The Ghosts of Eden Page 9

  ‘Oh! We didn’t expect . . .’ Stanley said.

  Kabutiiti shook his hand. ‘We decided to drive here for the celebrations when we heard that you were both performing in the parade.’ He congratulated them on their playing. A smiling city-girl in a shimmering red blouse, black skirt and glassy high-heeled shoes stood by his side. She wore a yellow headband. Stanley waited to be introduced.

  ‘Do you not recognise me?’ she asked.

  Stanley was sure he would have remembered such a pretty girl, but for a moment his mind was blank.

  ‘You’re Felice,’ Zachye said, pulling down a fold of shirt that had ridden up above his drum. ‘Forgive us,’ he added, ‘we’re just herdsmen.’

  Stanley winced with embarrassment. Here was the daughter of the man who had paid for their education, and they had met her before, although over four years ago. How could he have failed to remember her? Had she changed so much? Yes, he decided, she had. All the men passing by were glancing at her.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s a long time. I was the girl with the book. I think I was arrogant, so let me apologise for that and then it’s quits.’ She smiled at them, relaxed. They grinned back, intimidated.

  Kabutiiti introduced his other friends: Wilberforce, going to Makerere University to study law; Godfrey, starting soon with Barclays Bank in Kampala; Joseph, due to start training as an accounts assistant with East African Airways.

  ‘We’re staying in the Pelican Inn, up the hill. Can you come for drinks? You can see the lake from there. We can give you a lift back home in my father’s car if you wish.’

  Kabutitii’s friends nodded cheerily in agreement. Stanley looked at his brother. It should be possible.

  ‘We’ve got to go back in our bus,’ Zachye said. He looked towards the street as if to show that they might already be late.

  ‘Another time then,’ Kabutiiti said.

  They walked on together, Kabutiiti beside Zachye asking after the family, Stanley noticing how Zachye was a little distant in his replies. Felice came up beside Stanley, saying that her father had told her how well he was doing, and that she hoped they would see him in the capital some time. Perhaps he would get a place at the university. She hoped to go there herself; most girls from her school did. She was now at a boarding school, a school originally set up for the sons of chiefs. Had God not blessed her? She talked to him as if he was a modern boy, someone who belonged to her group, no longer a herd boy who could not read. He started to feel at ease and a little excited. If he went to the capital he would have companions such as Felice and her friends. The future blossomed bright – in yellow, shimmering red and jet black.

  They said goodbye on the main street, Zachye remaining reserved; more than that, Stanley thought: shifty. They walked on in silence.

  The shops were shut for the national holiday and everyone was on the road: Indian shopkeepers, with and without turbans, and their families, the men in conversation, strolling with their hands clasped behind their backs, the women in glowing saris; dapper young African men in pressed trousers and collared shirts, talking loudly in groups with their well-shoed girlfriends from the offices on the hill above town; large men displaying brightly patterned kitengi shirts; village people, bare-footed but in newly washed shorts, woollens and wraps, wandering about, examining the faces of the modern Ugandans to understand what they themselves must become. Down the centre of the street bunting spanned the lampposts. High on each lamppost was a picture of the Prime Minister’s benign and young-looking face. Prime Minister Obote also looked down from above the doors of the Indian dukas; no one wanted to be seen to be anything but loyal Ugandans. Above one shop Stanley could see fresh paint on the sign. ‘Patel, Patel and Patel’ was still there, but he could just make out ‘(All British Subjects)’ through the paint.

