So I protested, ‘Education is not indoctrination . . .’ but I noticed his jaw throbbing like an angry little lung and decided that maybe some capitulation might be in order. ‘Josef, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t teaching the book, swear to God. I just had a few students around my place, few beers you know, and one of them saw the book and, hey, I lent it to him, that’s it. I know it’s banned but really, come on, is it that big a deal?’
‘You’ve done nothing but undermine me and also you have directly questioned the integrity of the King. This isn’t Ireland, Sean, this is Bwalo and you are a visitor here.’
Having been at the sharp end of a few of these things, I knew this preamble well. He went on for a bit and then, exhausted or bored, he tossed out the conclusion like an afterthought, waving his hand. ‘You are, of course, fired. Effective immediately. I’d be surprised if your visa remains valid. You’re dismissed.’
‘And you’re a fucking disgrace,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t fire me.’
‘Pack up, get out, you’re no longer welcome at the university. I suggest you leave the country soon or I’ll make your time very uncomfortable.’
‘You wouldn’t fucking dare.’
‘Try me.’
I considered punching him but knew that would dramatically shorten my time. I’d be on a plane before I had a chance to grab Stella or say bye to Stu. But though I managed to cool my fists, my words poured out before I could stuff them back in. ‘If we are going to start burning books it should be your book, your history, fantasy of Bwalo, hagiography and disgraceful fucking propaganda. You should be ashamed. Ashamed of what you’ve done to your people, ashamed of this mockery of a university that you care so little about, destroying the future of your own country. I don’t care who the fuck you are or who you know, I know this much, Sonny-Jim. You’ll die a lonely man who only has one thing to look forward to and that’s fucking rotting in hell!’
Before he could reply, I walked out as fast as my legs would take me. Beatrice’s face was tight with shock; she was crouched, half standing near the door, as if she’d been eavesdropping.
And I wish I hadn’t seen it but I did. As I was storming down the corridor, it caught my eye: through the glass door, the edge of it peeking out: the bookcase, returned to its spot. Someone had dragged it from the skip and placed it back and I don’t remember getting my keys out, don’t remember unlocking the door, don’t recall where I found the fire extinguisher but I do recall how good it felt raising it up like an axe and bringing it down so it smashed the first shelf, then again the second, and again and again, until I’d beaten it flat – who knew violence could be so uplifting, so purifying, so satisfying – then I yanked the extinguisher hose and blasted the remains until it was hidden below a foam-mountain. The extinguisher hit the floor with a solid clank and I was gone, out the door, blinking away sunlight, riding my motorbike home.
The first thing I did was check all the rooms; thank God Stella was out. I couldn’t face her right now. Then I sat on the khondi and punched a hole into a bottle of whisky, until my irritation got so hot it blew itself out and I realised something. I wrote my first book out of sheer rage, when all my options were gone, and now look, here I was again, against the ropes, the very spot where Sean Kelly comes into his own, this is where I shine, where I tear and claw my way out of the very knot I’ve tied myself into, and I’m not missing this opportunity to take a breath, focus my fury, sit at my desk and . . . I ran to the study, pulled the cover off my typewriter, sat before it puffing like a boxer, then . . . nothing. Like a fish escaping the hook, the line fell slack and I stared at the wall, and waited and waited, breaking the monotony by screaming, Why can’t I fucking write? Outside the cat replied with a sarcastic meow. When I was young my brain effortlessly translated booze and experience into witty prose. But now booze collects into a clot that my rage brings to the boil and all it gives me are headaches and weeping jags.
I’d spent a fortune shipping my typewriter over from Cork. Having poor Mum with her bad back get up into the attic. I wrote my first book on her: my dusty blue Royal. She’s everything I’m not, functional and gorgeous, and together we made a rare team. At times it felt as if Royal wrote the book with me looking on, gently encouraging her, That’s a great bit there, Royal, on you go, don’t let me get in your way. Yet now I stared at her keys and they glared back like a mob of disappointed eyes. But then, right at the deepest point of despair, my fingers suddenly began to dance, black bloomed on white as I hit a rhythm of fluid words and a gang of letters leapt up and stuck in an arthritic clump! I yelped! Fumbling desperately, prising them apart, returning my fingers to the keys, but . . . no. No! It was gone. I raised Royal above my head and threw her – imagining her sailing through the window in a blaze of glass – but she fell short, hitting the floor and chipping a concrete shard that shot into my ankle like a bloody full stop. Facken Christ! Yanking it out, I rinsed the blood with whisky to see the wound wasn’t as spectacular as the pain suggested. I took deep breaths, the steam of my rage escaping, leaving me flat and exhausted as I hobbled through the house and sat my sorry arse on the kitchen stoop.
