‘They’re trying to follow us back into Uganda,’ said Azalea.
No one wanted to respond to this rather frightening proposition.
‘Down!’ came a second command. More headlights, and now a convoy of trucks. One, two, three, four . . . and trailing them a Land Rover with armoured windows. The excited voices of the boy soldiers drifted across the void as the vehicles swept past.
‘We can’t stay here,’ said John Hall.
‘What do you suggest?’ asked Ritchie.
‘If we head east on the road to Kapoeta, we can cross the border into Kenya.’ Hall forced himself to sit up. ‘Let’s all make our way to the truck. Keep low. If anything comes past, just lie down. We’ll give them an hour and then we head east.’
They linked arms and filed out of the hut. A few hundred yards off the road they came to the lorry and climbed aboard. All of the children were silent. They waited in the perfect darkness with barely a whisper. After an age, John Hall tapped on the back of the cab and the engine started; they rolled slowly over the desert and back onto the potholed road to Kenya.
19
June 1992
In the bright light of an African morning, it didn’t need a doctor for John Hall to realise that his face had been shredded by glass in an ugly, bloody stripe that had taken out both his eyes. Lauren knelt over him picking tiny fragments of glass from his face.
‘Am I going to see again?’ Hall asked her.
Lauren shook her head slowly. ‘I’m not an eye surgeon,’ she said. ‘Can you sense light and dark?’ She moved her hands in front of his eyes and then pulled them away.
‘I think so,’ he said.
‘In that case, maybe your retina hasn’t been too badly damaged. You might get some sight back with a good surgeon, but I really don’t know. We do need to get you to a hospital, though. You need stitches. And there’s a risk of infection.’ Lauren tore a cotton fabric belt from her frock and tied it around Hall’s face like a bandage.
They were parked about a mile from Kapoeta. The difficulty was a roadblock that guarded the entrance to the town. It may have been a Sudanese government barricade – or it might have been SPLA. The information had come from a driver they had met at Logirim, where the road starts to coil up towards the mountains. The mercenaries had stopped well short of the blockade so that one of their number could approach on foot and make an assessment of the risk it might present.
They breakfasted on flatbreads and pawpaws bought in Logirim. The mood of the six children had lightened now that the trauma of the previous day had passed. They all sat up in the back of the truck and everyone chatted at once, and it was like the noise in a playground.
This was a hostile landscape. Not quite desert, not quite mountains; great rocky hills burst free of the sand and occasional tenacious shrubs clung onto life. There was little tree cover. It was hot in the back of the truck. John Hall lifted himself up, feeling his age.
‘Is Azaliah here?’ he asked.
‘I’m here,’ said Azalea. She had been sitting alongside the big man, trying not to look too hard at the bleeding mess that was his face.
Hall held out his hand. ‘Can you walk me out into the desert?’ he asked. ‘I need to move about a bit.’
‘I’ll help you,’ volunteered Ritchie.
‘Thanks all the same,’ said Hall. ‘But I’d like to speak to Azaliah.’
She took his hand and led him through the rocks onto the sand. She didn’t question why he had asked for her. Maybe, she thought, he had a message for her from Luke.
They sat in the shade of a cliff. Azalea was still wearing the dirty nightdress she had worn for breakfast at the mission; her feet were still bare.
John Hall was shaking. His temperature was raised. In a few hours, he knew, this would become a fever. He had to talk to her now.
‘What did you want to say to me?’ Azalea asked.
Hall reached into a pocket and drew out a slim leather wallet. Slowly he pulled a photograph from the wallet and passed it to Azalea. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that I will ever see that picture again. Not in this life. Not with these eyes.’
The photograph showed a very young girl in a swimsuit on a beach. The girl had a shock of maple-red hair.
‘Who is that?’ John Hall asked.
Azalea looked at the picture for a very long time.
‘Is it me?’ she asked at last.
John Hall nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘I think so too,’ she said. The child in the picture seemed a long way from the girl standing by a dry desert road in Sudan. The light in the picture was cool and grey and the soft, inviting sea swelled a deep blue. The hills that rose up to one side were so pure and so green and so unspoilt that they told of a land of an infinite, almost heartbreaking peace.
