by Louise Dean
She looked at him, at the peevish turn of his lips. He was only there begrudgingly.
In getting pregnant, she’d aimed to capture the essence of him so that the living fact of him would be less and less important to her. She had to get over his smile with its slight underbite, the rough-shaven chin, how his face came together when he smiled, how he was never serious by choice but when he was forced to be, how he was bemused, somehow left behind in the game. He must have been a lovely boy, he must have made his mother’s heart sing, he must have been naughty and daring, he must have called to her from high branches, from cold rivers, from under the bed, he must have cheated and cheeked her, he must have stolen and been sorry, he must have smoked and been sorry too, he must have messed up at school, too dreamy to get good grades. And then one day he’d come home, dumped out his schoolbooks which were a mess of graffiti and bad jokes and brought out his artwork, a pencil portrait of another kid, graded A. And his father would have come in with his cap set back one time, fresh from the park, his brow sweaty, and he would have told the mother about the boy’s swing, and his eyes would have been slightly teary and the mother would have held her hands together tight and hard, not daring to clap.
Jeff handed four empty cans to the hostess and nudged her elbow so that he could pass her and go up to the toilet. She stepped up to let him pass.
The WC door opened and he allowed a man to exit, then ducked inside himself. He stuffed her gift for the journey, the little paperback edition of the book of Job, introduced by Bono, down the waste shute and sat down for a shit. When she talked to him about charity, the proper meaning of the word, a love that did not prefer, true love, she called it, he felt like killing her.
I hate lies, she said about the disputes, as if it were all that easy.
Oh yes, we all hate lies, sure, why not? Apart from the fact they’re very, very useful. People lied and cheated not because they were fools, as she seemed to think, but because they were between difficult things, obstacles, caught hard and the only way out at all was under the wire, on your belly.
‘You think you’re better than me,’ he said to her, sitting back down, swinging on the forward passenger’s headrest to manoeuvre himself into the pew. He opened a fifth can of beer that he’d grabbed from the hostess station. ‘It’s the arrogance of it that kills me.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Where’s Jesus in it? Huh?’ He pulled the ring, released a fine sour mist. ‘Say you don’t think you’re better than me . . .’
‘I don’t.’
‘OK. OK. So. Are you chosen?’ She said nothing.
‘Come on. Have you been chosen? Rachel? Have you been chosen? Did God choose you?’
‘I don’t know why it upsets you, me being a Christian . . .’
‘Ah, sweetheart . . .’ He made a spitting sound, kicked his feet out, pushed his knees into the seat in front of him. He took a drink from the new can, wiped his mouth. ‘Part of me just wants to watch your fall from grace.’
* * *
The old Russian chopper with its floral sofa seat coverings was the same. They flew low over the river ways and inlets into Freetown again. The hundreds of hands reaching and grabbing at the arrivals were all the same as before but the two of them emerged fairly relaxed with their handful of exhausted banknotes into a small group waiting for a minibus in the car park. They were with three American businessmen who were making much ado about staying at Mammy Yoko’s, they’d been told to stay there,
they were set on it and the bus pulled up every place else where the driver had some sort of interest and at each stop attracted new woolly-hatted hangers-on, useless and helpful, self-important, some furthering other causes and others devoted to the cause of the three men’s stay at the Mammy Yoko.
The minibus drew up again and again and at each stop there were long-winded futile discussions.
‘I believe I’m in Africa,’ said one of the three men.
‘You bet,’ said Jeff warmly. ‘Listen, guys, I bet I can get you in at our place. It’s not so bad, some Indians run it, it’s kind of clean. Showers in every room.’
‘Sounds good to me, partner,’ said the man, offering Jeff his hand.
The sari-clad owner’s wife arranged the rooms and Jeff and the Americans went to the bar.
Rachel stood in the room alone with the bags of gifts and toys.