  They walked on past a billboard advertising ‘The completely new Anglia – the Belle of the Ball’. The slogan puzzled Stanley, but he noticed that the car was sunshine yellow, like the strip in their new flag. They passed the Caltex petrol station, its uniformed attendants ready for service with their window-cleaning rubbers and flimsy carbon-paper receipt books. Beyond the road that branched off down to the lake the town became less certain of its order. The white-painted kerbstones were gone and in place of the smooth water run-offs down the side of the road the tar ended like a broken biscuit. Erosion gullies ran between bicycle repair sheds, kiosks and small bars with glassless windows and rough wood doors. The buildings bore the names of Ugandan proprietors written on the peeling plaster in uncertain capitals, as if their tenure was provisional. The lampposts did not extend this far, and as the outskirts of the town were reached magnificent eucalyptus trees gave way to common black wattle. Just before the bus park the tar gave out and the roadside trees became grey from a dirty coating of exhaust soot and road dust. The town was frayed at the margins, but Stanley was confident the fine weave of its centre would extend rapidly outwards now that Independence Day had come. One day there would be a tar road to their kraal, so that Zachye could drive right up to the entrance in his Anglia. Stanley blinked hard, cutting the dream. How could Zachye ever have such things? He would never get his school certificate. Stanley resolved again to help him if he could. If Zachye would let him.

  At the bus park soldiers were climbing into the back of an army truck. The boys looked on admiringly, for here was the real thing. Boys’ Brigade now seemed like a child’s game.

  Zachye surprised Stanley by saying to him, ‘They have big bands in the army.’

  The truck drove off and the children cheered at the soldiers sitting facing each other in the back. But the soldiers did not cheer back. Stanley thought it was because of their importance in defending the new nation. It must have weighed heavily upon them.

  A group of boys about Zachye’s age, but in dirty school uniforms holed at the shoulders, hung around a kiosk signed G.O.B. Bazanyamaso High Life Beverages. Others stood leaning against a billboard, which read ‘Together we’ll always stand’, from a line in the National Anthem.

  An Indian boy, about their age, walked purposefully past them, carrying a tin of cooking oil. One of the boys leaning against the kiosk, with one knee bent and his foot on the wall, shouted, ‘Hey, half-boy. Go back to India.’ A pied crow investigated a discarded tin near the kiosk. ‘And take your scavenging Indian crows with you.’

  Another boy tapped his forehead in the place where the Hindu women painted their red bindi, and shouted, ‘Bullet hole.’

  The Indian boy did not turn his head, but he quickened his pace. Stanley was about to pass comment on their rudeness on this of all days (were there not two members of parliament named Patel?), but he saw Zachye had put his hands in his pockets and, checking to see that Mr Nyaishokye was looking the other way, was drifting towards the boys. As he did so he shed his military bearing and slumped into a rolling walk, his limbs lolling at his side. Stanley saw Zachye speak to the boys and take the offered draw on a cigarette. He seemed to know them. A barefooted girl in a soiled dress came from behind the kiosk and greeted Zachye in a less than formal manner, offering an outstretched arm to him, which he slapped. Stanley was unsure whether this was a gesture of affection or dismissal.

  On the way back to their school in the bus Stanley tried to engage Zachye in conversation. ‘Do those boys have work?’

  ‘Of course not. They’re half-educated. They didn’t get their school certificate. What work can they get in town?’

  ‘But they’re looking for work?’

  ‘What for? There is no work.’

  ‘But they try – surely?’

  ‘What does it matter? They’ll never own their own cars, or wear a black suit to pick up the girls from the banks and the offices.’

  Zachye was looking away out of the window. Stanley thought of Felice: she was surely a top office girl. ‘We’ll both get our certificates,’ he said, but his voice trailed off. Even he could not make himself believe it any more.

  Zachye shoved him in the ribs wi
th his elbow, but said in a forgiving tone, ‘Little brother, you don’t have to look after me. Did I not look after you at one time?’

  ‘I remember,’ Stanley said in a whisper.

  Zachye closed his eyes as if to go to sleep, but Stanley watched the terraced fields rising away above the red earth of the roadside cuttings.

  Then Zachye spoke suddenly, without opening his eyes. ‘Felice! I’ll tell you something. One day she’ll be mine. You’ll see.’

  Stanley looked at Zachye, astonished. Then he remembered how, those years ago, Zachye had been right when he told him that he would find a way to persuade his father to send him to school. In non-academic ventures Zachye always found a way. But now Stanley baulked at the thought of Zachye winning Felice. The match could hardly be less likely. With a heavy heart he felt that his brother would not be good enough for her. There was something else as well: Felice was three years older than him, and he held little hope of finding her love, but it would be painful indeed to imagine her and Zachye becoming intimate instead.

