one of the lighted tables near the bar.

  The table was done up in African-hut style, with a parasol made of straw. Hanging from the central pole was a hurricane lamp that suffused the man and woman with an orange glow. He was wearing short sleeves, khaki trousers, and a pair of up-to-the-knee field boots, she was in a summer dress. I strained my eyes to see their faces, my ears to catch their whispered voices. Then his hand moved to her knee.

  I found myself running blindly back through the park, crashing into branches. I clattered down the street – my heels noisy as castanets on the kerb – through to the market. The envi poster flashed by, the woman’s face laughing at me. I ran on. Reaching the garage, I spoke to the mechanic hoarsely and thrust the bundle of shillings in his hand. He looked at me pop-eyed, surprised at the sight of this agitated muzungu.

  I calmed down in the van. I calmed down as the road took me on its way, the pot-holes and all of it, bumping the sighs out of me, bumping the hurt out of me. There was a full moon. The good light of it came down through the curve of the windscreen, sweetening my bitterness. It was Freddy Swanepoel’s hand that had reached for Marina’s knee.

  I was very down that night, and drank most of a bottle of whisky. What about her husband, whom she was meant to be with? What was wrong with me, if she was going to have an affair? What about ‘I’m married to the British Ambassador’ and all that crap?

  All this, I knew, was something of an over-reaction to the event itself. It was the way one thing had piled on top of another that did it. Sara going, Stone and his machinations, that macabre business with Kay, the strangeness of Amin and, perhaps most of all, my fascination with him and my reluctance to get the hell out of there.

  I spent the rest of the next week in a kind of foolish daze, so much not myself that even Amin noticed.

  “What is the matter?” he asked. “You look as if you have seen ghost.”

  To my horror, I broke down in front of him and started hyperventilating, pulling acres of vacant air into my chest. Idi looked at me penetratingly and his voice when it came was soft and deep, soft and deep, like you think an angel’s would be.

  He patted me on the shoulder. “Doctor Nicholas, I can tell at once that you are in love. I have been this way myself, oh, many times.”

  I was opening and closing my mouth like a goldfish, and there were little amoebas of light exploding on my retina. Idi rubbed my shoulder harder.

  “My dear, dear friend, you have to accept that the god’s plan is not always what you thought.”

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped, getting my breath back. “I’m not…”

  “If it is love you want,” he said, the dark pools of his eyes pulling me in, “you must not be eager. I am a very successful lover through this tactic. If you walk in Kampala, you will see at least twenty-three girls pregnant by me. That is why they call me Big Daddy. It is obvious.”

  I managed a laugh, though the taste of tears filled my mouth.

  “I think you must go on holiday. You must go and see the animals at Mweya Lodge, or even Paraa. Go, Doctor Nicholas, you will see double-tooth barbet and whale-headed stork, colobus monkey and, of course, Mr Crocodile and Mr Elephant. Hippo yawning because they are very tired. Even there are some simba. Lion!”

  He made a claw-like gesture with both of his hands, drawing back his lips over his teeth. In spite of myself, I had to smile.

  “So,” he said, “who is this lady who does not see your beauty?”

  I shrugged.

  He said, “Well, it is all ri
ght. You see, you do not need to tell me anything that happens in Uganda. Because I know it all already. I have many agents. For example, I know that the wife of the British Ambassador is a bad lady and you” – he poked me in the ribs – “were going to be chasing after her, but in fact she was with another fellow who she should not have been playing with either.”

  I looked at him, more dumbfounded by this than any of the other ludicrous things he had said, in all of my encounters with him. I felt as if my life changed direction at that moment, as if I were on a railway and someone – someone not myself – had pulled the points over.

  My mouth was open. There was a heavy clunk as the heel of his big army boot hit the polished floorboard. “You see!” he said triumphantly. “All this my agents tell me and they are correct. But listen…”

  He came closer and put a hand on each of my shoulders, looking into my eyes as if to say I had his deepest sympathy.

