‘What? No, this is nothing to do with you.’ He began to weep uncontrollably and I saw he had something in his hand. He held his fist out, then it slowly opened and inside it was a Dictaphone. ‘I am so sorry, Father, I stole it and it is full of terrible things, this is all my fault . . . all my fault.’
‘Solomon, no this is nothing to do with you, this is more complicated than I can explain right now, calm down . . .’
But I couldn’t persuade him, couldn’t pacify him and I didn’t want to risk stopping.
Solomon was fiddling with the Dictaphone and he clicked a button and suddenly I heard the hotel manager, Stuart, and his wife, Fiona, whispering: ‘Listen, I just heard: they think they found Patrick Goya . . .’
I snatched it from him and mashed the buttons on the Dictaphone, trying to stop it, but not before I heard Fiona say: ‘Well they found his body. Dr Todd said he saw the body. Said some heavies came to . . .’
Then I grabbed Solomon and pulled him close to me. He sobbed, his face buried into the side of my body, as I said, ‘It’s not you, Solomon, you’re not responsible for anything, we are fine, we are fine, we are fine.’
‘So Patrick is dead?’ he asked and for a moment I was incapable of saying the words as Solomon sobbed against me.
Then he asked, ‘Are we going to be killed next?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You are my son and we will survive this. Now we must be quiet and careful and everything will be fine, Solomon. Fine.’
I pulled into the back entrance of the Mirage; the staff gave me a fearful look.
I said, ‘Can you please get Master Stuart.’
Stuart came out of the building, his eyes smudged with sleep. When he saw us, and our bags, he didn’t talk. He touched Solomon’s head, guiding us into the kitchen as the staff turned away from us, acting as though we were not even there.
THE BIG DAY
Bwalo Radio
Yes yes! Ha-ha! It is here, beautiful Bwalo. Dawn is breaking on this our greatest day. Your day! My day! Our day! The Big Day! So sing with me, Bwalo, sweet soul of Africa, sing with all your heart. Kwacha! Kwacha! Kwacha! And never forget what your mother told you: If you have, give; if you need, seek. For I am shaking, yes, vibrating, yes! People, people, listen! Can you hear the sound? Yes! That’s the sound of beautiful beating hearts. The wondrous day has arrived and we are born again because of our great and glorious King. So get out of bed, comb your head, wash your face, buy a pack of Life and come celebrate this day of splendour. Yes, my friends, yes! The Ngwazi is great!
Charlie
There is one room in the hotel without a number. The other rooms are decorated in what Mum calls Africhintz and Dad calls Africrap. Marlene Horst decorated the whole hotel and Mum said Mrs Horst thinks that the height of good taste is an elephant-foot ashtray. So all the rooms have mounted animal heads, ebony carvings, and lots of paintings of elephants. But not this room. This room was totally bare. Only a bed, sink and toilet. This room didn’t even have a number; it just had a clean white door. People who stayed in this room never had their names on the register, never stayed more than a day and were never seen again. The room always had the Do Not Disturb sign hanging off the door. And it was the only door that, even when the King was coming, I was still not allowed to knock on. Once I saw a man going into the room, a man I recognised. And when I asked about it, Dad pulled me back to our house by my arm, and told me I was never to tell anyone I’d seen the man, not ever, no matter who asked. I was especially not allowed to mention it to Solomon. Dad had never looked so serious, and at the end he didn’t even make a joke like he normally does. He just stared at me, checking I understood, and I nodded, pretending I did.
Very early in the morning, as the hotel was buzzing – waiters rushing about, wet with sweat – Ed took two meals to the room. And one was a kid’s meal. Though I knew I was never supposed to go down there, I was so curious about what sort of a kid would stay in that room that I followed. Standing a safe distance away, I watched Ed go straight in without knocking. Something we were never to do; you always knocked on all doors before entering. That’s one of Dad’s laws.
