Beneath the Darkening Sky (11 page)

Just as I dropped my pants I heard someone say, ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’

I looked up and saw the four big boys walking towards me.

‘Who the hell are you?’ one yelled. ‘Who gave you permission to shit here? This isn’t your village where you can just walk around and shit wherever you want.’

I pulled my pants up and backed away. The leader charged and tried to kick me in the ribs, but I was already running, with my bad knees. We were right at the edge of the jungle, and even though
I was terrified of mines, somehow I was more petrified of the leaders.

The path was through a thick bunch of trees, leading away from the camp down to a banana grove. Before I got beaten I was always pretty good at climbing the trees, so I was thinking, If I can
get to the grove and up a tree, I’ll be safe. As I reached the head of the path, I slammed into an even bigger man. My legs turned to mush. I’d get beaten for this, for sure.

From the ground I looked back, and the boys were frozen, staring wide-eyed.

‘Enough,’ Priest’s voice boomed.

The boys stood like petrified wood.

‘Go! Or I will shoot you where you stand!’ His hand was on the gun slung at his side.

My attackers didn’t know what to do. ‘But —’ one of them said.

‘Are you arguing with me?’ Priest bellowed, then in a quiet, dark tone, ‘I’m going to count to three.’ He raised the rifle to his shoulder. ‘One
—’

They ran. I watched them go a few metres, then I sighed and collapsed to the ground. Priest let the gun swing back against his thick leg. He turned his gaze towards me. ‘And you,’ he
reached out a hand. ‘You need to get up and quit running.’

I took his hand and he pulled me to my feet. I brushed the dirt off my clothes as Priest turned back to where he had been sitting. My legs were still shaking, partly from the adrenaline leaving
them and partly from fear of this giant of a man.

‘Running won’t help,’ he said.

‘I’m fast,’ I blurted out.

He turned from his seat on a nearby rock and raised an eyebrow.

‘I was the fastest person in the village,’ I said, encouraged by the lack of anger in his face.

He picked up his gun.
He’s going to shoot me.
I stood paralysed.

‘This,’ he waved the gun, ‘is the only speed that matters.’ I remembered that the soldier on the truck had said the same thing. ‘That, and the balls to vomit on the
Captain.’ He smiled a little and indicated, with a nod, a rock nearby. I went and sat on the rock.

Guns are all around me. Only the new recruits like me are not armed. There is no one in the camp weaker than us.

On my second day, I wake up to see Parasite sitting on the floor, a ratty towel laid out in front of him, and his AK-47 across his knees. As deliberately as a spider building her web, he starts
to dismantle the weapon.

I don’t say anything, I just stare at the gun.

‘You like my disease?’ he asks with a smile.

‘Your what?’

‘This.’ He strokes the half-dismantled gun like a pet kitten. ‘My gun. It’s name is Disease. Get it? I’m the parasite, this is the disease.’ He pulls another
piece off the gun.

With a small oily cloth, he starts wiping down the gun, digging out bits of dust. A little bottle of baby oil sits on the towel. He pours it on his hands, rubs them together, then rubs his hands
all over each piece of the weapon. The way he does it, the look on his face, gives me a feeling like I shouldn’t be watching. Maybe he’s doing it to tease me.

‘I’ll tell ya, Baboon, cleaning a gun is like when you feel yourself getting an erection. There’s that lightness you feel, that little burst of happiness. And then it’s
there, man. It’s you. Big and strong!’ Parasite shifts a little where he is sitting. He wipes his hands on the cloth and starts reassembling the pieces.

‘Shooting stuff,’ Parasite says, with his gun reassembled and glinting, ‘is just like making love, man. This gun has made love to three very beautiful women. Have you ever seen
a woman dead?’

I remember my uncle’s wife, back in the village. They tore away her clothes and tossed her into the dirt. She was so weak from fear that, even on her hands and knees, she had trouble
staying up. Once they were finished with her, they left her dead in the dust next to my burning hut. Looking at Parasite, I shake my head.

