by Jemma Wayne
“It’s organic,” said Lynn. “John thinks organic food’s going to cure me. Of course it’s absurd but we might as well humour him.” Emily carried the basket to the cash register, smiling at the thought of John who arrived sometimes, unannounced, in a whirlwind of hair and aftershave and harmless chatter, and often brought fresh fruit and vegetables, and seeds, and other things he had read were good for beating cancer. Lynn took out her purse, passing a card to the cashier, who she said good morning to, and deftly entered her pin number into the card machine.
The girl behind the counter did not respond to Lynn’s greeting and was treating the interaction as a mundane obligation of her life. But there was a fleck of animation in Lynn that Emily had not seen before, a whisper of vivacity she had uncharacteristically on this shopping trip decided to share. And it rallied her.
“Good morning,” Emily repeated to the cashier, pointedly. And surprised, Lynn looked at her, and chortled with such devilishness that Emily couldn’t help but abruptly join in. Loudly. And for a long time. Emily couldn’t remember the last time she had made anybody laugh, or laughed herself. The cashier shook her head and pursed her lips into a sneer. Delighted, Lynn laughed harder. It made Emily think of chopping vegetables with her mother.
Back outside however, the clouds had cleared and the sun had muscled its way onto the blue canvas, making Emily squint and abandon her fleeting feeling of elevation. The light danced around her causing her head to swim. A migraine had been threatening all day, and Lynn’s questions that morning had already unsteadied her. She reached for the wall.
“We’ll whip these up in no time,” said Lynn, perhaps noticing and letting the door to the shop swing shut. “You look like you need feeding up. Here. To tide us over.” She dug with an exaggerated flourish into the shopping bag on Emily’s arm and, with the whisper of exuberance still dancing around her face, pulled out the chocolate, breaking off a piece for herself and then offering it to Emily. But Emily had lost her appetite recently. She nibbled at Lynn’s biscuits, but often couldn’t stomach anything else. Suddenly she felt sick.
“Can we just walk please?” she said to Lynn tentatively, refusing the extended chocolate bar.
Lynn did not reply but she threw the chocolate back into the bag and quickly began walking in a different direction to the way they’d come, her playfulness immediately dissipating.
“Where are you going?” asked Emily.
“Home of course. This way is quicker. It’s almost one isn’t it? You’ll want to be finishing.”
Her voice betrayed hurt, and perhaps embarrassment, and Emily felt sorry for it, but Lynn was not to be argued with. She was never to be argued with. Besides, Emily could not deny that she wanted to get home, to be alone and shut out the dizzying light.
“Of course you should have told me how late it was,” Lynn admonished.
And Emily nodded, her head and stomach pumping as she followed Lynn dutifully through a series of winding streets that eventually spewed them out in front of a church.
With a domed top.
And the sun reflecting off it.
And outside, a man holding a lead.
And shouting.
And dogs barking.
“Emily,” said Lynn.
But it was too late. The eggs had smashed on the floor, and Emily was running.
*****************
Lynn’s navy shoes were splattered with egg yolk. The man with the dogs pulled them to attention and moved on. There were no taxis on this road. It had been many weeks since she’d been to the shops on her own. Pain was stabbing through her side. In her handbag was a mobile phone, but she did not want to disturb her sons. Emily was gone. A slight flutter of panic crept across Lynn’s chest. “Poise,” she instructed herself.
*****************
The pounding in Emily’s head hammered harder and harder until she could hear no other sound than the fierce, insistent thumping. The thud of her feet on paving stones jarred and rattled, adding to the clatter, but she couldn’t stop for fear that the noise would catch her. Slicing through the air. Knocking her down. Even with Lynn and ordinary shopping bags. Even here amongst the greyness and the coldness and the friendly unfriendliness that was not, after all, enough.
