The Mission Song (39 page)

‘You mean silly of Brinkley,’ I suggest, but the name is unfamiliar to him.

There is business, as they say in the theatre world, about hauling me to my feet. After the whack on the head, I am heavier than I was, and one boy is not enough. Once they’ve got me standing, Arthur places himself in front of me, officiously pulling down the skirts of his jacket. He reaches into his breast pocket, produces a brown envelope marked
ON HER MAJESTY
’
S SERVICE
and slaps it into my unresisting hand.

‘You have accepted this notice in the presence of witnesses,’ he announces to a larger room. ‘Kindly read it.
Now
.’

The printed letter, when I am finally able to focus on it, tells me I am an unwanted person. Arthur gives me one of Haj’s Parker pens. I make a few passes with it and scrawl a ragged version of my signature. Nobody shakes hands, we’re too British, or we were. I fall in between the two boys. We step into the garden and they walk me to the gate. It’s a sweltering day. What with the bomb scares and half the city on holiday, there’s barely a soul about. A dark green van with no name and no windows has pulled up in front of the house. It’s the twin of the van that sat outside the Hakims’ boarding house, perhaps the same one. Four men in denims emerge from it and walk towards us. Their leader wears a policeman’s cap.

‘This one trouble?’ he asks.

‘Not now he isn’t,’ says a blond boy.

20

An interpreter, Noah, even a top one, when he has nothing to interpret except himself, is a man adrift. Which is how I’ve come to write all this down without quite knowing whom I was writing to, but now I know it’s you. It will be a few years yet before you are called upon to decipher what Mr Anderson liked to call my Babylonian cuneiform, and when you do, I hope to be there beside you, showing you how it works, which won’t be a problem provided you know your Swahili.

Watch out, my dearest adopted son, for anything in your life marked
SPECIAL
. It’s a word with many meanings, none good. One day I will read you
The Count of Monte Cristo
, a favourite of my late Aunt Imelda’s. It’s about the most
special
prisoner of them all. There are quite a lot of Monte Cristos in England now, and I am one of them.

A
special
van has no windows but special facilities on the floor for special detainees who for their safety and comfort are strapped to it for the three-hour journey. Lest they have it in mind to disturb the public peace with screams of protest, a special leather gag is provided at no extra cost.

Special prisoners have numbers instead of names. Mine is Two Six.

A special hospitality block is a cluster of repainted Nissen huts, built for our gallant Canadian allies in 1940 and surrounded by enough barbed wire to keep out the entire Nazi army, which is all right for the many British who still believe they are fighting the Second World War, but less all right for the incarcerated inmates of Camp Mary.

Why our camp should be named after the Mother of Christ is officially unknown. Some say the first Canadian commandant was a devout Catholic. Mr J. P. Warner, formerly of the Royal Corps of Military Police and now Special Hospitality Officer, has a different story. According to him, Mary was a lady of the local town of Hastings who, in the darkest days of the war when Britain stood alone, favoured an entire platoon of Canadian pioneers between the hours of last parade and curfew the same evening.

My early brushes with Mr Warner gave no hint of the warm relationship that would develop between us, but from the day he felt able to partake of Maxie’s munificence, the bond was formed. He has no quarrel with darkies, he assures me, his grandfather having served in the Sudan Defence Force, and his father with our distinguished colonial police in Kenya during the troubles.

Special inmates enjoy special rights:

–  the right not to venture beyond the borders of our compound

–  the right not to join the dawn trek into town with other inmates, not to sell unscented roses to motorists at traffic lights, not to clean the windscreens of their BMWs in exchange for a few words of abuse

–  the right to remain silent at all times, to make and receive no phone calls, to send no letters, and to receive only such incoming items as have been previously approved by Authority and thereafter handed to me as a personal favour by Mr J. P. Warner, whose responsibilities, he assures me, are awesome.

‘I’m not listening to you, Two Six,’ he likes to advise me, wagging his finger in my face. ‘It’s air I’m sitting with,’ he will add, accepting another glass of my Rioja. ‘Not flesh and bone at all.’ Yet Mr Warner is a shrewd listener who has swum in all the oceans of life. He has managed military prisons in far outposts—and even, long ago, for misdemeanours he refuses to divulge, had a taste of his own medicine. ‘Conspiracies, Two Six, are not a problem. Everybody conspires, nobody gets done. But if it’s cover-up time, God help us all.’

