The Last King of Scotland

by Giles Foden

  ‘Nestor!’

  ‘What are you shouting about, darling?’

  ‘Nicholas is booked into the Agip, he can’t stay there, can he? I’m going to send Nestor down to collect his bags.’

  ‘Look,’ I protested feebly, ‘there’s no need. I’ll go back later.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Merrit said. ‘It’s dark. You’ll fall into the ditch. Stay. We’ve got plenty of room since the kids left.’

  ‘That’s very good of you. Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, nodding his head. With the white streak down the middle, he looked a little like a badger.

  Mrs Merrit stood up, rubbing her palms together briskly. ‘Now, have you eaten? We already have, I’m afraid, and the house-boy has gone home, but I could rustle something up for you. How about a toasted ham sandwich?’

  ‘That would be great,’ I said, realizing that I was quite hungry.

  ‘I’ll just go through and make it,’ she said. ‘Shout for him again will you, Spiny, it annoys me he takes so long.’

  ‘Probably asleep.’

  Merrit – why, I’d been wondering, did she call him Spiny? – got up and walked down the steps into the garden, going a little way round the corner of the building.

  ‘Nestor! Nestor!’

  ‘Will you have mustard?’ his wife called from the kitchen. ‘I can make some up. We get Colman’s powder from the duty-free shop in Kampala.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Nestor!’ His voice grew fainter as he ventured deeper into the garden.

  She came back out holding a bowl of peanuts. ‘Here’s something to keep you going.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, as she put the bowl on the table.

  ‘And do have some mustard with your ham. I think the powdered version’s nicer than the bought stuff back in UK, actually. More oomph to it. It’s the kind of treat you’ll miss when you face the shops in town. Even the Indian dukas only have the very basics.’

  ‘All right, then,’ I said, grasping a handful of peanuts.

  ‘If we’d known when you were coming, I’d have got you a proper meal,’ she said. ‘The Ministry are hopeless like that. I’ve made sure they’ve cleaned the bungalow up for you, though. It’s one of those across the way.’

  She pointed over the flower-beds, where I could see the outline of another three houses. ‘The middle one. It’s fully furnished, but you’ll need to get bedding and so on from the market. I can lend you things for the time being. And you must eat here till you’re organized.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said. My voice sounded distant – all I could hear, inside the bones of my head, was the noise of the peanuts as I crunched them.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I know how hard it is when you’re setting up somewhere. I’ve done it enough times. Now, I’m going to toast your bread.’

  She went back to the kitchen. I drank some of my beer, enjoying the sensation of bubbles on my tongue after the stickiness of the peanuts.

  A few seconds later, Merrit came up the steps, puffing. ‘I don’t know where the old bugger is,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s time to get someone younger.’

  He sat down, and we talked. I noticed that he had that peculiar waxiness of skin which certain men get as they pass out of middle age. When I told him about the incident which had taken place on my journey, he just laughed; and then – the froth of the Simba gathering on his moustache – took a sip from his glass, as if to wash the laugh away.

  ‘It’s just Africa nonsense, Nicholas. You’ll get used to it, or you’ll get used to not being used to it. You have to see the funny side, or you’d go mad.’

  ‘I suppose I will,’ I said, wondering how what had happened could be thought funny at all. ‘I think I’ve got a lot to learn. You feel like you can cope with it all and then something like that happens and everything seems impossible again.’

  ‘Not really, it’s very simple. This place – chaos, you just have to expect the worst. You think it’s a matter of it getting worse for it to get better, but actually it just gets worse and worse. Take this new business with Amin. I hear they’re all happy as sandboys right now up in Kampala, but it’ll end in tears, I promise you. Our own stupid fault, of course.’

  I reached for the peanuts and he sipped at his beer again. Simba.

  ‘Lion,’ Merrit explained, when I asked. ‘It’s a Swahili word, simba’s king of the beasts; there’s even a Simba battalion in the army. Their barracks are in town. Sometimes they come into the hospital for treatment.’

  ‘Bullet wounds?’

  ‘Well, more often syphilis.’

