Coincidence: A Novel (18 page)

‘Where is the other one?'

‘In our other lorry.' Hall smiled. He pressed the call button. ‘Just checking in,' he said into the device.

‘Roger.'

The commander looked at this with relish.

‘A range of ten miles,' said Hall, holding up ten fingers.

The LRA man reflected. Then he spat on his hand and held it out. ‘Fetch me the guns,' he said.

Hall spat on his own hand. They shook hands through the cab window and the Ugandan mercenary did the same.

‘You send one gun,' said the man, ‘and we send one guest.'

Hall agreed. He spoke into his walkie-talkie. The LRA man shouted some instructions and boys ran towards the camp.

This was going to take all day.

A long time passed. Then a man came hurrying up the track. He was leading Tebere.

Hall spoke into the radio. A few minutes later, the second mercenary lorry approached slowly from the main road. The other Ugandan mercenary climbed out. He was carrying a box of ammunition. The exchange took place. The lorry, now with Tebere as passenger, reversed back up the track and a second hostage was sent for. Kila was exchanged for more ammunition. James was swapped for three rockets and Lubangakene for three more. The Lord's Resistance Army were holding the English captives until last. But the mercenaries were holding back the guns, so honour was even. Anyeko came next. She earned the LRA a box of grenades.

This was taking too long. Hall began tapping his fingers against the side of the lorry. He was impatient to see Azalea; impatient to see this adopted girl with the name of a child he once knew. He could feel the impatience gnawing at his bones.

There was a long wait. A man came up the track with a white woman. Hall looked at her with interest. She was too tall, surely, to be Azalea. His Azalea, he thought, and then he checked himself for daring to entertain the idea. It was Lauren. She looked terrified. ‘It's OK,' Hall told her. ‘I'm not sure who you are, but it's good to have you with us.' He pointed towards the second lorry. She was exchanged for a Barrett anti-tank gun.

A tall, athletic-looking white boy – Ritchie – was swapped for another Barrett. Now the LRA had three.

‘One more guest,' said Hall.

The LRA commander seemed to sense the mercenary's anxiety. ‘Give me the money now,' he said.

Hall pulled two hundred dollars from his pocket. The money was counted once, twice, three times.

‘More,' demanded the commander.

Hall puckered his lips and shook his head. ‘No more,' he said. ‘One more guest, and you get the rocket launcher.'

Did the LRA man want to keep the lengthy exchanges going? Was he loath to see an end to this day-long charade?

‘What is the rocket launcher?' the man said, suddenly. ‘What make is it?'

Hall contrived to look bored. ‘It's an Israeli weapon,' he intoned, ‘the B-300. It's a shoulder-launched assault weapon. Do you want it?'

The man held his stare, then broke away. The command was given and a boy was sent to fetch the final hostage.

It was growing dark as two men swaggered up the track with Azalea. In the low evening light John Hall could make out only the lissom, nondescript figure of a girl – just the
shape
of a girl in the gloom. The men held her at a safe distance while they waited for the lorry bearing the final trade. The equatorial sunset was nearly over. By the time the second mercenary lorry ground up the track towards the negotiation point, they were in a darkness relieved only by the flicker of a heavily shaded moon.

But now, as the whole operation was almost done, the LRA man seemed to be growing cautious. ‘Show me the gun first,' he said.

John Hall considered this. He shouted to the second lorry and the Ugandan mercenary who had made all the weapons exchanges stepped out holding the launcher.

‘Show me,' demanded the LRA man. ‘Show me how to work it.'

John Hall climbed down from the lorry. He looked over towards Azalea, still only a shadow in the darkness. His heart was beating fast. He moved into the pool of light cast by the lorry's headlamps and gave the LRA man a cursory description of the B-300.

‘Show me how to load it,' said the man.

‘First give me the girl.'

The LRA man nodded agreement. Azalea walked forwards alone towards the second lorry. In just the briefest flicker of moonlight Hall saw a stick-like girl wearing a long nightdress, with a shock of red hair – thick, curly red hair – the ghost, if ever there could be one, of Marion Yves. His heart skipped.

The moon vanished and Azalea was in darkness. John Hall reached out an arm as if to call her back and then checked himself. Another momentary flicker of moonlight, and in that fragment of time John Hall saw her face. He saw the face of a girl he hadn't seen since she was three years old. His hand flew to his mouth.