Hope
The room felt taut – a trap was set – I wheeled him into it. Ministers rose, old men with aching bones. A standing ovation for the great performer. I sat in the shadows, searching for some hint of revenge or reckoning, some suggestion that these men were finally going to overpower their king. But for all the blood and corruption flowing between these men, they didn’t have it in them. Most of them were harmless academics or businessmen appointed for their greed and malleability. They hoped time would do their bidding, would finally stop the crocodile rising each morning to feed off his starving nation. These ageing yes-men would prefer that death, in its guiltless way, take Tafumo and leave no blood on their soft hands. Their eyes caught the shining wheelchair; it brought false hope. It was a ploy. Tafumo was using it to throw them off guard and to spare his energy.
Patrick’s seat remained empty, a missing tooth in the circle of chairs. Josef never spoke in meetings; he was smarter than that. Many ministers who’d spoken out were now gone. But today all eyes moved to him and mine followed. His neck was skinny as an egret, his face and hands fleshless. Against my will, my heart beat for him, as he cleared his throat and began, ‘Excellency. With the utmost respect, the demands of the IMF aren’t entirely unreasonable. Could we potentially start by . . . toning down the Big Day festivities to show . . .’ Sympathy worked like a spark, our old love flickering to life, urging me to take Josef away to safety. The other ministers looked like schoolboys who’d escaped a beating, who’d sent Josef to do their bidding. There was fear in his eyes as he spoke. He’d lost that shine he once had, that suggested he knew things that others did not. That brightness that Essop, Boma, Levi, Patrick and I were once drawn to.
The only other man as scared as Josef was Essop, who knew his friend was making a grave error. Terrible things stirred below the surface of this dull meeting. For as beautifully delivered as Josef’s speech was, I knew that Tafumo didn’t hear any of it. His hearing was now so bad that crucial words lay camouflaged in silence, sentences collapsing as he tapped his hearing aid, only for it to squawk like a bird nesting in his ear. I saw the light of his hearing aid wasn’t on; he’d given up even pretending to listen.
Just as Josef’s speech was gathering pace, ‘Even minor concessions would . . .’ Tafumo cut him down: ‘Minister Songa. I’d hope that you of all people know I’ve no intention of being bullied by the world. We fought hard for the freedom to rule ourselves.’ Tafumo stopped abruptly and moved his eyes from minister to minister. ‘It pains me to look at you all. Pains me that our great ancestors have become you: a table of fat, pathetic men.’ He gave the cruelty of his words time to sink in.
‘Do any of you have anything more to say to me?’ He let the silence stretch, as if daring them to respond – thin microphones craned from the table to their mouths, taunting the ministers to speak – before releas
ing a bullying laugh, then proceeded to deliver his favourite speech about how as a boy he had walked with bare feet from his burning village to fulfil his destiny. Josef, who wrote the speech, stared with strange blankness, unconsciously mouthing the words as the others squirmed. Tafumo continued to rant. His mind was weak today; lucidity like water through a net.
I watched Essop’s fingers dance nervously on the tabletop and I noticed how all the fidgeting ministers accentuated Boma’s stillness, as he sat staring at Tafumo with undisguised disgust. Once his greatest supporter, Boma now looked at Tafumo with the disenchantment of a son discovering his father was a fraud.
Boma caught me watching him and, like the film on a snake’s eye, he hid his hatred behind a glaze of boredom. Boma the big man. The big man who I’d known since back when he was still just a boy, a student, the youngest uMunthu, a naive kid with a wild Afro, who wore tight cowboy shirts. But now Boma thought himself the big man. Now he treated me as though I were a ghost. He ignored me; ignored me like a man who’d never drunk my beer, eaten my food, or come to me for a sympathetic ear after one of my friends had broken his heart. Now he was playing soldier. A man who’d never fought in a war, chest emblazoned with medals granted for valour on imaginary battlefields. He wore his false medals with real pride. Where had all those young caring men gone? Drowned in the fat of pitiful old men? A sharp bang broke my concentration. A fidgeting minister had knocked over a glass and water flowed across the polished table as they leapt to absorb it with their suit sleeves, damming it before it reached Tafumo, who talked on as if nothing was happening. Grown men leaping up, bums in the air, faces full of fear: it made me sick. His speech droned to an end, he snapped his fingers, and I wheeled Tafumo out as the ministers rose for a final standing ovation.
