Afterwards (22 page)

– That only added to the sense of unreality. Sitting with stewardesses and businessmen, hitching flights over to Lake Victoria or up to Aden if we had weekend rest. We’d walk round the rim of the volcano there, and swim out at the NAAFI facility at Steamer Point. Sleep on the veranda at Khormaksar if the camp was full. I enjoyed that, the warm nights.

Joseph had worked his way past the stairs, past the old man, and he had to turn his back to him now, to sand the long edge of the hallway, but David didn’t seem to mind.

– You have to understand this was hugely exciting. To be twenty-three and flying across Africa to go swimming. At a time when few people took planes anywhere, long before package holidays and so on. I had to fly down to Mombasa once, took us past Kilimanjaro on the return leg. One of the most magnificent things I’ll ever see. I knew that too, while it was happening. That’s just what it felt like. The most enormous privilege.

He was quiet then, but it wasn’t like he was waiting. Joseph didn’t think he had to do or say anything: remembered listening to the old man in the summer, how he paused like that on and off while he was talking, but always picked up again if you let him. Joseph finished sanding, and started brushing everything free of dust, but then the quiet went on too long and he had to stop, because it had him unnerved.

David wasn’t facing him when he looked up. Still sitting at the bottom of the stairs, eyes still fixed on a point somewhere beyond the open door of the living room. He said:

– For years afterwards, when I thought about Kenya it was to remember falling in love. The Sumners’ house and garden. Being ill too, that weakness, the long recovery, but that was all bound up with Isobel anyway.

He shifted a little, but carried on with his careful explanation.

– All of what I’ve just described sounds so harmless, doesn’t it? The Mau Mau shot a Kikuyu chief in the mouth. That’s what prompted the Emergency. They hijacked his car and murdered him. He was a government official, of course, and the Mau Mau despised them. Men in the Home Guard, Africans who worked for the state, ‘Tai Tai’, that’s what they called them, because of their European dress. They hacked a Kikuyu politician to death with pangas, on the marketplace out in the African quarter, because he was a moderate, he spoke out against them. One farmer, a white man this time, his wife and young son, they were butchered like
that, by their own workers. Cut the legs off another farmer’s herd. Didn’t kill them outright, you see, left that for the farmer to do. Not only financially ruined, but he had to finish off his own livestock too. Doubly cruel.

He stopped a moment, then he nodded.

– I never saw any of that. I didn’t see what our forces did on the ground either, the army. Or the Kenyan police. Any of the detention camps. Thousands passed through them. Thousands died. I know many were hanged. Many more were beaten, starved. Women and non-combatants among them. But I’ve only read accounts.

The old man frowned.

– Impossible to reconcile. Do you see? My memories with what I learnt later. I’ve tried, but what I see are mountains and forests and lakes, and the woman I went on to marry. Strange to say it: we were there to combat an insurgency, but most of the time it felt like being on an exercise, bombing on a vast practice range, if I’m honest. Even when we flew low for the strafing, the trees were so dense, we really couldn’t see much, just the canopy. The ground, and whatever our bombs finally hit, our bullets, that was somewhere much further below.

He blinked, kept looking straight ahead, but Joseph thought he was aware of being watched.

– Seems like nothing when you compare it with Hiroshima, with napalm in Vietnam, the firestorms in Dresden. And I’ve read enough afterwards to know that we didn’t do much damage. Not by military estimations.

We didn’t have enough bombs to do the job properly, for one thing, and those we had were often old. A mix of instantaneous and long-delay fuses, they were unreliable, leaky, many failed to explode. Most people agree, in fact, that we were responsible for very few enemy deaths. The air contribution was mainly in supply. Keeping the ground forces serviced with food, munitions. Some go so far as to say it was a costly waste of time us being there at all, the bombers.

David was silent a moment, his eyes narrowed.