‘Father be with me,’ she murmured. She went to the window and opened it, she saw the nets on the shingle beach, the seaweed, the empty coconut husks, and she saw the twinkling lights of the small huts at the coastline on the other side of the harbour. ‘Sweet Salone,’ she said, using the local nickname, then she went to join him at the hotel bar.
The Special Court was in session and the bar was full of white people this time, the barman jumping through hoops; the diamond dealer was back again. Jeff was holding court, buying beers for his new friends. When they asked him what he was doing there, he gestured with his thumb at Rachel.
‘Ask her, she’s the good one. I’m the no-good non-believer. I’m here for the beer.’
Chapter 22
The quiet morning was rising and the last of the UN cars and trucks moved along the streets. There were groups of lucky children in dark-green uniforms going to school.
Mohammed told them the kids were ‘hungry’ to see them, he’d been by to see them just the week before. He hadn’t changed the music in the car.
‘Corruption, corruption. Pack and go. Pack and go . . .’
The kids were this time more joyful than shy, in their new T-shirts and flip-flops, they were ready with songs and dances, the older girls giving the younger ones harsh shoves when they moved too slowly, the boys cocksure.
Mohammed came up the steps of the church hall and stood outside, watching them. He leant back and raised a hand lightly to acknowledge Rachel’s glance.
Salamatu was pushed into her arms and Rachel took her on her knee as well as Olive Jean, who was the tiniest child there. She called out to a plain girl of about seven or eight who would not join in with any of the games but hung back in her ragged red pinafore dress. Her hair was braided in three pigtails that came out of her head like a version of the Hydra. She had a squint.
‘Hawa?’
The girl looked at her.
‘Hawa? Why don’t you smile?’
‘I am ashamed,’ she said. She raised her chin, then she turned away and went to sit on the steps of the wooden building to look out across the dust that blew through the yard between the shanty dwellings.
Rachel brought the staff up to date with their progress in establishing the fund-raising charity and they announced that they had found the land and needed, as they had correctly estimated and communicated already, about a thousand pounds to secure it. This sum Rachel and Jeff had deposited upon arrival in the national bank with the pastor as co-signatory.
Mohammed stood in this doorway too throughout. He seemed to be taking an interest in the venture.
Rachel told them she wanted to sit down with the kids one by one again and get as much biographical detail on each as she could elicit. She intended to take the details to the UNICEF office to check that none of these children were being sought by their parents. It was due diligence, she said.
The Christians exchanged looks.
‘That will be hard,’ said Uncle Abu, grimacing awkwardly. ‘The children, they are not always remembering, not always truthful either, I’m afraid. It is best you take from our notes please.’
Some of the kids she was speaking to about their histories for a second or third time. She sat with her notebook, turning pages back and forth. Their stories changed; Jakka’s mother was bitten by a snake and died in Conakry, was raped and killed in Liberia, shot dead in Hastings, and was also a lunatic a few doors up from the church hall.
Rachel told the staff she was confused.
‘It is as Uncle Abu has said,’ Sister Rose ventured, a hand curling upon Rachel’s shoulder. She went between the wh
ite woman and the black children, translating the stories with her style of bashful brutality, smiles and stick, willing her charges onwards and backwards.
In the afternoon, the stories were translated by the spruce and humourless younger pastor, whose large pregnant wife had wrested the chicken bones from Sister Rose. His translations were unfathomable. He’d lift his head and say in clipped tones, further to a small boy’s earnest account in Krio, ‘I’m sorry but this is nonsense. This is of no use.’
Besides the six- or seven- or eight-year-olds who seemed so lucid and sincere, were the surly older kids, less than cooperative, and then there were the bewildered babes, saying little and looking off-stage all the time, turning their heads to the door.
‘Where is de mama?’
The coquettish little girl giggled and put her hand over her mouth.
The young pastor stiffened, his jaw clenched. ‘Where is de papa?’
Olive Jean pointed at Uncle Abu and laughed.
‘Joking,’ said the young man. ‘She is joking. She is a bad girl.’
