Terroir (9 page)

It was only a brief flare of synapses, a blush of memory in the chemical brain, to connect Nakasero or Owino market in Kampala to Tommyfield market in Oldham, or the little market behind the swimming baths in Chadderton, or the famous market in Bury where you could buy black puddings and yards of worsted or cotton cloth.

After their retirement my parents had loved to take a day
-
trip to Skipton or Halifax, wandering through the markets in search of bargains, buying a nice piece of rolled brisket and having fish and chips for lunch. Every so often my father would return home with a pair of shoes, a bargain from the Age Concern or Oxfam shop. Those shoes had the scent of death and decay about them, a coolness to the touch as if body heat had just evaporated. Once he bought a mobile phone, a year or two after my mother had died in Crumpsall hospital, but he'd never learned to use it. Another gadget – like the TV remote – he never got the hang of. A problem he attributed to things that were
fucking rubbish
, rather than to himself.

Now here I was in Owino, a sweaty mzungu among thousands of Africans, wandering towards Nakasero in my bush hat and cargo pants, thinking about the dark little cobbler's shop I'd visited as a child.

Where I grew up there were four spinning mills, built at the turn of the century when cotton really was king, and money was still spewing from the frames and looms for the mill owners. My grandfather had been employed in King's Mill as a mule spinner until he'd lost three fingers from one hand and worked out his days on the roads for the Corporation. He died six months before retirement, leaving a sweet
-
jar full of sixpences he'd saved. He didn't even live long enough to see his son buy his first car – a Morris Seven with a second
-
hand prop
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shaft and differential. We had some old photographs of my dad with his mother on the front in Morecambe – a stout woman in a beret leaning on the bonnet and licking an ice cream in the wind.

The cobbler's shop was below the mills. Below the fishmonger's and the corner
-
shop butcher's and the Co
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op where we bought ammunition for our peashooters, where my father had begun work just before his fourteenth birthday. In the window was a pair of clogs and on their soles a pair of flamenco dancers had been picked out in nails and hand
-
painted. I remembered how the woman wore a crimson frock and the man tight black trousers. The clogs had brass toecaps and were made of oiled leather.

As a child my father had worn shoes rather than clogs, a fact he'd always been proud of, as if it marked him out as special. The other kids had clogged seven bells out of him and, despite the shoes, labour had stuck to him all his life. The cobbler's shop had a doorbell that jangled over your head on a metal spring, bringing Carson limping from the back room in his grey apron. He'd lost a leg at Monte Casino. The shop counter was dark mahogany and the shop smelled of tanned leather, neat's
-
foot oil, Dubbin, heelball and brown paper. All the accoutrements of the cobbler's trade. Bullhide not bullshit, my father had said right there at the counter, with a light in his eyes that was the blue flash of thunder. I'd always wondered what Carson's artificial leg was made of. As far as my father was concerned, he had a job where he sat on his arse all day.

– Sah?

You're right that it makes no sense – harking back to a mill town in the 1960s when I was walking through an African marketplace in the twenty
-
first century and mixing it all up together. As if Carson might limp from one of the shop doorways or leap up from one of the treadle
-
operated Singer sewing machines that were everywhere. Just like the machine my mother had used to make our clothes when we were children.

– Sah?

A meat fly landed on my arm and I brushed it away. Maybe it was those black enamelled machines with their gold lettering that had sent me back, recalled my mother sewing clothes for the neighbours, or pinning up my father's trousers as he stood on a chair and ranted. My mother who could make any garment with her hands. My father who could shape even the most recalcitrant piece of metal. The cobbler who turned over a freshly repaired shoe in his hand to show the new leather gleaming.
Good for a few more miles.
It made no sense, admittedly, but then maybe that's all the sense there is. To be everywhere and anywhere at the same time. Somewhere and nowhere. To be outside yourself.

– Sah?

The man's voice – a soft, insinuating voice – startled me. When I did look up I saw a small Ugandan man in a ragged tee shirt and khaki pants. He looked about thirty, but it was hard to tell. He had a wispy beard and his skin was paler than that of most Africans. His eyes were the lightest brown eyes I'd ever seen, like honey poured over almonds. Beautiful eyes that slanted down with slightly hooded lids.

– Shoe, sah?

He was holding out a pair of refurbished casual shoes. You saw them all over Kampala. Dead men's shoes re
-
cycled. They were made of tan
-
coloured leather and had plastic soles and had been polished until even the scuffmarks gleamed. They were shit. You needed good shoes in Kampala where the roads were broken and gave way to red dirt and pot
-
holed tracks. I shook my head. The man held the shoes closer, as if I hadn't looked at them properly.

– Good shoes. Try them. Try them, sah?

A marabou stork flew over the market and its shadow crossed the man's face. Darkening those amazing eyes for a moment. His arms were sinewy and the veins stood out on his hands.

– Not for me, thanks.

– Not for you? No shoe? They your size. See?

The man smiled incredulously. He thrust the shoes at me again, then looked down at my shoes, a pair of knackered brogues made in Dundee. Good shoes once, they had a coating of dust from the market and were stained with salt. Sweat was trickling from my hatband and down my neck.

– Sah, you come!

He tugged my sleeve and dragged me into a gap between two stalls.

– Come! Come!

We ducked under a carousel of leather belts, past a stack of watermelons with their sweet, sugary smell. Then we were in a narrow alleyway between buildings, catching the tang of human shit. A beggar held up his fingerless hand, but we brushed past and turned left into a narrow street and into a shop doorway that gaped under a blue and white striped awning and had yellow cellophane in the widow.

– Come sah, come sah!