‘This was before I was . . . before I was adopted?’
‘It would be. Yes.’
‘So you knew me then?’
John Hall was quiet for a moment. He started to shake again. The fever was beginning. ‘Do you have a scar?’ he asked. ‘On your face? Just here?’ He ran his finger over his own bloody face – a face that, if it survived, would be a map of scars.
Azalea’s hand went up to her scar and she ran the warm tip of a finger along its familiar valley. She looked at the face of the bleeding man, unafraid now to contemplate his wounds. ‘Yes I do,’ she said softly. ‘I do have a scar.’ She took his heavy hand and let him trace the line on her face.
‘Then I did know you,’ whispered John Hall.
He was breathing heavily, and she had to lean towards him to hear his voice clearly.
‘How much do you know about your life before . . . before you were adopted?’
Azalea looked away. The landscape here was harsher than Langadi, where everything was so lush and green. Here the rich and fertile soils of Uganda had given way to the arid sands and rocks of the Sudan. And yet, she thought, there was a beauty to this landscape, too. She tried to think back to that day at the fairground in Totnes. She had no memory of it. Could she, perhaps, have any recollection of a time before? Had she closed the door on a life before the Folleys and St Piran, and before Langadi? Had there truly been a time when she had stood barefoot on a beach in a blue and white swimsuit, and this big tattooed man had photographed her with the swell of the sea to one side and the utter tranquillity of the hills to the other? She closed her eyes for a moment. Were there shapes there? Shapes of a young, young girl and the memory of the cool sea spray and the call of unfamiliar seabirds?
She opened her eyes again. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I don’t . . . really remember anything.’
John Hall said, ‘Do you recognise this tune?’ He started softly to sing – it was a lilting tune, gentle, a rocking tune, but the words were very strange. ‘V’ad oie ayns y Ghlion dy Ballacomish,’ he sang. His voice was as rough and broken as his face, but his heart knew the melody and his lips knew the words. ‘Jannoo yn lhondoo aynshen e hedd. Chaddil oo lhiannoo, hig sheeaghyn troailtagh orrin!’
‘Bee dty host nish,’ the words came out of Azalea’s mouth. ‘Ta mee geamagh er’n ushag.’ She gave a little gasp and sprang to her feet. ‘How do I know that?’ she said, alarmed by the mining of this memory from her brain.
‘It’s OK,’ said John Hall. He reached out for Azalea’s hand. ‘It’s a lullaby . . . from the Isle of Man. Your mother used to sing it to you. She would sing you to sleep with it. Later you would sing it together.’
‘I didn’t,’ she exclaimed, and she shook away his hand. ‘I didn’t. I never did.’ But I did, she thought. I did. I knew those words, that tune. She blinked her eyes away from the fierce sunlight and looked away from the bleeding man.
He hummed the tune again, a gasping hum from a damaged throat.
‘Bee dty host nish, ta mee geamagh er’n ushag,’ Azalea whispered, ‘ . . . geamagh er’n ushag.’ She turned back to look at John Hall. He was leaning heavily on the rock as if the lullaby had worked its magic. ‘W
hat does it mean?’
‘It means go to sleep baby, the fairies are coming.’
She was disturbed by this memory. ‘I’ve never been to the Isle of Man,’ she said.
‘You’ve never been to the Isle of Man and you never knew the words of that song,’ said John Hall. ‘And yet . . . and yet you have. And yet you did. You were born there.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You were born on 8 August 1978, in a village called Port St Menfre. Your mother was a barmaid called Marion Yves. Your real name is Azaliah Yves.’ He spelled out her name for her.
She echoed the words back. ‘Port St Menfre. Marion Yves. Azaliah Yves.’
‘All the boys loved Marion Yves,’ he said. ‘That was her problem. When you were christened you had three godfathers. There was a barman called Peter and a fisherman called Gideon Robertson, and then . . . well, then there was me. The vicar dropped you into the font. That’s how you got that scar.’
Azalea’s hand went to her face. She touched the scar again, touched this physical memory of a time beyond memory. ‘Marion,’ she echoed quietly again. ‘Marion Yves.’ There was a dark familiarity to the words. ‘Why did I have three godfathers?’