  The bus slowed to pass a dead cow on the side of the road, a casualty of a vehicle – perhaps the army truck.

  Rusoro Town: 1957

  Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,

  And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head.

  Keats, ‘To Hope’

  One

  Michael, aged seven, knelt beside his bed in boarding school at lights out, on a prayer mat made by himself in handwork. His end of term report was to note that he was four foot two and three-eighths of an inch, and three stone nine at the start of term; and four foot two and three-quarters, and three stone nine and three ounces at the end. ‘Apart from a head cold Michael has been well, although he developed a marked and frequent batting of his left eyelid in the last week of term. I suspect he was worrying about something.’

  Face buried in the blanket, teddy-like in its comforting powers where it curved taut over the edge of the mattress, Michael said some things to God. He strained to hear God say something back. When he had become quiet and had stopped thinking about Rupert Bear and stilts he could feel God noticing him – just a little: a quick pat on his head and letting him know that mostly he was pleased with him. He told God that he was ‘cumbered with a load of care’ since Thursday so, as the song said he should, he was taking it ‘to the Lord in prayer’. It was up to God now to do something.

  Michael found it difficult to concentrate on his prayers because Lewis was whispering the Apostles Creed loudly from a little red book. He always missed out the ‘catholic’ in ‘we believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church’. ‘That’s because we’re not Catholics,’ he had told Michael when he asked.

  Simon also knelt beside his bed, but he was reading Tintin, Destination Moon. Michael felt a little sad for Simon, that he had not let Jesus into his heart, but he also felt a little sad for himself that he was not reading Tintin. Simon did not have to pray because his parents had told the aunties not to make him. Michael thanked God that his parents were normal, and not funny-odd, like Simon’s. He was pleased that Simon learnt memory verses like everyone else because Jesus might say something to him one day in a verse.

  Prayers ended, Michael could see a small bump of boy in each bed. Lumpy shadows moved across the walls as Auntie Cynthia took the paraffin lamp out of the room. He lay on his back, pillow puffed around his ears, looking through a gap in the curtains at the night sky beyond the eaves. Bats momentarily extinguished a star here, and a star there, as they swooped out from their roosts in the roof. Michael had once listened so hard that he thought he heard one squeak, but Lewis said, ‘My dad says that’s impossible.’ Lewis’s father knew a lot. He flew a Douglas DC3 Dakota for East African Airways and had flown the Queen around when she came to visit Uganda.

  Michael heard a whirring sound and wondered where the moths went when Auntie Cynthia took away the light. He heard Simon get out of bed and then there was a tinkle sound. That was the sound when they aimed straight: it made a plinking at the end. When Simon pushed the potty back under the bed there was a scraping noise on the concrete floor. Simon had once drank his potty for a dare; he drank it all up and put his potty on his head. He said he could easily do it again but he didn’t. Michael didn’t drink his because he knew Jesus wouldn’t be pleased with him.

  When he closed his eyes he saw himself running for the school lawns as he had that morning when they had swarmed out of Nature Study. Rainbows under the sprinklers on the spongy grass made hoops of colour to dive through before cartwheeling down and down towards the end of the lawn where the grass slipped under the purple, thin-as-crêpe-paper, surface of the lake. The volcano on the opposite shore rose up like a giant green papier mâché cone. Fishing canoes made sparkling paths of light as they crossed between the islands.

  Auntie Cynthia, the matron, was on play duty. ‘Children, look at the swallows!’ Michael looked up and felt dizzy from their dipping and looping. ‘To see how God in all his creatures works!’

  Auntie Cynthia was always saying things like that, from a poet called Wordsworth. Michael did not like Wordsworth – his name was stuffy and his poetry books had lots of tiny words all bunched up together. But on Sunday afternoons Auntie Cynthia made them sit on their grass mats under the branches of the giant pepper trees on the upper lawns, so she could read Wordsworth to them. She liked him, she said, because he loved God’s creation: flowers, birds, clouds, every pretty thing. Michael liked the birds because they zoomed. That they were made by God and cared for by God was as obvious as his mother’s love, and therefore just as embarrassing to talk about.