  “…it is foolish to be sad because she commits adultery with another man and not with you. You are jealous because his lips have been on hers. Don’t try to cover the truth under ten blankets. Because it is natural for women to be in love with men – a handsome finger gets a ring put around it, everyone knows that. Yes, it is impossible to control feelings of love. Let your experience be a lesson to all of us men. The main thing is, anyway, that neither of you has introduced a bastard into the family. Once you put children into the equation, it is another thing altogether.”

  I wiped my face on my sleeve.

  “That fellow, he is no good anyway,” Idi continued. “He is the best pilot in Africa except for President Amin, but he is no good all the same. Don’t you worry about him. It is bad to play around with other people’s wives and bad also to spy on President Amin. He is a spy and he works for a very greedy aero company from Kenya who also want to make me pay too much. I asked them for things, special things I needed from Nairobi, and they wanted me to pay not in Uganda shillings but in US dollars.”

  He pulled a bundle of blue notes from his pocket and held them aloft, like someone grasping a fluttering bird.

  “What is the point of having my face on this money if I cannot use it? It is a very bad situation.”

  ∗

  Not – I thought later, lying on the sofa in the bungalow, clutching a bottle of Scotch like a baby – as bad as mine. I resolved to pull myself together, to build a castle in myself. Running away from Uganda was not the answer. Running away was never the answer. I thought of one of Idi’s Swahili proverbs: “If you have an itch in your behind, it will follow you round wherever you go.”

  Impregnable, that is what I told myself I would be. And healthy: I had let myself go a bit and taken on a touch of that jaundiced, tired-expat look of Ivor Seabrook’s. From now on, I’d go swimming and sunbathing a lot, get a good ruddy hue in my yellowing countenance, eat fresh fruit daily – and let nothing bother me. Yes, I’d stick it out here, do good work at the hospital. Help people, like I was supposed to. Be useful.

  I got up from the bed and wrote it down in my journal, an instruction in capitals, and two phrases, underlined.

  CULTIVATE

  The discipline of my native land

  The focus of my profession.

  And I was doing quite well with my resolutions, until Stone from the Embassy rang me up again and asked to see me the following Saturday morning. He didn’t expand, but I knew it would be the thing about treating Amin again – in which direction, needless to say, I had taken no steps. It was too dangerous, I’d reasoned. And yet, as I thought more about it after Stone’s call, the notion of using drugs to bring Amin to order did make some sort of sense; perhaps it was in that way that I was meant to be useful. And I was still, I have to admit, vaguely attracted by the murky James Bondishness of it all.

  ∗

  Here on the island, it’s all clear. Clear as the things and people I see around me in my new life: the window of my new soul. My relinquished, immedicable self far behind me. That’s the stocky figure of Malachi Horan going down the hill now. Malachi is one of the local fishermen. He mostly supplies the Ossian Hotel (a sort of health farm-cum-millionaire’s knocking shop on the west side – saunas, Jacuzzis, that kind of thing), but whenever he’s had a big catch he brings something up here for me. He’s just dropped off three mackerel, a piece of twine through their gills. I’ve put them outside the door for now – it’s certainly cold enough.

  So there they are, a bunch of silver hanging from a nail, their blank eyes trained on the path of their burly death-dealer. And here’s me, my neck aching from sitting and writing all day. Maybe it’s a premonition: they say the aristos in the French Revolution used to get neckache before execution. A sentinel symptom. A little like when people get a headache prior to sexual activity, a projection of the muscle contraction at the top of the spinal cord that will occur during orgasm. Real but not real – not like these fish. I’ll scale them later. One fillet tonight, the rest in the fridge.

  28

  There was a funny smell in the room. Stone, sitting at a big hardwood desk, was wearing a herringbone sports-jacket. And those dreadful brown slacks again. As if he didn’t want to look me in the eye, he kept turning his head back towards the window as he talked.

  “I’m glad that I’ve got you on your own this time. It didn’t help having those two around before.”

  “But why isn’t the Ambassador here?” I demanded. “If you want to discuss the same matter as on my last visit, I want to see the boss.”

