Coincidence: A Novel (14 page)

‘Don't go too close,' Thomas said, unnecessarily. He held out his good hand to steady Azalea as she edged towards the rim, and the rocks below seemed to beckon with malign intention.

Azalea was clutching a small spray of flowers, daffodils – the first of the season. They made Thomas think of Wordsworth and of Peter Loak in his permanent dark Lakeland.

‘Do you think this is where he did it?' Azalea asked softly.

‘Yes,' said Thomas.

‘The funny thing is, I do remember some things. I think I do. I remember a tortoise.'

‘A tortoise?'

‘Yes. It must have been either at Marion's cottage on the Isle of Man, or else maybe at Peter Loak's house in Cumbria. But I remember it. I remember unwrapping him from a box at the end of the winter and watching him creak away into the bushes. People don't keep tortoises any more, do they? But we did. He was an old tortoise. I remember we used to call him Prairie Tortoise; that was my name for him. And then I remember years later telling my mum, Rebecca, about him. She laughed, and she said, “That's the name for the Lord's Prayer.” I didn't understand what she meant. Not at first.'

‘The prayer He taught us,' said Thomas.

‘It's always made me laugh,' said Azalea. ‘When the priest says, “Let's all stand and say together the prayer he taught us”. Because it always makes me think of Prairie Tortoise, and I wonder if he's still alive, and who wraps him up in the autumn and puts him into a box, and who unwraps him in the spring?' Azalea started slowly to unpeel the cellophane wrapping from the flowers.

‘I don't even know what she was
like
,' she said. ‘My own mother . . . I'd like to know what she was like.'

‘She was probably just like you,' said Thomas. ‘They do say, Like mother, like daughter.'

‘But I don't think she
was
. How could she sleep with three men and not know which one had fathered her child? I couldn't do that.' They watched the ocean billow and surge against the cliffs, and Azalea pulled her coat a little tighter. ‘Do you want to know a strange thing?' she asked. ‘I've been avoiding telling you . . . but I shall have to tell you sometime, I suppose.'

‘You can tell me anything.'

‘I was worried that this one might freak you out. It's another coincidence. Tell me if you don't want to hear it.'

‘Coincidences never freak me out. Of course I want to hear it.'

‘Marion Yves died on Midsummer's Day, 21 June 1982. She was my birth mother. Rebecca and Luke Folley died on Midsummer's Day, 21 June 1992. They were the parents I knew and loved. Rebecca and Marion died ten years apart. To the day.' Azalea plucked a daffodil from her bunch and cast it into the wind. ‘So this is for you, Marion Yves.' She threw another. ‘I'm older now than you were when your life was so brutally taken from you.' She threw a third. The wind picked up the flowers and swirled them against the cliff beneath in a welter of petals and spray. ‘We're all victims of savage, bastard inhumanity,' she cried into the wind. ‘Marion, you were taken by a wicked, violent monster.' She cast another flower into the wind. ‘Peter Loak, the man you loved, was mutilated by war.' Another flower. ‘Rebecca and Luke Folley, who loved me and raised me, were slaughtered trying to protect me.' A final burst of yellow daffodils all flung into a gust of wind. ‘And my friend, Thomas, lost his mother, too, to another murderous thug with another stupid gun in another fucking stupid war.'

They watched the daffodils slip down the rock face and vanish into the waiting foam; just the way Marion, cold and lifeless, must once have done. The wind had increased, as if a guilty spirit out in the bay was shouting back. Thomas placed his hand on Azalea's arm – just the gentlest of pressures to suggest that perhaps she should step back now, just a little way, from the edge. But Azalea's face was set towards the storm. ‘I don't care who you are,' she shouted suddenly into the face of the squall. ‘I don't care who you think you are . . . trying to rule my life!'

‘Azalea, please.'

She shook free of Thomas's hold. ‘I don't care what games you're playing with me,' she yelled into the wind. ‘I don't care who you kill. Do your worst. Do your fucking worst!'

They stood as the gale buffeted them like stoic statues set against the tempests. There was salt spray in the air and it flashed against their faces as the hulking waves below rolled across the rocks and shattered into droplets and mist.

‘Shall I take you home?' said Thomas.