‘Because any one of us . . . might have been . . . your dad,’ said Hall.
Azalea looked at him, open-jawed. ‘You?’ she said. ‘You might have been my dad? My real dad?’
‘I am your real dad,’ said Hall. He held out his hand. After a moment, Azalea took it. They were just a father and a daughter resting by a roadside; just an ordinary parent and child. There was no LRA and no roadblock. There were no guns. There was a sandy beach and the swell of a blue sea and a green, green hill and the haunting echoes of a lullaby.
‘In the spring of 1982,’ said John Hall, ‘Marion Yves moved out of Port St Menfre and she took you with her. She never came back.’
Azalea thought about this. ‘Where did she go?’ she asked.
‘I have no idea. She left the island, that’s all I know. No one saw her again.’
A handful of sand swirled up in the wind and flicked its fingers at them. Azalea blinked the grains from her eyes. She thought back to what she had been told of that time. ‘In June 1982,’ she said, ‘I was left at a fairground in Devon. No one could find my mother. That’s how I ended up with the Folleys.’
Hall nodded. ‘I guess that explains it,’ he said. ‘I guess she left you there for someone to find you.’
Azalea tried to remember the fairground but no pictures would form. ‘Does that sound like Marion? Is that something she would do?’
Hall seemed to reflect on this. ‘No,’ he said after a while, and he said it with some finality.
Azalea noticed that Hall was sweating badly even though the sun was not fully upon them. She felt devoid of any energy or emotion, as if the desert heat had bleached all feeling from her soul, as if a plug had been pulled and her very humanity had drained away into the dust. The story was true, she knew that. The lullaby was true. The scar was true. The photograph was true and Marion Yves was true, and all of this meant that there really was a past in her life sometime before the world she now knew. But all the same, it didn’t feel real. Not here, not sitting on this rock with this bleeding man with his damaged face and the blood-soaked bandage around his eyes. The fear she had felt in the LRA camp still lingered in the marrow of her bones; the terror as she ran towards the truck while the big soldier, who now said he was her father, yelled at her to RUN, the shock from that moment when the fireball swallowed up the truck. And Rebecca Folley, her heart yelled, was her true mother, her soul mother, and now she, Rebecca, would be crying out for her, would be desperate in her fear and her loss, because at that moment another mother seemed like a dreadful betrayal. And now the guilt of that betrayal and the unbearable weariness from these past two days and the aching from a hard, uncomfortable night in the back of the truck seemed to well up in the throat of the thirteen-year-old. But somehow her tears refused to run.
The man beside her spluttered and spat blood from his mouth.
‘What should I call you?’ Azalea asked the man who said he was her father. ‘I can’t call you Dad.’
‘Just call me John.’
‘Do you have a picture of my mother? Of Marion?’
Hall turned his bandaged eyes towards her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I never had a photograph of Marion.’
Slowly they walked back to the lorry. Hall was stumbling badly. Ritchie helped him on board and they waited. Water bottles were passed around. The mood that had been so good at dawn now grew tense. Some of the children were sleeping. John Hall also fell asleep in one corner and snored like an ox.
The mercenary who had been sent to investigate the roadblock returned. They drove forward a couple of miles and then soldiers from the Sudanese army swarmed aboard. They poked at the children with bayonets fastened onto ancient Winchester .303 rifles. They flipped John Hall over to check that he wasn’t concealing contraband. They were looking for money. Hall barely stirred from his sleep. The soldiers started to demand documents; but there were no documents. They were threatening to search the lorry; this wasn’t a welcome development. They would find an arsenal underneath the planking. Something creative was required to prevent the situation from turning bad. In the end, it was Ritchie who provided it.
‘I tell you what, chaps,’ he said to the men of the Sudanese army in the voice of someone who had once captained the first eleven at cricket. ‘We need to get this chap to a hospital. What we need is a military escort.’
Azalea, weary, with her head deep in her hands, translated for him.
