Coincidence: A Novel (8 page)

11

June 1992

I
n Langadi the day began early. Anyeko, thirteen years of age, was the oldest child in the orphanage. She would rise when the cockerels started to call, when the sun was still an orange gleam on the eastern hills. She would pull on her blue school dress and would scamper out of the dormitory. She would lead the nanny goats from the night shed and tether them in the grass yard, and she would throw open the shutters of the chicken roost and laugh out loud when the birds all flew down at once.

When it was time to milk the goats, Anyeko would go to the window of the mission house and tap on the glass. Azalea, now also thirteen, lanky and tanned with a boy's cut of hair and not a single girlish curve on her figure, would slip out from beneath her mosquito net, and, barefoot, still in her nightdress, she would tiptoe outside. The two girls would run back to the goat yard, and snatching up the buckets, laughing together, high, happy voices floating over the compound, they would milk the nanny goats in time for breakfast.

Breakfast at Langadi was at seven o'clock with the sun still low in the sky. Odokonyero, the big Acholi cook, would be waiting for the goats' milk. He would splash it straight from the bucket into the pan ready to make cassava porridge. Tebere, one of the older boys, would fetch rolls of charcoal for the stove, and two more girls, Okema and Kila, would stir it. When seven o'clock arrived, Odokonyero would nod towards Anyeko and Azalea and the two girls would tug on the bell rope, and the bell high in the bamboo rafters would summon the mission to the table.

The mess hall was a high wooden gazebo, open on all sides around a cement floor, shaded by a roof of deep black thatch. The kitchen was no more than an alcove, featuring a barbecue fashioned from the two halves of an oil drum and a lock-up cupboard for storing pans and provisions. Mrs Rebecca Folley, her long hair tied back in a bun, would sit at the top of one long table smoking her first cigarette of the day and slowly savouring a tin mug of tea. She favoured her tea freshly brewed, using tea leaves from western Uganda, still green, bought in bundles from the market in Moyo. Luke Folley, on the other table, preferred coffee. His favourite beans were from Mbale in the far east of Uganda, freshly roasted each morning by the cook.

The smell of Luke's breakfast coffee roasting slowly over the charcoal would become one of Azalea's abiding memories of Langadi. Long after this day was over, this day that would change her life for ever, the smell of coffee would be one of those delicate index smells that could trip delicious cascades of memory, so that even as an adult, even in the winter streets of London, she could walk past a coffee shop and catch just the faintest hint of Mbale beans rich with all the smells and sounds of Africa: the chuckle and whoop of the gonolek bird and the flash of its scarlet and black wings, and there in the distance would be the sounds of the motor scooters on the road to Moyo and the high, excited voices of the orphanage children; and if she closed her eyes just for the briefest of moments, there would be Pastor David droning out grace and Odokonyero doling out the meals.

It was a morning such as this, a hot African morning. The fifteen orphanage children and the Folleys, the cook, the six farm workers, and Stanton who drove and maintained the mission bus, and the old Buganda preacher Pastor David, and Maria the orphanage matron, and Elizabeth the nurse, and two maids who cleaned and washed and helped in the kitchen, and two boys who swept and minded the compound, and Ritchie and Lauren the VSO students still pale from the English winter, and old Mzee Njonjo, a Kikuyu man from Kenya, who served as the nightwatchman; all thirty-six sat down for breakfast, and another sixteen breakfasts would be cooked and served to patients in the hospital. You might argue that only thirty-five sat down for breakfast, since Odokonyero never quite took a seat at the table – he was too busy with the porridge and with Mr Luke's coffee – but a place was set for him nonetheless.

The five farm boys were first at the table. They had already milked the Ankole cows and walked them out to pasture, and now they were hungry. They bantered and jostled until Mr Oweko the farm manager came to take his seat beside them.

