A Song for the Brokenhearted

by William Shaw

‘Yes. That’s it.’

  ‘Where?’

  Breen checked his notes again. ‘Nyeri.’

  Sam nodded. ‘Tell me, what do you think “screening” means?’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t any idea. James Fletchet described it as interrogation and intelligence.’

  ‘What’s so funny?’ said Helen.

  ‘Screening. It was such an innocent word. The men you are talking about were probably torturers.’

  ‘Torturers?’

  ‘That’s what screening was. The British like to pretend otherwise. But it’s a fact. Especially in the screening stations in Nyeri.’

  Breen looked round at Helen, who was seated slightly behind him. ‘Torturers?’ She was chewing on her lower lip. ‘How do you know this?’ she asked.

  ‘Everybody knew it. How aware are you of the background?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘By and large, during the course of the first half of the twentieth century, the Kikuyu people were evicted from their land by white farmers. Instead of being farmers, they became tenants with few rights, or landless labourers. This suited the white settlers, because they didn’t understand the land they had taken. They needed the local Kikuyu farmers to help them make it productive. Without labourers and people who understood the land, their farms would have inevitably failed.’ The young man smiled, leaned back on his chair until it almost touched the wall behind him. ‘The Mau Mau was a secret organisation that vowed to fight until they got their land back. It started with a few assassinations. A pro-British Kikuyu chief. A settler. A black policeman. But it quickly grew. When the whites finally realised that the Mau Mau meant business, they created a system of mass arrests, mass internment, to isolate them. They rounded up every black man in Nairobi. Every single one. But the British had a problem. How could you tell who was Mau Mau and who wasn’t? They called it screening.’

  Breen tried to imagine the blue-blooded gentleman he had met in a darkened cell with a victim at his mercy. Here, in an office in Bloomsbury, the idea seemed ridiculous.

  ‘The Mau Mau were well known to be a fanatical underground movement,’ said Breen. ‘Presumably you would expect the government’s response to be harsh.’

  Sam smiled. ‘As an Englishman, how harsh would you have expected them to be?’

  ‘Don’t get Paddy started,’ said Helen. ‘He’s always going on about how he’s Irish, even though he grew up in England.’

  ‘An Irishman?’ smiled Sam. ‘Well, you would know about how the British are.’

  ‘Were you arrested?’ Helen asked Sam.

  ‘I was detained. But I am not Kikuyu. I am a Luo. I was set free within two days. It was fine.’

  ‘What about him?’ Breen pointed to the picture on the desk, Jomo Kenyatta.

  ‘Of course. They thought he was a leader of the Mau Mau. It was never about leaders. The Mau Mau was like a virus. A fanaticism that spread through the people. But he was a politician. They didn’t torture him.’

  Helen said, ‘Are you actually, genuinely, truthfully saying that these people we are talking about were torturers?’

  ‘I would be extremely surprised if they were not. You don’t believe me, do you? I knew you would not. You have to understand what they believed they were up against. They thought the people were savages.’ Sam laughed. ‘Maybe they were savages. Do you know how the Mau Mau recruited people? The Mau Mau would arrive at night and force the squatters to swear an oath of secrecy. And if they didn’t take the secret oath, they would kill them. In front of everybody. Men and women. Even children sometimes. And then they would make friends and neighbours mutilate the body. Sometimes they would come back, dig up the rotting body and make them hack it apart again with knives and spears. Savages, you see?’

  Ijeoma had been silent through all this. Now she said, ‘When you are faced with superior weapons, you use the only weapon left, which is fear.’

  ‘You think that is how people should behave?’ said Sam.

  ‘Maybe they had no choice,’ said Ijeoma.

  ‘Sometimes they forced people to rub the rotting flesh on their hands and their lips. To show people they were not afraid to kill the enemies of the Mau Mau.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ said Helen.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ said Ijeoma. ‘Imperialist brutality creates brutality.’

  ‘Spoken like a true Maoist.’

  ‘I’m not a Maoist. I’m not anything,’ said Ijeoma.