  I picked up the bottle. The beer of strength and quality, that’s what the label announced, underneath the lion picture.

  ‘They don’t really speak Swahili round here, though,’ he continued. ‘Not as such. It’s from the Arabic … sawahil – people of the coasts.’

  Merrit said sawahil in an affected voice, twisting his mouth down so it came out as ‘sour heel’. He frowned as he did it, his moustache looking funny-fierce.

  ‘Mombasa, Zanzibar, down there. Where the slavers came in. I went there once. It’s all narrow alleys and overhangs. They have some very beautiful carved doors on the houses. Arab, hundreds of years old. Here they’re mountain people. Totally different, with a totally different language. Some do speak Swahili, though, as a lingua franca, and if you’re going to learn any language in East Africa it might as well be that.’

  He took another mosquito coil from the packet next to the peanuts, fixed it into the springy steel holder and lit it. It flared and then settled down into a comfortable glow.

  ‘Syphilis, too, actually. That came up from the coast as well. Trade routes.’

  ‘Do you think I should learn?’

  ‘You’ll pick things up. In Kinyankole, too, that’s the local one. But to be honest, you’re fine with English.’

  He looked up at the doorway. ‘Here’s Joyce with your toasties.’

  ‘Any sign of Nestor?’ she asked, from over a tray piled high with golden-brown triangles.

  ‘Not yet.’

  She put the tray down in front of me. ‘I did some cheese ones too.’

  As she stood looking into the garden, with her hands on her hips, I bit into one of the crisp parcels – and immediately took a sharp intake of breath as hot cheese burned my tongue.

  ‘Nestor! Where is he, Spiny?’ she exclaimed. And then, to me: ‘We have terrible problems with servants here. Stealing and so on. Let me know when you’re ready to get one and I’ll put out the word. Otherwise you’ll just get someone one of the other expats has sacked.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ll really want one,’ I said, finishing my molten mouthful. ‘I think I’d rather look after myself.’

  Merrit snorted. Spiny. I wondered whether the nickname was from the streak in his hair.

  ‘Everyone thinks that when they first arrive,’ he said. ‘You’ll change your mind soon enough, when you have to wash your own clothes by hand.’

  ‘And in a way,’ she added, sniffily, ‘you’re doing them a favour. They’re very keen for the money, you know. They earn a lot more from us than they would on the plantations or going down to the tobacco estates in Rhodesia. Nestor!’

  Just as the word left her lips, Nestor – I guessed – materialized out of the night, carrying a hurricane lamp. He was a bent and wrinkled old man, with a khaki greatcoat hanging loose about his bony shoulders; a former soldier, I thought to myself, realizing, as a tobacco smell came to me, that he must have been the ghost-like inhabitant of the hut at the gate. He saluted smartly as he approached us.

  As Mrs Merrit gave Nestor instructions, her husband questioned me at length about what I’d seen of the coup.

  ‘Were you scared?’ he asked. ‘I’d have been scared if it had happened when I first arrived. That was over twenty years ago, mind, when it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘More bewildered than scared,’ I said. ‘It wa
s scarier with the soldiers on the bus, really.’

  ‘Spiny,’ Mrs Merrit said, having sent Nestor off, ‘it’s terrible that Nicholas has had to find his way here in such a haphazard way. I think you should send a memo to the Ministry.’

  ‘There’s no point, darling, they don’t listen to me. Don’t worry, we’ll soon get you fixed up. You’ll find it as comfortable as England once you’ve settled in.’

  ‘Scotland,’ I said.

  They laughed – together, in that harmonic way of long-standing couples.

  ‘That’s exaggerating,’ she said. ‘It’s quite a hard life here. I often wish we could go back.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you?’ I said.

  ‘There’d be no point. We’re African now.’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ her husband said. ‘And we will go back. When the time is right.’

  ‘There’s nothing for us there, Spiny. You know how depressed you got on our last leave.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  He looked cross, and then she turned to me, her lapis ear-rings gleaming. ‘England has changed so much since we left. You’ll find, if you stay here a few years, that half your mind is back in the UK. You’re living in two places at the same time. And then you do go back there and you realize it’s a different place altogether from the one you had in your head.’

