Stone Kingdoms (15 page)

‘
Very much, Naomi – we've been in Africa a long time. Nearly twenty-five years, on and off.'

‘That's a long time.'

‘Too long, I think. Time to go home. We have grandchildren now. We're looking forward to seeing them, doing the things that retired people do.' She paused and clapped her hands to the music. ‘We never got to know each other, Naomi, never really got a chance to talk. I'm sorry about that.' A tiny lime-green lizard scurried across the floor, miraculously evading the flailing feet of the dancers.

‘When I first came, Peter and I weren't long married and just when I was getting used to being a wife I found myself living in Africa and working in a hospital which was barely entitled to call itself by that name. I used to go home at night and cry my eyes out and beg Peter to take me home, but he'd say we had a job to do and there'd always be another time to go home, and so we stayed and did what we had to do.'

Nadra had the children sitting on the floor and was leading them in a traditional song. Other children's heads crowded into the windows and open doorway. I held the little mirror Nadra had given me, anxious not to smear the glass with the sweat of my fingers.

‘You must go home too, Naomi, when the time is right. Don't wait twenty-five years like I did.'

‘How do you know when the time is right?'

‘I think you'll know. You'll just wake up one morning and know that it's time. I knew but never listened. And make sure to go home while you've still a life to go to. It's very easy for Africa to become all there is, all there is of you.'

‘Sometimes, here seems more real than home.'

‘I understand that. In a place like this you feel closer to life because you're closer to death. And being close to death can make a lot of other things seem meaningless. But to make this all your life is to give yourself to something that will finally consume you, like it's almost consumed me.'

Rollins
came over and asked her to dance, and she let go of my hand and giggled like a girl, then stood up with him, moving round the room with stately steps, her head barely reaching his chest, the whiteness of her hair floating like a lily on the green sea of his fatigues. I glanced down at my face in the glass, the red rims of my eyes, the dried-up furze of my hair.

‘You're very serious on your birthday. Did you not get enough presents? I'm sorry I couldn't find balloons.'

‘I was just thinking about home, Charlie.'

‘Yeah, well, we all get homesick sometimes. You miss Ireland, then?'

‘Yes, that's right, Charlie.'

‘Another three months and you get six weeks' leave. You can go home, soak in a bath, eat real food.'

‘Sounds good.'

‘Can I have this waltz?'

He offered me his hand and I took it, my hand on his shoulder still holding the mirror. I felt the press of his hand on my back and his body push close to mine as he led me round the tiny space and I tried to follow his steps without entangling our feet. Round and round we went, more quickly than I wanted, my hand clutching the mirror, my head beginning to spin a little, and then I was aware of a noise beyond the music and a woman's voice crying and a man's voice shouting over her cries and slowly people's heads were turning from us to the compound outside. We stopped dancing even though the music played on and I felt dizzy and wanted to sit down but people were pushing past us and through the open door. Only Aduma was coming the other way, waving the children out of his path. He came to Wanneker and I knew it had been his voice shouting.

‘There is a woman outside, she wants speak to girl with fire in her hair. She wants speak to Miss, she says to give you this.'

I took the dirty little scrap of paper from him and opened it and read where I had written the word Bakalla and I felt dizzy
again.
I stepped towards the open door, my hand slipped and there was the sharp tinkle of broken glass and a sudden surge of silence all about me. She was standing in front of the building. I stepped towards her and she stretched out her arms to me and the voice breaking from her throat was calling for her baby. As I stood silently looking at her, she sank to her knees in the dirt and held up her arms.

I asked only Nadra to come with me, thinking that I was sparing Martine and Veronica, but then realized the terrible thing that I was about to make her do, the words which I was to ask her to say, but there was no other way. We helped the woman from the ground, her flailing wail of pain evidence that she had already read the truth in our faces, and walked her slowly to where the darkness softened and blurred the thorns of the acacia. The words seemed to come from another world, but I had no others and so I passed them to Nadra and tried to hold the woman's hand, listening as they twisted into a different tongue. But she jerked her hand from mine and plucked at the dirt, showering the dust over herself and swaying back and forward as a shrill, ululating wail escaped her throat. Spiralling into the barren branches above our heads its shrillness punctured the calm of the night like a hole in a gourd. Then her family came round her and joined in the rising cry. Nadra took my arm and led me away.