* * *
In the afternoon, they left the children and went in two cars with the staff to inspect the plot of land. The owner showed them the land with pride, touching the sugarcane as he passed it by as if shaking hands with old friends. They came to a clearing. In the distance were low-lying red mountains.
‘Africa!’ said Rachel.
The staff formed a circle and they all held hands there while the pastor said a prayer. Before they left, Jeff picked up a red rock, volcanic-looking, and gave it to Rachel. She held it in her hand, her palm taking the blessed heat of it.
The negotiations with the landowner were brief. They sat with his wife in a small room, painted blue. Mohammed joined them, again at the doorway, in mute surveillance, an eye on the road, an eye on the room. The landowner approved their scheme; it was a good thing, the children would be happy there.
After they all shook hands, he took them down the mud pathway towards the river creek, his garden. They passed under a laden avocado tree; he gave them miniature bananas. She’d never tasted a banana like it. She said to Jeff, ‘They taste like a rainbow looks.’
Some men were digging a latrine on the way down the hill and they grinned at their visitors. Hoeing the soft mud beside the river were the owner’s family members, children more or less naked, and women with babies on their backs. They waved up at them and Rachel was struck by the scene. Suddenly, tears coursed down her cheeks.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it,’ she said.
The pastor looked at her but said nothing. The Brooklyn pastor might have said to her that it was because God was with her, but this pastor said nothing.
Two of the owner’s grandchildren brushed against his pressed trousers and, as he bent to sweep them, Rachel noticed the Armani brand name on the band of his boxer shorts.
In the car she took the rock to her lips. Mohammed saw her in the mirror. He wore mirrored glasses, she did not see him looking.
Jeff offered him a cigarette.
‘Thanks. I like these cigarettes,’ he said. ‘You like that land. You’re pleased with it?’ he asked, blowing out smoke.
‘I think it will be great for the kids,’ she said, her eyes outside, going from wandering child to wandering child.
‘The kids, kids, kids. All she think about is the kids.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jeff.
‘You poor man. She must give you very hard time to make money for the kids, the kids, the kids. She got you working all the time, right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jeff, ‘that’s right.’
‘Oh yes,’ Mohammed drawled agreeably. ‘Just like my wife.’ The traffic was still. He turned off the engine. He made a call on his mobile phone. It was a brief and happy exchange. He took off his glasses as the smog and dirt merged with the early-evening darkening of the shantytown landscape.
‘Your wife?’ asked Jeff.
‘No.’ He laughed.
‘Your lover?’
‘No, not her,’ he returned with pride, ‘no, it was a friend of mine. I’m going to take you to meet him. He’s a very old man, very wise. He can help you. You’ll like him. A very respectable man, very religious. He’s in the government. The only man who is not corrupt!’ He put a finger in the air, started the engine, and the usual music.
‘Corruption, corruption, huh?’
‘You said it, man.’ He put his glasses back over his eyes, extinguished the cigarette, and was quiet for the remainder of the drive. He looked at the two of them more than once; the man relaxed and loose, and her with her hand at her chin, in a fist which suddenly broke open like a bird’s wing when she saw a child to wave at. He couldn’t understand why she was not with her own child; he kept his eyes on her when they were shaded.
He deposited them at the offices of an Italian children’s charity. This time he stayed in the car, in his usual pose, one hand tapping out the beat of the music on the car door, waiting for it to be over.
The Minister for Children’s Welfare arrived on a motorbike wearing a long white jellaba. He had his bike to get round the potholes, to dodge the loopholes, to make quick getaways. There were not enough chairs and so the pair of them sat and others stood, like bouncers ready to bounce them, around a table outside under an old stone pagoda affair, a relic of colonial days. The woman who ran the charity was something like the mediator. She had a notebook opened at a blank page and began by asking them to explain what they were doing in Sierra Leone. They did.
He looked old, the minister, but as it happened he was more quick than dead.