But something wasn't right. The LRA man was sliding a solid rocket with a high explosive tank round into the launcher. ‘Like this?' he was asking.

‘Azalea run! RUN!' John Hall shouted. He leaped onto the running plate of the first lorry. ‘Go go GO!' He smacked his palm onto the windscreen. The Ugandan mercenary at the wheel hit reverse and the lorry shot backwards. Hall looked around to see what had happened to Azalea. She was visible now in the headlights of the second lorry – running towards it, her red hair flying out behind her.

‘Run RUN RUN!'

The moon reappeared. In the cold light Hall could see figures in pursuit. Azalea jumped onto the footplate of the second lorry and now both vehicles were barrelling backwards. Somewhere in the light John Hall could see the LRA man raising the launcher to his shoulder.

‘Spin the lorry,' he shouted to the Ugandan at the wheel. ‘SPIN IT!'

The mercenary hauled down on the steering wheel and the lorry slid sideways in a hurricane of sand and dust. It came to a halt at a right angle across the track.

‘Now get the fuck out!'

John Hall leaped from the running plate. The Ugandan in the cab wasn't quick enough. There was a whoosh and a flash of flame and an eighty-two-millimetre missile smashed into the side of the lorry. The force of the explosion picked Hall up off his feet and threw him backwards in a slew of flame and debris. Everything was very dark. He blinked.

Invisible hands grabbed at him. An Englishman's voice was barely audible over the ringing in his ears. ‘Are you OK?'

It was too bloody dark. ‘I can't see you.'

‘Can you run?'

Hall struggled to his feet. ‘I think so.' He reached out and caught the Englishman's arm. His eyes were stinging badly. His face was wet with blood. ‘Lead me,' he said.

‘Let's go.' The Englishman took his hand and they fled like lovers up the track, feet kicking up the sand. The Englishman helped the big Manxman into the back of the lorry, and with a roar of the engine the vehicle tore back towards the main road.

‘What about Rico?' shouted Hall. His ears were humming.

‘Was he the other man with you?' said the English voice.

‘Yes.'

‘I'm afraid we lost him.'

‘Shit,' said John Hall, and he slumped down uncomfortably in a corner of the truck. ‘Shit, shit,
shit
!' He put his hands to his face. His eyes felt as if someone had gouged them out with rusty nails. ‘I need a doctor,' he said.

‘I'm a doctor,' said the voice, and then it added, ‘almost.'

The pick-up point was about three miles away – a roundhouse well off the main road. No wonder it had taken so long to choreograph every switch. The two South African mercenaries were guarding the place. All the other hostages and the Belgian mercenary were inside.

Hands lifted John Hall out of the lorry and carried him into the hut. There was no light – not that Hall would have noticed. They laid him down on a rug of goatskins. The vehicle was then driven away, to be hidden out of sight.

‘What were you doing in the damn truck?' John Hall asked Ritchie.

‘I went along for the ride,' Ritchie said. ‘Just in case they needed a doctor.'

He tried to examine John Hall in the faint gleam of a cigarette lighter. The Manxman's face had been slashed by shards of glass from the exploding truck. This was not the kind of case Ritchie had ever seen at medical school. ‘You're pretty fucked up,' Ritchie told him.

‘Great bedside manner,' said Hall.

‘I don't have any painkillers, any sutures, any antibiotics, anything to clean you up with,' said Ritchie. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘I don't have anything. We need to get you to a hospital.'

‘Boy, am I glad you came along,' said Hall. ‘Do you have any idea where we are? We're in the fucking desert. We're in the middle of a civil war zone.'

Outside, one of the South Africans called, ‘Down!' There was silence in the hut. Careering down the main road came a truck. It shot past. On the back there were kids with guns.

‘They're trying to follow us back into Uganda,' said Azalea.

No one wanted to respond to this rather frightening proposition.

‘Down!' came a second command. More headlights, and now a convoy of trucks. One, two, three, four . . . and trailing them a Land Rover with armoured windows. The excited voices of the boy soldiers drifted across the void as the vehicles swept past.

‘We can't stay here,' said John Hall.

‘What do you suggest?' asked Ritchie.

‘If we head east on the road to Kapoeta, we can cross the border into Kenya.' Hall forced himself to sit up. ‘Let's all make our way to the truck. Keep low. If anything comes past, just lie down. We'll give them an hour and then we head east.'