Back in the clinic I asked Aduma to take them food and water, and watched as Martine and Veronica brushed away the broken glass and gathered up the little store of presents. As we walked to our tent the cries pierced the night and opened up everything that had been shut away – the hessian-shrouded bundle of leathery skin, the ochre-coloured earth, the tiny pile of stones. In the morning the family had gone, absorbed into the fraying, unravelling fabric of the camp, hidden from our sight by the weight of numbers and the growing spread of makeshift shelters.

12

When
Veronica told me the news it felt as if Wanneker was offering us a convalescence, a three-day restorative for our failing spirits. It seemed unfair that Martine had been left out, but as the Olsons had departed it probably wasn't possible for her to go too. The purpose of the trip to Mercu was for Wanneker and Stanfield to meet and plan the immediate needs of Bakalla and for Stanfield to hand over the American dollars that made the wheels turn. Mercu was on the coast and Stanfield would fly in to a nearby airstrip belonging to an American oil company. The journey would take us a day and a half by jeep. We were to go along too, just because a change of scenery would do us good. His promise of a couple of nights in a small hotel with clean beds and fresh food was enough to persuade us.

On the journey, we stayed overnight at an irrigation scheme organized by the Agency and met the two workers who had flown out with us, and slept in tents amidst a sweep of greenness – rice fields, a crop of millet, banana groves. That first night, the three of us sat round a fire and I listened as they talked of home and where they grew up and I was happy that there was little room for me to speak. The mood was suddenly light and foolish, like the first day of a holiday, and Veronica and Charlie's stories spilled over each other.

‘Have you seen the film
Out of Africa?'
she asked, and we all laughed. ‘Why are you laughing – it's a really great film. I've seen it twice, once in the cinema and once on video. No, three
times
– I saw it once on television as well. It was on one Christmas.'

‘What's it about, Veronica? I can't quite remember it,' Charlie said, widening his eyes.

‘It's about a woman, Meryl Streep, who has to choose between two men, Robert Redford and someone else. And she has this beautiful house and garden just like she's living in England.'

‘Wow,' he said, ‘and why is she in Africa?'

‘I can't remember. She just is, and at one point she's nearly killed by a lion.'

‘Jeez, Veronica, you're just telling us this to scare us. Do you think there might be lions out there somewhere in those groves?' And he growled his impersonation of a lion.

‘Very funny, Charlie. All the lions in Africa are in game reserves.'

‘I hope you're right, Veronica, but I'm not so sure. Once I talked to the head of a village, not a million miles from here, and he told me a lion made off with three people in three weeks. And you know, Veronica, lions get bored with the same diet all the time, sometimes they like a change – a bit of white meat maybe, know what I mean?'

We encountered no lions on our way to Mercu. It was a small town which had grown from an old Arab trading post, set up to facilitate the shipping of slaves, a sleepy little place with low white-walled buildings and narrow streets winding up from the shore. Cooler breezes blew in from the sea and the inhabitants made their living from fishing or working for the oil company, which had a refinery a couple of miles up the coast. The hotel was run by an Italian called Sandro who told us he was a second cousin to Luigi Riva as he showed us to our rooms. The dozen or so rooms were mostly occupied by Americans flown in to service some part of the refinery or search for new oil fields. We ate meals of pasta and fish in the small terrace restaurant, and I shared a room with Veronica. That night I
slept
in a bed with white sheets and a mosquito net that draped over it like a canopy. It felt so soft that I seemed to float into sleep the moment I lay down.

