by Louise Dean
* * *
When he woke the next morning, it was quiet, and he had the bloom of a dream still close. It had opened in the first light; lovely, fragrant and fair. Rachel was leaning over him tracing an eyebrow of his with one finger, saying: What is it that you want?
Chapter 17
To get into the capital, Freetown, they had to board old Russian helicopters on an island runway off the mainland and once inside they crouched, unseated, holding on to straps, looking out through the open windows, passing low over mangrove swamps. With them was a plump, foppish-haired businessman in a lightweight suit, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, frowning into the twilight.
The first thing that hit Rachel was that everywhere it smelt intensely orange, a lethal kind of human sweat which had her reeling as she and Jeff were manhandled, pushed and bossed forth by scores of men in blue overalls, hoping money would rub off on them as they passed the foreigners along the line to their bags. Their bags were removed from them, it was no use protesting, their fat wallet was taken too, thrust across a single counter and emptied of its pounds sterling and changed into local currency.
Pushed to one side, Jeff was struck dumb. Rachel had a hand over her mouth, wide-eyed. Here and there each man took a note, a boy too at the very last minute, and finally the throng dispersed and left them with one single man who had their bags on his back. They followed him and he gave the bags to a man standing by a car and the wallet to them at last. Finally they had it back, the notes as limp as autumn leaves, stinking.
Jeff said something like they weren’t in Kansas any more and she smiled back. She saw the crooked tooth that came from behind, that clasped the canine and overlapped it, when he was nervous. Their driver opened the door for each of them in turn.
‘My name is Mohammed,’ he said.
He took them to a bombed-out hotel. It was the best there, according to him.
The lobby was bare apart from a wooden desk set in concrete.
* * *
There was a plastic letter board on the wall behind it bearing the names of foreign currencies with consonants missing and the figures scant. There was the scar of where the name of the hotel had once been on the roughcast wall.
It was as if it had just been evacuated. The open corridors gave on to rooms with doors wide open. In the courtyard, tropical plants were overgrown and there were empty cement bags hanging from them. Everywhere they went, people attached themselves to them: the receptionist had a family member who needed surgery, a barman had a child who wanted to go to school, and on the street, a shoal of grinners accompanied their cross-channel swim to get to the National Bank.
A photographer had told them on the plane, how the people who go first into a war zone, photographers and aid workers, weren’t heroes, to his mind, but adrenaline junkies. But those days were over, the junkies — or rather the vultures, he grinned — were gone, and now it was a mopping-up job, small pickings for journalists now. There was no media market for ‘Salone’, but the Congo, now that was big. The relief agencies were pulling out, those still there were doing some partying before the next disaster.
In their room, she opened the door to the minibar and saw the wall. The sink sagged in the bathroom from one fixed and one loose bracket and the toilet was seat-less and already filled. The covers on the bed were bandages, bearing cigarette holes. The horizontal strip blinds had been punched toothless.
But outside there was the Atlantic. Local people sat on their haunches before it as if waiting to see what its tide would bring in from America; families squatted among the undergrowth with small fires and tents in the sunset.
‘It’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘It’s quite beautiful in a way. It’s sad. Like the end of time. Like a disaster movie. You know, to have so little, but to have fire and each other. It’s very touching. Come and look.’
He stood beside her a moment and nodded. He went to unpack the bags.
‘Man, this toilet’s really bad news,’ he exclaimed from the bathroom.
She was still standing at the window.
* * *
Mohammed had waited outside. He’d offered to stay with them for the week for a good price. They went outside early evening and found him there, leaning against the car door, smoking contemplatively. He snapped to, dropping his cigarette. There was nothing to eat at the hotel, they told him, so he took them a short drive to what he said was the most popular bar with the foreigners. He bade them go in, like a parent taking his children to a party. ‘Go on,’ he encouraged them, ‘have fun.’ And he lit up again.
Inside, short Bolivian UN soldiers were teaching taller European women how to dance with a man. Pakistani bureaucrats, who were settled in for the long haul, nursed rum drinks. The local hookers sat around the sides of the bar, pulling at the chinoed legs of a group of businessmen, offering to blow them for a soda. Ordering a couple of malaria-aware gin and tonics, Rachel heard a girl saying, ‘I’d like to suck you.’
Jeff shook his head in admiration. There were no rules in a place like this. It was the sort of place you could find out how like other people you really were.
The following day they met the pastor, Alpha Bangura, a young, blue-black, very thin man with a hard jaw and large eyes. He was formal with them, all nervous energy, hanging off their words as if trying to learn them by heart. Each member of his voluntary staff made a formal presentation of themselves before the children were assembled.
While they gazed upon the forty or so faces of the children, who had arranged themselves in three rows by height, Rachel glanced now and again at the attending adults, feeling their gaze, and she saw how each was keeping an eye on her particularly, the mother figure. The kids were instructed to sing, and they began a song with dreary conviction, eyes rolling to the ceiling, hands loose, with the smallest of the children, some just toddlers, coming up slightly short on the words but as solemn as the oldest.
* * *
No mummy; mummy gone,
No daddy; daddy gone,
Who gonna love the orphan pikin?