Ed came out with the empty tray and walked back to the kitchen. I crept up to the door and I laid my ear against it. I heard footsteps coming towards me and in a panic I ran, but knew I’d never make it down the corridor, so I hid behind a laundry basket. When the door opened I saw Solomon’s dad peeking out, then quickly closing and locking it. I went over and even though I knew I’d get into trouble, I knocked. There was a long wait, some whispering, I felt someone on the other side of the door, looking through the spy hole, heard them breathing, the lock clicked and there stood Solomon’s dad. His eyes flicked up and down the corridor before he said, ‘Charlie, hello.’
‘Hello, Mr Songa. Happy Big Day to you.’
He smiled strangely. ‘Happy Big Day to you too.’
‘Why are you in this room, Mr Songa?’ He turned and closed the door. When the door opened again Solomon was there. He looked tired, his normally shiny skin was dull; his hair, which was usually neat, was misshapen and spongy.
‘Howzit Sol. What’s happening?’
He didn’t reply for ages; we both just stood there. So I said, ‘You look funny, eh.’
‘Sorry, Charlie,’ he said and held out his hand and there, in his dark purple palm, was my Dictaphone.
I took it and said, ‘But I knew you stole it, though.’
‘Sorry,’ said Solomon and I just shrugged. ‘Fancy coming to play, Sol?’
Solomon shook his head. Then, not knowing what to say next, I said, ‘ok, then, well I’ll check you later.’ But Solomon kept shaking his head, then he explained, ‘We’re leaving, Charlie. For ever.’ I didn’t understand what was happening, and even though I knew it didn’t make any sense, I still said, ‘ok then, Sol, see you around.’
Solomon closed the door and I went to find Mum, to ask what was happening. I raced past the pool, across the golf course to the house where, before running through the door, I heard screaming. I stopped, waiting on the khondi, listening. Mum was shouting, ‘And you protect that man! That man who put so many people in prison.’
‘That man and his son, who is our son’s friend, could be shot dead. Is that what you want?’ Dad yelled back.
‘What about us! What about Charlie! We’ll all be next, get rid of him, get them out of that room, out of the hotel. Now, Stuart! Now!’
Dad tried to shout over her. ‘They’ll be gone in an hour, it’ll be fine.’
And it made me want to cry when Mum said in a mean voice, ‘You always think everything’s going to be fine, don’t you.’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Dad but he didn’t sound sure and Mum said in her cold voice, ‘Well that’s not always how it goes, darling.’
‘What the hell are you going on about?’
Then Mum spoke in a really scary quiet voice I’d never heard before. ‘I’m talking about two naive people who went to live in a strange place, and when things fell apart they overstayed their welcome and were slaughtered in a bloody mess along with their child.’
‘Calm the fuck down,’ Dad shouted and when I walked into the sitting room they froze like musical statues. Then Mum ran over and grabbed me into a weird hard hug. ‘Sweetie, don’t cry, we’re just talking . . . Listen, there’s nothing for you to worry about, but after the Big Day we’re all going to have a chat because your dad and I think it’s time to return to Scotland, it’s time to go back home.’
I didn’t say anything and so Mum looked briefly at Dad then she said to me, ‘Come on, Charlie, that will be fun, right? What do you think? Won’t it be such a great adventure going back home?’
I said, ‘How can I go back to a home I’ve never been to?’
Then they both gave me that look I get when I’ve either said something really silly or really smart.
Josef
For the final time I saw Tafumo’s kingdom. Shops shining bright and clean; even the roads, usually pitted w
ith holes and carpeted in sugarcane husks, were now immaculate. But beyond centre stage, past all the perfection, we hit the outskirts, the dirty backstage. We saw Tafumo’s monuments; each commissioned and unveiled on previous Big Days. Each year a new edifice erected to prove Bwalo’s good health and Tafumo’s great power.
We passed the newest Big Day commission: the Tafumo Stadium. The previous stadium had been perfectly good but Tafumo had declared that it was time for a new one. The new showpiece was unnecessarily big and hysterically expensive, I’d been privy to the budget, a spreadsheet of corruption. David had shown me a subversive cartoon of it: cash, food and humans falling from the sky into the hungry round mouth of the stadium. I imagined Patrick’s bones embedded in the foundations, to be discovered long after the structure had collapsed and decayed back to dirt. Ministers joked that the stadium wasn’t as expensive as feared, as it was built from cheap bones rather than expensive concrete.