They linked arms and filed out of the hut. A few hundred yards off the road they came to the lorry and climbed aboard. All of the children were silent. They waited in the perfect darkness with barely a whisper. After an age, John Hall tapped on the back of the cab and the engine started; they rolled slowly over the desert and back onto the potholed road to Kenya.

19

June 1992

I
n the bright light of an African morning, it didn't need a doctor for John Hall to realise that his face had been shredded by glass in an ugly, bloody stripe that had taken out both his eyes. Lauren knelt over him picking tiny fragments of glass from his face.

‘Am I going to see again?' Hall asked her.

Lauren shook her head slowly. ‘I'm not an eye surgeon,' she said. ‘Can you sense light and dark?' She moved her hands in front of his eyes and then pulled them away.

‘I think so,' he said.

‘In that case, maybe your retina hasn't been too badly damaged. You might get some sight back with a good surgeon, but I really don't know. We do need to get you to a hospital, though. You need stitches. And there's a risk of infection.' Lauren tore a cotton fabric belt from her frock and tied it around Hall's face like a bandage.

They were parked about a mile from Kapoeta. The difficulty was a roadblock that guarded the entrance to the town. It may have been a Sudanese government barricade – or it might have been SPLA. The information had come from a driver they had met at Logirim, where the road starts to coil up towards the mountains. The mercenaries had stopped well short of the blockade so that one of their number could approach on foot and make an assessment of the risk it might present.

They breakfasted on flatbreads and pawpaws bought in Logirim. The mood of the six children had lightened now that the trauma of the previous day had passed. They all sat up in the back of the truck and everyone chatted at once, and it was like the noise in a playground.

This was a hostile landscape. Not quite desert, not quite mountains; great rocky hills burst free of the sand and occasional tenacious shrubs clung onto life. There was little tree cover. It was hot in the back of the truck. John Hall lifted himself up, feeling his age.

‘Is Azaliah here?' he asked.

‘I'm here,' said Azalea. She had been sitting alongside the big man, trying not to look too hard at the bleeding mess that was his face.

Hall held out his hand. ‘Can you walk me out into the desert?' he asked. ‘I need to move about a bit.'

‘I'll help you,' volunteered Ritchie.

‘Thanks all the same,' said Hall. ‘But I'd like to speak to Azaliah.'

She took his hand and led him through the rocks onto the sand. She didn't question why he had asked for her. Maybe, she thought, he had a message for her from Luke.

They sat in the shade of a cliff. Azalea was still wearing the dirty nightdress she had worn for breakfast at the mission; her feet were still bare.

John Hall was shaking. His temperature was raised. In a few hours, he knew, this would become a fever. He had to talk to her now.

‘What did you want to say to me?' Azalea asked.

Hall reached into a pocket and drew out a slim leather wallet. Slowly he pulled a photograph from the wallet and passed it to Azalea. ‘I don't suppose,' he said, ‘that I will ever see that picture again. Not in this life. Not with these eyes.'

The photograph showed a very young girl in a swimsuit on a beach. The girl had a shock of maple-red hair.

‘Who is that?' John Hall asked.

Azalea looked at the picture for a very long time.

‘Is it me?' she asked at last.

John Hall nodded. ‘I think so.'

‘I think so too,' she said. The child in the picture seemed a long way from the girl standing by a dry desert road in Sudan. The light in the picture was cool and grey and the soft, inviting sea swelled a deep blue. The hills that rose up to one side were so pure and so green and so unspoilt that they told of a land of an infinite, almost heartbreaking peace.

‘This was before I was . . . before I was adopted?'

‘It would be. Yes.'

‘So you knew me then?'

John Hall was quiet for a moment. He started to shake again. The fever was beginning. ‘Do you have a scar?' he asked. ‘On your face? Just here?' He ran his finger over his own bloody face – a face that, if it survived, would be a map of scars.

Azalea's hand went up to her scar and she ran the warm tip of a finger along its familiar valley. She looked at the face of the bleeding man, unafraid now to contemplate his wounds. ‘Yes I do,' she said softly. ‘I do have a scar.' She took his heavy hand and let him trace the line on her face.

‘Then I did know you,' whispered John Hall.

He was breathing heavily, and she had to lean towards him to hear his voice clearly.

