Divinity Road (9 page)

She is much happier here. She plays with Fatima, the daughter of our Pakistani neighbours, and she has the beginnings of a circle of friends at school. Abebe has adapted, too. He takes after his father and gets on with everybody. Both of them are doing well with their schoolwork. They get praised by their teachers for their industry and enthusiasm, for their helpfulness. Can they really be so untouched by our journey? Or is the damage so deeply buried that for the moment it is undetectable, concealed like some slowly mutating tumour? Worries, worries...

All this change, all this anxiety, it has aged me beyond measure, my dear. I am sure you would have a job to recognise me, what with my wrinkles and greying hair. Yes, that beautiful head of hair that you used to help me plait has begun sprouting grey and I have bought my first ever colouring product, and I am not yet thirty-seven years old!

No news from the Red Cross.

Look after yourself. Look after Gadissa.

With all my love

***

Dear Kassa

Will it never end? Goodbye Easton, hello Hartcliffe. From colourful inner-city to windswept estate, it seems we have come full circle. The house is not too bad, a quiet road. They tell me many years ago there was a tobacco factory here, a thriving, busy community. Now there seem to be so many people wandering around during the day, young and old, men and women, that I wonder whether anyone has a job or goes to school.

For me, the usual process of discovery, a new library, new shops to explore, new bus routes to negotiate to take me to my English classes. A new college also, as the old site was too far from here, perched as we are on the southern edge of the city, so I have transferred to the Bedminster campus, one bus ride away. Sad to say goodbye to my old friends, my thoughtful teacher, but if Yanit and Abebe can put up with this constant chopping and changing, then so can I.

I do feel for them, the guilt has never been stronger. Blossoming at school, neighbourhood friendships, the beginnings of a social life. Then these fragile roots torn out, another upheaval, more dislocation.

It is bad enough for them as it is, what with having to cope with so many bewildering puzzles in their lives. Confusion upon confusion! The challenge of language here, for example. Consider their linguistic history. Think about what they have had to cope with: born into a Tigrinya-speaking environment but with Amharic spoken at home and Arabic in the mosque and
Qur’anic
classes. Then thrown into an English-speaking world, though with most of their neighbours in Easton speaking Urdu or Bengali or Punjabi. It is more Babel than Bristol, but they cope, automatically fit their language to the context, and seem to thrive in all of them, as if somehow each one complements and supports the others. You would be amazed to see Yanit’s nose buried in a thick English novel, to hear Abebe chattering away to his friends using the latest slang. Oh silly me, I am starting to cry! What an old fool I’m becoming...

But that inner-city chapter has now ended and I am not too confident that this next one will be as much to their liking.

Gone are the playmates, the mixed school, the halal butcher, the mosque, the Asian shops and Muslim centre a stone’s throw away. This is a different kettle of fish, black faces most definitely in the minority, a tough, white, working-class world.

But we beggars cannot be choosers, as I tried to explain to tearful Yanit when it came to breaking the news to her. The lease came to an end, the landlord wanted to sell the property, and after three months of increasingly frantic house-hunting, I had found nothing we could afford with my housing benefits.

As a result, made homeless, we found ourselves placed by the council in emergency accommodation, in this drab but clean house in Hartcliffe. It is the most space we have had, not only the usual two bedrooms, but a proper lounge, a full-sized kitchen and our own piece of garden behind. The downside of this new location is the road we are situated on, a cul-de-sac next to a field. Even an outsider like myself can see it is a problem site. Neighbours’ gardens are filled with discarded fridges, sofas, bags of rubbish. The field is the nightly meeting place for drug dealers, joy riders, gangs of intimidating youths.

As always, we batten down the hatches after dark, find escape in our homework, our books.

We continue to maintain some of our old ties. We still make the trek to St Mark’s Road for the children’s
Qur’anic
classes. Once a fortnight I take Yanit up to visit Fatima, taking the opportunity to stock up on meat and vegetables and spices in the Stapleton Road stores. But in truth, the page has turned, a new chapter has begun. It is up to us to make the most of it.

My solicitor phoned on Tuesday to tell me we have a date for my case on the first of the month. We can only pray.