There is comfort of a sort in knowing you are one of a kind.

Looking back, it was inevitable that my confinement at Camp Mary should have got off to a bad start. I see that now. Just arriving at Reception with
SPECIAL
stamped all over me was enough to put hackles up. To have PV in addition against my name—PV standing these days for
POTENTIALLY VIOLENT
—well, you get whatever you deserve, as I learned when, in a spirit of solidarity, I joined a sit-in of Somalis on the roof of the old vicarage that serves as Camp Mary’s headquarters. Our message to the world was peaceful. We had wives and Sunday School kids in bright cottons. The bed-sheets that we held out to the beam of the camp’s searchlights were daubed with conciliatory words:
DON
’
T SEND US HOME TO BE TORTURED
,
MR BLAIR! WE WANT TO BE TORTURED HERE!
In one very important sense I was however at variance with my fellow demonstrators. While they were on their knees begging for permission to stay, I couldn’t wait to be deported. But in confinement, team spirit is all, as I discovered to my cost when a contingent of no-name policemen in motorcycle helmets dispersed us with the aid of baseball bats.

Yet nothing in life, Noah, even a few broken bones, is without its reward. As I lay in that sick bay, manacled to the four corners of the bed and thinking there was little enough of life to live for, enter Mr J. P. Warner with the first of the fifteen weekly letters I have received from the hand of your beloved mother. As a condition of going quietly, she had with typical bravura prised an address out of her captors where she could write to me. Much of what she wrote is not yet for your young eyes or ears. Your mother, though chaste, is a passionate woman and speaks freely of her desires. But one cool evening, when you are very old, and you have loved as I have, I hope you will light a fire and sit beside it and read how, with every page your mother wrote to me, she brought tears of joy and laughter running down my prisoner’s cheeks, washing away all thoughts of self-pity or despair.

The strides she is making in life more than compensate for my immobility. No mere Degree Nurse Hannah any more, but Sister Hannah in a brand-new teaching ward in the absolute best hospital in Kampala! And still somehow finding time to continue her studies in simple surgical procedures! On Grace’s advice, she tells me, she has bought herself a temporary wedding ring to keep the wolves at bay till the day I am able to equip her with the permanent variety. And when a young intern groped her in the operating theatre, she gave him such a talking-to that he apologised to her three days running, then invited her to spend the weekend at his cottage, so she gave him another.

My one anxiety is that she may not know I have forgiven her for removing tapes five and six from my shoulder-bag and transmitting them without my prior knowledge to Haj. If only she could understand that there was never anything to forgive in the first place! And if she can’t, will she, as a good Mission girl, turn her back on me in favour of a man who has nothing to reproach her with? Such are the ingenious terrors which imprisoned lovers inflict upon themselves in the endless hours of the night.

And there was one letter, Noah, that for want of moral courage I at first declined to open at all. The envelope was thick, oily brown and faintly lined, a sure warning that Britain’s secret overworld was about to make its presence felt. For reasons of security, it bore a normal first-class stamp instead of the printed logo declaring it to be On Her Majesty’s Service. My name, number and the camp’s address, accurate in every detail, were written in a hand as familiar to me as my own. For three days it stood staring at me from my window-sill. At length, fortified by an evening passed with J. P. Warner and a bottle of Rioja procured for me with Maxie’s ill-gotten wealth, I grabbed a soft plastic knife that is designed to spare me self-harm and slit its throat. I read the covering letter first. Plain white A4 paper, no watermark, address
LONDON
and the date.

Dear Salvo,

I am not officially familiar with the writer of the enclosed, neither have I perused its contents, which are in French. Barney assures me they are of a personal nature and not obscene. As you know, I do not believe in intruding upon the private domain unless the interests of Our Nation are at stake. It is my sincere wish that you will one day remember our collaboration in a more favourable light, since it is essential that Man at all times be protected from himself.