‘How much do you know about your life before . . . before you were adopted?'

Azalea looked away. The landscape here was harsher than Langadi, where everything was so lush and green. Here the rich and fertile soils of Uganda had given way to the arid sands and rocks of the Sudan. And yet, she thought, there was a beauty to this landscape, too. She tried to think back to that day at the fairground in Totnes. She had no memory of it. Could she, perhaps, have any recollection of a time before? Had she closed the door on a life before the Folleys and St Piran, and before Langadi? Had there truly been a time when she had stood barefoot on a beach in a blue and white swimsuit, and this big tattooed man had photographed her with the swell of the sea to one side and the utter tranquillity of the hills to the other? She closed her eyes for a moment. Were there shapes there? Shapes of a young, young girl and the memory of the cool sea spray and the call of unfamiliar seabirds?

She opened her eyes again. ‘Nothing,' she said. ‘I don't . . . really remember anything.'

John Hall said, ‘Do you recognise this tune?' He started softly to sing – it was a lilting tune, gentle, a rocking tune, but the words were very strange. ‘V'ad oie ayns y Ghlion dy Ballacomish,' he sang. His voice was as rough and broken as his face, but his heart knew the melody and his lips knew the words. ‘Jannoo yn lhondoo aynshen e hedd. Chaddil oo lhiannoo, hig sheeaghyn troailtagh orrin!'

‘Bee dty host nish,' the words came out of Azalea's mouth. ‘Ta mee geamagh er'n ushag.' She gave a little gasp and sprang to her feet. ‘How do I know that?' she said, alarmed by the mining of this memory from her brain.

‘It's OK,' said John Hall. He reached out for Azalea's hand. ‘It's a lullaby . . . from the Isle of Man. Your mother used to sing it to you. She would sing you to sleep with it. Later you would sing it together.'

‘I didn't,' she exclaimed, and she shook away his hand. ‘I didn't. I never did.' But I did, she thought. I did. I knew those words, that tune. She blinked her eyes away from the fierce sunlight and looked away from the bleeding man.

He hummed the tune again, a gasping hum from a damaged throat.

‘Bee dty host nish, ta mee geamagh er'n ushag,' Azalea whispered, ‘ . . . geamagh er'n ushag.' She turned back to look at John Hall. He was leaning heavily on the rock as if the lullaby had worked its magic. ‘What does it mean?'

‘It means go to sleep baby, the fairies are coming.'

She was disturbed by this memory. ‘I've never been to the Isle of Man,' she said.

‘You've never been to the Isle of Man and you never knew the words of that song,' said John Hall. ‘And yet . . . and yet you have. And yet you did. You were born there.'

‘I wasn't.'

‘You were born on 8 August 1978, in a village called Port St Menfre. Your mother was a barmaid called Marion Yves. Your real name is Azaliah Yves.' He spelled out her name for her.

She echoed the words back. ‘Port St Menfre. Marion Yves. Azaliah Yves.'

‘All the boys loved Marion Yves,' he said. ‘That was her problem. When you were christened you had three godfathers. There was a barman called Peter and a fisherman called Gideon Robertson, and then . . . well, then there was me. The vicar dropped you into the font. That's how you got that scar.'

Azalea's hand went to her face. She touched the scar again, touched this physical memory of a time beyond memory. ‘Marion,' she echoed quietly again. ‘Marion Yves.' There was a dark familiarity to the words. ‘Why did I have three godfathers?'

‘Because any one of us . . . might have been . . . your dad,' said Hall.

Azalea looked at him, open-jawed. ‘You?' she said. ‘You might have been my dad? My real dad?'

‘I
am
your real dad,' said Hall. He held out his hand. After a moment, Azalea took it. They were just a father and a daughter resting by a roadside; just an ordinary parent and child. There was no LRA and no roadblock. There were no guns. There was a sandy beach and the swell of a blue sea and a green, green hill and the haunting echoes of a lullaby.

‘In the spring of 1982,' said John Hall, ‘Marion Yves moved out of Port St Menfre and she took you with her. She never came back.'

Azalea thought about this. ‘Where did she go?' she asked.

‘I have no idea. She left the island, that's all I know. No one saw her again.'

A handful of sand swirled up in the wind and flicked its fingers at them. Azalea blinked the grains from her eyes. She thought back to what she had been told of that time. ‘In June 1982,' she said, ‘I was left at a fairground in Devon. No one could find my mother. That's how I ended up with the Folleys.'