She was out of breath. A gate swung on its hinges ahead of her and Emily pushed through. The place was wooded and dark, part park, part graveyard. Crouching low next to a swing set, she loosened the scarf around her neck and clutched her legs, burying her face into her knees and rubbing her throbbing scar against them. It was the dome that had done it, the dome of the church, just like the one she’d run to once. And the noise: shouting, barking. Her throat stiffened and contracted. She was suffocating, she was sure of it.
No, she was cold, she told herself. She was in London where it was cold and she was cold, and the air was cold, and she could breathe it.
But her throat was hot, burning. And suddenly she was spiralling backwards, too far, past the memories she controlled and so carefully rationed, past the recollections it was possible to sort and restrain, past, Before. And she was there again. In Rwanda.
They’d seen the men coming. Their small, wooden house sat on top of a hill, just in front of the graveyard where they sometimes played hide-and-seek amongst the trees and bushes, so it was easy to spot visitors across the fields as they approached. These visitors came wielding machetes and masus. One near the front carried a spear. He held it in front of him as though he was an old tribal warrior and shouted a chant the others quickly took up: Hutu Power, Hutu Power. All of them wore the colours – yellow, green, blue – threatening colours suddenly, detached from the flowers and the grass and the sky. Green is for grass… they were taught at school. No longer. Different lessons were needed now.
Rukundo had seen them first. They hadn’t been to school that morning and instead had been loitering around the front of the house pretending to be doing something other than looking and waiting. For days it had been too dangerous to risk the streets. Gangs of Hutu Power supporters were gathering and chanting and stopping you if they knew you were a Tutsi, or if you looked too tall, or if they felt like it. Sometimes you escaped with words only. But the feeling was of something worse to come, like a pot of water slowly simmering, the boiling point as uncertain as it was inevitable. The only thing to do was watch, and stand as far away as possible from the heating pan.
They kept to themselves. Not even Jean sought her out as he once had, and they restricted their movements close to the house and to each other. Gahiji had left a week earlier. He had friends crossing over to Uganda to join the rebel army and he wanted to be part of the resistance. There, in numbers, with weapons, they could do something he said. Cassien – always brave, or rash, or in awe of Gahiji – had wanted to go with him but Papa refused and Emily slapped him for even suggesting such a dangerous thing. At least in Rwanda they were together, and had friends, and a home, and could be careful and survive. Still, her parents had kissed Gahiji goodbye and not stopped him, and ignored her screaming and then her tears, which fell first for herself and then more urgently for Gahiji’s benefit as he resolutely packed up his paltry possessions, trying to avoid her pleading eyes; Emily had learnt at a young age of her eldest brother’s weakness for them. When she was very little, she’d utilised this tool keenly. If their mother scolded her, even if she deserved it, like the time she broke Gahiji’s new belt by misusing it as a skipping rope, her biggest brother was always the first to come to her rescue. The last time had been only a few months earlier after Jean had ruined everything with a kiss.
She and Gahiji had been walking home from church a little ahead of the others when she let it slip out. She hadn’t meant to tell anyone, or anyone else (Jean had already seen to it that enough people knew his version of events), but Gahiji had asked why he hadn’t seen Jean around for a while and without meaning to, Emily had told him.
Despite her attempts to normalise their interaction over the past months, Jean’s mix-matched,
swagger-filled eyes had remained full of that unnerving intensity, green and grey darting out at her in equally unsettling measures, and lately he’d started winking at her again. “You look like you’ve got a twitch when you do that,” Emily had said to him this time, reaching for the cigarette they were sharing behind the schoolhouse, she still 12, he recently 14. Jean made a sarcastic face at her and took the cigarette out of her mouth.
“Well you look like a boy when you smoke,” he retaliated, blowing an inexpert cloud towards her.
Emily grinned. Such teasing was familiar territory, safe ground. She waved her hands through the puff. “Don’t. My mum will smell it.”
