Beneath the Darkening Sky (13 page)

Christmas is also in the yard, sitting on a bamboo chair, also looking at me. I don’t know which of them I’m more afraid of.

Next to Christmas is a small table with a thin plastic tray and two cups. The chair opposite has the Captain’s clothes hung over the arm. They could be a couple in any village.

‘Ah, you’re here,’ Christmas says.

I just stand at the fence gate, in between two of the Captain’s guards.

‘Come in, come in,’ he orders.

I take one step inside the yard and give a little bow to the Captain. ‘Sir,’ I say.

He grunts and puts his head back against the edge of the bath, closing his eyes. He and I both know how quickly the guards could turn and shoot me. I think about it so hard it feels like
it’s just about to happen.

‘Please,’ Christmas says, waving at the other chair. ‘Have a seat.’

‘Oh, it’s okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll just sit on the ground.’

‘No, you’re our guest, take a chair. I insist.’

‘I’m used to the ground,’ I say.

‘She insists,’ the Captain mutters, eyes still closed.

‘Sir,’ I say and move towards the chair. I’m relieved enough to smile when Christmas takes up the Captain’s clothes and moves them to her own chair. Grabbing the tray,
she goes into the house.

I’m sitting in a real chair for the first time since I left the village. It’s been so long that the chair is actually uncomfortable. It’s not been two days after all. I
can’t put a number on it, days or months or years, but I feel it. Long enough to forget and be forgotten. But somewhere my body remembers sitting in chairs.

My fingers rub the guitar strings, forcing their metal into the soft flesh below my calluses.

Christmas returns, bringing me a cup of water like I really am an honoured guest. I drink slowly, trying to look grateful, even though it’s the same boiled water I normally drink. Before
I’ve finished, the Captain pulls himself out of his bath and I lower my eyes while Christmas brings him a towel. He wraps the thin fabric around himself and walks into the house without
looking at me. I finish the water in one swallow and Christmas takes the cups and tray inside.

Alone in the yard, I watch the door – an old curtain tied off inside the house. I wait for instructions. Maybe they’ll come out and sit like at a concert. Maybe they want me to
follow them inside. With no further clues, I just sit. Better to be stupid than wrong, is one of Priest’s lessons. After a few minutes, the Captain pokes his head out.

‘Baboon,’ he says, his voice more normal than I’ve ever heard. ‘What are you waiting for? Play us something slow.’

Oh. I understand.

I play a song with English words, but I don’t know the words, so I just play the chords. I want to play well, so that the Captain isn’t angry, but not so well that they want me to
come back. I just play the one song, the same few chords. Priest’s voice sings in the back of my mind and I strum along. My mind is free to wander. I think about the other recruits in my
barracks, and whether underneath the way they act any of them feel like me. I think about what Priest has taught me.

After a while, sounds come out of the house, sounds I want to ignore, so I concentrate on putting new chords into the song, trying new ways to play it. I play for hours, until my fingers are
hard to move and the song has slowed right down, almost to stopping. It must be midnight. The world is silent. The barracks has shut down, the hospitality house closed. Silence from the
Captain’s house.

Suddenly there is movement at the Captain’s door and I jerk myself up to keep strumming. It’s Christmas. Dressed just in her T-shirt. I know she is something I shouldn’t be
seeing, and that I want to see. Priest would tell me to close my eyes, but I don’t want her to think I’ve fallen asleep and tell the Captain, so I look at the guitar, and my fingers
that feel like they belong to someone else.

When I look up again, to the light coming out of the hut, she’s standing in the doorway looking at me. I see her sleepy smile. ‘Go to bed now, Baboon.’ She waves at me.
‘Thank you.’ She goes inside and I stop playing. The image of her stays in my mind and I try to remind myself about the lion’s scent.

As I step out of the yard, I see one guard slumped in a sitting position. The other stays on guard on the far side of the house and he nods to me with an approving raise of his eyebrows. I go
towards Priest’s hut. Tonight I’ll sleep on a grass mat with my arms for pillows.

I go back to the Captain’s house every night. Priest looks at me silently with his sad eyes, and sends me off with a prayer. I have to arrive at precisely ten or I will
be beaten. This is the first time I’ve ever thought about the exact time, or had to look at clocks. From that day on, as soon as the sun goes down, I ask everyone who has a clock what the
time is.