The Americans would sit in the tiny bar which formed the hotel's entrance and drink the local beer, mixed with shots of Southern Comfort, which they kept stashed in their bags or wrapped in beach towels. Wanneker would sit and talk sport with them, discussing the latest football news or else badmouthing government foreign policy, and sometimes they'd pull their chairs in tighter and talk and laugh in conspiratorial voices, then drink toasts to increasingly meaningless things. On a couple of occasions they asked Veronica and me to join them and then they'd slip into the role of Southern gentlemen, holding chairs and redirecting the fan on the bar so that it cooled us. Their boss was a man called Homer who wore shorts which struggled to hold the sag of his stomach and a Hawaiian shirt. It was soon clear that he claimed centre stage in every discussion and that the other men deferred to his wisdom. There was no sign of Stanfield. One slow afternoon, as the fishermen trailed their nets on to the beach to repair them, we sat in the dark little bar with its shrine to Luigi Riva and listened to Homer talk.

‘The first and worst thing gonna' happen if the Fundamentals take over is that this country'll be as dry as a preacher's shoe. It'll be no different from Saudi or any of those states, so you guys savour that drink because the only thing you're likely to see in the bottom of your glass is Coca Cola.'

‘Come to think of it, Homer, wouldn't surprise me at all if Coca Cola weren't behind everything's going on in this part of the world. Dry everywhere up, then open up your factories. You can bet your life that someone's making a buck out of it,' said his sidekick George.

‘The people making the biggest bucks are the arms dealers. Everywhere you look, some kid with a hole in the ass of his pants is carrying a Kalashnikov or a rocket launcher, or some
other
piece of technology that costs an arm and a leg,' replied Homer, pouring more drinks for everybody. ‘Excuse my language, ladies, we're not used to being around women too often. Six months out here either makes your marriage or breaks it. Either every homecoming is like a second honeymoon or it's another instalment in the divorce plan. Now me, I've got one of the loveliest ladies alive back home. Every time I come home she puts out the flag and ties a yellow ribbon round the front tree. Can you believe it? A yellow ribbon!'

They laughed and one of them called for more beer. In the doorway, transfigured in the intense block of light, stood two rags of boys. One of the men flicked coins at them and then Sandro came and shooed them away.

‘It'll be a hard six months if this place goes dry,' continued Homer, as tiny rivulets of sweat licked his temples and vanished in the folds of flesh that swaddled his throat.

‘Whatever the law, you can always get a drink,' said George, flicking flies away from the finger-smeared rim of his glass.

‘Oh sure, you can get a drink and you can also get a lot of lashes as a chaser. Sure as Hell have to be a mighty fine drink to be worth that. You remember Danny Sullivan – the little Mick out of New Jersey? Got caught, took ten, ended up an embarrassment to the company and out of a job. Hell of a hangover that proved.' Some young girls tried to come into the bar to sell peanuts and plastic flowers, but Sandro chased them away, flapping a drying cloth at them like a matador's cape. ‘You know, ladies, I sure admire the work you do out here. I know it can't be easy for you seeing all those little kids dying and not enough food to go round. Where exactly you from?'

When he learned I was from Ireland he asked me if I knew Danny Sullivan who had now become a ‘Hell of a nice fellow'. He seemed surprised when I said I didn't.

‘Now I'm no expert on Ireland, but it seems to me as if you've been killing each other over there for a mighty long time. It just doesn't seem to make much sense at all, going round killing
people
because of what religion they happen to be. I mean, back home most people don't give a hoot whether someone's a Jew, a Baptist, a Catholic or whatever – it just doesn't seem that important at the end of the day. You understand what I'm trying to say?'

‘Yes, I understand,' I said, sipping beer from the bottle.

‘Now if it was about colour, well, that's a whole different ball game,' he said, slapping the soft flabby flesh of his thigh and leading the laughter until the rucks of flesh on his face and neck quivered and his mouth cracked open in a contorted grin. ‘You'll excuse us Miss, we all like our little joke around here. No offence meant.'

Wanneker winked over at me, and asked, ‘Do you guys not think business could give some more to humanitarian aid?'