No news from the Red Cross.

To you and Gadissa as always we send our purest love. There is never a day, an hour, a minute when we do not miss you. When I say you are always in my thoughts I do not only mean that I think about you a lot, that there is a frequency to the number of times I recall, reminisce, reconstruct, speculate. No, what I mean is that whatever I do, the filling of a kettle, the visit to the baker’s, the queuing for the bus, the brushing of my hair, every activity is flavoured by your absence, spiced by my loss, poisoned with the virus of our separation. Every knock at the door, every car horn beep, every time the phone rings, my heart skips a sweet-sour beat. That is what I mean.

His first reaction is to stand up, drop his rifle and run, screaming and waving, down the hill. He takes a step and checks himself. Some instinct, a voice in his head, whispers to him to stay put, to return to the flat ledge of rock concealed behind the bushes, to be patient. He crouches down, scrambles from boulder to bush, taking care to keep himself hidden. He reaches his refuge, digs out the binoculars from his backpack and lies down flat behind a thick bush.

He watches the approach of the vehicle through his binoculars. As it reaches the crash site, it slows, weaving between the debris and scattering the regiments of pillaging vultures. The creatures are only momentarily put off and soon return to their feast.

The vehicle pulls up about fifty metres from the tent. Through his binoculars he can see that it is some kind of pickup converted for military use, a heavy-calibre machine gun manned by a shaven-headed youth in khaki battle fatigues, the weapon welded to the vehicle’s bodywork. The driver, sporting a flat peaked cap, is dressed in a similar outfit. The back of the pick-up is crammed with six other African men, all armed, several dressed in ill-matching army garb, others in loose robes and wound cloth headgear. From a distance it’s difficult to distinguish detail, but two of them look no older than teenagers.

The cavalry, he thinks, but there’s a small question mark in his mind, enough to stop himself from rising to his feet and waving.

The soldiers clamber out of the vehicle and the leader, short and slight despite his camouflage uniform and military boots, barks an order, points to various points around the theatre of death. Casually, he lifts the automatic rifle he’s holding and fires several bursts into the nearest group of vultures. The birds squawk and flap in panic, the unscathed ones taking to the air leaving three or four carcasses strewn around the crash victim they had been gorging on moments before.

The commander reminds Greg of someone he can’t quite place. He strains to recall and is about to give up when the memories slot into place and the connection is made: it’s the head teacher at the small rural school in Zimbabwe where he first worked as a volunteer all those years ago, a petty man whom the other local teachers had nicknamed Pol Pot due to his bullying style of management.

Greg watches as two of the soldiers approach the body. For an instant he thinks they are going to cover it, return to it something of its dignity, but is shocked to see one of them bend down to remove its watch. Already two other soldiers have located the wreckage containing the store of baggage and are emptying the suitcases, removing electronic equipment and other valuables.

He watches as one of the youths grapples with the body of the air hostess, pulling off her necklace, watch and bracelets. Another soldier whoops with joy as he pulls a handful of banknotes from a besuited corpse. The youth has now moved on to an elderly woman lying near the section of a wing, struggles to remove some rings from her swollen fingers, pulls a machete from his belt, puts his foot on the lifeless arm to steady himself, slashes down on the fingers two, three times, then bends to pull off the bloodied jewellery.

It is a systematic and cruelly efficient looting. Every so often one of the soldiers fires his rifle at the vultures to gain access to a body, but the birds are only fleetingly deterred. For some minutes Greg watches the ruthless progress of the marauders, but when one of them uses his rifle butt to extract the white farmer’s gold teeth he can bear it no longer. He looks out to the empty plain, to the mountains in the far-off distance and the dying embers of the sunset sky, trying to cleanse himself of these visions of brutality.

A line flits into his head, ‘deliver us from evil’, and in his disorientation and exhaustion it takes him a minute to trace it back to the Lord’s Prayer. He thinks of Nuala, of a future reunion, and wonders where his deliverers are, the rescue parties, the planes and helicopters, wonders what in God’s name he’s doing here in this horror movie and how he will ever escape.

