Beneath the Darkening Sky (15 page)

I turn away from the dim swaying of the spoiled wives and watch the hospitality girls dance. I watch them for a long time.

When someone grabs my arm and pulls me towards the stage, where the crowd is thinner, I scream. Of course, no one notices, everyone is screaming or shouting or singing words made up for
Priest’s song. Who has grabbed me? I look down and stop moving. It is Christmas. I yank my arm away.

‘Hey,’ she says, looking a little hurt. ‘I just want to dance.’

‘I can’t dance.’ Which had not been true ten minutes ago, but is true now, with fear crowding out every other thought.

‘Are you kidding?’ she says, hands on hips. ‘You play the guitar!’

‘Yes. That’s all.’

She grabs my hands and starts to move. ‘Just move to the rhythm. I know you can. That’s all a dance is.’

I am barely listening. My eyes are searching for the Commander. Even talking with Christmas is pretty much the most dangerous thing I can do, let alone dancing with her. I tear my hands away and
stumble backwards, against the stage. Priest’s song has ended. The crowd is cheering and I feel Priest’s hand grabbing my arm, dragging me up into the lantern light, away from
Christmas. Before I understand what’s happening, the guitar is in my hand.

Now I am on stage, safely behind the guitar. The entire camp stares at me, quietening down, trying to work out why Priest has stopped playing. How many are there? They stretch on into the
darkness.

All I can see is their eyes, waiting for me.

‘Go ahead, Baboon,’ Priest says loudly. ‘Give the boys what they want.’

My thoughts have stopped. The stage, which had seemed so short when I looked up at it, now feels a hundred feet high as I look down.

‘What are you doing, Priest?’ I hear a voice call. ‘Are you just trying to embarrass him?’

They boo me. ‘Baboon doesn’t play guitar!’

‘Wait a minute,’ Priest replies. ‘Wait a minute. Patience. Give him a second.’

‘Get off the stage!’

My eyes scan the sneering crowd and I see Christmas. She doesn’t look angry that I escaped and she isn’t booing. She looks curious, wondering what will happen.

I am not a great guitar player and I have never performed for a real audience, just the Captain and Christmas, and the birds at home. But in this moment, the stage is the safest place I can
be.

So I close my eyes, feel the smooth strings and strum.

Finally, I am back in my village. I walk the paths, pass the huts, smell the air. I am in the garden, playing on the wall that makes us such good neighbours, chasing away birds. I am with my
goats, guarding them on the narrow road, keeping them out of the crop fields. I am with my mother, smelling the maize flour as it boils, dropping twigs in the cooking fire. I am in a field, playing
hide-and-seek with Pina, dancing with a thousand bodies around me.

The drums throb in my bones and the horns call to my blood. In the firelight of a hundred torches, bare feet pound the earth. A chant rises to the stars. Hands clap and fly, they cut the air and
grab at the wind. An arm turns in a great circle. A waist rolls, flexing and folding back in on itself. A thigh rises, every sinew clear in a moment of tension, and then descends. A heel digs into
grassy earth.

No map for these roads. This is my village. Everyone in the village knows each other, and I know every route through every street to and from every house. My feet and those ways are old friends.
I know where every one of my sweet potatoes is in the garden and every tree with a beehive. The roads of the lions and the trails of the snakes, every line of the village and every tangle of the
jungle, they’re all in my head. Even after so long, they are still right there. Still vibrant and clear. Every animal my family owned and all the best spots for sugarcane.

I remember the hut I shared with Akot. Just one big room with two bamboo beds and a cooking spot on the far right. In the evening, we’d see the smoke coiling in the air above our
family’s corner of the village and we’d all come running. We’d sit in a big circle and eat with our hands and tell stories to pass the time.

I remember all the games we played. Climbing trees or hide-and-seek in the bushes. We sat by the watering hole and ate wild fruit. We ran around half naked and unashamed. Just children, running
free through the trees and fields like gazelles. That I miss.

I remember everything I’ve forgotten.

My eyes snap open and my fingers buzz with the gentle pain of releasing the guitar strings, their soft tones still hang in the air. Everyone is looking at me, every soldier, every officer, every
wife, every woman shared. Their eyes are fixed on me, but I can’t tell what they’re thinking. Christmas looks shocked. A sudden burst of adrenaline hits my blood. My breathing heaves.
If I don’t move, perhaps I won’t wake up.