  ‘It was efficient, at least,’ said Sam. ‘People were more afraid of them than they were of the British. Which was an achievement, I suppose. So people like your friends responded in kind. They knew they had to make people more afraid of them than they were of the Mau Mau.’

  Helen wrinkled her nose and said, ‘The British tortured hundreds of people during the Emergency? This is only, what, ten, fifteen years ago? And we’d never heard of it? I’m sure there were some, but…’

  ‘It wasn’t hundreds. It was thousands,’ said Sam. ‘Thousands and thousands. I don’t expect you to believe it. Many of the British who were there didn’t believe it at the time. But if your friends were at a screening station in Nyeri, that’s what they would have been doing. Prisoners could be there for months, being processed. I was a young legal student then. You heard people talking about what went on in these places.’

  Helen said, ‘I just find it pretty hard to believe, that’s all. If anything happened on that scale there would have been records. Reports in the newspapers.’

  ‘I’m sure there are records,’ said Sam. ‘The British always kept good records. But there were also a lot of bonfires in the days before independence.’

  Breen sipped his coffee and looked at the man. He said, ‘Say I believe you. What kind of torture?’

  ‘The usual. Torture is always the same. How do you hurt someone to make them say things they do not want to say? The first job I had was with some Indian lawyers in Nairobi. They defended people who had confessed to taking part in atrocities. The defendants had had their fingernails pulled out. They had been electrocuted. Some had been burned with cigarettes, or had the soles of their feet whipped. Sometimes the lawyers won. Sometimes they lost. If they lost, the men were hanged. But in every single case I was involved with, the judges refused to believe the men had been tortured.’

  Ijeoma asked, ‘Why did none of this come out when you got independence? Why didn’t you bring Britain to justice?’

  ‘It is an inconvenient memory. The torturers were not just white men. They had helpers too, who profited. Kikuyu tortured Kikuyu. Other Kenyans tortured Kikuyu too. But we all knew what was happening. The violence was everywhere. A friend of mine, his father saw his own two-year-old boy beaten to death with the butts of guns, right in front of him. Everyone has a story. It wasn’t just men. It was women. Children. Everyone. You don’t believe me, do you? I can see from your face that you don’t.’

  Helen said, ‘There are always some people who will go too far.’

  ‘This was not “some people”. It was the British system. This was how they ruled us. I will tell you a story. There’s a nightclub in Nairobi I used to go to. The Starlight. We used to go there to listen to Congolese music. Do you like music, Mr Breen? I love it. The Congolese are the best musicians in the world. But mostly I went there for the girls. There was one girl I fell in love with there. She was so beautiful. Beautiful hair. Beautiful face. Beautiful bottom. Her name was Mukami. In Kikuyu it means “the one who milks the cows”. But everyone called her Tusker. You know what Tusker is?’

  Breen shook his head.

  ‘It’s Kenyan beer. They say it drives men crazy. She certainly did that. But she was also cold and hard as glass. Like a bottle of beer. But that just made men crazier. That’s why we called her Tusker. She loved to dance, but she was cold and hard and she drove us crazy. Me at least. I was in my twenties. I was single. I was a senior clerk in a legal practice. I was going somewhere. And I was determined I should have her. Everyone talked about the lucky man who would even
tually get Tusker. So I danced with her every night. I was a young man earning lots of money in a legal practice. I bought her gifts. I bought her perfume. I wore her down, bit by bit.’

  ‘I hope there is a point to this story,’ said Ijeoma.

  ‘I thought you would appreciate a story about a pretty girl,’ said Sam.

  ‘I’m just feeling sorry for her already,’ she said.

  ‘You should. I have known many shy girls, but Tusker was the shyest. How could such a beautiful girl be so shy? It was like a challenge. When I finally won her trust I persuaded her to sleep with me. So one night I took her back to my apartment. She said she would sleep with me on one condition: I kept the lights off. I agreed. I wanted to undress her, but she insisted on getting into bed fully clothed, taking them off herself under the covers. And when I tried to touch her, she kept pushing my hands away. It was driving me mad.’

