Sing Like You Know the Words (27 page)

Everyone knew that the harvest
in the north had failed again. That was bad, but it was said that
the government troops had actually been burning food stores in the
affected regions. Nobody he talked to had seen it, but they all
seemed to believe it.

He remembered that Ray Hawkins
had been there; not to trade as he said, but only to look after a
nervous little man from Turin who never seemed to leave his room.
They were all wasting their time anyway: the Colonel suspected that
anyone who spoke English was an agent of the hated Americans. The
Colonel had all the Russian arms he needed. He even had troops from
Cuba at his disposal, but the word was that he preferred to let
hunger kill his enemies.

Somehow Ray had sources of
information. He said that the stories were true. The idea was to
depopulate the rebel areas. Most of the rebels would be among the
five million who might die. It was the traditional way, the Colonel
said. In any case the land was overpopulated and with modern
farming methods the country did not need so many peasants.

It sounded about right. Albert
had heard enough about the regime not to have any illusions. He’d
seen some of the street posters. “Temporary setbacks shall not
deter us from our final objective of building communism” was the
official view. Making a paradise for the poor if it meant killing
most of them in the process.

They never met the Colonel, but
they heard he was neither stupid nor corrupt, which seemed to make
matters worse. The most frightening thing about the man was that he
was sincere about his revolution.

Albert had wanted to find out
more. Ray had asked him why he would want to know. Ray’s final
words on the subject stuck in his mind.

-I like you Albert. I don’t know
why. But you´re not cut out for this business. You should get out
now. All this death; it’s getting to you.

- It’s the same for you.

-But I don’t have your refined
sensibilities. I’m not looking to make sense of it all the time.
You know my philosophy. If someone gets in my way, he goes down
before I do. I think I’m maybe what you would call a bad man, in
that way. You’re not like me at all.

He’d taken Ray’s advice to the
extent of getting out of the country. Not long afterwards
everything escalated and the world discovered the situation. It
suited everyone after that to treat it as an undiscovered human
disaster, even though all the governments had known what was going
on, he supposed. He had only been an observer, just a little closer
to the events than the people he was among now. But what could he
tell any of them about it that would sound true?

There are no accidents on the
scale of genocide, he thought, and there are people in the world
who can give the orders that such things should happen, not because
they are sitting in a presidential palace isolated from the
consequences, but because they have seen understood the
consequences and willed that they should occur. And men like these
live in all continents, not just in what we call the third
world.

He had no words for these
thoughts, and for once he felt out of place and wished he were far
away from the polite and happy company. He hoped tonight they would
leave him alone. But Matthew was talking to him, standing slightly
too close, sounding too jolly.

-You’re fond of telling us about
imperialism, aren’t you Albert?

-I’ve seen some of its effects
in the world.

-I was saying that pictures of
suffering don´t explain the causes and that´s what we need to
understand. You can tell us about how the old empires affected what
happened in Ethiopia

-Ethiopia wasn’t part of
anyone’s empire. It was one of the oldest kingdoms in the world;
independent for centuries except when the Italians invaded for a
while.

-But you know what I mean. Tell
us, which was the worst colonial power, the English or the
French?

Albert realised that Matthew was
remembering words that they had exchanged a week earlier. He´d said
that for all the atrocities committed by the Belgians and other
Catholic invaders, the damage they did was limited in scale;
primitive acts of savagery that were sustained by the promise that
it hardly mattered if thousands of unbaptised heathens perished if
the word of god could be brought to a few, and a good profit earned
in the meantime. It was the patient English and Germans he said,
with their systems and their administration, who were the most
dangerous. In Africa at the turn of the century, the English had
invented concentration camps and the Germans had perfected methods
of extermination that obliterated the entire Herero people from the
southern Cape.

-The French were not exactly
Catholics, he´d said, but they imagine themselves philosophers,
which is worse. There is no depth of egoism, vanity or sheer
stupidity that a man will not stoop to in the name of philosophy.
As for the English, if you believed their own words, they conquered
half the globe only because wherever they found themselves, things
were in a terrible mess that needed to be sorted out; only so that
common sense and order should be established. And common sense
sometimes looks so much like self interest that you can´t tell the
difference. They were pragmatists, they preferred not to take out
their motivations and examine them in the cold light of day. That
was their strength.

That conversation was only a few
days in the past, but tonight all the words seemed so trivial that
Albert had no time for them.

-You seem very annoyed about
something Matt. Is everything ok with you?

-Never better. Bit too much
booze, that’s all. Well what do you think?

Patricia stepped between them,
hoping to change the mood.

-All that was a long time ago.
At least those horrible things couldn´t happen today. People would
get to know, and they wouldn´t stand for it.

Albert replied in spite of
himself.

-Like in Ethiopia in eighty four
you mean? What do you think people knew? It wasn’t just a crop
failure. There were people starving in camps practically next door
to depots that were full of food, and then the government decided
to move nearly half a million starving people out of the region.
They died in their tens of thousands on the road.

-There’s inefficiency and
corruption everywhere, Patricia replied.

-It wasn’t incompetence Pat, it
was a war, and starvation was a weapon. The government wanted to
empty the land so that there would be nowhere for the rebels to
hide.

Patricia looked as if she was
not sure he was being serious.

-If that were true then it would
the most shocking crime.

Albert shrugged.

-It´s the same in every place.
How were you taught that the First World War ended? Did you think
the Germans in the trenches ran out of bullets? Germany was
blockaded by the English navy and the people starved. The blockade
went on for a long time even after the surrender. Imagine starving
to death when the war was already over. Food as a weapon is nothing
new.

Matthew responded angrily. It
was an anger that he did not understand even as he expressed it;
made worse by Albert seeming to have answers for everybody´s
questions.

