by Jacob Ross
The ground floor flat was no different from Shehu’s or any other she’d passed through: a small electric heater on the floor of the living room near the fireplace, a bare plastic table in the middle of it. At the back, the tiny kitchen with a row of MDF cupboards above a three-hob stove.
She dropped her bag by the door.
He handed her a towel. Light blue. Clean. She thanked him in Swahili. ‘Only for tonight,’ she said. Then she thought again. ‘Maybe tomorrow too… I… I…’
His cheeks lifted in a quick smile. ‘Ah – she can talk! You from Acholiland, no?’
She nodded.
‘From The Camp, no?’
She nodded again.
‘Family back there?’
She said nothing.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘We are like Christians when they die – no-one knows if they went to heaven or hell because they don’t return to tell anyone.’
‘Only for tonight…’
‘Up to you,’ he said, flicking a quick wrist at the sofa. Again the careful English. ‘You hungry? Spaghetti? With cheese?’
He strode into the kitchen and began busying himself over the stove.
She dried her hair, rested the limp towel on the back of a chair and scanned the room. ‘You live on your own?’
Her question halted his hand over the pot. ‘Better for me,’ he replied, without turning.
He brought the plates to the table and pulled out a chair. Long dark fingers, confident hands, a deeply scarred thumb.
He asked her to sit. She told him, no. Ate standing while taking in the long head, the neatly barbered hair, the jawline that made her think of the delicacy of bird-wings.
‘Tell me your story; I tell you mine.’ He’d leaned back against the chair, the food barely touched. Charcoal eyes – a pinprick of light in each one.
She told him of her home in Pamin Yai in the north – a place of cattle, rocks and maize; her months in The Camp near Gulu Town, then here.
She could hardly offer more than that. Here in London, she’d let its strangeness suffocate her memories – the welcome racket of this new world, the cold which, even in summer, still found its way into her bones, the daily wordless gathering of litter from between stiff indifferent feet at Liverpool Street train station.
Her treks from flat to flat had also helped with not remembering: the shared rooms in Northolt, Harlesden, Peckham, Elephant & Castle… the bickering of her housemates when the electricity ran out, or when the rent was raised and they either paid and starved or packed their things and left.
She swayed on her legs and listened to him speak in that beautiful voice of his, always in Swahili. Coal-dark lips moving around words that left her with images of a boy running from a disembowelled place named Kivu, picking up the languages of the people in the places he passed through. And though she would never let him know this, she found herself liking the way he talked – this oddly familiar stranger, his calming voice turned inwards, sometimes hesitating, often over the awful things he said he’d seen and preferred not to speak of.
At the end of it, he’d rolled up the left leg of his trousers and shown her the hole gouged into his calf; then made a gesture which took in the living room, the dripping streets out there, the world.
‘This Africa – they tell us it is cursed. They help us kill each other off, and when we’re all dead, they’ll have it for themselves. They will never leave us alone.’ He held out a hand to her. ‘I’m Kiki Kinkela.’
It came as a shock to her that, until then, they hadn’t exchanged names.
‘Miya,’ she said, and withheld her other names.
She woke to an empty flat, a faint memory of warring voices in her head; of things being broken and turned over. She rummaged in her bag, went to the shower, then dressed, avoiding her reflection in the mirror over the sink. She pushed a head into his bedroom. His bed was neat. A green blanket rolled up like a carpet across the light-blue sheet; a small lamp on the bedside table without a shade; the light socket in the ceiling empty.
She dialled Gabriela, counted to the fourteenth ring, then cut off, reminding herself that the woman had said that she hardly used ‘the thing’ and only carried it because her eldest daughter insisted.
When he returned from work, she’d cooked. She’d gone to the vegetable stall on Ponder’s End Road, bought green plantains and chicken and made her own version of matoke.
