Terroir (24 page)

They'd been playing soccer with a ball made from banana fibre tied with string and Solomon was been in goal, laughing as he caught shot after shot. He'd been placing the ball to kick it out when he heard the silence and looked up to see a line of solders in rag
-
tag uniforms. They wore necklaces to feed a heavy machine gun and carried AK47s. The brass cartridge cases glittered in the sun as they closed in. The younger kids had already fled, but Solomon was trapped against the wall between the goalposts. And he couldn't leave his mother. So he'd been captured. There were reasons. The garrison at the base had gone out on patrol that morning, and those left – the fat quartermaster and cook – were shot down as they tried to escape. Two bursts on an automatic weapon, the crack of single shots, a chemical smell of spent cartridges dispersing. The rebels dragged their bodies into the village and laid them up against the jacaranda tree like a couple of drunks who'd fallen asleep against each other. The rebel commander wore a pair of women's boots with a leopard fur trim. He'd put his arm around Solomon as he led him to the chopping block, the way his father might have done.

Father Brian had given them the address and name of a contact in the city and they were taken in and cared for by a European charity. A journalist visited, scribbling in his notebook, setting off a flash camera. They'd been featured in the newspaper as an example of what the rebels did to innocent citizens. A
cause célèbre
. When it was clear that Solomon needed treatment that couldn't be given at the local hospital, they were asked if they wanted to go to Sweden or the UK. Solomon remembered Manchester United. He'd seen them play on the television set that ran from a stinking generator at the local bar. He knew nothing about Sweden, except that the people there had white hair, like albinos or ghosts.

Visas were arranged, the airfare donated from a UK charity, and they were taken to the airport. It was at the tip of a finger of land that jutted into the lake. From the porthole of the plane, between wing and fuselage, the lake passed under them like varnished copper. They were heading northwest, over deserts and mountains into Europe. It was strange how the desert seemed to have been shaped by water, with valleys and gullies wrinkling it. Solomon watched the outsized plane on the electronic map, nudging over Libya, Italy, Germany and France towards the small island of Britain. When their meals arrived in little plastic containers with foil covers, the airhostess helped him to open them. He'd grasped the fork as if it was a trowel. She was a beautiful girl in a cream suit with red lipstick and caramel skin and she was trying not to look at his hands. His mother told him how she had once been on an aeroplane to Nairobi, when she'd worked for a Muslim businessman before she'd met Solomon's father. They'd gone there to buy fabric for his clothing business.
Aigh!
she said in English, shrugging into the thin blanket the airline issued,
We will survive.
Solomon asked what happened to the businessman. His mother shrugged. He had disappeared in the civil war. What had happened to his father would have to wait. He wanted to know, but he daren't ask in case his mother knew, had really known all this time.

The cabin lights dimmed and the aeroplane droned on, hardly seeming to move, yet its airspeed was hundreds of miles an hour. His other life felt like the memory of something now, the way we remember a dream that has never happened, the way the mind can think anything, but can't unthink it.

When his mother was safely in bed, Solomon took the laptop computer into the living room and switched it on. He was taking online courses in English, Accounting and Computing and he'd been lent a machine to practise on. When they returned home he would be able to earn his living. They'd build a house with a veranda where his mother could sit out of the sun. They'd have a little ornamental garden and a
shamba
to grow food and a fishpond, all in a compound with iron gates.

The screen lit up slowly and he typed in his password. He had a Facebook account and was gradually collecting friends. Some in the UK, some in Africa – even America and Canada. It was exciting to check his email and find a request to confirm someone as a friend. Someone he'd never meet, but who smiled out at him from their photograph. Then there were friends who knew friends and so the network grew. Sometimes he chatted to them about football, the premier league; usually he had little to say. He followed Manchester United; he lived with his mother; he was studying to be an accountant. He tried to type with all his fingers as he'd been taught, but it was hard. It was hard to do things in the correct way when
he
was no longer correct.