No one could eat until Pastor David had recited grace, and he would always appear ten minutes or more after the breakfast bell, by which time the farm boys and the orphans were shrieking his name and the porridge was cooling fast on the table. ‘Please hurry, Pastor David,' Matron Maria would reprove him, ‘or our orphans will starve.'

‘One more minute and I'd have said grace myself,' Azalea would say.

The language spoken at the St Paul Mission was English. This was a tradition begun by Lester Folley I. Acholi was spoken too, informally, and other Luo and Sudanese dialects like Dinka and Madi. Fragments of Swahili were used as a lingua franca in marketplaces and on the streets, for this was a melting pot of a place and snippets of English and Swahili were necessary to carry out business here. Sometimes there would be Arabs in the marketplace, swathed in Bedouin headscarves, walking tall and erect, speaking Sudanese Arabic, shunned by the Acholi. There could be Kenyans, who had drifted across from the difficult farmlands of Lake Turkana looking for greener fields to work. There were short, dark people from the lands to the west – Congolese – in their colourful cottons, here to trade with animal skins and bush meat and forest fruits and beads made from the teeth of crocodiles. There were Chinese here from time to time, emissaries from Peking looking for opportunities to engage with the ever-changing regimes. There were Europeans, too – Britons mainly – farmers and missionaries for the most part, like the Folleys, but some who came to work on projects for the UN or for businesses back in Europe. Any journey from Karama to Gulu and north on the dirt road to Moyo would pass a whole collection of missions and clinics, their signboards proudly proclaiming their presence to passers-by. Never, the Acholi must have felt, had there been so much interest in their immortal souls.

Then there was commerce of a less spiritual kind. There were representatives of charities and foundations whose aims were related to aid, healthcare, education or wildlife. And often in Gulu, around the pool at the Acholi Inn, or limbering with cold beer at a roadside bar, would be the occasional mercenary soldier from Belgium or from England, kitted out in neutral khaki, displaying biceps with tattoos to advertise their unsavoury trade.

But this international assortment was, in reality, little more than a dust of seasoning among the growing numbers of native Ugandans and Sudanese for whom this forgotten line on a colonial map had become a refuge from a conflict zone – and this only when the borderland managed to escape from being a conflict zone itself.

Azalea would later talk about these days in Langadi as the happiest of her life. The Folleys had a network of friends in the communities of the West Nile, and these families would come to visit in their Land Rovers or in their old Toyota vans. Out on the verandas in the evenings the adults would talk and play bridge and click Scrabble tiles, while Azalea and the children would make endless explorations of the farmstead, climbing the trees and collecting insects in jars. When Lester Folley I bought the farmstead in 1907 it was a remote place, off every beaten path. By the time Luke and Rebecca arrived at the mission in January 1984, the track had become a thoroughfare and the cluster of huts that had once comprised the village had grown into a township, now with its own school and church and a welter of uninviting shops and bars. For two hours every evening, between four and six, the mission would open up its gates to provide access to the standpipe that drew water from an aquifer, and this singular act of charity saved local families the long walk to the river for water and the longer walk back. A queue would begin to form by the gate early in the afternoon, women mostly, bearing jerrycans and plastic bottles; and by the time Odokonyero (whose job as cook also made him head of security) swung open the gate at four o'clock, there could be two hundred people waiting for water.

Odokonyero would count the villagers in – he knew them all by name – and he would police the whole operation with his watch. Every day this involved an awful lot of hand-waving, raised voices and squabbles.

‘Can't you all be a little quieter?' Rebecca Folley would appeal to Odokonyero. Her schoolroom was right next to the standpipe, and the daily commotion disturbed the children.

‘But it isn't me who is making the noise,' Odokonyero would exclaim, quite untruthfully for his was the voice that soared above them all. But no matter: the inefficient routine of the water pump was too much a part of village life ever to interrupt it.