He’s been feeling a growing giddiness, and now with a lurch he identifies the source of this queasy unease, a feeling that he’s been press-ganged into some hideous game, a game whose rules he does not know. Or perhaps there are no rules. Maybe he has to make them up himself.

Meanwhile, Pol Pot has been standing around idly, occasionally shouting an order, firing a burst of his Kalashnikov at the scavenging birds. Greg watches as he wanders over to the tree, zips down the tent door and pokes his head inside. He bends down and disappears into the interior.

Maybe he’ll help her.

Minutes pass. When he emerges, he’s pulling up his combat trousers, buckling his belt.

Jesus, no. It can’t be...

Pol Pot barks something and through the binoculars Greg can see that he’s smiling, gesturing towards the tent. The three nearest soldiers join him, begin arguing, jostling each other for position. The leader says something and points to one of the men in flowing robes who shouts in triumph, then bends to enter the tent.

No way. No fucking way, he whispers.

And here it is, he realises, the moment when he has to make up the rules all by himself. He scrambles back along the ledge to the cave, retrieves the hunting rifle and checks that it’s loaded. He trains it on the tent entrance, aims through the telescopic sights and waits. He estimates that he must be a hundred metres or so away and hopes that it’s still in range. A flashback, a childhood memory of Greg playing with his neighbour’s airgun, the boy’s father, ex-services or territorial army, lecturing them on body position and grip, breathing and trigger pull. Greg remembers his odd mantra: Squeeze the trigger gently, lads. Squeeze it like a baby.

Now he ceases to consider the consequences of his actions, that he’s about to give away his own presence here, and, as the robed man scrambles out of the tent a couple of minutes later, the smile of satisfaction on his face, Greg pulls the trigger.

Another deafening blast, another stabbing pain in his shoulder as the kickback hammers home. This time he hits his target. The man is thrown back into the tent, and after a few seconds of shocked silence the soldiers are thrown into a frenzy. Greg presses himself to the rocky ground, listens to the screams, the shouting and the bursts of automatic gunfire below. When he looks up a minute later, peering through the thorny undergrowth, he can see that the soldiers have gone to ground, hidden behind wreckage, shrubs, the pick-up. Only the vultures seem unperturbed.

He wonders to what extent precisely he’s revealed his location. They must surely know that he’s somewhere up the kopje, but can’t have identified where exactly.

Sit tight or make a run for it?

Greg’s aware of the speed of nightfall in Africa, realises that he’s observing that swift transformation at this very moment, guesses that dusk will give way to darkness in half an hour or less. The temperature’s dropped suddenly and he shivers.

Be patient, he answers, and huddles down to wait.

***

Cutting through the pitch-black gloom of the evening, the low voices of the militia below are easily discernible. He fears they’ll mount a night advance up towards him, hoping instead to hear the sound of an engine starting, a vehicle pulling away and receding back across the plain, but he’s disappointed.

He wishes that they would at least build a fire to signal their decision to stay put during the night. He’s too frightened to sleep and remains crouched on the ledge clutching his rifle, tuned to the slightest sound from below. He waits.

As the minutes turn to hours, his thoughts eventually wander. In the immediate aftermath of shooting the soldier, he’d been too shocked to consider his actions, too focused on his own survival, on keeping his location a mystery. Now, with time on his hands, the full impact of his deed hits home and his head reels. Jesus Christ, he thinks. What have I done? I’m just a soft shite from Oxford. A week ago I was wielding a paintbrush. A day ago I was eating groundnuts and sipping a cold bottle of Castle. Today I killed a man with a hunting rifle, put a bullet through his chest. I fucking killed him.

He crouches and waits, every sound magnified a thousand fold, every rustle, every murmur. He pictures the men gathering below and imagines he can hear their whispers, their stealthy steps. They might at this very moment be stealing up the kopje towards him. He remains braced, engulfed in the tense agony of fear and indecision.

At midnight he can stand it no longer. If he stays put, he’ll still have to face them in the morning. He heaves his backpack onto his shoulders, clutches his rifle in both hands, edges his way off the ledge and heads up the slope towards the summit.