We passed another Big Day monument: Tafumo’s Academy. An exclusive school for the intellectual elite. Children were tested and taken from rich and poor families alike, taught an Etonian curriculum of Latin and Greek, and expelled if they were caught speaking Chichewa. This from the man who’d declared, ‘My food. My tongue. My soul.’ Yet here he was repeating the colonial crime of slicing out our tongues. Tafumo’s surreal oasis, in the style of King’s College Cambridge, complete with spires and gargoyles, yet populated by black children wearing bow ties and straw boaters in the blazing heat. The truest testament to his demented relationship with his adopted nation.
Other Big Day monuments didn’t fare as well. Many lay abandoned like carcasses of old feasts. I passed Tafumo Avenue, unofficially named Nowhere Avenue. A Big Day project loudly launched before, a month later, being quietly forgotten. A road to nowhere, curving off then stopping, its silver tarmac crumbling into the bush. On the outskirts of town we passed Tafumo’s Polo Club. Once green and lush but now bald and brown. The horses, those finely tuned creatures, were toiling on farms as labouring animals. Those that were not put to work were put to death and eaten. And a mile on, an abandoned Roman amphitheatre, a giant dust bowl, its rings of seating plunging into the earth like a ribcage. I breathed a little easier as we pulled away from the town, pushing the accelerator, feeling myself catapult into the future, safe somewhere beyond here, but my body twitched at the sight of a roadblock. As we slowed down, Solomon sat up, but the soldier saw my face and without even asking for id he smiled and waved us on. Essop was true to his word.
We turned onto a dirt road. Solomon and I had to stop often to move fallen trees but otherwise we drove without impediment. As the sun rose I wondered if we’d survive to see it set. I knew Essop and Boma would have me covered but what would happen when Jeko discovered I was gone? All ministers were expected at the palace, the full cabinet, before dawn, at six am to wait for the King. Then my absence would be noted and I knew nothing would stop Jeko taking matters into his own hands. Phone calls were being made, orders racing down wires, outpacing our car, spreading like a web to the corners of the country as I gunned the engine to outrun them. Was a prison cell ready for me, a blade sharpened, bullet loaded? My paranoia bled into reality and I saw up ahead another roadblock. The shine of oil barrels in the dust, a pole between them, soldiers playing cards by a shack.
As I slowed the car, I thought how simple my task was: get Solomon and myself across a few metres of dirt and we would be free. But when the guard leaned in, I could tell something was wrong. Either Essop hadn’t paid this man or I’d not outrun Jeko’s orders. Jeko had got to this man and told him to hold me at all costs, or worse.
His fingers reached in to pull the key from the ignition. I knew too late that I should have risked everything and driven through the barrier. The guard pointed his finger at me: ‘Out.’
Solomon and I followed him to his hut and there, behind a school desk, sat a guard, the man in charge, with glowing red eyes and filthy boots. The room stank of sweat and beer. Solomon cradled in close to me. The man behind the desk ate a mango, slicing off segments, juice staining an orange patch in his beard. He waited. I knew the game. I’d played it on many men. I waited. Giving nothing more than I needed to give. Finally, he popped a slice into his mouth. ‘Well today just got interesting.’
‘You know who I am,’ I said with a firm voice. ‘Now let me through.’
More guards came in behind us, making excitable hyena noises, tightening the space in the room. Clearly relishing his moment, the head guard said, ‘If you had been here yesterday I would have nodded and bowed and waved you through but today the world has changed, my friend. There is a rumour that you vanished and Tafumo does not like vanishing ministers.’
‘I know that Boma called you yesterday and told you to let me through.’
‘That was yesterday. Today I had a new call. From another man. Jeko.’
‘I’ll have you fired and thrown into jail.’