– But I wonder whether I repeat these things to console myself. I’ve read about monkeys, their fur scorched, down to the flesh. Craters, thirty feet deep, trees splintered and torn up by the roots. Elephant and rhino with holes ripped in their ears, deep gashes in their flanks. I remember a rumour while we were there, something in the region of two hundred Mau Mau dead or wounded after one series of raids. That figure was discredited. Still, I can’t believe we never hit a human being. In twenty months of air operations, that would seem deluded.

The old man’s voice was low, controlled.

– The Mau Mau used the terrain to their advantage, they had supply lines coming in from the Kikuyu reserves, a great deal of support from their people, gave our ground forces a great deal of trouble. But I’d still have to describe it as an unequal battle. They had no flak, no anti-aircraft defenses, unless you count the forest. I don’t. I can’t.

A small movement, his head, or maybe just his eyes. Quick, but Joseph had seen it: as if David had wanted
to look over at him, but thought better of it again. He went on:

– I know what kind of damage the bombs we used can do, when they explode.

Another short pause.

– If they don’t kill, they can deafen and blind and burn, and plenty would have detonated, after all, it stands to reason.

The old man passed a hand across his face: an involuntary gesture.

– What should I say about all this? I have never known what it is that I should say.

He broke off, adjusted his hands on his lap, but when he started speaking again, there was no change in his voice.

– My son-in-law tells me it was brutal. How can I deny that? I’ve heard myself talking, in this house all these years. I can hear how brutal it sounds.

The old man stayed where he was, but Joseph knew he’d finished. Pot of undercoat by his feet, he opened it, and stirred the paint. Calm and deliberate, only that wasn’t how he felt. There were two more pots over by the door, but he couldn’t see the brushes from where he was sitting. Brought them in from the van this morning, must still be at the other end of the hall, where he’d started. He’d have to walk past the old man to get them, but then he’d be the first to move, disturb the quiet in the hallway, so he waited.

Minutes had gone by already. David was still sitting on the stairs, hands folded in his lap, shoulders curled around him. He looked small and old and it made Joseph angry.

– Is that you done now?

It came out cold, and the old man looked up at him.

– Because I’ll get on with my work if you are.

His pale eyes were hurt behind his glasses. Joseph hadn’t come here to be cruel to him, but it was like he couldn’t stop himself. It turned his stomach. He hadn’t been shouting, but his voice was loud, and the old man was only a few feet away from him. David blinked, but he didn’t say anything, just sat there watching him. Looking at Joseph, like he was thinking. He used to talk about it with his wife, that’s what the old man had told him. Joseph pictured them both, sitting here in these rooms, years and years of talking and trying to work it out. Couldn’t see what it amounted to.

– You feel bad about what you’ve done. My heart bleeds. I believe you. So you can let me get on.

The brushes were in the porch, but Joseph still couldn’t move. Not with those eyes watching him like that. All upset and waiting, like they were expecting something from him.

After what felt like a long time, the old man stood up and walked past him: into the kitchen first and then out into his garden.

Joseph saw it happen, even before he’d started. Paint hurled across walls and banisters. Undercoat, heavy and stinking. Thick, oily mess of it under his shoes, slipping on the dustsheets. The floor turned slick and grey and he was already looking for the next tin to throw. Something else, anything to create more damage, and wherever he moved Joseph left marks: footprints, palms and fingers coated, paint oozing up his arms. Last pot he got through a window, smashed it. The top of the door all spikes of glass. Dripping white, he couldn’t see through any of it now except the hole: above head height and showing autumn sky.

The old man must have heard it all but he never came back. Joseph stood at the door with the shock of what he’d done. Cold, outside air filling the hallway. Paint flung across the floor and walls and the windows and seeping into the carpet.

Joseph tried writing lists. While he was still in the army, and again after. To get things down on paper. Once they were there, he could maybe try to organise them later.

The dead man: that was always the first thing, even though it was one of the last things to happen. He always had to write that down, get it out of the way and then on with the rest of it, split under different headings.