‘What we need,’ said Ritchie, raising himself up to his full six-foot-two height and sweeping back his blond fringe, ‘what we need . . . is one army vehicle ahead and one behind to take us all the way to the Kenyan border. That way, we can avoid bandits or SPLA. We need this,’ said Ritchie, ‘to prevent a diplomatic incident.’ He surveyed their bewildered expressions. ‘OK chaps,’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘Let’s do it, shall we? Chop, chop.’
With this piece of colonial posturing behind them, and the military escort alongside them, the rest of the journey went as smoothly as the corrugated roads and potholes would allow. At the Kenyan border post there was consternation because not one passenger was carrying a passport. But the Sudanese army captain who had led the convoy pulled rank and waved them brusquely through. It was still light when they spotted the ‘Welcome to Kenya’ sign.
In the first town there was a rudimentary pharmacy. ‘Do we have any money at all?’ Ritchie asked the mercenaries. There were two hundred dollars in a plastic bag in the diesel tank. ‘It’s to buy fuel,’ one of the South Africans explained. The men had some loose change, but all in Ugandan shillings. Lauren disappeared into the store and emerged with aspirins and alcohol wipes. She gave four tablets to John Hall and he swallowed them with some difficulty. ‘They say there’s a mission hospital in Kakuma,’ she said. ‘Sixty miles.’
The driver started up the wagon and they pulled back out onto the road.
In the back of the truck, Azalea slept. She was holding John Hall by the hand. Ritchie Lewis and Lauren Marks slept with their arms around each other. The mercenaries sat at the back, awake, smoking, with their feet hanging over the tailgate.
They made slow progress along the bad road. The sixty miles took three hours. When they got to Kakuma it was dark, and John Hall had sunk into a very deep slumber. They carried him into the mission hospital. His breathing was shallow.
There was no doctor present, only a girl in a dirty white frock who told them that she was the duty nurse. The doctor, she told them, would be there on a Monday. No one seemed quite sure which day it was, but it wasn’t Monday.
‘I guess,’ said Ritchie to Lauren, ‘that makes us responsible.’
They operated by the light of a single bulb, stitching every wound they could, cleaning away foreign matter and damaged tissue. They re-bandaged John Hall’s eyes with clean white bandages.
>
The mission gave them space to bed down in the hall. It almost felt like being back at Langadi. There were straw mattresses, wool blankets, chicken-feather pillows. There was blissful darkness and the calling of crickets. In the morning a bell summoned them to breakfast, and they joined a happy throng of children and fed on boiled vegetables and millet meal and sweet milky tea.
Later in the morning the mission chaplain came to see them. ‘Are you in charge of the orphanage here?’ Ritchie asked him.
The chaplain nodded with a hint of reluctance. He knew what was coming.
‘We need to leave the Acholi children here,’ said Ritchie.
‘They belong in Uganda,’ said the chaplain.
Ritchie drew closer. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘these children were kidnapped by Joseph Kony. LRA. Do you know them?’
The chaplain nodded.
‘Then you know they can’t go back,’ said Ritchie. ’It will never be safe for them.’
The chaplain seemed to consider this. ‘Five Acholi children,’ he said at last.
‘Four,’ said Lauren Marks, holding up four fingers. She shot a glance at Ritchie. ‘Anyeko comes with us.’
Ritchie looked at her. ‘Five children,’ he said, sadly. He turned back to the chaplain. ‘Anyeko will be safer here.’ He put out his hand to touch Lauren on the arm. ‘We can’t keep her.’
Lauren looked away.
‘Five children,’ said Ritchie again to the chaplain.
Later that afternoon, the two young doctors sat outside in the garden of the mission under the shadow of a thorn tree drinking Fanta Orange through straws. One of the South Africans came and pulled up a chair. ‘We’re leaving you guys here,’ he said.
Ritchie nodded.
‘We need to get back to Gulu,’ the mercenary said.
‘I understand,’ said Ritchie. ‘What about Azalea? What about us?’
‘We leave you here,’ said the soldier. ‘It won’t be safe back in Langadi. Those LRA guys will go back to look for you.’ He gave Ritchie and Lauren an apologetic smile. ‘You’re safer here.’
Coincidence: A Novel Page 18