He’d knocked on his own door and she let him in; he’d eaten the food and thanked her and when he went to shower and change, she allowed her eyes to rove around the flat again, as she had done all day. She did not know what she was looking for. There was nothing on the walls to halt her eyes. Everyone she knew who came from somewhere else – all the people she’d shared rooms and mattresses with – brought something from home with them. Or if they didn’t, they recreated it. Sometimes it was a picture, or the colours of the clothing they were drawn to; or, like her, the food they chose to cook, or simply the ingredients they brought to it. There was nothing in this flat to place this man who’d been living there for five years. Yet he’d told her who she was so quickly and with such ease that she felt exposed.
‘Maybe you can stay, I mean, after the weekend? I’m not chasing you.’ He’d come out and seated himself at the table.
She picked up the plates and cutlery and brought them to the sink.
‘I’m not chasing you,’ he said again.
She did not turn around or answer him, aware now of his eyes on her and the dreadful leadenness that had crept up her back and settled under her shoulder blades.
She didn’t realise he’d left the chair until she felt his breath on her neck, his hands reaching down to untie the knot of her lesu. She closed her hand around the cloth, raising the fabric up to her throat. She turned to face him, her eyes on the curved neck of his tee shirt. Nedda, she muttered, Hapana! and slid her body sideways, her back against the counter.
She looked him in the eyes, because that had always worked, and said the same thing she’d told Shehu the first time he placed his hands on her that way: ‘I can lay with you if you want; but I can’t, I can’t take… have…’
His reaction was not like Shehu’s – the slow retreat in the eyes, the firming of the lips, the slight turning of the head away from her, the gradual easing back.
He followed her gaze to the laundry bag, still leaning against the wall beside the front door. He drew breath and swallowed, and she noticed for the first time, the very fine scars on the skin of his throat.
‘It’s fine,’ he said, lifting the plates from the sink and holding them under the running tap. ‘I promised myself to be a better man. You still stay, I won’t…’
‘I won’t stay,’ she said.
He shifted his head towards the window, staring through the flimsy curtains that misted the streetlights outside. ‘The damage is here?’ He pointed a finger at his head, ‘or…’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Sorry,’ he said and headed for his bedroom.
On the sofa, she drifted between wake and sleep. The spill of light from the street lamp outside, softened by the curtains, filled the room with a twilight glow. It reminded her of the time of day her mother called lak nyango – when the sun had just risen and had not begun to sting, casting long cool shadows across her father’s fields.
The cotton plants and maize were shivering with rain. A time for trapping the sweet white flying ngwen that emerged from the anthills after a heavy downpour.
She was running after her elder sister, Payaa, through the dripping cassava and tobacco, the air above them shimmering with silver-winged insects. All she was thinking of was the odii ngwen, the delicious ant-paste that their mother mixed with honey and gave them, along with roasted cassava.
Then, to the left of them, the maize shuddered and came alive. Eight men stepped into their path. She saw again Payaa turning back towards her, a scream twisting her sister’s mouth; then the fast flash of silver before her sister’s bo
dy hit the red earth.
They ordered her to sit down. She remembered the glint of their blades as the men threw them on the grass and began walking towards her; saw again their approaching shapes against the great Pamin Yai rock that stood above their homes. Remembered Payaa’s last amputated cry and the roar of Ayago river in the distance.
Nothing else.
She must have fallen asleep because the howling woke her up. She sprang off the sofa and stood in the gloom, her body leaning toward the noise of the thrashing bed. It could have been another woman, but the sound came only from him, guttural and gasping. She heard no pleasure in those sounds, just the thumping and the awful, gasping noise.
And words.
She pushed open the door, entered the room and switched on the bedside light. It did not wake him. He seemed to be in the grip of something awful. Whatever disturbance he was living through made a flailing, throbbing thing of him. Spittle and words torn from his mouth like bloodied cloth, and those two words: ‘Sit down…’
He was an Acholi man. The language of his nightmare was the same as hers.
