The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  ‘Can’t we just drop back a bit? One can never be late for a picnic,’ Mrs Adams said, closing her window and placing a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. But Mr Adams was already accelerating out of the dust and the car was swooshing down the side of the bus. Michael could see three hens and a cockerel ahead on the side of the road. He was sure their little eyes widened in terror. They stretched out their necks and started out for the other side of the road. Then Michael saw the child. He looked a younger version of Tomasi and was running after the chickens – towards the road. Michael barely had time to think out the whole thought: the little boy’s family has only got those four chickens and he wants to save them.

  Mr Adams spat ‘Damn it’ as he swerved this way and that. Mrs Adams had covered her eyes with her handkerchief and sat rigid with her head bowed. There was a dull thud. Michael and Simon turned, open-mouthed, to look behind. Their own dust cloud billowed out, already hiding the bus and the road, but on its peripheries red, black and bronze feathers turned in the hot sun like the glowing ashes from a fire.

  Mrs Adams screamed. ‘Stop, Henry! You’ve hit the kid.’

  ‘Nah, don’t think so. Would have been a bigger bang. Got the chickens, though.’

  He sounded casual but Michael saw him blow out through his lips as if relieved.

  ‘Good driving, Dad,’ Simon said, then turned to Michael. ‘That’s how they drive in the East African Safari.’

  Michael laughed with Simon. They had survived and missed the boy, without God keeping an eye on them. Simon’s father had got them out of trouble all on his own by his own clever driving. Michael felt that he had joined in something daring and it had paid off. God was a good friend, yes, but it was exciting to get away for once; to go somewhere without him; to spread his wings on his own.

  ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ Mr Adams said. Even Mrs Adams joined in the chuckling.

  As soon as Michael had laughed a disturbing image came into his mind from his Picture Bible. He saw the disciple, Peter, standing warming himself by a brazier at the first pink of dawn – red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Behind him a cockerel was crowing its head off. Peter had already disowned his best friend, Jesus. Michael remembered the cockerel on the side of the road, and how it had looked at him as if it knew.

  They slowed slightly as the road narrowed and became corrugated. Michael and Simon held imaginary steering wheels and threw themselves from side to side, negotiating the course. Miles passed with no sign of permanent habitation. The land opened out into rolling arid pastureland.

  ‘It’s down here,’ Mr Adams said, as he braked hard and turned off onto a boulder-strewn track.

  Mrs Adams folded out the camp chairs under a thorn tree with a view. Mr Adams removed a large plastic coolbox from the boot of the car. Simon and Michael raced towards the pools of water amongst the rocks in a shallow cut in the land. They put their fingers in the water.

  ‘Hey, Dad,’ Simon shouted. ‘It’s hot!’

  ‘That’s why they call it Hot Springs.’

  They took off their shoes and jumped on the rocks, but jumped back immediately because of the heat. The water slipped over a flat boulder at the edge of the water so they started to construct a causeway for their cars. When they looked up they found two young herd boys were looking at them from the slope above the pool. The older was big and strong but was hanging on his spear, which he gripped with both hands. The younger boy had light bones and was small, but stood straight as if ready to run.

  ‘Ignore them,’ Simon said.

  ‘Why?’ Michael asked. Everything was new and strange in Simon’s family: he had to learn the new rules.

  ‘For a start they’ll want our cars and then they’ll ask for money,’ Simon replied.

  ‘Tomasi doesn’t ask for money.’

  ‘Who’s Tomasi?’

  ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘OK, you ask them to play and see what happens,’ Simon said, ‘but my mum and dad won’t allow us. I think they’re worried about disease.’

  Michael shouted to the boys, but they just stood there gawping at him. He wanted to go up and ask them their secrets, the places where the snakes sunned themselves and the places where illegal distilleries were hidden, but the boys remained motionless, just staring – as if they were looking at Queen Elizabeth herself.

  ‘There, see? They just stare; they don’t even know it’s rude to stare,’ Simon said triumphantly.

  ‘I think they haven’t seen white people before,’ Michael said.