For a while neither of them moved. Then Azalea turned and buried her face into his shoulder. ‘Yes please,' she said. ‘Take me home.'

16

June 1992

T
he low building that was Pastor David's house was built in the style of a circular Acholi hut and roofed with grass, but the building material was cinder block and not traditional adobe mud brick, and there was glass in the windows and a concrete yard with a bench and a rocking chair and a cooking stove. Inside the front door was a small anteroom, and leading off from this, two awkwardly shaped rooms like the slices of a pie. One was the room where the pastor slept, and the other was where he lived and conducted his business. Behind the roundhouse was the toilet hole, a rain barrel and a separate lean-to arrangement of corrugated metal sheets, behind which the pastor could carry out his ablutions in reasonable privacy.

When the alarm bell sounded from the roof of the mess hall, Pastor David had just returned from breakfast and was in his washroom soaping down, and maybe this is why he failed to hear the bell which should have summoned him back to the hall; or maybe – and perhaps more likely – Pastor David was growing a little old and his hearing was not so good. Whatever the reason, by the time he had finished washing, the bell had stopped. Pastor David had no need of a towel. He would dry off in the sun on his porch. He had laboured around to the little concrete yard and was lowering himself into the rocking chair to contemplate God's glorious creation, when down the path like a pair of cane rats came Anyeko and Azalea.

‘LRA! LRA!' Anyeko was shouting.

Among the Buganda people, of whom Pastor David could be counted, there was no love for the Lord's Resistance Army and very little fear of the magic they claimed to perform. The pastor lifted himself back out of his chair, still wet from his morning wash. ‘In there,' he commanded, and the girls disappeared into his sleeping room.

The wise thing, now, to have done would have been for Pastor David to have settled once more into his rocker, giving the appearance of a man undisturbed enjoying his morning nap. Instead the good pastor took up a position outside his front door, like a soldier guarding a palace, and this is how the two LRA boys found him when they came running down his path just a few moments later.

‘Who are you?' Pastor David demanded of them in English. This took them aback. It was not a language they could reply in.

‘Are you the pastor?' asked one of the boys in Acholi.

‘I am,' said the old Buganda man, replying in their language. ‘What do you want?'

‘You are wanted,' said the boy. He carried a very old rifle.

‘Who wants me?'

‘Joseph Kony wants you,' said the boy.

‘Why does he want me?'

‘To chase away a devil.'

The pastor looked shaken by this information. ‘Tell him to come and get me,' he said.

The boy looked frightened. ‘You must come,' he insisted. ‘You
must
come.'

The second LRA boy, whose gun was equally antique, made for the door of the house, but the pastor blocked his way. ‘Very well,' said the priest. ‘I will come. Lead the way.'

‘You're hiding someone!' shouted the first boy in excitement.

‘No,' said the pastor, ‘I am hiding nobody. Now take me to Kony.'

The first boy hesitated. He was used to taking orders and perhaps, before his own abduction, he may have learned to respect the elders of the church. But the second boy, it seemed, did not share his qualms. He pushed past the elderly pastor, who could do little to stop him, and burst into the house. A moment later he emerged, and at the dangerous end of his gun were Azalea and Anyeko.

This is what Azalea remembered of that day. She remembered being marched at gunpoint back to the compound. There was a sense of general pandemonium. Kony had left, and the men and boys who remained seemed wild-eyed and unsure quite what they should be doing. There was a lot of shouting.

It was as well, perhaps, for the delicate psyche of the thirteen-year-old, that Azalea was spared the opportunity to witness much of what followed. She and Anyeko were thrown roughly into the back of a truck, joining Tebere and Kila and Lubangakene and James. She felt a knee sharply in her back, and someone wrenched her arms behind her and pulled a plastic cable-tie tight around both her thumbs. Then she was shoved aside like a bag of cassava and with a jolt the truck was off, bouncing down the potholed mission drive.

In the annals of human recklessness or stupidity, what happened next might well deserve an entry. Despite his undertaking not to engage in heroics, Ritchie Lewis, now outside the mission compound and on the road to Langadi township, had struggled against this irregular instruction. When Luke had thrown his devil act, Lauren had grabbed Ritchie's wrist and had marched him firmly away from the compound. But it felt wrong to Ritchie. No sooner had they escaped from the confines of the mission than Ritchie dug his heels in. ‘You go,' he told Lauren. ‘I might be needed.'