* * *
The children swayed and put their hands out to Rachel and Jeff at the end of the chorus. Rachel stood during the song, facing them, shimmering, out of focus; the smile on her face taut.
One little girl in the front row was exceptionally beautiful, her eyes shone. Salamatu. The poster girl who’d beckoned Rachel across the sea.
‘Well,’ she said to Jeff, as they sat in the back seat of the car leaving just before dark to return to the hotel. (They had waved
through the back window all the way to the main road.) ‘It’s clear to me. Much as I’m taken with little Salamatu, it can’t be some sort of beauty parade can it, this whole thing? We can’t just lift one kid out of this hell, we’ll have to do something for all of them. We’ll have to build a home for all of them, here. That’s what we need to do. That’s what would be right.’
They shared hand-wipes. Jeff wiped his face and Rachel followed suit and they showed each other the rust colour on the tissues.
She put her hand on his. ‘Whew,’ he said. ‘Whew.’
‘What do you think?’
He didn’t say. He’d got a football out and kicked it about in the dirt yard outside with the boys while the girls lined up to receive clothes from Rachel: a T-shirt, some shorts, some underpants each.
She’d taken the time to ask each one in turn about themselves, while a member of staff either side of her urged the child in their own language and smartly filled in the gaps of understanding, with anxious laughter at some of the children’s misconstructions, correcting them in English.
‘This child is ignorant!’
The girls had hair in thick crusts like plaster, set with dirt and dust, and their arms and legs were mottled and dry, there was nothing soft about them, the younger ones smelt of urine, the older ones of sweat, and they touched her face and her wedding ring and earrings and the older ones tried to whisper things to implicate themselves especially in her affections.<
br />
All of their characters were fixed, it seemed to her, from the coquettish five-year-old to the surly unhappy seven-year-old; they were either winning or losing, in a way, and it was hard to know from their stories whether this was due to experience, but it seemed so. The most kittenish of the little girls kept running to the legs of Uncle Abu and was gently but firmly pushed away from him.
Rachel organized a game in which she told a story and had the children play parts. They fell apart laughing at the preposterous notion of goats going over bridges, and bears in beds, so she asked them to make up their own.
The oldest girl, Jakka, took charge, hissing at the little ones who went ahead of instruction, beating a boy who played the fool, and her story was both intricate and morally grandiose; she used all the children available, had the heroine — herself — going forth saving souls, doing good, and being countered at every turn, and all those who did her wrong were avenged, they fell down groaning and moaning and she stepped righteously towards victory. For the finale she took the remaining unused little children in her arms and had them call out (after much angry enjoinment to do so and some pinching and smacking), ‘Mother! You have come for us!’
Rachel stood outside in the dusty yard, wiping the back of her neck with her hand, letting Jeff photograph her amidst a sea of little black faces milling round her. She had her long red hair pinned up and curls stuck to her damp nape. ‘Their storytelling is amazing, I suppose because it’s an oral culture. Jakka’s so impressive really. So ferocious. So bright. I can’t think of a child I know back home who would be able to hold a story like that.’
‘She probably rehearsed it a few times.’
A couple of the little ones clasped her and hugged her to them and she bent down and was nearly overbalanced by the tide of children.
When they rejoined each other for the finale, a Christian song with hand clapping, they shouted out their thanks to the Lord and named each member of staff and cheered loudest for ‘Uncle Jeff ’ and ‘Auntie Rachel’.
‘We love you!’
‘Shit, who wouldn’t be touched by that,’ said Jeff, quietly. ‘That’s quite something.’
‘Where are they going now?’ Rachel asked, wiping her permanently sticky hands on her trousers, watching them file out.
Uncle Abu said that some were staying with him and his wife. He had a winning smile, rich in patience, and his eyelids fluttered when he spoke. A thin woman stepped forwards with one dead arm that she held with her other hand and nodded stiffly. His wife didn’t smile.
‘She has bad teeth,’ her husband explained.
‘I have fifteen living with me,’ said Sister Rose, pushing through to the fore. She looked like Whoopi Goldberg, Rachel thought, with her craven smile. ‘Fifteen! One bag of rice a day!’
Chapter 18
They went back to the room after a beer in the hotel bar. She was elated, she couldn’t stop talking about the children. In their room she would not sit, she stood, talking. He wanted her to have sex with him and so he said, ‘Come on, honey, let’s get naked.’
She paused.
‘Come on, honey, share that love.’
She took her clothes off, lay down on the bed and looked up at the electric wires hanging from the ceiling — spare, useless, potential. As he started to go faster inside her, she looked aside in the sliver of mirror remaining on the cupboard door and she saw there was a melancholy to her face.
He didn’t kiss her before or during sex, he only began it by looking lovingly at his member, taking it in one hand and tapping it against her thigh, as if to rouse it, and then he entered her and followed his own directions to find the way out, asking no help from her. It was a route he knew so well.
She spent most of the night awake, thinking, making lists of things for the children.
‘Are you awake?’ she asked him, at one point, halfway through the night.
‘Yes,’ he said, but nothing more.