Jeko was waiting in the corridor, his skin as grey as his suit. He said, ‘Please excuse us, sister?’ I walked away, back to the door of the cabinet room, and peeked in on the ministers standing in clusters like women in the market, chattering excitedly. Josef sat alone, hands clasped in his lap. Boma and Essop stood together away from the others.
Tafumo waved for me and, walking back, I was overwhelmed by the ordinary moment, as if studying a significant photograph from my past. Everything shone with a clear and anxious clarity: me walking towards them; Tafumo sitting motionless in his wheelchair; Jeko getting smaller as the corridor swallowed him down its deep red throat.
I wheeled Tafumo back to the bedroom where he got out of the chair and waved me away, revived by the meeting, his performance, by turning the trap set against him on to those who set it. Walking fast, I broke out of the cool palace into the heat and there was Josef: standing by his car, staring dumbly at the sky. He said drowsily, ‘Hello, Hope.’
‘Josef, listen, I’m not sure what’s happening but there have been things going on . . .’ I noticed the guard at the gate looking over at us and Josef said, ‘Thank you, Hope, but I can take care of myself.’ I wanted to slap him out of whatever dream he was in. Grabbing his hand, I whispered, ‘Josef, I think someone is coming for you; in his sleep Tafumo talks of a man, he whispers his name. The man’s name is Sefu.’
I noticed he was shaking slightly, like a leaf in a breeze, but he seemed not to have heard me, and when he replied it was as if we were simply having a pleasant chat, ‘Take care, Hope, take care.’ He got into his car but, before driving off, leaned out and asked, ‘Can I give you a lift to your tree?’ He saw me flinch. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you, Hope. Just happened to see you there . . .’
I said something, I can’t remember what, as I turned and walked quickly to the kitchen. When I got there I was still flustered and I felt a disproportionate sense of disappointment when I noticed Essop wasn’t around. The young rage against routine as the old cling to it. And today of all days I needed my routine to hold me together. Reading my reaction, Chef said, ‘Essop’s at a meeting,’ and I replied, ‘Of course. I was at the same meeting. It’s just . . . Well, he’s usually here when I come.’
As he handed me my lunch, Chef explained in a tone of mild frustration, ‘Are you so blind, Hope? Essop is always here because he is always waiting for you to come here.’
I stood with the brown paper bag hanging from my hand, until Chef added, ‘There’s plantain in there. I popped a spoon in. Be sure to bring it back. I think it’s solid silver.’ When I finally found my tongue I said, ‘Thank you, Chef,’ and he grinned and replied, ‘My pleasure, Hope.’
Josef
My secret friend, a boy I’d carried on my back and elevated to power, sat before me stewing in his own dementia. Tafumo’s was a mind ripe for madness. Never questioning his own judgement, his opinions flowed unhindered by self-doubt – he’d long ago disposed of such tedious checkpoints – and now senility slipped through the gates. Instead of replying directly to my pleas for concessions, he recited a speech, a speech I’d written for him many years ago. There wasn’t much left of him now, this man made up of scraps of speeches tied together by lies.
As Tafumo rambled, I remembered the day our friendship finally came to an end. One of the last times he’d come to my house, last time we’d sat together without ministers or aides. It was a few years ago, on the day of Rebecca’s funeral. Everyone had already left by the time he turned up. He was splendid, saying all the right things, giving a moving performance. And performance it was. He talked to me like he spoke to people on the streets, revelling in his own reflected glory.
In the early days, when he first took power, he would drop by my house, we would drink and talk. He rarely mentioned our past but I knew those get-togethers were his way of reconnecting with it, escaping the cronies and sycophants. But those times were long gone, and as we sat together on the khondi that day, I realised my old friend now only traded in epic emotions: in life, death and power. He only came because he knew it was worthy of him to come, that he could bestow his presence upon me in my time of need and that I would be eternally grateful.