‘Needed! How?' Lauren demanded. But there was no restraining Ritchie once his gallantry had been awoken. They crept to the roadside a short way from the mission gate and concealed themselves behind a makote tree.

‘Get down!' Lauren commanded in a stage whisper. ‘They're coming.'

The truck carrying Joseph Kony and his henchman came barrelling out of the compound, flying past them in a dust cloud.

‘You know who that was?' Lauren said. ‘That was Joseph Kony. The most dangerous man in Africa.'

‘We don't know that for certain,' Ritchie said.

‘I've seen his photograph,' Lauren hissed.

‘In that case,' said Ritchie, his mettle wholly undented by this possibility, ‘they need us even more.'

‘What are you intending to do?'

‘I'm not exactly sure,' said Ritchie. He pulled Lauren towards him and, on impulse, kissed her firmly on the mouth.

‘Is that in case we die in the next ten minutes?' Lauren asked. But the kiss had robbed her of some of her resistance.

‘We won't,' Ritchie said reassuringly. And if the possibility of mortal danger had failed to occur to Ritchie before the kiss, it seemed even more remote after it. They crouched down and watched the road.

‘What can you see?' Lauren whispered.

Ritchie was peering through the undergrowth. ‘I think they've got the kids in the truck.'

‘What? All the kids?'

‘No. I think they just have four . . . or five. I don't know.' He paused. ‘Azalea's with them.'

‘Oh, shit!' said Lauren. ‘Don't do anything rash, Ritchie. There's nothing we can do. They've got guns.'

‘They're coming,' Ritchie said suddenly. He scrambled to his feet.

‘Where are you going?'

‘I'm going with them.'

‘What? Are you mad?'

‘I might be able to help,' Ritchie said. ‘You stay there.' He stepped out from their hiding place behind the makote tree.

‘Ritchie – you idiot.'

He was standing now in the middle of the track. The second LRA truck was on its way out of the mission compound heading towards them.

‘Oh, for God's sake.' Lauren was on her feet too. ‘You'd better kiss me again, you cloth-head,' she said.

They kissed, and less than two minutes later, with cable-ties around their thumbs, Ritchie and Lauren were in the back of the pick-up with Azalea and Anyeko and the rest of the children.

They drove for perhaps four hours, possibly five. The captives lay, tied and uncomfortable, on the floor of the truck, while an assortment of LRA soldiers sat on the wing plates with their guns, enjoying – it would seem – their appearance of gangster-like intimidation. When they pulled up at their destination and all the soldiers had whooped and jumped clear, a man who had the appearance of a senior commander came to inspect the catch. He was visibly disturbed by the presence of Azalea and the VSOs. ‘Muna muna!' he yelled with some alarm. A crowd of armed and thin LRA conscripts and soldiers swarmed up to the truck. There were loud exchanges of view. Azalea's command of Acholi was fairly good. To her ear, the commander – or whatever his designated rank might be – was terrified that white captives would attract the attention of the Ugandan army. A welter of opinions and suggestions was forthcoming from the other LRA men. One suggestion was to shoot them right away and dump them on the road, but the senior man, to his credit, could not see how that would help. It would only enrage the army more. A suggestion that drew more support was to demand a ransom. The LRA were not proficient kidnappers – not for money, at least – but the idea clearly had some merit. Ritchie was identified as the spokesman. ‘Are you British?' the LRA man demanded of him in Acholi.

‘Tell him “Ee”,' said Azalea in a whisper.

‘Ee,' said Ritchie, uncertain what he was saying, or why.

The soldiers conferred.

‘He asked if we were British,' said Azalea. You said “yes”. They respect the British more than some of the others. Also they think the British would pay a good ransom for us. And they are scared that if they hurt us, then the British might come and track them down.'

After quite a bit of shouting, orders were given to unload the captives from the truck. As this happened it looked, for a moment, as if the St Paul's orphans might be going somewhere else. Azalea seemed emboldened by the success of their first intervention. ‘They stay with us!' shouted Azalea, in Acholi. A stunned lull in the bedlam greeted this declaration. ‘If they don't stay with us, then the British will send planes to cut you all down!'