‘I will look into this group of war orphans, but I doubt they are what you think they are. We have, I think, managed to get something like ninety-five per cent of child war refugees back to their villages, where they will be looked after. There is no such thing as an orphan in Africa. It is quite unlike the West in that way. The community is the only wealth we have. The children you saw at the school you mention were left there by their ambitious parents. We have seen already three orphanages built in Freetown and with all of them it is the same and so we discourage such things. We do not want two systems here. And that is the least of it frankly. My next job is to call my counterpart in Holland, there are four hundred of our children there, shipped over for the sex trade. They had been kept in an orphanage near the border, as a holding centre. So you can see, there are many reasons we do not allow orphanages to be built here. So now, please give my office a list of these children’s names, will you?’
They stood, chairs scraped dirt. He was back on his bike and away leaving them with the word ‘orphanage’ sounding suddenly so communist, the pagoda cringing away from the baked earth.
That evening they met with their orphans and their sponsors, the Christian Ministry of African Brothers and Sisters, for a half hour of song and prayer in the church hall. Afterwards, they followed a few of the kids back to their ‘foster’ parents, brothers and sisters who, indeed, looked very much like them, and whom they called mummy or daddy. The orphan children, the ones they’d come to house, school and feed and to remove elsewhere, were being made by their families to sing for all of their suppers.
* * *
Mohammed knew the location of every possible place they needed to go but, given there were so few roads, wherever they went they were obliged to sit for hours on the same main through road in the traffic fumes and fog, sweltering hot, filthy dirty, sore-throated, thirsty while Mohammed turned his engine off for minutes at a time.
On the long road home, an hour’s drive, every time the pedestrian or street hawker they set off alongside would pip them on arrival, a footfall ahead. From the car she saw people pawing through the garbage dumps, hawkers selling green liquid drinks in bags, donkey carts pressing on, picking their way through the chaos, and everywhere you looked someone was watching you back. Jeff sketched a tall boy with his bundle of sticks, leaning against a workshop, looking at the mêlée as if he saw open fields, daydreaming. He
titled it ‘Ambition’. He caught perfectly the boy’s poise, the will of his conjuring eyes.
* * *
In the morning, she stood by the window. Jeff woke, saw her there and sat up. ‘Rachel. The young guy, you know the apprentice pastor or whatever, he said to me yesterday they’d need a motorbike. I said sure, what, like a moped or something? He said, no man, I mean like a big bike, a Honda, 850cc. Don’t you think his wife’s kind of fat for Sierra Leone?’
‘I honestly don’t know what to make of it,’ she said, looking down to the sea. Like pepper for the eyes, she thought.
Chapter 23
She took the ‘pastor’ to task over lunch. Was he really going to have these children taken from their parents? He considered his bowl of cassava. Sensibly, he ate while she left the sticky bottle of soda untouched, annoyed by the mosquito bite beneath the line of her ankle socks, reaching down to swipe and scratch like a chimpanzee.
If he was tired, then he was tired. He looked like he’d taken better beatings elsewhere. There was an edge of defiance he was keeping clean for the next time, she could see that; only a portion of him was present. He was already thinking ‘internet’. He polished off his lunch.
And what about her? So she took the upper hand and threw him off. But what had she left behind her moral line in the sand? Just a gulf of understanding; slightly deeper.
* * *
Both of them saw through her at the same time now; she was quiet in the car, defensive in the bar. Jeff tried to make it better, over beers, he tried out some jokes. Black humour.
‘What SUV do you think the pastor drives?’
It seemed sweet, somehow cinematic, only the day before when they drove down the hillside, tossing handfuls of wrapped sweets out of the car window to the children running alongside.
She sucked at the brown beer bottle, the backwash sweet and frothy. They’d put a whisky bottle up on the bar shelf earlier this week and there were peanuts in a dish. The war was over, but the UN were almost done pulling out and business was bad. A lone black woman in a miniskirt sat without a drink, carrier bag at her feet.