The shop was piled up with fabric, saris and shalwar kameez and made
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up suits hung from mannequins, the glass
-
fronted display cabinets were piled with ties and collars and socks and – yes – shoes, though of a kind I'd never buy. We entered a gloomy back room where an elderly Sikh gentleman with a white beard and a maroon
-
coloured turban was watching a black and white television set. Gentleman? There seems no other word. My Ugandan guide spoke to him in Swahili and the Sikh eyed me carefully. He held out his hand to shake mine.

– You are welcome.

– Thank you.

– You are looking for shoes?

I shrugged, slightly helpless and more than slightly intimidated. The Sikh gentleman bent down and examined my brogues carefully. He drew a finger across the toe of one, making a line in the red dust.

– I have. Come.

The Ugandan man had taken the Sikh's place and was screwing up the volume on a Kenyan soap opera. I felt a tug on my sleeve and followed the proprietor into another room at the back of the shop.

At first glance the room seemed to be draped with curtains but as the Sikh pulled the curtain back I saw that the walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were filled with boxes. Shoe boxes. I remembered the sharp smell of my father's pantry – a mixture of shoe polish, turps and Swarfega – where he kept his shoes neatly stacked on shelves made from old fruit boxes. The old man stooped in the gloom and pulled out a box, pulling down his spectacles on his nose to check the label.

– You are a nine?

It was a good guess.

– Yeah, nine.

He straightened up and handed me the box.

– Here. You try. Very good shoes.

I noticed that he was wearing light leather slippers that allowed him to shuffle almost noiselessly from room to room.

– Come. Come to the light.

He led me back to the room with the television where my Ugandan friend was now eating from a Tiffin tin of matoke and tilapia stew. He ignored us both. The food reminded me I was hungry.

I took a seat and opened the box. Inside was tissue paper, then two velvet bags and inside each bag was a shoe of unmistakeable quality. Dark brown stippled leather, richly oiled. Double
-
welted soles. The tongues were stitched into the shoe at the side to form waterproof webbing. Genuine veldtschoen.

– I am Nayanprit Singh.

The proprietor smiled at me a little shyly.

– These are good shoes, eh? Good shoes. You like them?

The shoes were kid
-
lined and the soles were solid leather, each heel laminated from thin sheets. They had that old smell that brought the ringing of the bell of the cobbler's shop in my hometown to my head. Flamenco dancers and the smell of lamp oil sold from a big metal drum under the counter. The stump, stump, stump of Carson's artificial leg. When I put my hands inside to feel the linings, they were soft and supple. There was no name inside, just the number nine hand
-
written on each tongue in black ink. They were probably the most beautiful shoes I'd ever seen and when I slipped them on and tied the laces, they fitted as if they'd been made on my personal last. I reached for the roll of cash in my pocket.

When I woke on Sunday morning, after a quiet night sipping tonic water on the guesthouse terrace, it was to the smell of new leather. No hangover after a quiet night. No work until tomorrow. I'd grown to love Sundays in Kampala when the city took on a sleepy quality, like a 1950s English suburb. Well, like I imagined that to be. No wonder the British had loved it here. I pushed on the curtains and caught the scent of cut grass where the gardeners were busy with sickles. A woman in a bright yellow gomesi was brushing fallen petals from the path with a broom. It made a soft, sifting sound, repetitive and soothing. A couple of cattle egret pecked at the lawn and a pied crow was mithering something that had died in the night.

After breakfast I walked down to the gate to buy a newspaper from one of the boys who gathered there, working the traffic and passers by. I hadn't seen much of McKenzie since Friday night. I wasn't surprised after his performance at Al's bar. All that beer and brown sugar. My new shoes felt good. Supple yet strong. They already had a layer of red dust. A woman passed me carrying a fat little girl in a frock made of pink gauze. She was sweating and cross. I could already hear hymns rising from the university chapel. One day I planned to give up fieldwork and teach somewhere. Maybe here where they needed engineers and surveyors and you could live cheaply. There was nothing for me at home now. Not since Helen had left me and taken the girls. For no reason, actually. I'd been faithful, but she didn't think so. I missed Emma and Tracey. Every Christmas I got a letter from them as if she'd stood over them with a whip.

Emma was the youngest at seven. Tracey was just nine. Emma had a harelip and cleft palate which had been repaired after a couple of operations. The surgeon had done a pretty good job. Helen even blamed me for that because it ran in the family as far back as my dad's uncle. I don't know what Helen thought I got up to when I was away. Not much but work, actually. I suppose you couldn't blame her, stuck with two kids when my job was a whole continent away. The guys I met who worked out here were mostly fucked up and mostly divorced. A lot of them went with young black girls. But I didn't want to be loved for money.

My new shoes felt good against the crumbling footpaths and pavements of Wandegeya.
Nayanprit Singh
. That was his name. A gentleman. A gentle man with a shoe emporium. His breath had smelt of peppermint in that dark little back room. I'd tried to memorise the location of the shop, the alleyways that my Ugandan guide had taken me through. It wasn't easy, though I remembered the touch of the old man's hand against mine, soft and insistent.

When I got back to the guesthouse I found McKenzie, still looking sheepish, sitting over a late breakfast on the terrace, watching two African boys play tennis on the clay court. They ran like deer, retrieving the ball from impossibly angled shots with vicious topspin. I tossed McKenzie
The Monitor
and ordered some tea. Then I stretched my legs and leaned to wipe the dust from my shoes. My father would have loved them. Maybe shoes were the only things he had loved. Not my mother, not me or Steve. Certainly not sheet metal or iron, which he beat with deepening hatred.

I looked across town to where the tower of a mosque leaned against the sky. It had never been finished. It needed pulling down before it fell down. I'd done some calculations once and worked out that it shouldn't be standing at all. But this was Uganda, where the impossible happened every day, where red tape could be finessed with something small.