He blinked, a touch less assured, then said, ‘Your threats don’t scare me. You were a big man yesterday but today you are nothing, an invisible man.’
He placed his pistol on the desk, its barrel staring in the direction of my stomach. ‘What am I to do. I’m a soldier. I follow the last order given.’
He was playing a game. This was good. I just needed to ascertain the rules. He hadn’t immediately picked up the phone to Jeko to tell him that I was here. Unless, that is, one of his men was outside making the call and the buffoon was buying time, entertaining himself by wasting the last moment of my life and the life of my son.
‘I can tell you are a thoughtful man,’ I said, and he smiled to show me he knew I was manipulating him but was also open to false flattery. ‘What do you need, sir? What can I get for you and for your men?’
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I like that. Sir. And that from an ex-minister no less.’
‘I am not an ex-minister. I am your superior.’ My voice held, no cracks in it. ‘This is merely a misunderstanding with Tafumo and I.’
His smile was greasy with mango juice. All these years my actions had gathered into a dark force and here he sat before me in his filthy boots. Demons are not the slick spirits one hopes. They are this: a brute with a brain just fast enough to enjoy terrorising you before he kills you and your son. Solomon was shaking and I held his hand to calm him.
‘I have an idea of what you can give me,’ said the guard.
‘Yes?’
‘Everything.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I am under strict orders to return you to Tafumo. If I don’t do that I risk my job. So my loyal men and I need incentive to not fulfil my orders. I am a soldier, my friend, and I like to take orders. So your car, everything in it, the money stashed, the cash strapped to your body, no man with a face as thin as yours has a belly as fat as that.’ His hyenas giggled. ‘Possibly even the money strapped to the body of your child, and your jacket too, I want that, it will look far better on me.’
I raised my hand to say something but his men grabbed Solomon, tearing at his clothes. He was screaming, ‘Daddy,’ and I was shouting, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ I took off my jacket, flung it on to the desk, opened my shirt and pulled the packs off my belly. They thudded to the floor. The guard seemed satisfied that Solomon had nothing and they pushed him against the wall where they pointed a rifle at his face. Slowly, I got out my wallet, passport and placed them on the desk.
He gnawed at the mango stone, teeth tearing the flesh. ‘And to think I complained when they posted me at this shitty road stop. I told them no one ever used this old road any more, and now look: a man like you comes along to make me rich.’ I sensed from the nervous cackle of his men that they too were not sure if I was going to be freed or executed. They were awaiting their orders as I awaited my destiny. He flicked his knife at one of the men. They seized my arm and I grabbed Solomon as the guards bullied us out the door. They pushed me with a gun against my back towards the oil barrels, there was no need to raise the wooden
pole for us, roughly shoving our heads under the barrier, and Solomon fell to the ground and picked himself up on the other side. We were across the border but guards had their guns trained at our backs as we began to walk. Solomon was in shock, his face like wax, unmoving, eyes searching the space before him as if tunnelling his body to the future. I took his hand and we walked slowly away. Solomon was trying to pull forward, to break into a run. Holding him back, I whispered as if singing a lullaby, ‘Don’t run, Solomon, walk with me, don’t scare them, Solomon, just walk slowly, walk slowly, Solomon, walk slowly.’
I waited to be lifted forward by the smack of bullets against my back. I heard the man shout, ‘Stop!’ The guards ran over and held us in place as the main guard took his time walking towards us. He looked me up and down, relishing my fear, taking it in through his eyes and wide nostrils. ‘I like your shoes, minister.’
I moved in the way you would before a wild animal; slowly, smoothly, I unlaced them, slipping them off. They looked odd there in the dim light of dawn, brown British things on a red dirt road. He admired them. ‘They will look better on me.’ I didn’t nod, or smile, I knew silence and submission were all he wanted, humiliation was his goal, and he looked at my feet and said, ‘Socks.’ I took them off, rolled them in a ball, placed them by my shoes. Looking at my bare feet with a face full of disgust, he said, ‘And your son’s shoes.’ Solomon took off his shoes and socks, gently placed them next to mine.
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