Now he could hear the engine snorting and hissing at the far end of the platform; a brooding, heavy presence. He imagined it as the head of a monster, the leathery-brown carriages its body sprawling out behind. What was happening to them was big and it needed something equally big to do it. When the monster started to pant it was ready to go, and no one could stop it.
A shrieking whistle sounded. The crowd panicked, shouting and running about, dragging their overweight suitcases, throwing bags and small children through the windows. The porters, upper lips wet with sweat, heaved the last sacks into the guard’s van. The peanut boys pleaded for one last sale even as they were pushed aside. Relatives inside the train fought to get off as the stragglers fought to get on. Coins and peanuts scattered.
Soon the suitcases were gone and there was a slamming of heavy doors. For one brief moment all movement on the platform ceased. A hush descended on the crowd and even the distant noise of the engine was stilled, as if it were drawing breath. In that moment Michael saw that everything was fixed and that everyone was resigned to what was going to happen next. He saw that some things will happen whatever you hope for and it’s no good blubbing, as it won’t make a difference.
The engine started panting and stirred. His carriage gave a lurch. It was a small movement but Michael felt it in his stomach. Even the people on the platform sensed it: they started frantically waving and shouting again. He took a quick look at his parents. They were trying to smile and his mother was saying something about letters. The harsh breaths of the engine sounded like some gigantic saw – severing him from home. As the whole carriage started to rumble he could hear the wheels rolling; metal against metal. The steely growls of the train grew louder and louder until he could no longer hear his mother or the shouting on the platform. An irresistible force was pulling him away. Everyone on the platform became smaller. Then they turned a corner, and his mother and father were gone. He always remembered how small they looked. It was the last time he saw them.
They clanked past marshalling yards grubby with coal, broken pipes, rusty coils of wire and oily sleepers – scattered like the burnt dead on a battlefield. He choked on a tarry gas that hit the back of his throat. He went and sat in the compartment. The seat plastic was coldly smooth against his bare thighs below his shorts, like snake skin. Simon was eating a corned beef sandwich, stinking the air. Michael felt an immense and aching solitude.
‘You know,’ Lewis said, ‘if they stopped all the trains from here to the coast and then you put your ear to the track and someone hit the track in Mombasa with a hammer, you’d hear it one hour later.’
Michael put on a half-interested expression but he wasn’t ready to talk. To take his mind off leaving home he thought instead about what his grandfather had told him of the building of the railway; how hundreds of workers had come from India to lay down iron bars – seven hundred miles of them – from the steamy coast right up to Kampala. He tried to remember more: it had been two years since his grandfather had died. It was easier to remember if he imagined himself sitting in his grandfather’s cottage again, looking at the line of the hill against the night sky. His grandfather told him that the land was a place of hard rock, escarpments and ravines. Those Indians had to hack, slash, dynamite and grade a straight way across the terrain because the carriages couldn’t go around sharp corners. Then there were the man-eating lions that roamed in the shadow-black nights. Nights that fell as ‘quick as doom’, his grandfather said. The man-eaters took the coolies in their hundreds; dragging them from the light of their fires, yanking them from the grasp of rescuers, snatching them out of their tents and even stalking down the corridors of the railway carriages to pull them off their bunks, still clutching their sheets. Their sheets were all that were found, ripped and bloody.
Michael felt better, thinking at least he was not a coolie. He wondered why he had not been born a coolie and why he had been born a missionary’s child instead. His father had said that God had a plan for everyone, whatever they were born as, and if they asked God he would show them what it was. Michael decided that if he had been born a coolie, he would have asked God for a plan that didn’t involve building a railway.
Simon took a Fanta from his kitbag. Michael had watery orange juice. His mother had said that although they couldn’t have Fanta or Pepsi they had other things – like knowing Jesus. Michael once shared a Fanta with his sister when they stopped for petrol on a long car journey. It was the best thing of the holiday, that Fanta: so fizzy, so sweet, so impossibly orangey. When he was grown up, if he got rich, he decided he would buy hundreds of crates of Fanta and keep them for himself and Tomasi in a secret place in the banana grove, but give the rest of the money away to people like Freda and Godfrey.
‘Hey, we saw Lawrence of Arabia last night,’ Lewis said.
‘Yeah, saw that and Dr No,’ Simon said.
The only time Michael saw films was at school at the end of term. Oh, the excitement as the day neared, but the nagging worry that he might fall ill and be confined to the san. When the day arrived the blackouts were pulled down in the hall and they sat cross-legged on the wooden floor with bare knees touching bare knees. At the back of the hall Pa Boyce mounted the huge reel on the projector, and the screen would light up and be spattered with black dots and numbers before the orchestra blared out, a little flat. A lion appeared on the screen, looked beyond them regally and roared a slightly wavering roar. It was a fitting expression of the fragile thrill of the occasion. When the reel needed changing they had an interval and drank hot chocolate from gigantic urns brought into the hall from the kitchens.
In the train compartment Simon and Lewis whooped over the exploits of Lawrence, but Michael got up and leant out of the window. The train voyaged on, marking distance from home with the regular clack, clack of the wheels on the tracks. The night had started to close in. He heard the cry of an animal somewhere out in the darkening bush. It sounded lonely.