  ‘It is the same,’ he said grumpily, getting up to fetch more drinks, ‘and, as far as I know, you can’t be in two places at one time …’

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ she said. ‘He gets bad-tempered when he thinks about the future. We haven’t got a pension, you see. It’s a bit of a worry. I think he should go into private practice in South Africa, but he won’t agree. Anyway, why am I bothering you with all this?’

  Merrit came back in and poured another half-bottle of beer into my glass. I watched the Simba picture turn on its head as he tipped the bottle. The lion’s design put me in mind of those black-and-white films (with titles like Safari! or Return of the Hunter) I had watched as a child – but it was stylized, too, like a heraldic sign from long ago.

  Rex rampant, I thought later in their guest room. Mrs Merrit’s crisp sheets were wrapped around me and the thin white gauze of the mosquito net obscured my sleepy view of the blue suitcase, across the other side of the room. It was dusty on the bottom, from where Nestor must have put it down on the way. Rex rampant, I said to myself again as my eyelids closed, rex rampant and leopard couchant …

  7

  The following morning, we had a delicious breakfast of coffee, home-made bread and oranges. The malaria pills sat in a little saucer in the middle of the table, and Merrit made me take one. I’d checked it out before leaving Scotland and knew I wasn’t headed for a high-risk malarial district, so I hadn’t planned to take daily doses. But he demurred.

  ‘We’re not exactly plagued by mosquitoes here, like in the areas we spray, but you can’t be too careful.’

  Half-way through the meal, Merrit got up to fiddle with the dials on a big Eddystone short-wave, pointing out to me the aerial wire draped on the avocado tree outside. It was then I heard for the first time the BBC’s ‘Lillibullero’, a tune with which I would become familiar when I sent off for my own Grundig Music-Boy through a coupon in the Uganda Argus.

  ‘This is the BBC World Service …’ Always an upper-class English voice, except for those football Saturdays with Paddy Feeney. It was he who kept me sane later, when things got bad with Amin: amazing how you can get everything in perspective, even a dictator, when you hear just a single mention of Raith Rovers.

  After the pips, the news came on. Gathered like one of those families you see in pictures from the war, the Merrits and I listened to the broadcast. Another British Ambassador kidnapped by guerrillas, this time in Uruguay. The post strike still on at home, and telephone lines between East and West Berlin reconnected for the first time in nineteen years.

  Afterwards, Merrit took me over to my own bungalow. I noticed a wasp’s nest attached to one of the wooden fascia boards under the eaves. Its greyish material made me think of papier mâché, of the rough dolls I had made at primary school. Cows and pigs. Humans.

  ‘We’ll have to get rid of that for you,’ Merrit said, seeing me look. ‘Smoke them out.’

  We went inside. I dumped my suitcase in the centre of the empty lounge. Our feet were loud on the bare floorboards as we walked around. The bungalow was light and airy in a desolate sort of a way, with its bubbly, whitewashed walls, crude wooden furniture and – strangest of all – a concrete bath. One item bore witness to Merrit’s suspicions about malarial incidence: a mosquito net, its coarse muslin ruched up into an iron hoop hung from the ceiling. Yet I felt, on that first day, that I might be happy there. Clean lines, that’s the phrase – bungalow number six certainly had those.

  ‘Why the bars on the window?’ I asked, going over to look out, through the ornate, curled-iron bars and the insect grille, at the green valley and mountains beyond.

  ‘Kondos,’ he said, ‘what they call armed bandits here, and the usual petty theft. I had my toothbrush stolen the other day. Someone actually put his hand through the bars on the bathroom window and filched it out of the mug.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful view,’ I said.

  ‘They call it the Bacwezi valley. It’s just swamps really.’

  We went back outside into the early sun and began the climb up towards the clinic. On the way, Merrit stopped to lace his shoe, and I looked down at the shrinking compound below me. It had been hastily thrown up, obviously, but was quite pleasant none the less: three sets of three uniform dwellings, tin-roofed and settled neatly among the high-banked flower-beds, with paths weaving in between and a high steel water-tower glinting above. The blades of its rotor moved slowly in the wind.