-I suppose it is the English who
were the real war criminals again. But still, you were happy enough
that your family had British passports and you could come here when
the trouble started in Uganda.

Patricia looked at him,
genuinely shocked.

-Matthew, I hope you are going
to apologize for that later. That’s too much.

Albert remained calm.

-I wasn´t talking about my
personal story, Matt. I´ve been lucky I know and I have a lot to
feel grateful for. I don´t think that makes bad things that
happened in the past alright; still less bad things that might
happen in the future. But if you´re saying that a British passport
makes me not quite British, or second class British, and I should
keep my mouth shut, then I´m sorry.

Matthew was silent with shame.
The emotion that had made him speak so aggressively had vanished as
quickly as it came. It was a mystery to him. His head was spinning
with anguish and self disgust and alcohol. He needed another drink
quickly. What had he felt the urge to shout at Albert? It had been
something about demanding that he take life personally for a change
and show that he actually cared about something instead of only
knowing about everything.

But really that´s me, isn´t it?
And it´s worse because I´m supposed to be the journalist and the
one who tells people what is happening and makes them feel
compelled to act. Journalist: don´t make me laugh.

Matthew stood in the garden for
a while, holding a glass of whisky that he never tasted and letting
the quiet darkness insulate him from the muffled sounds of voices
from inside the house. By the time he´d recovered himself and gone
back to apologize to Albert, his friend was back to his charming
self and refused to accept that any offence had been given.

There were other thoughts that
he wanted to share with Albert, when they could talk without
everything needing to be polite. Shock was no substitute for
compassion, he wanted to say. People were always hungry for novelty
but they could resign themselves to any kind of cruelty if it was
distant enough. He thought he had the words now but it was too
late, the conversation had moved on.

Albert told him that he would be
leaving for a while in the next few days. He had some unspecified
business to attend to but he expected to be back soon. In the end
there were no hard words between them, but it was a bad way to part
with someone Matthew would never in his life see again.

Chapter Eight

It seemed as if 1992 was going
to be a much better year for them all. Matthew was almost happy,
because there would be an election and he was as certain as
everyone else that the conservative government could not win;
discredited by personal scandals and backbiting; clinging on amid
the ruins of its economic policy. The next prime minister would be
Neil Kinnock, and even if he wouldn’t be perfect, at least it meant
that the country could start to recover from the ravages of
Thatcherism. You almost felt sorry for his opponent, John Major.
After her own party had stabbed Thatcher in the back, Major was the
only one left who was senior enough and not steeped in the
blood-letting, so he took nominal control. He’d be a forgotten man
by the end of the year.

David warned Matthew not to hope
for too much in the way of a new age, but even he could hardly have
believed that the government would hold on to power. He only said
that the world had moved on in thirteen years of Tory rule. Some of
the industries and institutions that Matthew wanted to see revived
didn’t exist anymore, and people had changed their view of what was
normal. David didn’t press the issue. Matthew knew much more about
current affairs than he did: that was his job; and in any case he
always thought that Matthew was cleverer than him. It was just that
when it came to making predictions, in print or in private, he
always seemed to be wrong.

So far as David was concerned,
he didn’t expect much from politicians, but he was pleased that the
business seemed to have passed through the crisis and now at last
they were making reasonable profits. He didn’t say much to Matthew
about it, but desert wars were heavy on tank treads and the
conflict in the Middle East had been good for Cromwell.

And he’d been right about the
housing crash. The same people who’d called him crazy to walk out
on legal practice now spoke about him as a young man who knew a
thing or two. In the local papers, he could do no wrong. He was the
man who had saved jobs and turned a dying business around. Still,
he thought, it wouldn’t have hurt Matthew to have given him a
positive article about Cromwell occasionally.

It seemed that only Patricia
didn’t share the general mood of optimism. She was making a name
for herself at the bar, she had plenty of other interests to occupy
her time, and so far as David could see they were very both happy.
It was Matthew in his role as confidante who got to see another
side of her mood.

Matthew met Patricia at the law
courts. It was easier for him to plan his arrival for their regular
lunchtime meeting that for Patricia to know when she would be
finished. When the weather was decent, he preferred to wait
outside, in the pedestrian zone by the main entrance. The back
doors were only for prison vans depositing remand prisoners for
hearings, or collecting them afterwards, like so many empty milk
bottles.

The court building made Matthew
uneasy, although to Patricia the place was like home. He didn’t fit
with the harsh women, large or skinny and their too many children
come to see if dad was coming home, or with the nervous tattooed
men with haunted expressions always looking for somewhere to smoke;
and he could never be mistaken for a lawyer. He belonged to a class
of outsiders; respectable looking individuals who were probably
there to stand as witnesses and seemed lost: ignored by all,
including the superannuated court ushers, flapping around busily
with their black gowns and their official clip boards of cases.

When Patricia appeared, they
went out of the building and round the corner to the old Victoria
pub. Matthew asked Patricia what she felt like eating. She wasn’t
hungry, so it would be only a liquid lunch for them. He asked if
she’d been busy.

-Nothing important. Only a
couple of hopeless bail applications.

-I thought you were beyond that
sort of thing.

-Rodney wants to keep the
clients happy. Two of his regulars: petty criminals but they keep
coming back – bread and butter stuff.

-And did they get bail?

-Raj and Pete? Not likely.
They’d have collapsed with shock if we’d won. Likely to commit
further offences while on bail, they say. Not likely so much as
certain. When the trial comes up they know they are looking at a
six months stretch, so for them freedom is a chance to work hard
and put something away with no extra risk. But there old lags; they
know the score. They came down for a day out and to collect
cigarettes from Rodney’s clerk.