Everything is silent. One little boy shouts at the top of his lungs, ‘I love you, Mama!’ Not that his mother can hear. Priest claps and is joined, at first like dewdrops, then like
rain and then a storm, one pair of hands at a time, by the entire field. People scream and hoot.

Soldiers beat their hands together. Mouse and her girls clap and cry.

The officers glare at me.

My eyes fall on the Commander.

The only light in the cell comes from the torches outside. A dozen soldiers step into the little room. The door bangs shut and a latch scrapes. A chain rattles and a key
clicks.

I see the eyes of those surrounding me. Hard eyes, digging into me, stripping me bare. The air is thick with old sweat and urine and silence. My knees shake as I get up. Patches of black explode
in my sight, edged with bright white. I stumble. I am spinning. Little black spots burst open in front of my eyes. I need to sit down.

A hand grabs my hair and throws me across the room. Another hand clutches my neck and shoves me. Every two steps in one direction or another a hand is laid on me, forcing me back. A fist plunges
into my stomach. I stagger. Hands against my ribs, thrusting me to the side. I double over. An open palm sails straight up into my face. My head flies up, I try to keep my balance.

More strikes and insults. I don’t count, it isn’t worth thinking about. Something is trickling down my face. In my mind, Mama gathers me in her arms. She rubs my back and rocks me.
She tells me everything will be okay, that I’m just having a bad dream. Everything will be okay when I wake up.

I wake up with my face in the dirt. At some point I don’t remember, they tied me up Congo-style. My elbows have been lashed behind my back and my ankles bound. Those
loops are cinched together so that my back is locked in an arch. Dull, constant pain. Joints turn to stone. I listen to the sounds outside.

Millions of crickets sing in the trees and the grass. I hear a cock crow in the distance.

I turn my ear to the earth. I’m in a little shack with mismatched sheets of tin stuck together. The feet and hands and voices have gone. But I hear a groan. I squint and turn my head.
Someone else is in here with me.

‘Hey,’ I whisper. ‘Hey’

The groan comes again, something like ‘Yes.’

‘What’s going on?’ I ask.

‘Are you kidding?’ His voice is weak. ‘Your song.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How hard did they hit you?’ My cellmate takes in a deep, ragged breath. ‘Your song. I don’t know what you call it. That whole bit about “the wind will carry
us”. How’d it go? “The wind will carry us home beneath the darkening sky.” Something like that.’

That was no song I’d ever been taught.

Now I recognised this kid – it was the boy who called for his mama.

Outside, the familiar tromp of the Commander’s boots. A brief chaos of locks and chains jangling before the flimsy door swings open.
Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.
One dusty boot lands in
front of my face.

‘Did you think it was you who’d gotten a promotion?’ He squats down next to me and grabs me by the hair, twisting my face up to look at him. ‘You think because you play
for me and my wife, you can play whatever you want? We don’t have songs like that here. Songs like that do not exist in our new world!’ He shoves my face back into the dirt.

‘No wind will carry you home.’ He pushes himself back up. ‘Really, Baboon’s Ass, how stupid are you? How could you believe for even one second that I would allow that
kind of anti-revolutionary propaganda to be played? And at the celebration for my promotion! Do you want to die, Baboon’s Ass?’ He rips the pistol from its holster, clicks the safety
and digs the nozzle into my temple. ‘Do you want to be executed as a traitor?’

I just lie in the dirt.

The pistol relaxes and hangs in front of my face. ‘Or are you just that stupid? Well, get this into that shit bucket you call a brain, maggot. You are here and here you will stay. You will
never see your charred little village or that ugly-bitch mother of yours ever again. You see, a lot of the soldiers out there, they think you’re resisting us. They think it was rebellion that
made you play that song. I think it’s because you’re a stupid fuck who doesn’t know better.

‘Now they all have this idea that there’s a resistance against us. Against the revolution. And every time they’re unhappy, every time they’re whipped for a breach of
discipline, every time they think they need more food, every time they’re weak, they will think, Maybe I can join the resistance too. Maybe I can be a Baboon too. So, what shall I do? Should
I kill you, Baboon’s Ass? Should I kill you for being stupid?’ He kicks dust in my face.