Hall nodded. ‘I guess that explains it,' he said. ‘I guess she left you there for someone to find you.'

Azalea tried to remember the fairground but no pictures would form. ‘Does that sound like Marion? Is that something she would do?'

Hall seemed to reflect on this. ‘No,' he said after a while, and he said it with some finality.

Azalea noticed that Hall was sweating badly even though the sun was not fully upon them. She felt devoid of any energy or emotion, as if the desert heat had bleached all feeling from her soul, as if a plug had been pulled and her very humanity had drained away into the dust. The story was true, she knew that. The lullaby was true. The scar was true. The photograph was true and Marion Yves was true, and all of this meant that there really was a past in her life sometime before the world she now knew. But all the same, it didn't
feel
real. Not here, not sitting on this rock with this bleeding man with his damaged face and the blood-soaked bandage around his eyes. The fear she had felt in the LRA camp still lingered in the marrow of her bones; the terror as she ran towards the truck while the big soldier, who now said he was her father, yelled at her to RUN, the shock from that moment when the fireball swallowed up the truck. And Rebecca Folley, her heart yelled, was her true mother, her soul mother, and now she, Rebecca, would be crying out for her, would be desperate in her fear and her loss, because at that moment another mother seemed like a dreadful betrayal. And now the guilt of that betrayal and the unbearable weariness from these past two days and the aching from a hard, uncomfortable night in the back of the truck seemed to well up in the throat of the thirteen-year-old. But somehow her tears refused to run.

The man beside her spluttered and spat blood from his mouth.

‘What should I call you?' Azalea asked the man who said he was her father. ‘I can't call you Dad.'

‘Just call me John.'

‘Do you have a picture of my mother? Of Marion?'

Hall turned his bandaged eyes towards her. ‘No,' he said. ‘I never had a photograph of Marion.'

Slowly they walked back to the lorry. Hall was stumbling badly. Ritchie helped him on board and they waited. Water bottles were passed around. The mood that had been so good at dawn now grew tense. Some of the children were sleeping. John Hall also fell asleep in one corner and snored like an ox.

The mercenary who had been sent to investigate the roadblock returned. They drove forward a couple of miles and then soldiers from the Sudanese army swarmed aboard. They poked at the children with bayonets fastened onto ancient Winchester .303 rifles. They flipped John Hall over to check that he wasn't concealing contraband. They were looking for money. Hall barely stirred from his sleep. The soldiers started to demand documents; but there were no documents. They were threatening to search the lorry; this wasn't a welcome development. They would find an arsenal underneath the planking. Something creative was required to prevent the situation from turning bad. In the end, it was Ritchie who provided it.

‘I tell you what, chaps,' he said to the men of the Sudanese army in the voice of someone who had once captained the first eleven at cricket. ‘We need to get this chap to a hospital. What we need is a military escort.'

Azalea, weary, with her head deep in her hands, translated for him.

‘What we need,' said Ritchie, raising himself up to his full six-foot-two height and sweeping back his blond fringe, ‘what we need . . . is one army vehicle ahead and one behind to take us all the way to the Kenyan border. That way, we can avoid bandits or SPLA. We need this,' said Ritchie, ‘to prevent a diplomatic incident.' He surveyed their bewildered expressions. ‘OK chaps,' he said, clapping his hands. ‘Let's do it, shall we? Chop, chop.'

With this piece of colonial posturing behind them, and the military escort alongside them, the rest of the journey went as smoothly as the corrugated roads and potholes would allow. At the Kenyan border post there was consternation because not one passenger was carrying a passport. But the Sudanese army captain who had led the convoy pulled rank and waved them brusquely through. It was still light when they spotted the ‘Welcome to Kenya' sign.

In the first town there was a rudimentary pharmacy. ‘Do we have any money at all?' Ritchie asked the mercenaries. There were two hundred dollars in a plastic bag in the diesel tank. ‘It's to buy fuel,' one of the South Africans explained. The men had some loose change, but all in Ugandan shillings. Lauren disappeared into the store and emerged with aspirins and alcohol wipes. She gave four tablets to John Hall and he swallowed them with some difficulty. ‘They say there's a mission hospital in Kakuma,' she said. ‘Sixty miles.'