Simon had not spoken to him again. His anger must be deep and well nursed, thought Michael, but he could see that it was not just his own refusal to collude with Simon that had broken their friendship. Simon was becoming hard edged; his behaviour embarrassing to Michael, his settler-boy friends rude and bullying. He had started making remarks about God Squads and Bible Bashers. At junior school he and Simon had competed for gold stars in memory verse recital. Once they had recited a whole Bible chapter by heart; they had never needed to look at the hymn book when they sang in the cathedral. But now Simon sang crude songs to hymn tunes to tease him.
Michael thought, with some pleasure, that he could get Simon expelled if he wanted. Simon’s night-time excursions to meet Veronica in the cricket pavilion had not yet come to the attention of the teachers. He allowed himself to imagine being thanked by the headmaster in his study as Simon was picked up by his father to get his just punishment. He got a satisfied feeling, as if he had scratched an itch.
Then a Still Small Voice spoke to him and said that he should forgive Simon because God had forgiven him for other things, like being too goody-goody and for laughing at Tomasi for still being terrified of chameleons. He blinked away a piece of soot from the smoke of the engine and wondered whether the soot was like a mote. Maybe I’ve got a plank in my eye and Simon has a mote in his, he thought. But what exactly was a mote?
He rubbed his eye and asked God for pardon. He prayed that Simon would forgive him as well. Feeling better, he pulled his exercise book out of his kitbag. The cover was blue, fading to grey around the edge. While the silhouette of the boy and girl holding hands and walking towards a mountain on the cover was sissy, it was the only book he had to write in. He chose a clean page and wrote in pencil, frequently crossing out words or full lines, but a poem emerged that he was proud of. He would show it to his father in the holidays and ask if he would translate it into Rukiga.
East African mail train, warm tropics night;
Bulk of the engine, red flickering light.
Smoke pushi
ng upwards, black velvet sky;
Huts and bushes, train clatters by.
When he finished the Still Small Voice said something else – something gulpingly hard. It said quite clearly that he should apologise to Simon to his face. He balked at that. Simon was likely to see it as pathetic cringing. But the Still Small Voice said that Simon’s reaction was irrelevant. Michael steeled himself to obey. All that remained was the timing of his repentance. Then everything would be all right; if not with Simon, at least between himself and God. He decided to wait until he got to school: there would be some gratification in letting Simon carry on scowling at him for the time being. He would bear it in the knowledge that Simon would feel more inclined to accept his apology if Simon felt that he had already meted out enough punishment.
A gong rang out along the corridor, announcing that their dinner was ready. In the dining car Michael found that the weight of leaving home started to lift. The waiters, haughty in their white jackets and black trousers, checked them in two by two. Michael gasped at the starchy finery. If heaviness meant quality, then the dining car’s interior was first class: chunky silverware, robust linen on the tables, substantial white china plates with satisfyingly stout white cups and saucers, rigid napkins. Teak-framed, black and white photos of the largest and tallest of big game hung between the windows. The pea soup was viscous enough for the chunks of white bread to lie proud on the surface, like swimmers in the Dead Sea. Hunks of beef followed, smothered in black gravy that battled for supremacy against a white sauce that flowed like a warmed-up glacier, slowly but inexorably, down a mountain of cauliflower.
They ate in silence until it became clear that the food was more than a match for their appetites. Michael was about to tell the others about a deadlier design for arrows when Simon said, to no one in particular, ‘Ah, Veronica! She’s so bloody beautiful.’
He burped and lolled back in his chair.
Michael tried to think of something funny to say, but then decided against it: Simon might not think it so hilarious. Lewis and David said nothing, Lewis suddenly finding his fork interesting. Michael knew that men and women came together when they got married but that was a long way off. Pa Peacock had talked to them one evening about husbands and wives and how a baby should be planned and some confusing stuff about how the baby was made. He had told them something surprising: that it was enjoyable, the making bit. Michael had puzzled over that, as he could not imagine how it could possibly be enjoyable snuggling up close to Ma Peacock. She was practically spherical and her hair was going grey.
David suddenly said that his crystal set could pick up Soviet radio and they could listen when they got to school. Lewis said he had CCCP stamps showing rockets. Simon pushed himself back in his chair, put his hands in his pockets and yawned.
Back in the compartment they lay satisfied on their bunks, digesting their meal. At 10pm the parent guardian looked in to ensure that their lights were out. They waited a little and then Simon turned on the lights again.
‘Are you going to tell on us, Michael?’ Simon asked.
‘No, of course I won’t,’ Michael said, making himself sound cheerful.
They had a pillow fight, Michael being careful to let Simon land a few, until the parent guardian knocked loudly on the door and said that they ‘had better stop larking about’.