  They heard Mrs Adams call them to come and eat. She had positioned their camp chairs in the shade and placed their sandwiches and cake neatly on plates. They ate in silence, listening to the bubbling of the water, the lazy croaks of a toad and the pure clear calls of a bird.

  ‘Do you think they’re going to watch us eating? I understand now how a lion must feel when a tourist bus stops to gawp,’ Mrs Adams said, looking at the herd boys.

  ‘That reminds me, I’m going to take a picture,’ Mr Adams said.

  ‘Get one of the picininis to do it. Make them do something as payment for their front row seats.’

  Mr Adams set up the camera on a tripod, pressed the shutter and hurried back to his camp chair. They looked into the lens and waited for the shutter to sound, putting their best face forward, except Simon who stuck out his tongue. ‘That was silly,’ said Mrs Adams. ‘A waste of a picture.’

  When Mr Adams sat down again he sighed and said, ‘Us in Africa. We’ll look back from our retirement home in Worthing and say, “those were the days”.’

  He ran his finger along his moustache. ‘Yes, these really are the days. We’re royalty for a short while longer, and then we abdicate and hope the natives don’t chop off our heads.’

  No one said anything. It was hot. Michael saw Mrs Adams lazily stretch her hand across towards Mr Adams and place it on the arm of his chair. Mr Adams didn’t look at her, but he put his hand on hers and squeezed it gently. Mrs Adams smiled a little and looked happy. They’re being kind to each now, Michael thought. There were lots of things he didn’t understand.

  While the boys picked the last crumbs off their plates Mr Adams became restless, got up and fetched his portable radio from the car.

  Mrs Adams was napping, her eyes closed, but she jerked her head up as the radio came on. ‘What the hell is that, Henry? Excruciating. Change it to something civilised.’

  ‘I like it. It’s got beat.’

  ‘Change it, Henry. Don’t spoil the picnic for Michael.’

  Mr Adams looked at Michael but Michael did not look back; he didn’t want to upset either of them. Mr Adams changed station.

  ‘Those kids are coming closer. I really would like some privacy. They’re giving me the willies. Tell them to scuttle off,’ Mrs Adams said.

  ‘Tell them yourself. They’re not doing any harm,’ Mr Adams said. ‘Maybe I can interest them in a mixer.’ He winked heavily at Michael.

  ‘I’ve had enough. Go away! Kwenda!’ Mrs Adams shouted.

  The two herd boys fled.

  That evening, after Mrs Adams had turned out the bedroom light and said a bedtime prayer – sleep tight, mind the gremlins don’t bite – Michael got out of bed when Simon had gone to sleep and knelt down and prayed. He felt bad about feeling good when they had hit the chickens and so he asked God to forgive him. Then, as always, he knew God’s kind pardon. He was glad God was a friend who knew him and not some sort of gruff judge. On balance Michael thought he had done well as God’s ambassador, considering that it was his first full day on the job. He reminded God of that. What worried him was that he didn’t know whether Simon’s family had noticed; whether Mr Adams was saying to Mrs Adams in their living room as he poured himself a beer, ‘Well I never thought I’d say it, Rhonda, but Michael’s a great ambassador for Christ.’ He doubted it. The chorus ‘In this world of darkness . . .’ played itself in his head. Then he cried a little, as he had the first night he went to boarding school.


  Kampala: 1962

  Cast from our course, we wander in the dark.

  Virgil, The Aeneid

  Michael, aged twelve, and his mother made their way out of the teeming ticket hall at the railway station in the capital. They left his father in the hall, pinned against a wall by Mr Adams, with his Bull Worker arms, who was suggesting that a man who truly loved his wife as Christ loved the church would buy her a stainless steel kitchen sink and built-in appliances. It was the Christian thing to do.

  Michael tried to hurry his mother down the platform to find his carriage. It was the start of his second year at senior school in Kenya and he wanted to lay claim to the prized middle bunk in the compartment for the twenty-four hour journey. A middle bunk meant being able to lie awake and watch the shapes of the night slide by, see the great Beyer-Garrett steam engines being watered in the shunting yards and see proud station signs announcing their altitude: Tororo 3086 feet, through Eldoret, Sosian, and Kaptagat, right up to Timboroa at 9001 feet and then on to Equator and down to Nakuru. He liked to see the orange-illuminated bustle on the platforms – families catching the train in the middle of the night having made their way along unlit roads from far-flung farms and villages.

