The Last King of Scotland (1998) (21 page)

There were lots of clubs and bars to go to. It amused me that these favoured names with connotations of air or space travel: ‘Highlife’, ‘Stratocruise’, ‘The Satellite’. In fact, they were absolute dives, where Zaireans in sharp suits and winkle-pickers played skipping guitar music and the bar-girls milled around like tsetse fly. I supposed the aviation theme was popular because most of the Ugandans in those places wanted to escape abroad, to build more prosperous lives.

I took the van back to Cooper’s and had them put a red cross on the bonnet. Swanepoel, the pilot whom I had met when I first arrived in the country, tipped me off to that one. Every now and then I would run into him in one of the bars.

“Helps you get through road-blocks,” he’d said on that occasion. “I picked it up in the Congo. The meres used to use it for ambushes.”

“Mercs?”

“Mercenaries. Katanga.”

“Really?” I said.

I never knew whether to believe Swanepoel’s stories. The next time I saw him, I was out on the town with Peter Mbalu-Mukasa. He was one of the African doctors at Mulago. It was very noisy in the Stratocruise that night, the usual Friday crowd.

As meaty and coarse as ever, Swanepoel was sitting on a bar-stool, with a girl on his knee. Her hair was all glossy – treated so it hung down and caught the light off the trashy spinning chandeliers – and her arms were draped around Swanepoel’s thick neck. One of his hands, meanwhile, was exploring her back, inside her red shirt. Cocking his head to one side, he raised a bushy eyebrow at me over her shoulder, as I pushed through the sweaty throng in the narrow gap behind them.

“Hello,” I shouted. “You’re back in Kampala, then.”

“Well, we all come back here,” he said. “Cradle of the human race!”

“What?”I said.

Peter, pushed from behind by carousers, was shunting into me in the gangway. The stench of beer, perfume and body odour was overpowering.

“Let’s get a table,” Peter said in my ear. “Tell your friend to come.”

“Come and join us,” I said to Swanepoel.

“Sure,” he said. And then, to the girl: “See you later, sweetheart.”

Once we found somewhere to sit, Swanepoel started banging on about the Semuliki discovery. That’s what he’d meant, I realized, about the cradle of the human race.

“Yep,” he said, “it’s official. This is where we all came from. Did you see the news? It was your part of the country.”

I had seen it. On the Zaire border, in the Ruwenzoris but farther north than Mbarara, they had recently found a cache of prehistoric human remains. There had been a display of bones on UTV – femurs and a jawbone and other bits and pieces lying on a bit of dirty cloth.

“Missing link?” Swanepoel said, “You’d have thought they’d have filled the whole puzzle in by now.”

“It’s very complex,” Peter said. “It is all going to New York for carbon dating.” Then he sighed and shook his head. “They are saying Amin made a museum there go up to $500,000 to be able to export it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Swanepoel said. “Did you hear him on the TV?” He stood up and, puffing out his chest, did a passable impression of Amin: “Ladies and gentlemen, it may be that my ancestors were the first people on earth. I may be all your fathers, all the world’s fathers are inside of me.”

“Careful,” Peter said, frowning. “You will be reported.”

“He wouldn’t touch me,” Swanepoel said. “I’m too bloody useful to him.”

“Everyone is useful to him – for a while,” said Peter. “But now even some of the coup officers have been killed. They will come for the whites soon, I am warning you.”

“No, they won’t,” said Swanepoel. “No offence, but someone’s got to run the place.”

I was a bit worried that Peter might indeed have taken umbrage at this, but he just looked at Swanepoel for a second over his beer glass, and then said, “You’ll be the first!”

We all burst out laughing, and then I said, “I was talking to the British Ambassador’s wife the other day.”

“Hey, big man!” Swanepoel said mockingly.

“No, seriously. She didn’t seem to think there was a purge on the way.”

“Marina Perkins?” said Swanepoel, scratching his beard. “What would she know? I met her once or twice. She’s a nice enough woman but, come on, she hasn’t exactly got her finger on the pulse.”