‘No. No point making you a martyr for a cause that doesn’t exist. Want to know what I’m going to do, Baboon’s Ass? I’m going to make you a fucking soldier.
I’m going to make you fast and tough.’ He chuckles. ‘I’m going to make you the best fucking soldier here! You’re going to stand prouder, sing louder and push harder
than anyone else in camp. So the rebel against us will be our hero.’ Again he chuckles. His feet step towards the other boy locked up with me.

Bang!
The ground vibrates with gunshot.

‘First, though,’ the Commander says, holstering his pistol, ‘we need to educate you. Bodies are easy. I’ve made skinnier runts than you into iron soldiers before. Minds,
though, are different. We’re going to find out just how strong your mind is. Oh, one more thing. No more guitars. Guitars are now banned in camp, and if I catch anyone even pretending to play
one – firing squad.’ He kicks me in the ribs and leaves.

When night falls, I’m moved from the shack into a narrow cage wrapped in thorn vines. They loosen the knots at my elbows and tighten them at my wrists. So I kneel,
always teetering towards the long thorns, in a cage maybe seventy-five centimetres long, seventy-five wide. Two days, they say, without food or water.

Completely exposed, I’m freezing. I sit back on my heels and look up at the stars, watching their slow turn. I sway in and out of sleep. The night fills with half-dreams, crowding around
me so tightly I can’t tell what’s real. Not that it matters. I’m tired of reality.

In brief moments of clarity, when I’m jerked awake by a thorn digging into my arm, I can hear pigeons singing to the dark. I try to dream that I’m a pigeon, free to take wing at any
time and go where I please. Do they dream of being me? Perhaps some dark force makes them sing.

The sun breaks through the treetops and the blistering day begins. A guard stands by me at all times. It’s impossible to escape, so he must be there to stop me killing myself. Sometimes
it’s Parasite who stands guard. At midday, my entire body is soaked in sweat, my legs slippery with it. The agony makes the heat increase and time slow. Parasite is my reverse. Another
soldier brings him water and a plate of grilled goat meat. They sit in the shade of a tree a few metres away and eat, drink and laugh.

‘Parasite,’ I moan. ‘Can I have some water?’

He holds up his canteen. ‘This water?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Turns out he’s thirsty,’ Parasite says to his friend, and they laugh. But he pushes himself up from the tree and brings the canteen over to me, unscrewing the cap and taking a
quick drink. He lowers it to the level of my mouth and as I lean forward to drink, he pulls it just out of reach. My lips almost touch the rim.

‘Please,’ I beg.

Parasite giggles.

‘Just a sip. Come on, please.’

‘Stop begging, man,’ Parasite says. ‘You know me.’ He tips the canteen and pours water at my feet. ‘Try calling for your mama. Maybe she’ll bring you
something.’

I drop my head, close my eyes and try to fly away. I go up, up above the cage, into the clean air. Up above the jungle, where I can hear other birds sing, and the wind cools my wings. Somewhere
in the distance, I hear a hum. Deep and steady, like locusts approaching, but lower. Voices in the camp. I open my eyes. Others hear it too. Then shouting. Have I summoned something? I look up. A
bomber sails through the sky in the east. From the camp, a wail of alarm rises up. It’s a government plane that I’ve called from the skies. It’s come to free me.

Soldiers scramble for cover. Parasite snatches up his rifle and runs, shouting back at me. ‘If you get killed by shrapnel, I’m going to piss on your corpse!’

My cage is a flimsy thing, it protects me from nothing. But I don’t want it to – one way or another, I’ll be freed.

I kneel, helpless and glad of it, as the hum grows louder. Pops of gunfire from the camp, then a stuttering roar as everyone joins in. I blink again and again as my eyes refuse to focus. The
sounds erupt around me, I can’t tell from what direction or how far, or who’s shooting at who. A soft boom echoes. Another explosion, louder, shakes the ground and the ground shakes me.
At an interminable distance I see the clouds of the explosion. Here it comes. The ground moves like a river. The roar is like a thing itself, surrounding me. A thin mist of dirt rains down.

I wait for the bomber to drop one on top of me. It creeps across the sky, too big and heavy and slow to fly, dropping payloads.

I feel something against my lips. It feels like metal – a knife. I jerk my head back. A cup. With water. As I lower my head again to drink, I see Priest holding the cup. The bomber passes,
the air falls still. Priest has gone.