  But making haste was as difficult as in a dream. Obstacles impeded every route: oversized suitcases, scuffed and bulging; spicy scented Indian women with insistent voices, flesh hanging in rolls from their midriffs, their gold-trimmed bright-red saris contrasting shockingly with the dull-grey platform; mail-lumpy sacks on squealing trolleys dwarfing the sweating porters leaning heavily into their loads; small boys in khaki-brown shorts and stained hand-me-down shirts getting in everyone’s way, pleading a few coins for peanuts in small newspaper cones.

  When he pulled ahead of his mother a little he found himself wanting to hang back again as if, although he desperately wanted the bunk, he was not yet ready to leave her. Not yet ready to make the transition from the snug care of his parents to the equally dependable but aloof care of the school; from being at the hub of a family, to being one of a crowd; from days where he need think of nothing but projects and games, to months where the first priority was to keep alert to avoid being last in every queue. Another nine months away from home. His parents could only afford to bring him back once a year. The Lord’s work required sacrifices. In the holidays away he stayed, like a wartime evacuee, with a dreamy and bookish friend whose parents owned a coffee farm, kicking around, missing Tomasi, missing Rachel and his parents, missing home.

  He saw Simon and his mother ahead. Simon was going to get to the middle bunk first.

  ‘There’s Simon. Why didn’t you want to invite him to stay with us this holiday?’ his mother said.

  Michael’s sockless feet felt gummy, confined in his shoes again, the straps too tight, the concrete platform hard and hostile.

  ‘I think he hates me,’ he said weakly.

  His mother frowned at him. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

  ‘Oh yes it is.’ He held back hot tears and felt his eyelid start to tic.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, putting a hand around his shoulder. He shrugged her hand away.

  ‘I sort of ratted on him at school. He was nearly expelled. He got detentions and I wouldn’t be surprised if his father beat him when he got home.’ He hadn’t meant to get Simon into trouble; it had all got out of control when he had refused to give Simon an alibi.

  ‘Perhaps telling on him wasn’t such a good idea?’

  ‘I didn’t, but what am I supposed to do? I should have fibbed.’

  Ahead, Simon and Mrs Adams had stopped while Mrs Adams looked for something in Simon’s kitbag. She seemed agitated; Michael could see her lips moving colourfully. She pulled out a packet of cigarettes. His mother raised her eyebrows in a question to him. He nodded.

  ‘If he smokes that’s his business. It’s something for his parents – not you,’ she said.

  ‘I know that!’ he hissed fiercely, suddenly angry. He tried so hard but God never helped. It was God that confused him (although he now felt his early attempts at second-guessing God – the quest for a Zephyr, for example – were babyish). But mostly he was angry at himself – for not knowing what to do; for looking like a goody-goody.

  Mrs Adams straightened up, pulled a cigarette from the packet and a white lighter from her white handbag. She drew heavily and put the packet back in Simon’s kitbag. She saw Michael and his mother.

  ‘God! Such a strain all this. Kid tells me he’s got to hide the bloody cigarettes behind his locker. But next year he’ll be safely in Bedales where boys can be boys – and with girls. So good for children to be free to find their own way, don’t you think? Not to have to be devious.’

  Michael’s mother puckered her lips a little. Mrs Adams noticed and blinked her heavily mascaraed lashes as if making a conscious decision to reformulate the world from another angle.

  ‘Of course there have to be limits: murder and . . . er . . . adultery and . . . such things. The Ten Commandments . . .’ she trailed off.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think they really matter,’ his mother said.

  ‘What, not murder?’ Mrs Adams’s eyes flashed cerulean.

  ‘Rules and laws are very . . . Old Testament,’ his mother said, casting her hand to the side as if chucking something away.

  ‘How extraordinary! My dear Stella, we should get together. I didn’t know you were such a rebel. I wasn’t expecting such radical views from a missionary. You must be corrupting the Afs terribly.’