“She’ll smell it on your breath anyway,” Jean laughed defiantly, taking a final drag before stamping out the stub. “Here, smell mine.” Pinching her nose between her finger and thumb as though she could already smell the stench, Emily leaned in only slightly and conveyed the verdict with an exaggerated grimace, but Jean rolled his eyes, clamped a hand either side of her face and pulled it to within an inch of his. “You have to come closer,” he told her. “Smell it properly.” Now he opened his mouth a little and exhaled. His breath was warm and the heat of it did something funny to her stomach, something strange, as though she was about to jump from a high branch, or sit a test. And suddenly, although she wanted to lean back, the toxic air seemed to root her to the spot, while at the same time filling her with a keen, supernatural alertness that made her notice things like the early stubble on the top of Jean’s lip, the single bead of sweat on his temple, the slight quiver of his jaw. She wondered if he still had that pure patch of white on his back. And then, too late, she realised that he was going to kiss her.
Emily was unprepared for the force of his lips on hers, the immediate, demanding searching of his tongue, not exactly horrible but disconcerting, alarming. Emily’s face contorted. She was almost 13, but she didn’t think of boys this way yet, not even Jean, who should have known this about her. When finally he let go, she pushed him hard.
“You stupid boy! What do you think you’re doing?” she screamed, kicking the dirt between them and disturbing the cigarette stub. “Why do you keep ruining things? You stupid boy! You’re pathetic!”
He took a step back, tripping over his heel but said nothing, and for a moment the two of them stood silent beneath the dark cloth of her indictment. She wanted him to apologise, or tease her, or somehow unmake the minutes, but he merely looked from her to the wall behind her as though, without her to whisper the answers, he was desperately searching for them in space.
“Well?” she demanded again after long seconds had passed, because one of them had to speak eventually. But after opening and closing his mouth three times, Jean still offered no words to reply or reproach or justify. Instead, a second bead of sweat adorning his temple, he forced out an absurdly loud laugh, then turned his back to her, and silently, with a feeble attempt at swagger, walked away. “Good! Go!” she shouted at him determinedly through the echo of his bravado. But as she watched him depart, Emily felt her fury quite unexpectedly evaporate, and gradually, as his silhouette grew smaller and smaller against the dying sun and the hills and the grass, it was replaced by a bewildering feeling of regret, and sadness, and loss. It was the first of many times that she felt the aching, pain-wrapped frustration of what might have been. But all she knew then was that she had to speak to him, and soon, if only to figure out why there was suddenly such a wrenching in her gut.
The next morning, a mass of cream-clothed students was as usual gathered outside the schoolhouse. She’d left early without Cassien to go via Jean’s house, but he’d already left when she arrived, or at least his mother had said he wasn’t there. He wasn’t waiting for her by the gate, or on the path, or by the edge of the grass where sometimes he and Cassien kicked a football. Standing on her tiptoes amongst the throng, Emily searched for him, an urgency filtering subconsciously through her, but she couldn’t see him. Instead, one of the girls she’d never liked and she and Jean had privately ridiculed, sidled triumphantly up to her.
“You’re so sweet,” she crowed, laughing loudly for the benefit of the others, who Emily now realised had been looking at her and were all listening. “To think that you tried to kiss Jean. But of course he wouldn’t kiss you. He said he could never fancy a Tutsi.”
When Gahiji heard this, he doubled back past the church, found Jean halfway to the lake, threatened him with a fist and made him apologise right in front of the girls he was walking with and winking at. Gahiji always put things right. He always protected her. He always stemmed her tears.
On the day of his leaving for Uganda however, Gahiji only hugged Emily tightly, tilted his head, and promised to see her soon. Both of them knew they were words spoken for comfort rather than truth, but she clung to them anyway. Desperately. Rukundo ran shouting into the kitchen. “They’re coming. Men are coming. The Interahamwe.” Cassien and Simeon fell through the door behind him and Mama dropped the vegetables she was preparing: carrots and sweet potatoes that had been piling up in neat circles now tumbling across the floor, one slice of carrot rolling underneath the stove where it would never be found. Emily scooped the new baby out of her cot. Mary, a sister at last, had arrived four months earlier. Their father appeared behind them with a useless stick in his hand.
“We leave now,” he told them.
