by Giles Foden
‘Maybe,’ said Paterson, on the way back, ‘seat-belts wasn’t such a good idea after all.’
Getting up the next morning, I heard Alec Douglas-Home on the World Service, condemning Amin’s proposed nationalizations as ‘outrageous by any standard’. I retied my dressing-gown – it had fallen open, and I always feel exposed when that happens, even when there is no one else in the house – and poured boiling water over the coffee I was making. The grounds expanded, fattening in the wet sac of the filter. I watched as the water subsided, leaving a crumbling brown crater. Breathing in the vapours, I suddenly realized that my bare feet were cold on the kitchen floor: the sun was already out but the wood had retained the night’s coolness. I had no slippers in Africa, only a pair of hand-made leather sandals I’d bought in Mbarara and seldom wore. Now Sara, she had worn them once, when she stayed with me. A feeling of sadness came over me as I tipped in the milk. I stared down at the swirling cup. She hadn’t written. She hadn’t called.
20
Someone else did, though. One day the following week, Stone summoned me to a meeting at the British Embassy. He wouldn’t say what it was about over the phone. I wondered whether they knew about my invitation to Marina. What did it matter, anyway? As I drove down Parliament Avenue, I remembered that I hadn’t yet told her that Paterson couldn’t make the weekend she’d specified.
Stone opened the door. He was wearing brown slacks and brown shoes, which merged into one another uncomfortably at the ankle, and a dark blue blazer. ‘Nicholas, we’re very glad to see you. Now, you know Major Weir, and our Ambassador, Robert Perkins.’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking at them in turn as I walked into the centre of the room, with Stone behind me. I’d forgotten how fat Perkins was, noticing as I greeted him how uncomfortably his suit jacket sat upon him, and how thick the lenses of his spectacles were.
Weir, his turkey neck flapping over the olive-green collar of his army uniform, was standing in a corner, next to the intersection of two windows. He was smoking a cigarette, cupping a cut-glass ashtray in his hand. He put it down and came over to shake my hand, gripping it harder than was necessary – and then returned to his station. Behind him, the windows were curtained with white cotton, receding on a brass bar into the corner. Light came in dimly through the fabric, turning his smoke into mysterious ribbons of gun-metal blue.
‘Right,’ Stone said, going over to close the heavy teak door. It clicked shut with an expensive, slightly sinister sound.
I looked around as he walked back over. A small Union Jack was hanging from a pole. Next to it, on a little table, stood a lamp with a pink shade and also a small photograph of Amin shaking hands with the Queen.
‘Please, sit down,’ Perkins said, taking a seat himself on the other side of the table.
I did so, and then looked at Amin in the photograph in front of me, his face as full of joy as I had ever seen it. His expression, as he looked at the Queen, was not unlike that of a child gazing into the eyes of its mother.
‘It’s him we’d like to talk to you about,’ Stone said, following my eyes.
‘Oh,’ I said, my mind racing to comprehend it all as Stone sat down next to Perkins. Weir remained standing behind them.
There was a tense pause. Weir’s smoke made me think of djinn, genies from the bottle. Or something more Scottish, but equally exotic. Pale Kenneth, maybe, the soothsayer they called the Brahan Seer.
‘The thing is,’ Perkins began, ‘the President has got out of hand.’
Weir caught my eye. I noticed that he had a large number of tiny scars about his doleful mouth and chin, and, remembering what Stone had told me, wondered whether they were from when he had been shot down.
‘We’re looking to you to help us on this one,’ said Stone. ‘You’ll remember I asked you keep an eye on things for us in Mbarara.’
In fact, I’d almost forgotten about our conversation that first time in Kampala, so much had happened since.
‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘But I couldn’t really see what help I could be. I’m just a doctor.’
Perkins and Stone exchanged glances.
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter now,’ said the latter. ‘But there is something where your particular skills might be the right ingredient.’