He had a bank account into which a monthly allowance came from the charity. He spent very little, even saved a little money, so sometimes he shopped online for small things. A tee shirt. A pair of jeans. Music for the Ipod he'd been given. There was no room for a garden in the little flat, not even a window box like those he'd seen in the town, so Solomon sent away for a fish tank. It arrived in a great cardboard box packed with polystyrene.
Aigh!
his mother had said, frowning,
What have you bought now?
But Solomon
had shaken his head and said nothing, smiling and placing one finger flat against his forehead, the way she'd shown him to keep secrets as a child.

Tonight, as she was sleeping, he went shopping for goldfish. Amazingly, they could be sent through the post.
Quality English-bred pond fish delivered to your door.
The tank came with a packet of gravel and water conditioner and a special bag of plastic pondweed to plant it out with. There was a little filter that you plugged into the electricity to freshen the water. You added a fish food and let it decompose to make bacteria, then after a week or so, you could add fish. He remembered that from Father Brian's lessons.

Solomon chose three goldfish – Comet Tails, three to four inches long – entering his credit card details carefully with the delivery address. They would arrive the day after tomorrow. Not long. He thought of the fish being chosen for him from hundreds of possibilities, one almost indistinguishable from another. The way they wouldn't know anything about it, because they had such a short memory span. Three seconds, they said, then everything was lost to them and began again. That was a myth of course, but they'd laughed about it with Father Brian when he teased someone for not paying attention. The next day was Thursday. Then Friday, when his English language assignment was due.

On Thursday afternoon he asked the woman in the supermarket about bluebells. The one who smiled at him and placed the coins so carefully into his hands. In her strange accent she told him that they grew in late April, that there was a famous bluebell wood just a few miles from town. In the spring he would take a taxi and drive his mother there to see them. They hadn't promised Father Brian anything, but they owed him that, at least. When they returned home to Uganda, they'd take some of those blue flowers in a box, their bulbs nested in damp cotton wool in a plastic bag in the darkness of the aeroplane's hold. One day, in the little house with its veranda and garden, he'd dig them into a shady place. Transplanted, they would have a new life, a new home.

On Friday morning he was downloading some free software in his bedroom when the doorbell rang. He went to the window before he went to the door. There was a white van parked crookedly on the pavement. On the doorstep a small man with tattooed arms checking a hand
-
held electronic terminal. He pronounced Solomon's name awkwardly, apologetically. Scottish.
Cattle raiders
. Another of Father Brian's jokes. The man fetched a small cardboard box from the van and jammed it under one arm, scanning a barcode on the label, holding the terminal steady for Solomon as he scratched his name on the screen, making a fist to grip the pen. The driver handed over the box, it had a shifting weight in it, slipping weirdly from side to side.

His mother called from the living room as he took the box into the kitchen, but he ignored her. It was to be a surprise, after all. His father told him how they had netted river fish in the Congo as a boy. He remembered that. A line of boys waded out barefoot, drawing the net tight between them and feeling the fish strike it, becoming lodged by their gills. His father ended the story like that, on a dramatic flourish:
What should have helped them breathe killed them!
Afterward they pulled the leeches from their legs and skewered the fish over a campfire, taking the rest home to share out in the village. He left when Solomon was eight years old. And, yes, he was called David. David Patrice Kubamba. The night before the box was delivered Solomon heard his mother talking in her sleep in a language he didn't understand. Perhaps she was talking to his father in his own tongue. She never spoke of him now.

Solomon took the box to the kitchen sink and found a kitchen knife. He had to grip the knife with both hands, carefully cutting though the tape that fastened the box. Inside was a plastic bag full of water and when the light entered the three goldfish in the bag exploded, making it jump and thrum. Solomon closed the lid quickly, pulling the delivery note from inside the box that told him to open it only in dim light to avoid shocking the fish. His heart had jumped and it was pounding now. There was a word for such situations, when you tried to do something good and something bad resulted. The fish had travelled in a complete absence of light, feeling the box lift and sway, then drop and lift again. Then the van's engine throbbing through water. All the time, seeing nothing. That was how the Russian sailor must have felt as power on The Kursk failed and they faced death, writing letters to their mothers and wives under dimming torches. Dying one by one with their memories in the face of the only certainty. The goldfish had travelled towards him in their own element, their gills kneading oxygen from water, touching against each other in liquid darkness. Solomon let the box stand with the lid half closed. Then, when they were used to the light, he took the knife and the box and carried them to the front room where his mother dozed and the fish tank stood on a low table.