Every now and then the villagers would appear with a child. The child would become the immediate responsibility of Matron Maria, who would look after his or her welfare until the parents or other relatives could be found. Luke Folley would complete the necessary government paperwork and would photograph the child, then send the papers off to the police control in Gulu where a show would be made of looking for the missing family. Often, of course, the parents were never found. There were fifteen children in the orphanage this morning, although there had sometimes been as many as twenty-six and once as few as five. Orphans didn't always stay long. As soon as they were stronger, well fed and partly educated, a distant family member would often come to claim them, especially if they were old enough to carry water, or to help in the fields. There was little that the Folleys could do when this happened. So the reclaimed child would be vaccinated and hugged and dispatched with the new family; and every now and again one of the Folleys would happen to drive past the village where the child now lived and, if all was well, a happy reunion would take place.

By nine in the morning the day would already be hot. Schoolchildren from Langadi township would start to arrive in their dark blue shorts and pale blue shirts (for boys), or their dark blue cotton frocks (for girls), clutching their exercise books and pencils, in twos or threes, often holding hands and chanting songs. There were two rooms in the schoolhouse. Luke Folley taught the younger children, Rebecca Folley taught the older ones. There was no grading or streaming by age; rather it was done by height and general ability, and by the need to keep around thirty children in each class at two to a desk. Luke taught reading and writing and numbers, and since most of his starters spoke little or no En-glish, he also taught the English language. He taught with a great deal of chanting and repetition because this, he knew from his own childhood, was a technique that commended itself to Acholi children. Every day they would chant the alphabet and multiplication tables, and then they would break to sing songs, and often Luke would strum along on his guitar. They would sing English and American songs: ‘Puff the Magic Dragon', and ‘Blowing In the Wind', and ‘In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight'. And if there was a noticeable absence of gospel tunes or hymns, well, nobody remarked upon it – and anyway, the children would sing these with Pastor David at Morning Prayers and again at Afternoon Prayers, so perhaps it didn't matter. Luke read poetry to the children, and every morning he would tell them a tale from Aesop's fables. ‘Today we will hear the story,' he would say, ‘of the lion and the jackal and the donkey. All three agreed to go hunting together, and all three agreed to share the kill.' All voices would hush and all eyes would turn to the teacher. Later they would learn more English words, and Luke would draw the pictures and write the words on the blackboard so that the children could chant them – lion – elephant – snake – bicycle – gun – fish – pencil – banana, and then the children would write down the words and there would be a lot more chanting, for Luke Folley never taught in silence except when he was telling a story.

‘Can't you teach more quietly?' Rebecca Folley would complain. ‘How can you expect my class to learn
anything
with all that singing and wailing going on in the next room?'

But Luke only knew one way to teach, and this was it, a successful enough formula for him. Six-year-old Acholi children – or children of about that age – would arrive at the start of term, often with no uniform, no shoes, no pencils, no understanding of English, no appreciation, even, of why they were there at all. Luke would apprehend the parents to explain the rules. Attendance at St Paul's was free of charge, but certain conditions applied: the parents would need to make a solemn oath that once their children started at the school, they would continue until at least their thirteenth birthday; they would not miss classes except for a family funeral; they would wear a uniform, and they would uphold the reputation of the mission at all times. The family would be expected to make a contribution to the mission: whatever they could afford, that would be enough. The contribution could be in the form of money, or it could be produce from the family farm, or it could be hours spent working in the mission fields. Either way, Luke told them, they had to understand the value of education for the children, and what better way to appreciate value than to contribute something. Luke would base his decision on what that contribution should be on his own assessment of each family's ability to pay. But given that most of these children were from the poorest families in a region that was already poor, and some lived not with parents but with the brothers or sisters of parents who had died, there was little expectation that the contribution would make any real difference to the mission coffers.

There was, of course, a final condition, which would normally be that the family attend the mission's Sunday service, but Luke was never particularly vigilant about this requirement. Pastor David would complain that mothers in Langadi were sending their urchins to the school yet were not attending the church, and Luke would hold his palms upwards, feigning despair –
What can we do?