Stone’s custard-coloured hair had got longer since I’d last seen him, falling over his ears at the side and making him look slightly girlish. He was still balding on top, though, and retained that shininess of forehead. I’d thought it was sweat last time, but it was obviously just the way he was.
‘We need your help, Doctor Garrigan,’ he murmured.
Perkins nodded his agreement so forcefully that the plump flesh on his face trembled. I thought about the swimming pool. His wife’s sideways-falling cup of joy.
‘The point is,’ Stone continued, ‘the killing has got to stop. You’ve seen the trucks, same as all of us.’
And I had – I’d seen the canvas-covered lorries heading off into the bush, three or four soldiers sitting in the back, and the half- glimpsed, white-eyed faces of the prisoners in the darkness behind. All the expats had seen them, I believe, and up till now we’d swept it under the carpet, carried on as normal, refusing to speculate on things we thought beyond our ken. To be honest, it was the only way to live. You had to cultivate a certain detachment – and now they appeared to want me to break that.
Stone was waiting for a response. I didn’t know what to say, what they expected me to say.
‘You see,’ said Perkins, finally, leaning back in his chair, ‘with the arrival of those Astans in London, I’m getting a lot of pressure. Top-level pressure.’
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and, removing his glasses, blew his nose.
‘What has this got to do with me?’ I asked firmly, once Perkins had stopped trumpeting.
‘Well,’ said Stone, ‘you are in, you find yourself in, a very sensitive position. A position, I may say, we were partly instrumental in achieving for you.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, surprised.
‘We’d been pushing your appointment with Amin and Wasswa for a few months now. And when the accident happened with the cow, it was, well, it was fortunate.’
‘In one way …’ Perkins said, cryptically.
I looked above him at the white curtains, and then at Weir, and suddenly realized that the latter hadn’t said anything during the whole encounter. His grey eyes stared back at me intensely, as if right through me.
Stone pushed the hair back from his buttery forehead. ‘I’ll come to the point. We’d like you to … treat him in a more forthright way.’
I was shocked by the implications of what he had said. I lifted my gaze over their heads and stared at the brass bar above the window. And then at the flag.
Perkins said, ‘He’s going to nationalize British firms and tea-estates here, as you’ve probably heard. We were hoping you might be able to reason with him.’
‘And if not that,’ added Stone, ‘give him something that will make him reasonable. Calm him down. That he has to take every day.’
Weir was frowning at me, I noticed, as if I had done something wrong. I felt like a pupil standing before a headmaster. Mr Laid-law, the one at Fossiemuir. He used to hit us on the palm of the hand with a heavy wooden ruler. I remembered the red stripe it left, like a piece of bacon across my palm.
‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Well, I suppose I could… but it’s not exactly correct practice, is it?’ I was momentarily flattered that they thought me capable of such intrigue.
‘Practice isn’t the point,’ Stone said, tapping his finger on the desk. ‘Your job as a doctor is to return him to normality.’
‘What,’ I said, coming to my senses, ‘do you mean by that? What does that mean here?’
As the smoke trickled down over his cravat of flesh, Weir smiled at me, his eyes glittering with some inner amusement.
Perkins said, ‘Make
him like a president should be. Other-wise Britain is finished in Uganda. And that will go for you, too, probably.’
I felt ill suddenly. The smell of Weir’s cigarette was making me queasy and light-headed. He still wasn’t saying anything, but it was as if he was looming in front of me as the other two continued talking in pressing tones.
‘How about tranquillizers?’ Stone said brightly.
Weir’s drooping face had dilated to twenty times its natural size, it somehow seemed. That was the image in my head as I listened to the cajoling voices of the other two – and when they asked me once more if I’d agree to dope Amin, I didn’t know what to say. In the end I left it open.
21
Perkins was right about one thing. Amin really did crack down on the British in Uganda during the next few days. It was almost as if he knew exactly what was going on – as indeed he claimed to. ‘Be careful,’ as Popitlal had said to Merrit and me as he got into the Land Rover all those months ago. ‘It will be your turn soon. First wahindi, then muzungu.’