“But that is it,” said Peter, “nobody has their finger on the pulse. Not even Amin. I know this, I know people in his household.”

“Who?” said Swanepoel.

“I can’t say,” Peter said, looking nervous suddenly.

“You guys,” said Swanepoel, shaking his head. “If you tremble in front of people like Amin, they’ll stamp on you. That’s how it is. Like when you’re walking past a big slavering dog and he scents your fear.”

“You don’t understand,” said Peter. “He stamps on us anyway. The soldiers have been beating up the students at the university.”

“Don’t worry,” said Swanepoel. “Someone will knock him off his pedestal soon. They always do.”

It was raining as we left, and by the time I reached home a fully fledged electrical storm had developed. The beer had made my throat dry, so I made a cup of tea before going to bed. I stood in the porch to drink it. Leaning against the doorpost, I watched as the blue and purple sheets of charged light flashed above the lake, and the wind shook the golden lamps of the grapefruit tree. It was terrifically noisy, more noisy than I can explain, but the strangest thing was how the noise had a smell, almost a taste: you could smell the charge dispersing in the air. A harsh metal taste of tarnished cutlery, battery terminals, or zinc supplement without the sugar coating.

I
t rained all weekend, as a matter of fact, and on the Monday morning I got a shock. The outside of the front door was covered with flying ants. Not the brown type but bright green ones. It was surreal. The rain had obviously brought them out in some seasonal sexual frenzy. I tried not to stand on them as I walked to the van, but in the end gave up and just crunched straight on. On the way to Kampala, the road was covered with them, and I had to brake several times to avoid the bands of kids who were collecting them up in little bags. As I drove, I remembered the whitebait taste of them from the banquet.

The rain had also turned the city to mud, not the usual red mud but a curious purple shade. And lots of it. As I sped through the puddles, it was as if the whole settlement was sliding down off the seven hills on which it was built. It was like Rome in that way, and the morning after the storm it was like Rome had been spilt.

Each hilltop was shrugging off its significant landmark: the King’s Palace (or the ruins of it, since Amin and Obote had bombed it), the big water-tank, the mosque, the UTV aerials, the barracks, the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, the Poor Clares’ convent…they were all coming down, sliding down in the slick purple mud. The same mud which sucked at my shoe, battening on the heel like an animal. It pulled it right off in the hospital carpark, and had me hopping around. After that, I thought, as I checked the blackboard roster, it’s bound to be a bad day.

It was the usual stuff marked up there: GSW for STS (Gunshot Wound for Surgical Toilet and Sterilization). That was debridement, when we had to pick out dirt and foreign matter (soot, fragments of cloth) with the forceps. I’d learned already that you had just to leave bullet wounds open for a few days. A gamble with infection. The latter is always a complicated business, in any case.

As Bailey and Love’s
Short Practice
puts it, “Staphylococci do not always cause sepsis; they may merely colonize an already discharging wound. Wound discharges containing staphylococci are sources of cross-infection…” But basically, if you see the pink flesh come and it starts to heal, you know you’re all right. Otherwise – well, you can tell from the smell.

As it was Monday, we also had the the usual cases of ‘Monday Drip’, as Paterson dubbed the venereals – the soldiers coming in after their weekends in the brothels.

“All bad things come from France,” he said, his face crumpling into a conspiratorial grin as he waved about one of the bougies over the patient between us. “Except in this case it applies to the cure as well as the disease.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Bougie’s a French word. It means candle as well as these.”

“Actually,” interjected Hassan, one of the Algerian doctors, “it’s Algerian. Bujiyah is an Algerian town centred on the wax trade.”

“You’ve got me there,” said Paterson.

The poor chap over whose bed we were having this abstruse discussion had a urethral stricture on account of gonorrheal infection. Medically speaking, the bougie was the flexible steel rod we had to introduce into his penis in order that he could pee. But in this case it was all too swollen and weeping so we had to make a supra-pubic puncture and drain off the bladder that way.