One night I’m five minutes late. The Captain calls Parasite out to whip me. Forty lashes across my backside. It’s really eighty, though, as one lash hits both sides. I’m never
late again after that.

I play the songs I know, and some I make up. Sometimes Christmas comes to talk with me after the Captain has fallen asleep. We talk about music and our lives before this place. I realise both of
us are captives. I must remember I am still the gazelle.

Silence covers the camp like a blanket of darkness.

People gather in small bunches in the entrances to their huts, around small cooking fires and under shade trees. Only the sound of birds can be heard. Twenty real soldiers went on a mission
yesterday but only five came back, and one has an arm missing. The whole camp mourns for the loss. Even the Captain cried when he heard the news. When Priest saw him crying, he fired his gun into
the sky and put his ammo belt on. ‘Our brothers need us,’ he tells me, and then leaves.

Soldiers grab their guns and follow him, chanting revolution songs. Even the half-men, the soldiers who have survived their wounds but are handless or one-legged and can’t fight any more,
are shouting about the need for revenge.

The Captain removes his cap. He follows the departing soldiers with his eyes, without saying a word. After they have gone, he gets up and goes into his hut.

Us new recruits don’t have guns. We don’t go on real missions. We sit under the trees and talk about the real fighting. Some recruits smile like babies when they imagine a day they
will get their real guns. I don’t understand anything about missions. Priest told me that in a raid it’s all about aim, fire, kill, but I don’t want to understand anything about
missions. I don’t want to remember.

I look around at the recruits. Some of them, now, are younger than me. I wonder whether they’ve stopped thinking of their villages yet. I wonder whether they’re thinking of other
times they have sat with a group of boys in the afternoon, some of them playing in the mud. I wonder whether they remember the sounds.

But I don’t ask them. I know what would happen if the Captain found out. He would be ashamed of us. We must show the government that we are fierce and more brutal than they are. So our
stories must be about a village getting burnt, a village getting looted, and villagers getting raped.

With so many of the soldiers away, I’m on duty as a lookout with two new recruits. We walk in the jungle and watch out for enemy spies. If we found them we’d run
for help – we still only have our dummy guns, not real ones.

The three of us are the fastest runners in the camp. But we cannot run faster than bullets. I don’t know why they send us out with no guns but we are not allowed to ask. We only say,
‘Yes sir.’

So we walk in the dark jungle. As we walk, all I hear are scary noises.

Even among the trees the sun is hot and there’s no water. We walk for ages before we come to a little stream in the bushes. The stream isn’t really a stream. It’s more like a
hole in the ground. We use a small broken bowl to scoop the water into our canteen and then wait for the hole to fill up again. It takes forever. I hear birds chirp and monkeys hoot. Clouds of
pure-white butterflies flutter through the damp air. I keep my eyes on the lookout in the underbrush. I like coming to the jungle when I’m with Priest because he has a real gun.

After we have drunk our fill, we sit. I am tired from the hot day, and from the late nights playing to the Captain and Christmas. I just want to rest for a while.

I hear soft cracking sounds. I open one eye but see nothing. Maybe it’s a bird. I go back to sleep. Before I realise that’s what I’m doing – sleeping – someone
kicks me in the side and another throws something at me. It feels like a rock, it slashes my calf, it must be a machete. I scream and roll on the ground. I try to look up but the kicks and beatings
come from everywhere.

Have we been captured by the enemy?

‘Please let me go!’ I yell.

The other two boys are getting beaten too. I can hear them cry and yell. I see boots, many boots caked in red mud, marching towards me, circling me, attacking me. I have no strength left. I
can’t find my voice. I can’t get up. I can’t fight back. I’m on fire, I’m burning.

‘God help me!’ I cry.

The beating stops. Maybe Priest is right, maybe God has heard my prayers.

‘Yeah, God has heard your prayers,’ a voice says.

I know that voice. I roll over on my back and open my eyes.

Akot and the Mobile Force stand up high and proud. He carries the longest stick. They giggle and smile at me and my two comrades. My own brother has beaten me while I lay asleep.