Well, it was Merrit’s turn and that of a host of other Brits throughout the country. But not mine. Amin was furious on account of the Douglas-Home speech, and he ordered a series of summary expulsions. Some of the British who stayed were forced to carry him in a litter through the streets as a sign of their devotion, others to kneel in front of him and take an oath of fealty. Perkins lodged a formal protest.
Amid all this, however, I somehow managed to escape attention. I wasn’t expelled, I wasn’t even called to carry the litter. Meanwhile, my duties as presidential physician remained agreeable. Every now and then I was called to treat another of Amin’s children, but it was hardly the kind of work one could call stressful.
‘You’re obviously his lordship’s favoured son,’ Spiny Merrit said sourly, when he came to see me on his way to the airport.
He looked unwell, thin and drawn – Joyce had gone home a month earlier, I learned – and it was all he could do not to blame me for the fact that the clinic had been run into the ground. Since I left, he said, there had been army raids on the equipment and several of the auxiliaries had disappeared.
‘I was the last white there in the end,’ he exclaimed. ‘Ivor went, the Cubans … If you had stayed, it would have helped.’
I said nothing. I felt it was an unreasonable line for him to take, but also that nothing would have been gained from trying to defend myself at that stage.
*
When I talked to Marina about Merrit going – during our boat trip, several days later – she wasn’t surprised.
‘It’s not just him, you know. Bob says we might have to go ourselves if it gets any worse.’
I didn’t mention the conversation at the Embassy. I presumed that she wouldn’t have been told about it, and from the way she talked about her husband and other pieces of Embassy business it seemed I was right.
‘Everything is rather strange at the moment,’ she said. ‘We’ve had a bit of a time with Archie Weir. They’ve called him back. Too cosy with Amin, Bob said. I always thought he was odd anyway. Too quiet. I don’t trust people who are too quiet.’
‘He’s gone back to London?’
‘Scotland. He’s been retired.’
‘Why?’
‘They –’ she paused for a second, as if wondering whether to take me into her confidence – ‘say he gave Amin an invasion plan for Tanzania, that he drew up the maps and munitions lists.’
I thought of Weir’s face, inflating above me, and the smell of cigarettes. ‘Why on earth would he do that?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. None of us do. Look, I really ought not be talking about it. Bob would hit the roof …’
As for the trip itself, initially everything went well, once Marina got over her surprise about it being just me and her.
‘I thought we were having a big party,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought far too much to eat.’
I’d hired the boat, and a nine-foot rod, from a boy at one of the villages on the Entebbe peninsula. Marina had brought a cool-box, and a basket full of food. The driver from the Embassy helped her carry them down to the pier, which stretched out between two beds of reed.
While the boat boy fiddled with the engine, we watched the villagers lowering large bundles of split wood into the water. These stained the surface with a milky, poisonous cloud. Fish began to flop up.
As the villagers were splashing about in the shallows, collecting up the dead fish, the boy managed to get the motor going. We pushed off with a flourish, leaving the boy and Marina’s driver at the edge. The driver looked a bit of a thug, I remember thinking – watching us intently as he stood there, legs astride, arms folded.
We were soon chugging happily along. I moved us away from the reeds into deep water, the wake from the propellor rippling out behind. After the rains, the streams were in full spate and the lake was swollen. The current, usually imperceptible, was making its presence known with little shreds of foam on top of the small waves. Overhead, the sky was bright blue.
‘Do you think it’s poisonous to humans?’ Marina asked, looking back at the bundles of branches.
‘I suppose it might be if you drank some of the water there and then. We should have stayed and waited for the kill to end. Apparently they catch hundreds in one go.’
She touched the big, triple-hooked spoon at the end of the rod, which was leant up on the bows.
‘It seems a bit easier than doing it this way.’
‘But less sporting,’ I said.
I moved the handle of the motor a little to the right to take us out of the way of one of the many sandbanks and large, tangled expanses of water hyacinth on the surface of the lake. The boat moved to the left accordingly (it was only a single-cylinder motor but did the job perfectly), and we sped on.