She put a hand between them, on the shared sheet, to find him and he rolled over on to his side, facing away from her.
* * *
At breakfast the next morning, over papaya and boiled eggs she said to him, ‘I can’t wait to see Salamatu. Well, all of them actually. I want to play some games with them, old English ones we used to play like Kick the Can. And we can buy them all a fizzy drink today, I thought, and give them some crisps or something.’ He ate slowly, carefully pushing the plantain aside. She took it
and popped it in her mouth saying, ‘It’s not banana.’
‘I know that.’
‘It’s plantain.’
He pushed the plate to her and looked out to the Atlantic, his fingers over his mouth, his nose resting on the tips of them. She saw his eyes cloud with the onset of a thought; to her he looked so handsome like that, pensive and fragile, and she wished he loved her as much as he loved whatever he was looking at.
‘Are you OK?’ she said.
‘Sure.’ Interrupted, he fell into being downcast. He dribbled the sachet of coffee powder into the tepid water, stirred it and looked at the table next to them.
A white businessman in a linen suit was sitting with a fat suited black guy in sunglasses and batik shirt and a prim-looking elderly white woman in khaki, ski glasses on the top of her head. The guy waived the offer of a cigarette from the black guy. ‘I don’t smoke,’ he said, though the evening before they had seen him smoking at the bar.
Jeff tilted his head, then dipped towards her to whisper, ‘This is something else, this place. I never imagined it would be this, well, fucked I guess. Man, it’s like another world. I feel — what’s the word — all discombobulated.’ His smile disappeared as soon as it formed.
She began talking about the layout of the home they would build. She sketched it out on the back page of his notebook. ‘I always had this dream of a big house with loads of bedrooms, you know, and I used to doodle all the time this sort of dolls’ house, and now I know why. This was always going to happen. I can do some good now.’
The businessman rose and shook hands. The prim woman sat looking very worried, while the black guy turned in his seat, ordering up another coffee.
Jeff looked at her T-shirt: International Mercy Movement.
‘American,’ he said, under his breath.
‘You are a very good woman,’ the black guy said, in basso tones, ‘God has brought you to us, Mrs Kemp.’
She didn’t reply. She dabbed her lips with the napkin, rose and shook hands with the man.
Jeff moved his chair to allow her to pass by. Looking up as she passed, he smiled at her, the flat, regretful smile of sympathy. He was taken aback by her look of disdain.
Before going to the Christian Mission’s quarters in Kissy they decided to take a look at an orphanage in Freetown. They’d been told by the staff it was the best. It looked almost clean, from the outside it was all primary-colour painted wood and breezeblocks — supplied by the Swiss. They looked into all the dark classrooms, stabling their glowering learning beings. In the last, there was a male teacher shaking in the dark, gritting his teeth, sweating over a natural law. The orphans were uniformed and smiling. Rachel chanced a wave at a small boy up front and he showed his teeth with glee.
Behind them came the less-tutored noise of a disturbance. The teacher raised his voice. A tall woman was being restrained by two security guards, who looked more doubtful than sure. There was a small child, red underpants, with a sticky-out belly button,dusty woolly grey hair and the cellophane snail trail under his nose, crying. The guards were shouting at her and pointing at the child and shaking him by his shoulders and pointing at her and pushing the child to her. But she was resisting taking him back. She was turning her neck, shaking her head, cowering and turning away, looking for the road. She wanted them to keep him.
Mohammed, their driver, sat solid in his seat as he drove them away. ‘You’re here on God’s work,’ he said, looking at them in the rear-view mirror. It was said without irony, but it sounded odd to
Rachel, having just heard another man say the same thing. On the sunken back seat, they bounced along to the rap music in the tape player.
‘Corruption, corruption. Pack and go. Pack and go . . .’
After miles of potholes, and a steep incline, Mohammed got out to retrieve the exhaust and stick it in his boot. He pointed towards an old mansion long bombed out, ivy clad. ‘You change money here.’
Jeff got out and went over to where, in front of padlocked gates, some other foreigners stood hairy legged, exposing their wallets, while the turbaned money-changer went through his pockets, pulled out wads of treacle-soaked brown notes. Jeff was laughing with the other white people, showing the notes to them and shaking his head.
They were going to give money to the staff of the Christian Mission, they wanted them to buy the children clothes and to keep them fed until they came back with more. They would tell them to start looking for land for the home.
Mohammed sat head on the headrest, hand on the car window ledge, waiting for them, his taped music on a loop, ‘corruption, corruption’, occasionally greeting somebody with two lifted fingers. Before him the kaleidoscope of the town changed its patterns every few minutes, renewing orange with red, blue with purple, yellow with brown, moving, stirring, bewildering, and he faced it with indifference.
Jeff stood at his window with the notes.
‘You pay me later, no problem.’ Mohammed turned the key in the ignition and the music started up again. ‘Corruption, corruption . . .’, and off they went to the lilting tones, the steel drums and electric organ, the windows rolled down, inhaling petrol fumes. Alongside them was a fleet of running children; bellies and lungs, sprung on legs, deliriously excited for as long as they could keep up with the car.