They waited patiently for a minute and then, leaving the window open to make it harder to hear each other’s movements, they pulled down the flimsy blind to black out the compartment and turned out the light. They played ‘blindy’, one of them being the ‘It’ who had to find and name the others, climbing stealthily from bunk to bunk in total darkness, senses straining for signs of movement. Michael curled himself up tightly in the corner of the middle bunk by the window. He avoided being tagged for several minutes. A hand brushed his arm and then returned, feeling for his face. He buried his face in his knees. The ‘It’ was Simon, and Michael was sure Simon knew whom he had found; hadn’t they lifted each other up trees, squeezed into hiding places together and arm-wrestled each other? Simon’s hand went away. He’s going to ignore me, thought Michael.
He started to uncoil himself in the silence in readiness to dive across to the other middle bunk before Simon changed his mind. Then Simon’s hands were back, but this time a sharp fist pushing hard into Michael’s shoulder, his knuckles digging in. Michael remembered, ‘Unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other.’ Simon’s fist slipped, or was driven, off Michael’s shoulder and into his windpipe. Michael gasped; a clamp obstructed his breathing, a hard knob of pain grew in his throat. Simon moved away again but Michael reached out, a volcano of fury welling, pent-up emotion forcing itself past the compression in his throat. Simon’s slights against him now seemed monstrous.
‘I’m not a weakling, you know,’ he shouted.
Michael found the neck of Simon’s pyjamas and pulled. Simon overbalanced, swivelling and falling away towards the window. A grey wash of light showed Simon’s form as the plastic blind gave way against his back. A rush of sooty night air forced itself into the carriage. The blind snagged precariously on the frame. Simon cried out. His hands reached for Michael. For a moment Michael did not help, wanting Simon to feel scared, wanting him dead, never wanting to see him again. With a quiet snick sound the plastic broke free and then exploded outwards. Simon fell away, his hands scrabbling at Michael’s sleeve. Michael lunged at him in sudden terror, trying to take hold of him. His fingers hooked on Simon’s clawed hand. He was wrenched through the window.
The train crossed a network of points, making a sound like the hooves of the horses of the apocalypse.
Kampala: 1983
Behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep . . .
The Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 24
One
In the British Airways jet Michael reconciled himself to having to sit beside a corpse for the remainder of the flight. The stewardess had gone to notify the captain and her colleagues of the sudden death. She returned, breathless. ‘You’re right. The captain says we should leave him just as he is until we’ve landed. I should’ve known that. It’s in our training, but when it actually happens . . .’
She met Michael’s eyes, and he could see she was looking for acknowledgement of her distress – but his claustrophobia was pressing in hard again so he just nodded once, and handed her his tomato-stained glass. She took it, stared again at the dead man and then, her face turning as pale as the overhead locker, sat down heavily on the bulkhead seat opposite.
Michael resumed his window-gazing, trying not to be oppressed by the dead man beside him, trying not to think about the constricting cylinder of the aircraft. The man’s death was certainly spooky, but there would be a natural explanation. Maybe a belief could set off a patho-physiological cascade that could kill. Perhaps he should have engaged him in conversation, allayed his subconscious fears. But he had had his own pressing preoccupations and he was a surgeon, not a psychiatrist. Superstition was likely to win over rationality in any case. People were wired up for that.
The aircraft banked steeply and slowed, crossing a corner of Lake Victoria. Lake Victoria – Michael considered the name too English; a name to tame and familiarise an alien place, to domesticate it and bring it within the national domain, like a Windermere. But the lake he saw stretched beyond the curve of the earth and violent pewter-grey waterspouts united with the sky where stormy showers fell. Soon the perspective changed rapidly. He was no longer the God-like observer of a place apart but a participant. He saw a canoe on the lake. The dark forms of the oarsmen turned to watch the aircraft. Images followed in quick succession, like a slide show from his childhood: the thin shore bordered by reeds, tin roofs bright as sun on flints, banana groves, smoke from a village compound, the shell of a car in a ditch, a cyclist on a black bicycle, the tar of the runway; and then came the jolt of the landing and the roar of the reversed thrust.
A
s the other passengers disembarked, unaware of the corpse in first class, Michael covered his dead companion with his blanket. He was satisfied that he had left him trim and tidy. After tightening his shoelaces – a secure surgical knot before throwing the bow – he stepped around the body in as dignified a manner as possible. Slipping on his light tan sports jacket (a recent purchase), he gave its hem a tug to smooth its lines. He turned his Royal College of Surgeons cufflinks so that their rectangles were lined up parallel with his arm, and collected his calfskin briefcase from the overhead locker. He felt lean and ready. Naomi had told him that he should have been a naval officer, ‘perhaps a submarine commander’ she had said as she mock-saluted him. Michael had no strong objection: he accepted that his bearing and manner came across as military at times, and his compact build would have suited a submariner. He had never told her about his claustrophobia.
The open door beckoned, but there was to be no quick exit: he had a tedious hour in the cabin repeating the undramatic story of his seatmate’s death to a string of officials of increasing seniority. He didn’t bother them with the curse angle, out of common sense.
At the foot of the aircraft steps, out in the open again under an ample sky, the day infused with light and warmth, he suppressed an unruly impulse to step out jauntily onto the tarmac, but he kept a measured gait as he walked towards passport control. Now, at last, he could enjoy his visit.
‘Welcome to my country, my friend. May I see your passport? Have you visited before?’
‘A long time ago.’
The Ghosts of Eden Page 18