His progress is excruciatingly slow, every footfall tested for potentially noisy twigs, every step hindered by knee-cracking boulders and needle-sharp thorns. Twice he finds himself face to face with a sheer wall of rock and has to backtrack to find a less perilous route. It takes two hours of exhausting climbing to reach the peak. He stops for a brief rest, gulps down some water, urges himself on, aware of the need to put distance between himself and the soldiers before daybreak.

If anything, the descent is even more demanding than the climb. The soil is pebbly, the stones as slippery as marbles, constantly threatening to upend him. His calf muscles scream from the effort of braking. By the time he reaches the foot of the hill, dawn is breaking and through the murky obscurity he can see that the terrain on this side of the kopje is less arid, more scrubland but with a thicker covering of vegetation. He’s desperately tired, aching and bruised and scratched from his blind escape, but knows he must force himself to keep going. He gathers what strength he has left. His body, battered by the crash, seems irrevocably damaged, and his mind, traumatised by the shooting, feels no less broken.

He walks on. At one stage he thinks he can hear the low hum of a motor engine. He stops and strains to listen. Silence. He crosses one dried river bed, then another. He halts to drink, to make futile attempts to use his mobile phone, to pull out some dried apricots that he chews on as he stumbles along. He tries to picture the soldier-bandits, to second guess their plan of action. He reckons that the booty at the crash site will be too great a pull to waste time on a man hunt, imagines their pickup loaded with loot, the remaining soldiers high-tailing it out of the area. Still, he can’t be sure, can’t risk being found, and fear of their reprisal spurs him on. He wonders who they are, what they represent.

Hours pass, the sun rises and the temperature soars. The throbbing in his temple and the stabbing in his abdomen form the beat to his marching rhythm. As he tramps through the inhospitable bush, he falls into a kind of numbed trance, his legs moving automatically, his mind retreating into a half-slumber. Every so often he jerks awake, stops to check his bearings with the compass, to make sure he’s not walking in some giant deadly loop that will bring him back round to the plane and the soldiers.

From time to time he finds himself forced out of his stupor by the physical pain. He thinks again of Nuala, wonders if they’ve broken the news to her yet, pictures the phone calls, the TV footage. It’s too awful to contemplate. By sheer force of will he conjures up an image of their kitchen at home, a peaceful breakfast scene, the children with their cereal bowls, Nuala spooning tea leaves into the blue china teapot, the toast popping in the toaster. It is this picture that he forces to the front of his mind as a spur to drive him forward.

By nine o’clock his clothes are soaked with sweat. Perspiration stings his eyes, runs down his nose, drips onto his shirt front. Despite the shade provided by this area of denser vegetation, the sun is ferocious. He sinks down into the shadow of a termite mound and eats a couple of stale rolls with a square of sweating cheese. When he gets up to relieve himself against a large rock, he notices that his urine is pinkish, laced with blood from some internal injury, the result, he assumes, of that blow to his abdomen.

He’s about to hitch his rucksack back up on his shoulders when he hears the drone of a light aircraft. He glances up, tries to peer through the foliage of a tree and looks around for a clearing from which to signal his presence. Dropping his bag and rifle, he sets off at a trot, wincing at the abdominal pain and ignoring the weariness in his aching legs. He remembers the empty distress flare canister and curses his bad luck.

Hey! I’m here! Here! he cries, his voice cracked and hoarse from heat and dehydration. He remembers the heliograph in his bag and considers running back to retrieve it from his bag. But he knows already that it would be a futile gesture, that he’s too late.

The plane passes overhead while he’s still under tree cover. He catches a glimpse of a small, twin-propeller aircraft, but by the time he emerges from the wooded area onto the flat, dry savannah, it is receding rapidly into the distance. He stops, waves, shouts, his attempts at signalling turning first to obscenities, then to pleading. He ceases his yelling only when the plane is a dot on the horizon.

Retracing his footsteps, he recovers the firearm and bag and heads back towards the savannah. Using the compass to take his bearings, he notes that he’s heading due north. The display on his ineffective phone tells him that it’s ten o’clock, and he decides to walk for as long as he can, take a break during the worst of the day’s heat and then hike some more towards the end of the afternoon. He sets himself a target of a two-hour march before he’ll find a shady place to rest.