He had not once come to see Rebecca when she was sick. He had paid for our flights to Switzerland but that was different to spending time with my dying wife, as he should have, as he would have done before, when he was still a real man not a false god. But at first I’d been pleased he’d visited. I thanked him and we drank together. When Ruby nervously served our beers, her head bowed so low, Tafumo grabbed her hand, ‘This beer is the perfect temperature, thank you, sister.’ Bending even lower, Ruby muttered, ‘Thank you, Excellency, thank you.’
By then my access to Tafumo was non-existent. The time between our informal meetings had stretched so much that I rarely saw him. So I didn’t waste these moments and, knowing I was in a strong position to ask a favour, I used the opportunity to explain that some small changes were required. To soften the walls and enable some freedom of expression. He nodded as I spoke, he wasn’t angry with me. I explained that many students were talking of democracy. That David had spies in student cells that were being encouraged by the democratic movement sweeping the world. That if we didn’t bend a little, then soon we would snap. He grinned as if about to agree, then said, ‘Did I tell you I saw Father Lane a while back?’
Confused by this non sequitur, I replied, ‘Oh?’
‘Yes. We fished together at the lake,’ he said. ‘It was splendid seeing him again. We sat on warm rocks, fishing lines shining in the sun, and I told Lane my life was full of stress and power struggles. Lane was just the same, a simple man, with his strange ear. And when I watched him staring out to the lake, thinking only of the fish he might catch and fry with salt and oil, I knew I’d never be like him. I’d never be free of worries and ambition and I envied this poor man fishing for his supper.’
This was an old, entirely fictitious, story that Tafumo told his public. It was his way of explaining to his people their lives were truer than his, that they should be happy with their lot, should worry only of fishing and leave him to suffer the stress of running the nation. I was furious. Now he was patronising me in the way he patr
onised his people. We sat in silence until Tafumo pointed at the lawn that rolled out before us and said, ‘We’ve come a long way, my friend. Pretty good for two barefooted boys from the bush.’
‘Thanks to you,’ I replied.
‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘You are the brains, always have been, listening for me, taking care of me, polishing my statue as I make a fool of myself behind it.’
This brief flash of self-awareness was ruined when he said again, this time more pointedly, ‘But you have indeed come a long way. Now listen, I’ve had these toilets imported from Italy, finest in the world, you should take one; also there are some incredible tiles. I’ll have them sent to your house with some men who will fit the toilet and lay the tiles.’
I wanted to shout, ‘Your toilets may be imported but your shit stinks same as everyone else’s.’ It’s what I’d have said years ago but now I said, ‘Thank you, Excellency.’ Inside my reply was a test; a word I was sure he’d dismiss. When it was just the two of us, if I threw in an Excellency he’d scoff, ‘Enough with the Excellency.’ But now he didn’t. He smiled, basking in his generosity, a man who rules a nation and comes to his mourning friend to offer him a toilet. Power is a drug that makes the baboon forget he’s foolish. And sitting there, next to Patrick’s empty seat, I suddenly had a vivid image of the toilet and tiles Tafumo gifted me. Tiles that he’d sent along with two men who laid them on my bathroom floor. Hope suddenly stood up and I watched as she wheeled Tafumo out of the room. It was all over.
I remained seated, looking at the old men holding together this exhausted nation; their ugly reflections glaring and trapped under the table’s surface. When he took power Tafumo declared, ‘So far as I’m concerned, there is no Ngoni, no Tumbuka, no Chewa. There is only one tribe: Bwalo.’ More lies. In fact, he hired heads from every tribe, inviting generations of blood and war to sit together. He wanted them divided and impotent. He differed from other leaders in one respect. He cut people arbitrarily, no one was safe, it mattered not who your father or brother was, anyone could be swiped out by a listless swat of his hand. Was I next? I stood and drifted through the palace as if sleepwalking – neither awake nor asleep but lost in the border between – considering if the man snooping in my office, the man following me, wasn’t just David. Was David working with Jeko? Was Tafumo the invisible hand behind everything? Was my time up? Is this really how all of it would end? One night soon I’d look outside my window and on the lawn, standing in the silvery light, would be the figure of Jeko in his silly hat, waiting.
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