  ‘God,’ said Ijeoma.

  ‘Yes. You know what’s coming? Eventually my hand landed on her buttock. I had always wanted to touch her buttocks. You, Izzie. You like to do the same, don’t you?’

  ‘You disgust me, Sam.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I am just telling the truth. The globes of her arse had always looked so good under her dress.’

  ‘That’s enough, Sam,’ said Ijeoma. ‘I get your point. I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘When I put my hands there I felt how they had cut her bottom. Her buttocks were just scars. And my erection simply faded away. She cried a lot. She had scars on her back too. And on her thighs. And her breasts. She told me that when she was seventeen they had thought her father was a senior figure in the Mau Mau. They held her in Athi River Camp, one of the screening centres. He was held too. They tortured him but he wouldn’t talk. So they tortured her too and said they would rape her unless he became an informer. But he didn’t say. I don’t know if he was really a Mau Mau or not. If he was, I despise him for letting his daughter be mutilated like that.’

  ‘One of the screening centres?’ said Breen.

  ‘There were many, many, many. Athi River Camp was just one near Nairobi but there were many, many more. In Central Province there were dozens. Nobody knows how many.’

  ‘I feel sick,’ said Ijeoma.

  ‘She put on her dress and left my apartment. I never saw her again after that. She was too ashamed to come back to the Starlight. Imagine that, Mr Breen. Are you sceptical still?’

  ‘They cut her breasts?’

  ‘They tortured many women like that,’ said Sam.

  ‘But these were black men torturing them?’ said Helen. ‘Black men, yes?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘You don’t think white people would do this?’

  ‘It would have been in the papers.’

  ‘You’re a fool.’

  Helen said, ‘I think you’re exaggerating, that’s all.’

  ‘They gave the torturers names. Like code names. I heard of one they called Kiboroboro. In Kikuyo it means “The Killer”.’

  ‘A white man?’ said Breen.

  ‘Yes. There is a friend of my mother’s. She told my mother she was beaten by a man they called Karoki. A white man. This man put banana leaves inside her.’

  ‘Inside her?’ said Ijeoma.

  ‘In her anus and her vagina. And they mutilated her breasts with pliers. It’s well known they used pliers on the testicles of the men too. Anything you can imagine, they did. There is a man who begs at Donholm Station in Nairobi, close to where my mother lives. The skin on his face is all scarred. Sometimes I’ve caught the young boys throwing stones at him. He was skinned by a white man, he says. They literally peeled skin from his face. Do you want to hear more?’

  Breen opened his mouth. Closed it again.

  Sam said, ‘Shall I ask Izzie to fetch you more coffee? Yours is cold, I think.’

  Breen looked down. He had not touched it. He felt cold too.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ Helen said as they walked down the stairs to the front of the building. ‘You think what he said is true?’

  Ijeoma looked at her. ‘Why wouldn’t you, of all people?’

  Helen said, ‘I mean, was there some kind of justification for that kind of behaviour? There had to have been.’

  ‘Why do you find it so hard to believe?’

  ‘Because if it’s true, then…’

  ‘Then what?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘I have to go now,’ Ijeoma said, holding out her hand to shake. ‘Did you get what you wanted?’

  Breen shook her hand and watched her walk away across Russell Square. There were purple crocuses struggling through the grass, heads blown by a north wind. The temperature was falling. He should have worn a scarf.

  Helen shivered. ‘I think he enjoyed it, didn’t he, telling us all that?’

  ‘But don’t you see? It connects the three men, Fletchet, Milkwood and Doyle, to torture.’

  ‘Of course I see,’ she said. ‘It just wasn’t what I expected, I suppose. And maybe it’s not even relevant any more.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ said Breen. ‘And just the mention of Doyle’s name spooked Fletchet.’