‘Sleeping on duty?’ he asks in a cold voice. ‘Or were you guys trying to run away?’

‘Definitely running away, this is not even the side they were supposed to guard,’ answers one of the Mobile Force.

‘You guys are dead,’ Akot says.

My heart aches.

‘Akot, you’re my brother,’ I yell. My voice is dry and wants to cry. The beating hurt, but knowing it was from my brother hurts even more.

‘The revolution doesn’t need a weak brother.’ Akot’s voice is calm. He looks like he might be on some of the drugs.

But really I know Akot has gone mad. I try to search his eyes, to find that brother I have lost, but he waves to his soldiers. They tie our hands and bring us back to the camp.

The Captain stands in the middle of the yard, with all of his recruits in a circle around him.

‘This is an army,’ the Captain says. He wants everyone to hear. Everything he says, he yells. ‘Do you know what they call people who run away from the army? They call them
deserters. Those who sleep on duty are deserters too. And do you know what you do with a deserter?’

Soldiers cheer and chant revolution songs. I close my eyes. Soldiers kill when they sing those songs.

I hear a chink sound and see the two other boys’ eyes bloom fear, their cheeks ripple with short, quick breaths. Akot kicks one boy’s back, pushing him into the dust. The boy weeps.
I don’t think I can cry any more. I only wish Mama was here so that I can tell her what Akot is doing.

Schop!
The Captain’s machete stabs straight into the boy’s arm.
‘Yiaaaaaah!’
the boy screams.

‘You new recruits don’t understand the great opportunity you have!’ the Captain yells.

The other boy has been kicked over too, and claws at the dirt in his fear.

‘You don’t understand that we are offering you the greatest freedom anyone in our country has! We have liberated you from the oppression of the evil government that makes all our
lives so horrible.’

Blood is pouring out of the boy’s arm into the sand. I try to move away a little.

Akot bends down and lifts up the boy’s head. He slides a small knife into his mouth and then presses it against the inside of his cheek. More tears, more crying. The boy is trying to beg.
Flick. With one turn of his wrist, Akot pulls the knife straight through the boy’s cheek. A new wail bubbles out of his mouth as it fills with blood.

I close my eyes. But I can’t shut everything out, because it’s my brother who’s doing this. I’m part of it. I hate him. I hate calling him my brother.

I look again and see the Captain’s boot holding down the boy’s arm. A machete comes down. Fingers. The machete chops his other hand. Above the noise of the boy’s screams and
sobs, the Captain continues yelling. ‘My brother soldiers have been dying, to bring you this freedom. And these recruits try to desert us!’

A forest of legs moves in between me and the boy. I hear slicing and screaming and wet sounds. Through the small spaces of their legs, I see blood fly up. Akot and the Captain have their small
knives out and are slicing. Short and fast strokes. A soldier throws something that hits the boy in the head. I stare at it until I realise that it’s the boy’s foot. He’s stopped
screaming.

The other boy cries and wails, calling for his mother. Will Akot kill me next?

When the forest of legs moves, I don’t recognise what they leave behind. The soldiers are around the other boy now. He’s crying so hard he heaves without sound. Akot stands up
straight and cranes his head to look at me. His eyes are blood-red and cold.

‘Hollow the tree,’ the Captain orders. The soldiers laugh.

One soldier grabs the boy’s feet and another gets his arms. They pull him like they’re trying to make him taller, then they lift him off the ground. Other soldiers jump in, taking
one leg, one arm, and they pull. The boy is trying to cry. I can see his face and it’s all twisted. A fifth soldier comes along and rips the boy’s shirt off. He pulls the machete from
his belt and runs a hand along the boy’s side.

I try to shut my eyes again, but they won’t stay closed. They burn. I can still taste blood in my mouth. The soldier puts the machete’s edge to the boy’s side and slowly
presses. The boy gives a sharp cry and goes silent. Blood is spilling out of the wound like tree sap. The soldier drags the blade along the ribs and then sinks it in where the ribs end. A horrible
half-scream escapes from the boy then turns into a bubbling sound. One fast move of the machete and the boy’s stomach opens and his guts fall out, like vomit into the dirt. Thick and red and
strange colours, like they’re not from inside at all.