What he could hear. The car engines, both of them running. The Escort ticking over and then mis-timing, like it’s going to give out any second, not enough revs to keep it going. The kids in the back seat, crying, sounded more like little dogs than children. Rain too. On the road, in puddles, rattling on the car bonnets. Had been on and off all morning. Joseph remembered it coming down his neck, and that the fronts of his thighs were cold and sodden. What else? Breathing: his own, coming fast, caught under his helmet, and then there was the shouting. Blokes’ voices: loud, and close. Sometimes Joseph thought his must have been one of them, because his throat was sore with it after, only he didn’t remember what he’d been yelling.

What he could feel. Wet and sick. Rain got into his boots. Maybe it was sweat. Helmet too heavy to be holding his head up. Loose guts below, tight feeling in his throat like a cord pulled and knotted.

What he could see. Car headlights up on the verge, grey-green branches and dark sky behind. Like night coming except it was afternoon. Joseph remembered torches too. Middle of the day but dark enough to need them on the checkpoint, with red cones pulled on top while they were stopping the cars. More torches after the man was down, but those lights were white, jumping circles, three or maybe four of them, moving like they were running, and then they were all over and under the Astra, checking. Shining in through the windscreen at the other man, the passenger, still in there, all white face and terrified, squinting in the torch beams.

The exhaust pipe: Joseph could see the fumes coming out of it, red in the tail lights, and white too, so the car must have been jammed in reverse. Not moving, though, just the engine running. But there were two cars, so which one was it? Back windscreen, steamed up, small faces behind it, smudging, small heads moving. That went with the small dogs sound on the other list, but Joseph stopped himself there, because he was meant to be just writing things, not trying to tie them together.

He started finding things he’d written that he didn’t remember. Tore up his lists or burnt them. They came out different every time he tried and so he stopped trusting the pieces after a while, and then his ability to slot them together.
Maybe you twist things to suit. I think I do. Or you turn things against you. Might do that too
.

The man was older than Joseph when he shot him. Not much, a year or two maybe, still early twenties. Joseph got older than him every year now, and he hated the
way his head did that: searched out that detail and held it up to hurt him.

He panicked just after it happened. Stood up from the road thinking he’d shot someone’s dad. Kids in the back, woman in the front, and he was thinking:
what fucking car did the man get out of?
Escort? He never saw. Kids crying, making that small dog noise and maybe that’s why.
That’s their dad
. Looking at the man, curled up on the road with his jeans on.
That woman in the front seat, she’s his wife
.

Joseph was lying on the road too, after it happened, between the cars. But he couldn’t remember how he got down there. On his back, so maybe the rifle had kicked him. But his shoulder didn’t hurt, no bruise above his eye from the sight, and there would have been if he’d fired that badly. He must have been on the ground a while because the backs of his legs were soaked, and he could remember standing up too, because Jarvis helped him, but the rest of it had just gone, in all the years it hadn’t come up again.
Shot through with holes, everything.

How far away was he when I shot him?
Five metres. Ten. Fifteen. Couldn’t have been far because Joseph had detail: the man’s jacket was undone, his beard was a real one not just unshaven, the Astra had rust spots all along the driver’s-side panel, next to where the man was standing. The car door was open and he was talking to the Lieutenant, and the Lieutenant was writing when he should have been looking.

But it wasn’t always that way: other times, Joseph saw all of it at once, the way he could never have really, because he was only over by the Escort and that was much too close. The man standing at a distance, the two cars, the full width of the road, and from this angle, Joseph could see who the man was looking at too: Townsend. Up on the verge. Knocking on the window, on the passenger’s side, but the passenger wasn’t moving, only the man standing in the road, and he was reaching behind him. That was before Joseph shot him, but how long? He couldn’t say now.

Years ago. But Joseph didn’t think time had much to do with it. His memory was already slow to respond the morning after. Soon as he woke he felt it, there was something about yesterday. But then there were long seconds in bed before he could say what was wrong, and what it had to do with him.

A week after it happened, Joseph was sent to see the chaplain. They sat in an office together and talked about thou shalt not kill and why God had made that commandment. The chaplain said if it was done to protect others, He might not look at it unkindly. At the time Joseph thanked him, but it never gave him much comfort. Too convenient.
Rules you can bend give you nothing to lean on.