He smiles with half of his mouth. ‘It’s amazing. I’ll tell you a secret. Women, they’re so much more beautiful dead than alive. The first time I killed a woman for real,
it was just me and her in the hut.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Two in the stomach, one in the head.’ He mimes the shots.

Parasite sets the gun across his lap and folds up the towel with the cloth and oil inside. He pushes the wrapped towel under the cot, next to his boots. ‘She was still warm,’ he
says. Standing up, he grabs his crotch and adds, ‘And so tight! Only took a minute. World’s best.’

He slings the AK-47 over his shoulder and stands there in his shorts, his erection at the level of my face. ‘Shit, man,’ Parasite whispers. ‘I gotta go to the hospitality
house. Are you even old enough to get it up?’

I shrug. I know what Parasite is talking about, but not really. Akot used to compare the rears of all the women in the village. The single ones, at least. That never made sense to me, how one
was better than another. He was the same with breasts. Hearing him talk, I did figure out that large breasts were somehow better than small ones, but I had no idea why.

‘Yeah,’ Parasite says distantly, and nodding for no apparent reason. ‘Real virgin, not just a blood virgin. You’ll get your chance, man. Someday, if you don’t piss
off the Captain so he decides to beat you to death.’ He laughs and heads out of the barracks, gun across his back, to the hospitality house. I fall back on the cot.

As soon as we arrived here, the soldiers handed the girls over to Mouse. Akidi shuffled and stumbled along with the other girls, away from the soldiers. I thought she was
lucky. It took me a while to figure out what kind of hospitality was being offered.

That happened as I was walking behind the house, trying to get to the barracks without being seen by the Captain. There was a sudden bang on the wall, right by my head. I froze. Fear echoed in
my bones. I heard heavy breathing and a woman’s little cries like she was being beaten, and then longer sounds.

I knew those sounds. My village was made up of simple huts and some people were very loud. Growing up, I’d heard those sounds so often that they faded into the back of my mind like the
humming of grasshoppers. The only thing about it was that it was daylight. And the women went with more than one man, though I didn’t think too much about that. But now those sounds sent an
instant wave of sweat across my palms.

I didn’t see Akidi much after we got to the camp. They didn’t let the hospitality girls out much. When I did see her, I knew she’d changed, everything about her was different.
My uncle’s sister-in-law went into that house and never came out.

I wonder if Parasite will visit Akidi.

I don’t know whether Parasite had always felt that way about guns and girls, or whether it was being here that made him think those things. I hope he
was
always
like that – but I think they want us all to become like him.

From the first, we had to learn revolution songs, but our morning runs included a different kind of song – not about the revolution and the glorious new world.

To have those words coming out in my own voice terrified me, and still does. Sometimes, if I’m in the middle, away from the Captain and the Mobile Force, I sing the words from my
village’s Sunday school songs under my breath, to try to cleanse myself.

Back home I was never much of a singer. Pina had been given a beautiful voice. She was the best singer in Sunday school. I used to play an old guitar to keep birds out of the garden and I could
tune it to her voice, she knew the notes so well.

The Mobile Force love to sing about death and rape and fire. Boys that haven’t even held a gun yet. And those words get in your head, like a dream you once had. I see it in the other boys
around me. The songs they sing turn into plans, weave themselves into real desires.

I’ve been fighting against those songs from the beginning, but the tunes embed themselves in your mind. You can’t resist. Once, just sitting in the evening, toying with the dummy
rifle they gave each recruit, I heard the words of one rape song coming from somewhere nearby.

Then I realised I’d been singing it. It was in my head, singing itself. The worst one, though, was the one about killing your parents.