  “He’s not…really my boss,” Stone said, silkily. “Only in name. Let me help you with something. Let me tell you how the world works. There’s a show within a show here, Nicholas. People like me have to turn over the wheels when they stick. And, sometimes, people like me have to count on people like you. Bob Perkins is just ceremonial.”

  He turned his head to the window again. Maybe he was worried someone might be listening. The window was slightly open. It was the tilting type, one big pane of glass with a wooden frame, and the refraction from the tilt threw up strange distortions of the garden outside, piling up trees and lawns at impossible angles. I couldn’t resolve them into what they actually should have looked like.

  “What happened to Weir?” I asked. “I heard he was recalled to London. Because he was too friendly with Amin.”

  Stone, for once, looked slightly taken aback. “Let’s…just say he was too talkative.”

  I was pleased to have scored a point. “He didn’t seem that way to me,” I said, rather too smartly.

  Stone frowned. “Getting back to what we were talking about last time, I suppose you’ve done nothing…”

  “No,” I said shortly. “ I haven’t. I was too afraid. Can’t you try another approach?”

  He sighed and leant back in his chair. The room smelled of his aftershave, I realized.

  “My work is nothing but approaches, Nicholas. There’s no constant, we just have to do what policy dictates, on a case-by-case basis. And in Uganda now, with things as they are, London thinks it is the right thing to do. We stopped a £12 million loan once he began that business with the Indians, but it wasn’t enough. We need you.”

  “Why does it have to be me?” I said. “I’m a doctor, not a secret agent.”

  “That’s the point. It’s your duty in that way. As a doctor. And as a British citizen. You must have heard, you must have seen what has being going on. There’s all the violence, lots of Brits booted out already. He’s even put the Kampala Club under guard. The next stage of his Economic War will be all of us gone. Including you, I’m certain.”

  “I’m just doing a simple job,” I said. “I’m not getting in anyone’s way.”

  “Well, you should be getting in the way. You should be getting in the way of the killings. The PM says that he must be stopped. It’s atrocious what’s happening. Law and order have collapsed, people are disappearing every day. We keep getting reports of massacres of soldiers, they’re dumping the bodies in the lake or in mass graves in the
forests. It’s like Hitler.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” I said, irritably. “Nothing is like Hitler.”

  I was annoyed by the way he kept trying to take the moral high ground. There was a pause as he rummaged in his desk drawer, finally pulling out a manila folder.

  “Look at these.” He pushed the folder across the desk. “I’ll make some coffee. You’ll need it. Then tell me what you think.”

  There were about fifteen grainy black-and-white pholpgraphs in the folder. The first showed three soldiers in the cockpit of an armoured car, two with helmets, one with a black beret. In the middle of them a man in a vest was looking up at the sky, his mouth open, as if he were calling out in pain. The soldier nearest had his shoulders slightly hunched, as if he were doing something with his hands at the front of the man – but I couldn’t see below the edge of the cockpit. It was a horrific image. I wondered who had taken the picture.

  Another one showed a boy in shorts tied to a football goalpost. There was a black bag over his head and he was slumped forward. You could see his weight on the rope where it pulled against the post. At the other side a man in military police uniform was looking on, one arm raised as if he were about to intervene. Or had just given an order.

  Looking at the photograph, stark there on the desk, part of me felt frightened, another part wanted to know the rest of the story. There were others that seemed to be in a sequence. A party of soldiers walking through the bush with a prisoner. Then the prisoner tied to a tree. A flour sack covering his face, the frayed corner of it tucked under his collar. In the next, I was shocked to see Amin, talking to the man with the bagged face, as if consoling him. His hand was resting on the man’s shoulder.

  I thought of his hand resting on mine, less than a fortnight ago. I felt a shiver of fear, then, at the possibilities of what Amin might do if he knew I was here. The next photograph broke the sequence, showing another man’s clothed body sprawled on a kerb-side, covered with flies, even – which was odd, I remember thinking – on the parts that weren’t bloody. He had been bludgeoned about the head, and the bones around the eye-socket had shattered, turning out the white ball like a boiled egg.