Yours ever,

R. (Bob) Anderson.

By now of course my eye had lighted on the second envelope to which Mr Anderson’s covering letter made such tantalising reference. It was bulky and addressed in electronic print to Monsieur l’interprète Brian Sinclair at his post-office box number in Brixton. The sender’s name, embossed in sky blue on the back, was given as the Comptoir Joyeux de Bukavu: a play, I quickly deduced, on Haj’s full name of Honoré Amour-Joyeuse. The contents were not so much a letter as a wad of random jottings done over a space of days and nights. When I closed my eyes and sniffed the pages, I swear I inhaled the whiff of a woman’s scent, and J. P. Warner said the same. The text was in French, handwritten in a meticulous academic style that even in hurried circumstances did not desert him, any more than did his scatological vocabulary.

Dear Zebra,

Tapes weren’t necessary. You screwed me, I screwed them.

Who the fuck’s Hannah?

Why does she talk a lot of medical crap at me and tell me to get my arse checked by a urologist?

And why does she tell me to stand up to my revered father Luc, and here’s the evidence to help me do it?

I didn’t need any fucking evidence. As soon as I got home I told Luc that if he didn’t want to end up dead and bankrupt the first thing he should do was pull the plug on the Mwangaza.

The second thing he should do was advise the Mai Mai and the Banyamulenge they were making horses’ arses of themselves.

The third thing he should do was confess his soul to the nearest UN big cheese, and the fourth thing he should do was take an extended holiday in Alaska.

Hannah says you’re in deep shit in England, which knowing you does not surprise me. She prays that one day you may make it to the Congo. Well, maybe if you do, I’ll behave like all the best crooks and endow a teaching post at the university of Bukavu, currently a disaster zone. And I won’t give a fuck whether you teach languages or beer-drinking.

And make haste, because not all God’s little angels at the gates of Heaven will protect Hannah’s virtue from her wicked Uncle Haj’s clutches when she comes back to Kivu.

In Bukavu it’s business as usual. It rains nine months a year and when the drains back up, Independence Square becomes Independence Lake. Most weeks we can offer riots, demos and shoot-outs, although timings are unpredictable. A couple of months back, our home football team lost a big match, so the crowd lynched the referee and the police shot the only six guys who were doing absolutely nothing. None of this deters white Bible-thumping American evangelists with perfect hair telling us to love George Bush, and not fuck any more because God doesn’t like it.

There’s an old Belgian priest here who got shot in the arse a few years back. Now and then he drops in on one of my nightclubs to get a free drink and talk about the good old days. When he mentions your father, he smiles. When I ask him why, he smiles a bit more. My guess is, your father screwed for the whole Mission.

My house in the Muhumba district is a Belgian colonial bastard’s palace at the lake’s edge, but he must have been a decent sort of bastard because he built a Garden of Eden all the way down to the water, with every flower you heard of and some you didn’t. Candle trees, bottlebrush trees, aloe trees, bougainvillea, hibiscus, jacaranda, agapanthus and arrowroot, but my orchids are a fuck-up. We’ve got spiders the size of mice, and mouse birds with fluffy heads and long tails, in case you’ve forgotten. Our weaver birds have a great technique for pulling girls. The male weaves a nest on spec, then talks the girl inside. If she likes what she sees, they fuck. Tell that to your evangelists.

I meant to say that this garden has a bungalow. I built it for my sainted wet-nurse who took one look at it and died. She was the only woman I loved and never fucked. It has a tin roof and a verandah and is presently occupied by about a million butterflies and mosquitoes. If you ever make it to Bukavu, have it. The Goma cheese is still okay, the lights go out for three hours a day, but nobody puts out the lights on the fishing boats at night. Our leaders are total arseholes who can’t think beyond the level of five-year-olds. Not long ago, our masters in the World Bank conducted a lifestyle survey of the Congo. Question: If the State was a person, what would you do to it? Answer: We would kill him. We have Black Awareness but every street hawker in town is selling skin-lightener guaranteed to give you cancer. Young Congolese talk of Europe as the promised land. So be aware: if you make it here, you’re going to look like a rejected zebra. The elections won’t deliver solutions but they’re ours. We have a constitution. We have kids with polio and kids with the plague who are feeling richer by three million dirty dollars. One day, we may even have a future.

HAJ

We are on the coast here too, Noah. Each morning my heart rises with the autumn sun. Each evening it sinks. But if I bring my chair to the window, and there’s a good moon shining, I can just make out a sliver of sea a mile beyond the wire. And that’s where their England ends and my Africa begins.