  Mrs Adams flicked the cheekily angled cigarette she held in the fingers of her lolling arm. The smoke entwined itself around her hips.

  Michael’s mother smiled and said lightly, as if she was just reminding Mrs Adams of something everyone knew, ‘We’re not under law, but under grace – Romans six.’

  ‘Say! You’ve lost me. I just read Vogue – when I can get it.’

  ‘It’s about love, Mother,’ Simon said, glaring with malice at Michael. He looked more and more like his father now, his crow-black hair rippling backwards; except his nose was more like his mother’s: small and delicate – not squoncky. A boy at school had started to call him Sniffy – until Simon punched him in the face.

  Michael saw Mrs Adams look at her son as if flummoxed, as if wondering what impracticalities Simon’s religious schooling had taught him. It was not the first time he had heard Simon use his reluctantly received spiritual knowledge to shoot barbed comments at his parents.

  ‘Well, I’m sure I’ve misunderstood something. But we mustn’t linger. Simon seems very anxious to get to his carriage. It’s divine – literally! – to see you, Stella.’

  She swept them with a smile and swung on down the platform. Simon hurried ahead of her. Michael thought of running to overtake them but it was already too late, and his mother was leaning close to say something.

  ‘I hate being stereotyped,’ she said, with a hardness in her eye that Michael rarely saw. ‘You must think this, disapprove of that, you’re two dimensional, can’t think for yourself, need a crutch to lean on.’

  He gave his mother a quick smile – her battling spirit restoring him a little. She returned his smile and he thought he would make an effort to remember it if things got tough in the year ahead. He took some strength from their fellowship against the hostile secular world. Since leaving junior school and starting at senior school it had become plain to him that being a child of missionaries, and having religious belief, was considered distinctly odd – at best a quaint leftover from the traditions of the past, at worst a pitiful eccentricity. Nothing fitted together as it used to. He felt caught between loyalty to his family – their dogged faith, the circle of their love, a sure God-given framework for living – and the world of his schoolfriends.

  As they reached the carriage his mother said, ‘I’ll be praying that you and Simon make it up.’

  That was all he needed to hear because God listened to his mother’s prayers more than anyone else he knew. He realised n
ow that he wanted Simon’s friendship as much as God’s.

  The steps up into the carriage were steep and he struggled with his kitbag. His father had somehow escaped Mr Adams – with what Michael hoped was an unexpected upper cut – and had caught up with them, carrying Michael’s suitcase, his mind on some translation riddle. Michael shuffled down the hot corridor towards compartment F while his father lifted the suitcase into the luggage racks at the end of the carriage.

  Simon was waiting in the doorway of the compartment. ‘I’ve bagged this middle bunk and I’ve bagged the other one for Lewis.’ He sounded triumphant.

  Michael said nothing, dumped his kitbag on the floor and went to the window in the corridor. Lewis was shambling towards him with a dreamy expression, picking at a wart on his thumb; Michael didn’t think that Lewis cared which bunk he had. He raised one hand a little in a quick and off-hand gesture, and Lewis raised his eyebrows in a brief acknowledgement. Michael prided himself on being just as good as his friends at keeping an even face whatever the circumstances – he felt it a mark of having left childishness behind.

  His parents were on the platform by the window saying obvious things like, ‘Don’t forget to put your tuck straight in your locker when you get to school,’ and questions which he could not possibly know the answer to, like ‘Will Ma Crickenhowe still be your dorm matron?’ or – his father – ‘Er, Michael, let’s limber up on your Latin. What’s “The queen killed the slave with the spear”?’

  Michael kept glancing up the train; waiting for something to happen. He hoped his mother wouldn’t blub, otherwise he might blub as well. Lewis was leaning out of the next window looking sombre, but he would never blub. It was annoying that his parents had left Rachel at a friend’s house nearby – he would have been brave for his sister. She played with him and Tomasi all holidays now: they dissected dead birds, swung on the rope over the river, hunted for waragi distilleries in the banana groves. It was as if he was going to sea, or to war, the way she asked him so many questions before he left for school; her eyes became huge, like fried eggs, when he told her all the most scandalous and funny stories from senior school. It was OK to fib a bit to little kids.