Beneath the Darkening Sky (10 page)

‘I am not your grandpappy!’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘You will follow orders or you will rot in the deepest part of hell my boot can grind you into. Now, dig that into the shit you use for brains!’

‘Yes, sir!’

After I have washed his clothes, he lets me out of the creek and leads me back to where I can hang them. He stands there watching me like I’m a wife he’s suspicious of. He missed his
wife and now has me doing his laundry. What else?

But he doesn’t touch me. Instead, he takes me out into the yard and tells me to sit. My icy, water-drenched clothes cling to me, turning my skin blue in the morning chill. I pull my knees
up to my chest to try to get some warmth back.

‘Parasite!’ the Captain calls. ‘Get out here.’

Parasite is there almost before Captain is finished talking. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Watch this idiot.’ The Captain walks over to me and draws a circle around me with his toe. ‘He doesn’t leave that spot until I say so.’

‘Yes, sir!’ bellows Parasite.

‘And every thirty minutes I want you dumping creek water on his head.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If he starts acting funny . . .’ The Captain clicks his tongue and walks off. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

Parasite’s face breaks out in a big smile. He chuckles, and shakes his head at me. ‘No angels here, man.’

Thirty minutes later, he’s back dumping a jar of water over me. Slowly, like it’s holy water. He says, ‘I’ll be back in thirty.’ Smiles, laughs, walks away.

It looks like Parasite thinks it’s a good day. All day, he doesn’t have to do anything except dump water on me. After a while, though, he seems to like it less – he has to be
there every half-hour, so he has to watch the time, and can’t do anything else. Once, he comes running out the barracks with his pants undone. Maybe he’d been having a nap and almost
slept through. He runs down to the creek holding them up with one hand. He’s out of breath when he gets back, and dumps the water on me like I’m on fire. He smiles at me like I was
supposed to feel good about him not missing this appointment.

He’s still doing it in the middle of the night. A crescent moon hovers over me and I keep staring at it, wondering why it has never looked like this back in my village. I watch it for
hours, at least five showers from Parasite. Maybe it’s hypnotising me, but I begin to wonder if there really is only one moon. How can it be the same moon that I used to see from my village?
And how can the same sun that kept me warm and safe in the village burn and beat down on me here? In the village, the moon had always been a distant thing, giving us a bit of light. This moon,
though, I feel like it’s waiting for me to speak to it, like maybe it’s here to carry my prayers to God.

Splash!
Ice-cold water, right in my face. Parasite sits down next to me.

‘I’m getting tired,’ he says.

A few moments of silence. ‘I don’t think my knees will ever be straight again,’ I say, and wonder whether he’ll hit me for being weak. But he laughs softly.

‘Parasite!’ The Captain appears across the yard, stepping out of the black shadows into the pale blue light.

‘Yes, sir?’ Parasite jumps to his feet and wobbles a bit. He hasn’t tied his boots and his foot lands crooked.

‘I’m glad to hear you’re still enjoying your bunkmate’s pain.’

‘Yes, sir!’ It sounds like he meant it, but maybe he’s pretending, for the Captain.

The Captain’s quiet, thinking. ‘Okay, Baboon’s Ass, on your feet!’

I try to stand, but my knees give out. Parasite grabs my arm and pulls me up. Knees shaking like leaves in a storm, I stand inside where the circle was before all the creek water washed it
away.

‘I’m getting bored seeing you over there,’ the Captain says. ‘Plus, you’re always shivering and I’ve been sweating all day – I was almost jealous. So,
both of you, go. You’re going to need the rest.’

I can hear the smile in his voice.

A dream leaves me like a spooked bird. My dreams don’t want to stay any more.

On my second day in the camp, outside the barracks, a shrill whistle. Parasite snaps to his feet, throws on his clothes and runs out before my brain is clear enough to figure out what’s
going on. My sleep-fogged mind tells me, Run out after them. But my body is slow, maybe still half absent. I sit for a moment on the edge of my bed and stretch out my clenched limbs. I’m just
so tired and want to sleep more.