If he’d really crossed Rwanda on foot from south Sudan, drunk the piss of others to survive the desert, escaped the AK47s and machetes of the children and men who burnt and killed so easily, his was an escape far different from hers.
A better man, she thought.
She lowered herself on the bed, felt his sweat-sheened body quieten under her hand, his eyelids fluttering like trapped moths. As he emerged from his dream, his face grew still, the lips settled once again over his bared teeth, until he became the watching, dark-eyed man who’d met her at the gate by the bus stop.
She watched him from under lidded eyes, asked, ‘What is your name? Your real name.’
He blinked at her, said nothing.
‘Nyingi anga?’ she insisted.
He was still heaving from the dream. She eased back, her hand still on his chest.
‘I don’t need to know your name. I know what you are: olum – one of those who left the bush. Mama Auma,’ she said. She felt his body stiffen under her hand. ‘You are worse when you call her name. Who was she?’
She didn’t need to ask; she already knew.
A small change had come over him. She felt it in the swelling of his chest.
‘I am not afraid of you,’ she said. ‘I died once; I have no more fear of dying.’
She pushed her weight off the bed and stood. ‘Mama Auma – you killed your mother too. Her cen is strong in you. All those people… they have followed you here. They are alive in you.’
She left him in the room, went to her bag, dragged out some clothes, stood in the living room and dressed.
She heard the rumble of the first trains at Ponders End; the bang and trundle of the bin trucks down the street. And birds.
Her hand was on the handle of the door when he came out – a shadow in the gloom of the living room. That voice of his – so lovely to listen to – reached across the room to her.
‘I was a child,’ he said. ‘Wan dano mere calo dano adana ni ya.’
He was reaching out to her now in the language of their nightmares. We are humans too. Maybe if he hadn’t camouflaged himself with lies at first – maybe…
‘I saw what a Joseph Kony child could do with a machete and a gun,’ she said.
She lifted the bag, stepped out the flat and pulled the door behind her.
BIRD
She went rigid with grief when the old man died. That was late last year – the rainy season, Mam said – although she couldn’t remember the rain. What she remembered was the last thing Sago said to her.
A pusson could be gone and still be here…
Some nights she thought she heard him tapping against the bedroom window. She’d rush outside, raise her head to the wind for the seawater smell of the old man, the drag of his naked feet on the dust.
Day time, she walked the narrow limestone roads of the island, not really searching – not after all these months – but to ease the heaviness in her stomach, the numbness in her limbs.
The last time she saw Sago was the foreday morning he came to her mother’s house, knuckling the wooden walls exactly where her head lay. She was out the door before he finished tapping, into a twilight so quiet, she could hear the breakers on the northern shore. There was still a moon – too bright to look up at without squinting.
‘You got your voice with you?’ he’d said.
She’d dipped into her pocket and held up the little lambi shell, pearly pink by day, now pale under the moon. The old man took it from her hand, made a show of inspecting it, then handed it back. He said the same thing every time. ‘Is de flute ov warriors. I talkin ‘bout Makandal and Nanny and that other woman who born right here.’
He’d brought the shell to her mother’s house the year before; narrowed his yellow-black eyes at the bandage around her head, then sat at her mother’s doormouth. He’d chipped away at the upper end of the shell until he’d made a hole. Then he pressed it against his lips, filled his cheeks, and made a sound that bounced around her head, filled up the world and scattered the sea gulls on the headland beyond the beach.
‘You got a voice now,’ he said, holding it out to her. ‘When school-chilren hit you with stone and tell you that you dumb-anchupid, blow dis in their face and deafen deir arse.’
The old Rastaman had taken her past the beach front, beyond the far edge of the mangroves and the heap of boulders, then along the limestone track to the Bay of Caves. Every now and then he stopped, lifted his face at the moon, drew a few quick deep breaths, then lowered his head and moved on.