  Each bungalow had a white picket fence around it, which added a villa-like note to the communal – that is, fenced, with a curlicue of barbed wire on top – feel of the place. I wondered what the Africans (there were some passing by below, on the track between the fence and the banana plantation) must have thought of this strange encampment in their midst. It was a little like those dinky almshouse squares you sometimes see from a bus and wish you could live in.

  The clinic was basic: nothing but another fenced circle of one-storeyed buildings on wooden stilts, partly shabby Western brick, partly built of clay, with drooping banana-leaf roofs in the local fashion. I’d hardly have credited it as a medical establishment if it hadn’t been for the line of patients (women with squealing babies, old men, the occasional soldier) waiting in the queue that stretched from the main door down to the outside gate we came through.

  ‘Ah,’ said Merrit, as we walked in, ‘the hordes are upon us. Well, Nicholas, welcome to my parlour.’

  I noticed that the patients had plywood boards with numbers painted in white hanging round their necks, or were putting them on; this process an energetic young man in a lab coat was organizing, handing out the splintery tags from a box hung over his shoulder and remonstrating with those who wanted to go before their number came up.

  ‘Morning, Billy,’ called out Merrit, ignoring the cries of the patients when they saw him and pulling away from a woman who tugged at his sleeve.

  ‘Bwana,’ he replied, solemnly, nodding his head as we passed.

  ‘The architects wanted us to build it two-storey but I refused. It was like that where I was before, in Blantyre – Nyasaland when I was first there, Malawi they called it later – and you just tire yourself out dashing up and down stairs in the heat. Right, I’ll show you round. We’ll do the outside first and then go in.’

  He waved at a couple of whites – both with dark curly hair and wearing red shorts – getting out of a dusty Peugeot.

  ‘Those are our two Cubans, Chiric and Canova. They’re alike as peas in a pod. They always remind me of those twins from that cartoonist my elder son liked. You know, Tintin.’

  ‘Thompson and Thomson,’ I said, recalling with a flash my own enjoyment of the strips whe
n I was young. ‘I think there was even one about Africa.’

  ‘That’s right. Belgians. It was banned on grounds of racism in Nyasaland, I remember, when the Banda regime came in. Richard was terribly upset when we had to burn his copy. Tears for weeks. Tintin, short skirts, long hair and pornographic magazines. An odd mixture to outlaw. But Banda wasn’t such an angel though, not by a long shot.’

  We walked towards the path that went round the perimeter, past an outhouse where a generator was yammering away, shaking the leafy roof and staining the air with the smell of diesel.

  ‘Anyway, they’re brilliant surgeons, those two. Canova especially. I must tell you the story of Canova’s heart one day. He actually performed a minor cardiac operation – here! Astonishing. I couldn’t have done it.’

  ‘But what are Cubans doing in Mbarara?’

  ‘Castro sends them everywhere. Like Guevara to the Congo. I don’t mind, they keep themselves to themselves at work and then chat up girls in town in the evening. But this is how it is, Nicholas. If they’re funded, we take them, American, Israeli, whatever. Can’t afford not to. Same with you, I’m afraid.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. We had stopped underneath a tall steel structure with fans – like the one in the bungalow compound, only bigger.

  ‘This is our borehole,’ said Merrit, patting one of the struts affectionately. ‘The water’s pumped up into the tank and filtered through silver catalysts on the way down. Cleanest H2O around. Though that’s not saying much.’

  ‘Why are the buildings on stilts?’

  ‘We had terrible problems trying to find the right site. The land round here is relatively boggy and in the end we had to sink in wooden piles to shore up the foundations … Look, there’s the hospital Land Rover.’

  He waved, calling loudly. ‘Waziri, come and meet our new recruit from Scotland.’

  The vehicle, its white paint covered with bright red dust, slowed down as it came towards us, turning around the central flower-bed in the little car-park. It pulled up close to us. An African with grey sideburns and a safari shirt held his hand down to me out of the open window.