My back explodes in a shower of stings, like a cloud of black wasps has landed on me. I jump off the cot and trip over the next one. As I fall down again I see three boys, tiny ones with shaved
heads and long bamboo canes. As I try to pull myself up on the fallen cot, the boys start hitting me again, blows from their thin weapons fast like rain.

Outside the barracks, someone is laughing. ‘Mobile Force is meeting one of the new recruits.’

A rough hand grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet, we’re heading for the door. I’m now completely awake. I catch on quickly and run for myself. Lines smarting all over my body, I
start sprinting towards the large crowd of boys. Behind me, the little boys chase two more recruits. One is Akot. I guess he was the one who pulled me from the barracks. He must have come to find
me.

The Mobile Force boys aren’t the youngest, they’re just small. The officers want their army to be big and frightening, so the smallest stay in the camp, for the Mobile Force. Maybe
that’ll be me: they are fast. The Mobile Force is in charge of making sure everyone obeys the rules when the officers aren’t around, or can’t be bothered. The Captain
doesn’t have time to punish everyone who is slow out of bed. Even the elite bodyguards, the quiet eunuchs that stand by the officers’ houses and guard the wives, can be beaten by the
Mobile Force.

From then on I learn to fear them, as everyone does, even more often than we fear the Captain, because you don’t always know when they’re around.

Once I am in ranks with the rest, though, there’s only one man to be frightened of. I make sure I’m lined up with those in front of me and on either side. For a moment I breathe in
victory, until heavy boots tromp out of the shadows in the dawn light.

At this hour the Captain moves like an elephant, every step slow and careful, but long, so that he still moves quickly through our ranks. He begins by checking our legs, telling us to make them
straighter, stand taller, chin up, chest out.

‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!’

He carries a long black stick. We are maggots, so he only touches us with the stick. He stops in front of me. The fear I breathed away rushes back in. Breathe in, breathe out. Please keep
moving. Please. He whacks the stick into my knee.

‘Stand proper, maggot!’ the Captain yells.

His stick comes down once on my head. He continues walking, with those long, slow steps. I’m still shaking when he reaches the end of the row, but I’m glad to have got off
easily.

‘All right, maggots!’ he bellows. ‘Into the creek, now. Run!’ He hits the nearest boy on the back with his stick, but most have already taken off.

Through the camp we run as fast as we can. It is a race, not against each other, but against Mobile Force, who run with their switches biting at the empty air between us.

The first set of splashes come seconds before the icy water laps at my ankles. I freeze. My body doesn’t want to go further. A boy collides with me from behind, making us both fall into
the water. We’re only in there for maybe five minutes, but it feels like days. I’ve never been so cold in my life. My fingers go stiff as I break the surface and the feeling in my legs
rushes out. I can barely stand, shivering uncontrollably, up to my thighs in the middle of the creek.

Now we’re running, through the creek to the far bank. The Captain wants us running up the steep mountains nearby. It’s like trying to run with crutches, my legs are so cold and
stiff. Many kids trip and fall down crying, only to be hit by the Mobile Force until they manage to get back up. I go down, my knee screaming, it’s still too cold. Two switches bite into me,
but I crawl from under them and push on, teeth chattering. This is our training.

The ones who don’t pay attention during drills get smacked around by instructors. The simple truth is that a human body can only be beaten so much before it stops. Why don’t the
officers learn that lesson? They’ll beat a child again and again and again, until, one day, he simply falls over, never to stand again. A lot of other boys, after getting a beating, go to bed
and never wake up.

Or maybe the officers have learnt the lesson but don’t care. Our commanding officers seem to know on sight which of us will make soldiers and which are too weak. They use the weak ones as
examples. Any rule they want to teach us, they wait for a little skinny one to break. They beat him or shoot him.

I wonder whether the Captain has picked me as one of the weak ones. He’ll beat me whatever I do, until I don’t get up. I think about not getting up, but I know my father
wouldn’t want me to do that.

The Captain isn’t in charge of everyone at the camp. There are other captains, with their own recruits, and the Great General, who is in charge of all of them. I
don’t know if the Captain gets shouted at by the Great General. Maybe the Captain started off as a recruit, and the Great General was his captain. I like the thought of someone making the
Captain run and beating him. It makes me like the Great General a little.