He’d sat her on a stone above the black-sand beach and eased his body down beside her. He unrolled his locks and she followed his gaze, taking in the glint and roar of the ocean straight ahead, the water gnashing against the rocks below, the toss and hiss of the tall mint grass behind. Then she’d pulled her brows together and flicked two questioning wrists at him.
‘You want to know what we doing here?’ he grumbled. ‘Hold on, nuh! Impatient is yuh name?’
She made a plosive with her lips, jabbed a finger at his thick locks-fall of hair, then pointed at the tangle of mangrove on their right.
‘Haul your tail,’ he chuckled. A fit of coughing seized him and she watched his quaking shoulders as he struggled to steady himself.
He pushed out his arm towards the beach below. It was silverblack in the moonlight. ‘Keep watching,’ he said. ‘Give it a coupla minutes or mebbe longer.’ He folded his arms and sat back.
She kept watching, saw that gradually the sand was coming alive. Like it was breaking off little bits of itself, becoming a wave of scurrying darkness heading for the water.
She turned puzzled eyes to him.
‘Turtles,’ he said. ‘They bornin tonight.’
It seemed to her that the ocean itself had hushed as the creatures emerged, and the little waves scooped them up in quick rhythmic surges, bearing them away.
The sky was brightening when the sand became itself once more. Like all the times before, when Sago took her from her mother’s house, the magic of the new thing that he showed her swelled her throat and left her with a fluttering heart.
‘I ask you this, Miss Dee,’ he said. ‘How come they know that moonlight splittin ground up here and is time to born and go? Eh? How come they know is de ocean they got to head for and not all that darkness back there?’ He nudged a thumb at the land behind them. ‘Jah great. Not so?’
He’d pushed his body forward, gathered his hair and made a hive of it around his head. She could barely see his face.
‘How long since you make me your grandaddy?’
She straightened an arm and flicked three fingers at him.
‘Three years. Add a coupla months to that,’ he said. ‘And I been doin awright, not so?’
She fluttered the air with rapid hands, nodding as she did so.
‘I feel so too,’ he said.
They’d fallen silent, she peering
at the dark patches in the face of the cliff at the far end of the beach, the old man swaying quietly beside her. Another fit of coughing gripped him. He sighed and nudged her with an elbow.
‘Miss Dee,’ he said, ‘I been tryin to hold on long as I could for you. I can’t no more. Mih spirit beggin for release.’ He took her hand and rested it on the swelling under his ear. ‘Nine months gone, it was a lil button. Now it turn a cricket ball. Didn want to tell you before, but it cross my mind you have to know. It been spreadin all over me. I ain got long to go.’
She began making rapid shapes in the air with her hands.
‘You not makin no sense,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t catch one word you say.’
He eased his back against the stony bank.
She was rocking back and forth, arms hugged around herself.
He nudged her again.
‘Yunno, Miss Dee. Is like them likkle turtle; when time reach they got to go. Can’t do nothing about it. Difference is, a pusson could be gone, but they kin still be here.’ He’d placed a finger on her forehead. ‘Right here. Y’unnerstan?’
She kept her hands in her lap, her eyes on the spreading smear of daylight on the horizon.
Next day, jusso, Sago gone…
Jusso…
‘The girlchile have to cry,’ Miss Tiny said. ‘To get Sago off she chest, you have to make she cry.’
‘She never cry,’ her mother said.
‘Not even dry-cry?’
‘Nuh.’
‘I bet if yuh cut she arse she cry. If was me! I do anything to get dat rusty school-teacher-turn-mad-rastaman outta she head.’
‘Nuh!’
‘So! You goin let she run round dis dry-arse islan till she dead?’
‘Tiny, haul y’arse.’
A sizzling evening, with the whole of Kara Isle sheltering from the heat. Even the ground-lizards had raised their bellies off the earth.
The distressed bleating of her mother’s goats descended on them from the sandstone ridge above the bay. She was busy polishing her shell with one end of her dress.