  ‘I think I’m going to go home, Paddy. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘You’re not giving up, are you?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  In spite of the cold, they walked round the outside of Russell Square twice. Then they went inside and sat on a bench. He pulled out an address book from his jacket pocket and started flicking through it. After a minute he stood and walked to a payphone on the corner of the square, outside the iron railings.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Helen.

  ‘I have to make a phone call.’

  The last few months, he realised, had brought him face to face with with people in power. Once he would have been intimidated by them. But as London was changing, so was he. He opened his address book at the name Tarpey. He was the private assistant of a Labour minister; Breen had done him a favour in the past, though Breen suspected Tarpey would not have seen it that way.

  ‘Mr Tarpey?’ said a voice. ‘One minute please.’

  Breen had to put in two more shillings while he waited.

  The man came to the phone, finally. ‘Breen,’ he said. ‘What a pleasure. I heard you were wounded. I was hoping for worse, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Tarpey was a Welshman. A Labour diehard, loyal to the party, always disappointed by England. ‘To what do I owe?’

  ‘Where would all the justice records from Kenya’s colonial administration have ended up?’

  ‘Why are you interested in them? And why do you think I would know?’

  ‘I’m sure you know better than I do.’

  ‘Don’t you policemen have proper channels for this kind of thing?’

  ‘I’m on sick leave still. But I need to find out whether a story I’ve been told is true or not,’ said Breen.

  A woman with a dog came up and stood next to the door, impatient. She pulled open the door. ‘You’ve been on the phone for five minutes,’ she said, tapping at her watch.

  Breen tried pulling the door shut from the inside. He fed another shilling into the slot.

  Tarpey was saying, ‘If it’s at the Public Records Office, you probably won’t be able to get at it under the fifty-year rule. Is it important?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t,’ said Breen.

  ‘What’s it about?’ asked Tarpey.

  ‘Counter-insurgency measures in Kenya during the Mau Mau Emergency,’ said Breen.

  Tarpey was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘You’ll be lucky. Tell me why you want to know.’

  ‘I’m interested in some British citizens who may or may not have tortured suspected members of the Mau Mau.’

  ‘I doubt they’d let you have it, then,’ said Tarpey.

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘If such evidence even exists, and I’m only saying if, it would be buried for years.’

>   ‘So there’s no chance of corroborating it?’

  ‘Why are you so interested?’

  ‘Would you think a story like that could be credible?’ asked Breen.

  Tarpey said, ‘Put it this way, what is stopping you from believing it’s true?’

  Breen said, ‘If you asked to see files on it, would they confirm that they existed?’

  ‘I couldn’t ask, myself. You’d have to do it.’

  The pips went again, sooner than Breen expected, and he was left feeling in his pocket for change while the woman rapped on the door to the phone box. By the time he’d got another coin out, he’d been cut off anyway.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Breen called to book a taxi.

  ‘Spendthrift.’

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ he said.

  ‘I hate being pregnant,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not having you going on public transport.’

  ‘You’re not having me going on public transport! Who are you to decide how I travel?’

  ‘Look. Catching a taxi is fine. I keep getting this money from the Police Benevolent Fund. Don’t know what else to do with it.’

  ‘Worth getting shot, then, was it?’

  ‘Like I said, you don’t have to go, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’d like it if you stayed.’

  ‘I’ve been away too long. Besides, I have to go and tell my mum and dad about…’ She looked down at her stomach.

  ‘Will they be OK?’

  ‘Dad’ll be hopping. Mum will worry what everyone will say. A baby out of wedlock. There will be lots of wagging tongues.’

  ‘Stay here, then.’

  ‘No. We’re bloody losing, Paddy. I thought we were winning, but we’re not. If they’re not connecting Alex’s death to Milkwood’s any more, we’re back to square one.’

  He went with her in the taxi to Paddington. Helen didn’t have much in the way of luggage; just a duffel bag and there wasn’t a lot in that. It was true. They could have caught the bus. Breen liked London taxis, though. It seemed to be the most civilised way to travel in the capital, even if it was one of the old ones; an empty space by the driver for the luggage and a ticking meter that crept round. Springs that dug into your behind in the seats.