The Great General is the only fat man in the entire camp. He is not very neat. Most of the time he walks around without a shirt, just letting his hairy stomach hang out. He wears a small scarf
around his neck for dabbing up sweat, and an old pair of shorts that sag halfway down his rear, showing a thick band of dingy underwear above them. Not even his wives have bigger rears. I
don’t know why his wives don’t wash the General’s clothes more often, or make the recruits do it, like the Captain does. Maybe they don’t care what he looks like.

Then there are the commanders, who call for drills whenever they feel like it. There is no schedule, no routine. They just shout and you say, ‘Yes, sir!’ and go. Otherwise you get
beaten, or whatever else they think will teach you.

Priest is the one person in the camp I can call a friend. He is one of the most senior soldiers – not an officer, though, he has no rank and sleeps in our barracks. We don’t have
lots of ranks like the regular army, mainly they just use them to make everything sound more official. Our army is not so complex. Priest is older than most other soldiers. We call him Priest
because he carries a bible everywhere. The Captain doesn’t believe in God – he believes in himself, God in the revolution kingdom. But Priest is allowed to do what he wants.

Priest got the bible when they attacked a village on a Sunday. They surrounded the church while everybody was inside. No one said anything. The drum stopped beating when the worshippers saw
them. Priest said that the people looked at each other as if they were talking with their eyes, trying to tell each other that they would be safe.

The Captain walked up to the pastor at the front of the church, pistol in hand and puffing on his cigar. He snapped the bible out of the pastor’s hand and flipped through it. Then he
looked out over the congregation, standing shoulder to shoulder with the pastor in front of the altar, as if preparing to read the lesson. ‘The white man is strange,’ he began, and then
turned to the pastor and poked him with his loaded pistol. ‘They worship a god who has a son but no wife.’ He turned to the worshippers, who looked confused as to whether the words were
actually coming from the bible. ‘But the son has a mother who is not the wife of the father.’ He closed the bible. ‘So much for the white man’s religion.’

They burnt the church. No one was allowed to escape. The Captain allowed Priest to have the bible, stolen in the name of the revolution.

Most of the kids have no one to look after them. As well as getting beaten and not knowing why, they get sick. You get sick in the villages, too, but it’s worse here. Here there is no rest
for the sick. I’ve seen boys fall over during a run and just fill their pants with the rice-water diarrhoea. I had it myself once, and had to keep running out to the latrine. The latrine is a
big crater where a mine had gone off in a clearing in the jungle, who knows how long ago. We use it because it’s away from camp, and a crater always means safety. Priest is not like Akot, he
takes me out in the dark when I wake him at night.

He tells me to be strong. If I’m strong I can beat anything that comes my way here in the camp. If I’m not, then I’m like that kid from yesterday. He had the cholera. He lay
under shade, curled up with his hands clutched around his stomach. He never got up.

When the Captain came he kicked him in the side with the tip of his boot. ‘This one is gone.’

They don’t care about the weak that die from the diseases. They only care about the heroes of the revolution. When a soldier dies at the hands of the government forces, our officers remove
their hats for a minute’s silence, before we spend many hours singing revolution songs.

A lot of the kids drink water right out of the creek. My mother ground it into me that you always boil water first, get it bubbling for a while before you even think about drinking it. But these
kids get up first thing in the morning and go to the creek. They get cholera. They shit so much that they get weak from dehydration, and what do they drink? More creek water!

Our commanding officers have wives who make sure they always have boiled water. The rest of us have to boil our own. Of course, even if you always drink boiled water, you’re still going to
get something from the beans. Beans for breakfast. Beans for lunch. Beans for dinner. My first night, some of the boys tried to have a farting contest, but the superiors in the barracks thrashed
them for it.

‘We’re all farting!’ they yelled. ‘We all fart a hundred times a day! Shut up and let us sleep.’

I met Priest on my first day. He’d heard about my vomiting over the Captain and the idea made him laugh. I’d seen a group of bigger boys from the barracks walk into a patch of jungle
to relieve themselves. We’d been warned that the jungle around the training camp had a lot of mines, but somehow these boys had found a safe spot, away from the stinking latrine. I decided to
use their spot as well.