Out of the back door they hurried across the graveyard, their mother without the time to tie Mary to her back, bundling her in her arms, Emily chasing as close to Cassien’s heels as she could. Rukundo and Simeon were far ahead, dodging through the trees they’d climbed together, but their father hung back, making sure they were all still running ahead of him. Once, Emily fell, but only for a moment. Then she was on her feet again, her hand gripped within her father’s, her feet somehow moving.
By the time they reached the church, it was clear they were not the only families fleeing. Hundreds of other Tutsis were already crowding through the doors, the priests ushering them in like shepherds, the angels and saviours they’d always purported to be. Emily clung to her father’s hand and mentally apologised to God for ever having complained about saying her rosary. Here He was, answering her, finally, loudly, when it mattered. Just as Mama had promised. Guiltily, Emily turned towards her mother, anticipating her pride at having been proved so conclusively right; but she caught the tail of a look that she had never seen before on her mother’s face, a gaze not of triumph, but something between sadness and disbelief, between dreaming and reality, her eyes fixed not on the priests but on the streams of frightened people.
Mary began to scream. Dragging her eyes away from her mother, Emily let go of her father’s hand and stuck her little finger in Mary’s mouth. The girl’s tiny body was swaddled closely in a white blanket Emily had helped her mother to bleach in the sun, but her delicate lips escaped the folds and sucked furiously for a few seconds until, calmed by Emily’s familiar touch, amidst the jostling, wailing crowds, she hunched her neck down into the blanket and slipped off to sleep.
“She loves you,” observed their mother, all at once waking from her trancelike state. “And I love you my daughter,” she added suddenly, starkly, with an urgent tenderness that was far more terrifying than everything else.
Emily clung harder to the swing set and let out a sob. Her body shook. She shouldn’t have loosened her scarf. The cold air had crept underneath it and was controlling her, her muscles contracting involuntarily while her teeth chattered a rhythmic beat that paralysed her to the spot where she was crouched. She had to move. She had to get back to her flat, to a state she could manage. She had to close the door to the memories that were flooding her, forget Rwanda, forget Mary, not think about what came next.
But what came next was smoke-swaddled, seeping through cracks. Hot. Suffocating. Blurred by intensity. She remembered a petrified mob snaking into the church like Noah’s Ark, in orderly channels of two or three, fear moving them to tidy regulation, to cling to what they knew, which was hie
rarchy and authority and chains of command. Rwanda. Emily and her family had joined the last of the convoy. In the distance, voices were beginning to ring out, exuberant voices, raised, intoxicated, chanting, baying, advancing.
Doors. She remembered doors closing and the priests standing in front of them, the hush of nearly two hundred people filling the church with the loudest prayer she had ever heard, spoken to God through sweat and silent tears and the sound of hearts racing. Now and then somebody coughed or a baby cried out, but its short infant gasps lasted only a few moments before somebody put a hand over its mouth, risking suffocation, usually the mother. Emily had again slipped her own finger into Mary’s mouth so that she stayed silent. She could still feel the wetness of her lips, the heat of her sleeping body.
Wood hit wood as clubs met the solid church door. Glass shattered. People began to scream. Some of the women fell upon the priests who were Hutus but also representatives of God: save us, help us. They pleaded. They kissed the priests’ hands. And the priests smiled consolingly. Emily remembered that clearly. Their smiles. They nodded reassuringly, and Emily had loved them for it. They patted their flock. They blessed them, sanctified them. They stood in front of the heavy, protective doors.
And then, they opened them.
In their robes that identified them as priests.
With words that called out: not us, we are Hutus.
God’s servants.
Pastors.
Friends.
From the back of the room, behind the altar where their father had hidden them, Emily crouched and watched as armed men rushed the building and the priests stepped helpfully aside. Smoothly. As if by prearrangement.
Then it was blurry again, and not blurry enough. There were machetes and masus. Blood was quickly everywhere. By their feet or hair, women were dragged outside. The door opened and closed and with every beam of sunlight there was another scream.