They teach us to kill before the person can plea for mercy. Of course, they say, one day we’ll learn to enjoy the power of those pleadings, we’ll understand how they can give us
strength, and therefore strengthen the revolution. But we’ll have to kill a few before we can learn that. They teach us to deny family, supposing we ever met them on the road. If a family
member calls out to us, we are meant to act like they are strangers. If they persist, we must shoot them.

The most terrible part of all is seeing Akot transform. While I try to resist the songs, he gets into contests with other recruits over who can sing louder, especially on the hard parts of the
run. Those first few first days of mine, he was next to me in the field formation. Soon, though, he was springing out of his bed faster than anyone. Front row, every morning.

Back in the barracks he does push-ups, competing even with the adults. Whenever someone cleans their gun, he watches like a vulture circling a wounded rodent. He stops looking at me, stops
caring when I’m beaten. He just presses on. The dimness that I saw in him back in the village becomes a bright fire in the camp. It has never been about the revolution for him, though he can
quote the slogans as well as the General. This is a different world from the village, and here he knows what to do.

Of the recruits from our village, Akot is the first to get a real gun, much sooner than anyone else. He is married to that gun and spends every moment practising out at the firing range. I can
always tell when he’s come back from shooting because that fire is brightest in his eyes. That terrible fire of an attack dog bringing scraps of victims to please his master. We know it is
dangerous for us to be seen talking. Our only family here is the revolution. Blood ties are gone. Akot has made his decisions about how to survive here.

After that first encounter, Priest and I meet quite often. Every day, I see him reading his bible. It’s the most beaten-up holy book I’ve ever seen. Even since
I’ve known him, he’s had to fix the cover twice. We don’t have glue, so he uses tree sap, which works well enough.

Today I ask him how he can read the Bible and still be a soldier.

‘Do you believe in God?’ he replies.

‘I suppose,’ I tell him. ‘One of the soldiers said that God’s forgotten about Africa. I think he might have forgotten about us here, anyway. But I believe he’s out
there.’

Priest nods. ‘If you believe in God, why can’t you read the Bible?’

‘Because, if I did what it said, the Captain would shoot me.’

‘Many of the saints died in much worse ways for their faith.’

‘I don’t want to be a saint. I just want to live.’

‘Me too, with God’s help. Remember what God says in Psalm 91 – he will give orders to his angels about you and they will hold you up with their hands so that not even your feet
will be hurt on the stones. Do you know what the Bible says you should do with your life?’

I shrug. It feels like it’s been years since I opened a bible. ‘It says . . .’ and I try to remember the verses the missionaries told us to memorise. ‘That you have to be
sorry for your sins. You have to forgive people. Don’t kill.’

Again, Priest nods. ‘What it really says is that you must love others. You must make them more important than you.’ He looks at the sky. ‘ “Greater love has no one than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” ’

‘And don’t steal things.’

‘I have a brother, like you. When the rebels came to my village, the elders went out to meet them, clapping and waving. Of course, the elders didn’t like the rebels, but they
didn’t want to have our village burned, raped and murdered either. So they greeted the rebel leaders like old friends and ordered a big feast. The rebels were so surprised they didn’t
know what to do.’ Priest laughs.

‘When they decided to leave,’ he continues, ‘they said they would give the privilege of serving in the army to ten of the boys in the village. Two brothers actually
volunteered. Their father beat them every day, they just wanted to get away from him. Plus, he had hit them in the head, so they were a bit slow. Then the rebels started picking boys. One they
picked was my little brother. They didn’t pick me because my arm was broken.

‘I jumped up and said that my brother was just a baby, that he threw up when he saw his own skinned knee. It was my right arm that was broken, so I told them I was left-handed. None of
that was true, but who cares? I asked them to trade me for him. They agreed, then they told me that if I died they’d go back and get my brother to replace me. So, I am here, doing what
I’m told so that I can survive. And maybe I won’t get into heaven, but my brother will. If there is no greater love than giving up your life for another person and I am here for my
brother, maybe God will forgive everything else.’