Eyes turned to the senior soldier, who was clearly the only man capable of making such a serious decision. He rolled his eyes and responded with a curt flick of his gun, and that appeared to be an instruction to keep the group together. Still bound at the thumbs, all eight of the prisoners were jostled off the tailgate, roughly herded underneath a jacaranda tree and ordered to sit in the dust.

‘You can cut these things off our thumbs,' shouted Azalea, her belligerence waning.

‘I really don't think you should upset them,' said Lauren.

‘Don't worry,' said Azalea. ‘They won't dare hurt us.' She turned to a round-faced boy who seemed to have been ordered to watch them. ‘And you can bring us some water!' she yelled.

The boy trembled. Then he shouted something over his shoulder and two girls came running with plastic water bottles. One girl held the bottle out to Azalea.

‘We can't drink these with our hands tied,' Azalea said. She turned again to the trembling boy. ‘Cut these ties from our thumbs,' she repeated, ‘or I will speak to Joseph Kony. I'll tell Joseph Kony that you refused to let your British guests go free.'

At the mention of Kony's name, the boy shook even more. He relayed the threat back to a larger boy and the message was passed to the senior commander, who came over to investigate. He barked something at Ritchie.

‘Talk to me,' said Azalea. ‘Those two are just tourists.'

The commander looked anxious again. Taking tourists could be a dangerous gambit – even by the standards of the Lord's Resistance Army. He stared at the willowy girl wearing nothing but a nightdress, who seemed to be shouting instructions at his men. ‘You know Joseph Kony?' he asked.

‘Of course I know Joseph Kony!' Azalea snapped. ‘Do you?'

The two held each other's gaze for a long moment. Azalea, who might not normally have counted herself a good liar, felt quite justified in her claim. Hadn't she been the first to see Kony at the mission, standing alone in the driveway as breakfast ended?

The commander looked away, apparently convinced. ‘What do you want?' he said.

‘First, get your men to release our hands,' said Azalea. ‘Do you have any idea how uncomfortable this is? Then we want clean water and a hut. We won't run away.' She stared obstinately at the man. ‘And bring us some bananas, we're hungry,' she said, ‘and a melon.'

The commander was breathing heavily. Once again he gave a flick of his gun, and a boy ran up with a long cane-knife to cut the cable-ties from their thumbs. To assert his authority the commander took the knife from the boy, and, holding it up against Azalea's belly, he brought his face very close to her face and shouted a stream of Acholi words. Then, for good measure, he turned and did the same to Lauren Marks. Lauren, to her credit, had now learned from the sangfroid shown by Azalea. She kept her composure as the LRA man finished his tirade and stalked away.

‘What did he say?' Lauren said to Azalea.

But Azalea, despite her bravado, had been shaken by the outburst. She shook her head, and for the first time there were tears emerging in her eyes. ‘He said we must stay here,' she managed to say. ‘We shouldn't try to escape.'

But what the soldier had really said was later told to Lauren by Anyeko. And what he said was, ‘Set one foot out of this camp, muna muna girl, and I'll slice you from your little white pussy to your little white neck.'

 

And so, back to Langadi for the scene that Azalea was spared. We need not dwell too long on it. It was, after all, an episode, like the slaughter of Lester and Monique Folley and their son Lester Folley III, that does not call for embellishment. This was 21 June 1992, ten years to the day since Marion Yves was abducted from a fairground in Devon. And what transpired at the mission was indeed the violent shooting of Rebecca Folley, the second of three mothers that Azalea would learn to love. But in one important respect it was not quite the slaughter that Azalea had always imagined.

When the trucks left the compound taking with them Rebecca's only daughter and five of the orphans she loved, Rebecca's world fell apart. The lioness in a snare, say the people of West Nile, will devour her own leg to reach her cubs. The pandemonium that had greeted Azalea and Anyeko as they were tossed into the LRA truck was, for the most part, caused by Rebecca. As the truck carrying Azalea and the VSOs and the orphans bounced out of the mission, Rebecca broke free from two of the young soldiers who were restraining her and she ran after the truck with her arms waving. We will never know what she hoped to achieve by this. Probably she knew that the gesture would be futile and dangerous. But what is a lioness in a snare to do?