‘The hyacinths were introduced by Belgian colonists in Rwanda, Colin – at the hospital – said,’ I told her. ‘He was the one who was going to come with us.’
‘Why couldn’t he?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Something on. Anyway, the hyacinths … They stole up the Kagera River, and now they are colonizing like mad. A million plants a year from a single flower, according to Colin. The hydroelectric people are worried it will clog up the whole lake. It’s the same with Nile perch, in fact. We – the British – brought them here in the fifties, and now they’ve eaten up all the smaller fish. So we’ll be doing the world a favour if we catch one.’
‘Look,’ said Marina, pointing behind me. ‘Weaver birds.’
I twisted around, making the boat sway slightly. Sure enough, on the far side of the sandbank – which was gliding away from us now, as if it had been shot out of the stern – were the little yellow baskets of woven straw in which they make their nests.
‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’s funny, when we went up to Murchison Falls, we saw fish-traps, and they were just that shape. Made of cane. You’d think they’d seen the nests and got the shape from them.’
Once we entered a clear patch of water, I cut the motor and reached over for the rod. ‘Let’s give it a go here,’ I said.
Taking care not to snag her, I sent the spoon some twenty yards out over the water.
‘That was a good one,’ she said.
‘Not really,’ I said, reeling it in with little bursts. ‘I used to be able to do it better.’
After a few more casts – and no bites – I suggested that she have a go. I stood behind her, holding her wrist as I showed her how. I felt the heat of our two bodies close together.
‘Now reel it in,’ I said.
We stood there silently in the swaying boat, under those African clouds touched with pink and red, and the only sound was the clicking of the line coming in and the lapping of the water against the side.
‘Maybe I’m doing it wrong,’ she said, as the glittering lure suddenly flipped up out of the water.
I caught hold of the dripping line. ‘You’ve got to be patient. If you want it too much, the
y won’t take. It’s the unwritten rule of fishing.’
‘I don’t think it’s me,’ she said, handing back the rod. ‘You do it.’
I cast out again, really putting my back into it this time. The line shot out, half as much again. But this time, too, nothing bit.
‘Let’s move somewhere else,’ I said.
‘There might be some near that island,’ she suggested.
She pointed over to the west, where the outline of some trees and rocks stood up against the horizontal plane of water. I fired up the motor again and set off in that direction. Marina was sat in the stern, the wind moving her hair as she looked out over the water. I wondered what she was thinking.
‘What about crocodiles?’ she said, turning round.
‘I guess there must be some. But you’re more likely to catch bilharzia.’
‘That’s the snail thing, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘The one that lays its eggs in you.’
‘More or less,’ I said, grinning at her. ‘We could stop here.’
‘Castaways,’ she said, with an engaging giggle.
The island was partly swallowed up by reeds, but there were a few gaps. I nosed the boat through one, to discover a small sandy beach. I cut the engine and we slid towards it. Then, unsteady in the rocking boat, I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers. Marina laughed at me as I hopped out to tie us up against a tree. As I did so, there was a clatter. We both jumped. A flight of ducks, just like British mallards, rose up out of the reed bed. We watched them fly up, six or seven, scattered at first and then falling into triangle formation. I splashed back towards the boat, my bare feet sinking into the sand.
‘I thought the noise of them was a gunshot,’ she said. ‘What’s that over there?’
Where she was pointing, the outline of a vessel was increasing in size as it came towards us. We suddenly heard music.
‘Maybe it’s Amin, maybe it’s the Ugandan Navy,’ Marina ventured.
I laughed. It was certainly possible. I stood and watched with her, the water cool around my ankles. Eventually the vessel got near enough for us to see that it was a passenger steamer. Low in the water, it had the words MV Lumumba printed on the side. There were two decks, all filled with people, some of whom waved at us as they went by. On one of the decks you could just make out the black boxes of two loudspeakers. The music was strong at that point, you could feel the beat of it across the water. But I couldn’t work out the tune, and neither could Marina.