  It must be fun to be a bird and zoom. His friend, Simon, had put his arms back and ran down the lawn weaving from side to side. They all followed like a flock startled from a tree, swooping down, swerving and twisting through each other. When Michael turned at the bottom of the lawn and looked back at Auntie Cynthia she was smiling at them, her arms folded beneath her bosom as if she was supporting two water balloons. Her cotton dress was floaty and colourful in the morning light.

  In his bed Michael looked out at the stars again. Auntie Cynthia is too old to zoom, he thought, but she might float. He imagined her drifting over the pepper trees and then out over the lake. He closed his eyes and then opened them wide again. He was trying to think about funny things, because if he thought about what might happen tomorrow he would not be able to go to sleep. This must be the ‘needless pain we bear’ that they sang about in the chapel. He watched Auntie Cynthia float about as the swallows swerved around her. She was holding onto the string of a balloon now, like Winnie the Pooh. She was quite happy.

  When Michael woke the house martins were shooting past the window. Auntie Cynthia said they came from England so as not to freeze in the winter. When they got cards from England at Christmas they gave them to the Africans as they especially liked cards with snow on. His parents said that he had been to England once, but he couldn’t remember being there. In England they had stairs in their houses and one day he would like to try climbing them.

  Michael heard the gong being struck and wondered why he had woken before it had sounded. Out of the corner of his eye, through the window, he saw Auntie Cynthia fall to the ground – she didn’t need to be floating up there any more. She just bounced once on her water balloons and then sat on a swing reading poetry. Then he remembered what today was and why he should worry. He sat up straight, scrunched his face up so hard that only the tip of his nose was uncreased, and prayed a memory verse: ‘Behold, O Lord; for I am in distress: my bowels are troubled.’ He was happy that there was a verse for everything.

  On his way to breakfast Michael’s worry started to make a lump in his stomach. He stopped outside the kitchen door and looked in. The cooks were folding the porridge with enormous wooden spoons held in their chocolatey hands. Some of the pots were popping and hissing, and he smelt simmering milk. It reminded him of home and he felt the back of his nose get ready to cry. When Freda, the most buxom cook, saw him sh
e wagged a finger at him, playfully telling him off, her palms shockingly pink: she was always washing her hands with the long green bars of Sunlight soap that sat on the sunny window ledge. He was not allowed to disturb the cooks. There were rules and Auntie Cynthia said they were there for a reason, but he couldn’t think of any important reason for this one and auntie rules were not as important as God rules. Luckily God rules were very easy to keep, like not murdering people and not coveting your neighbour’s wife. He would have to ask his father what that meant, but he was sure he would never do it and never want to do it.

  He lingered to catch Freda’s attention. They chatted together by making faces, having decided that the rules were only for talking. She cocked her head to one side and he answered by chomping his mouth while he gazed longingly at the pots of porridge. She rolled her eyes around and around as if she was rubbing her stomach. He made a face as if he was going to cry. Freda looked terribly concerned and tilted her head again. He screwed up his face and strained. He could discuss anything with her. She nodded wisely, picked up a spoon and then tiptoed to a cupboard. The other cooks made laughing faces. She had to bend over to reach into the cupboard and her head and shoulders were gone a long time, although her bottom stayed patiently outside, wobbling a little. She shuffled back, turned around and then came towards him with two large prunes balanced on the spoon. She would do well in sports day. He opened his mouth and in popped the prunes. She tapped him lightly on the cheek, as if to say ‘swallow those quickly and go’.

  Michael was glad that he could tell Freda anything – it was like having a mother at school. The aunties were kind but they had to be strict: they had to be a teacher or a matron or a headmistress and were too busy to be a mother. He grinned at Freda and ran off down the corridor to skid on the polished floor, past the big picture of Jacob wrestling with an angel by a wild shadowy tree.