Solomon cut the bag and poured the fish awkwardly into the tank where they darted and swirled, golden ricochets flashing with fire and life. His eyes could hardly follow them or know which was which. Then they were still, breathing calmly, their fins and tails swaying, nosing at the gravel or the strands of artificial weed. Solomon hoped they had already forgotten everything that had happened to them: their own surprise and terror, that sudden blast of light. They would be satisfied with the passing moment. What
had
been meant nothing to them. They were what
was
, pure and simple. They feared nothing except what the present turned into. Their eyes were wide, watchful and indifferent. They swam to unknown territories, nudging gravel or air bubbles that rose to the water's surface, moving on to what was endlessly new. Solomon pressed his hands against the glass of the tank, feeling it cold and smooth. The fish watched him with open mouths, their gills working. They flickered away, a shower of golden meteorites. Then he called his mother to wake her.

WHERE STORIES GO

Night
-
time shadows touching me. Big yellow moon at the window, low on the hill. Little Puck's there, staring, bleating. A lost lamb in a striped shirt, face turned up under his trilby hat. Hands atremble like leaves in a windy wood. Like trees at home behind the house. Me and Rufus in bed with dirty knees taking turns to listen to the crystal set. Wind in the trees like voices. Moon lemon cut with a knife. Voices from the BBC telling us news in whispers. Voices in the next room and Rufus holding my hand. Before bedtime on Friday, Mum stoking the fire to make the boiler work, a bucket of coal wet from rain. Me and Rufus in the zinc bath with Mum scrubbing us, dragging the nit comb through our hair. Rufus crying because it hurts, because his hair curls. Dad coming home from the pub with bottles in his pockets, his boots banging on the yard stones. Then Mum getting into the bath with her blue veins sticking out and Dad pulling off a Guinness cap with his teeth and laughing. Now here, awake, all these years later. Awake now and Puck looking up through the window. Those ghosts tumbling at the glass.

That night we went to Easter Fair, me and Dad, his arm around me on the ghost ride, smelling of armpits and beer and oil from the mill. His face all bristly when he kissed me. Laughing. Aiming for ducks on the rifle range.
Phat! Phat!
He held my arms and let me shoot for a goldfish that went fluffy white and died belly up in a pickle jar in the backyard. We had candy floss on a stick and toffee apples and a twist of paper with hot peas and vinegar and a wooden fork we licked and kept in our pockets just in case. Coloured light bulbs and the smell of everything mixed up and my mouth burnt. Mum not there. But another woman with red lips and black hair and a glittery headscarf and a gold tooth laughing, holding onto Dad's arm. I didn't know her. Dad shushing me with a wink, the woman laughing on the rides, her blue skirt flapping in the wind, showing her legs.
Mavis from work
.

There was a hurdy
-
gurdy man and a big nigger man in a white vest boxing in a ring for shillings
.
Watching him knock the skinny lads down, noses all snot and blood.
Silly bastards.
The fat man in a black suit counting backwards.
Too much ale and no sense.
A gypsy fortune
-
teller with a pack of cards and silver rings in her ears. She scared me. Dad laughing and the woman kissing goodbye and hugging me like Mum, but smelling of ciggies. I had to pee in the fields on the way home, wetting my legs, and Dad still laughing and saying don't tell Mum he'd given me a taste of beer. Don't tell Mum about Mavis. And I never did, dreaming of the gypsy woman, the ghost ride, dizzy all night, the carriage rocking and Dad close by, kissing my hair, wiping sick off my cardie with his fingers.