It was a messy, nasty business, and so was much else we did. Tropical medicine is essentially pyomyositic. It centres on the collection of pus in areas of muscle. Or in the gut: we got a lot of abcesses as a result of strangulated hernias. This was often a direct consequence of bad diet: too much matooke and nothing else. Later that morning, in fact, we had a poor woman come in with a stomach so distended with wind that when we introduced the tube to – how shall I put this? – allow her to let off steam, the noise went on for eight minutes. Her kneeling the whole time, clutching a rosary as she said her prayers. She felt better afterwards, but we would still have to cut out the redundant piece of gut, the dead bowel, later in the week.

At lunch-time I rang Marina Perkins. Having made some plans with Paterson about going out on the lake, I remembered what she’d said about it. It was just a thought, inviting her, but when it came, I realized I’d been thinking about her a bit. I guess I was really missing Sara.

“It’s…Nicholas Garrigan here,” I said, uncertainly, into the big black mouthpiece.

“What a nice surprise!” Marina said. “I haven’t seen you at the swimming pool recently.”

I told her about my encounter with Amin.

“Oh, he’s always doing that,” she said. “I should have warned you.”

“I wanted to ask you,” I said. “What you were saying about the lake, well, my colleague at the hospital here, Colin Paterson, he’s organizing a fishing expedition. The two of us, maybe some others, are going to hire a boat with an outboard motor and perch rods. Next weekend. I was wondering if you fancied coming along for the ride. What do you say?”

There was a pause. “Well, I don’t see why not. But it couldn’t be next weekend. Nor the one after. We’ve got Embassy functions. The first one in February would be good, though. Bob’s going down to the Kagera Salient. Amin’s invited a deputation of diplomats down there to prove he’s not planning to invade Tanzania.”

“OK, then,” I said, relieved but still nervous. “I’ll speak to Colin and ring you the Friday before.”

“I could get the cook to prepare a picnic,” she said.

With that over, I went back to the seemingly less awesome task of stitching up a panga wound. Pangas were the big cutlasses they used for agriculture – and the violent settling of a quarrel. It was a very particular type of injury. People would put up their arm to protect themselves from the assault, naturally enough, and what you got was a series of linear cuts, severing tendons and, usually, producing a compound fracture underneath.

Well, those were the easy ones. Sometimes, and it was like that with this fellow, they get cut on the skull. This one was fractured. The blade had gone nearly right through the dura mater, the fibrous layer beneath the bone. It looked as if he would be OK, but a damaged dura mater gave infection a direct route to the brain.

And if the blade had gone in farther than that, the case was altered substantially. Even with all the research teams, not one of us there, not even Paterson, could debride the brain. We’d need a proper neurosurgeon. But it will happen one day. There will be brain surgery in Uganda. Hospitals are like people: they grow, they develop, they learn. And they decay too, and they die.

Towards the end of the month, as a matter of fact, Paterson and I went out to one of the first hospitals in the country. Built by the missionaries in the late 1800
s
, it was once the best hospital between Cairo and the Cape. When we visited it was a dump, with no dependable electricity supply and so short of beds and linen that some of the patients doubled up on single mattresses, or simply lay on the floor. Several just had logs for pillows. There was a sign in the toilets – “Please do not expectorate in the sink” – but it was pretty pointless, so far as the prevention of infection went, since there were faeces all over the floor.

It turned out that we had a transfer from there later in the week. Not just any transfer, but a top-level patient, a VIP. It was one of Amin’s daughters. She attended a Catholic boarding school somewhere in the bush and had managed to sit on a needle during an embroidery class. I reckon it must have been a practical joke: someone sticking it in her chair. The needle had apparently disappeared into her thigh, so the nuns had rushed her to the hospital. There, a pair of North Korean doctors hadn’t been able to find it in a cursory examination, so they had decided to operate.

For two hours they dug about. Steel seeking steel. No joy. Eventually, everyone panicking now because she’s Amin’s daughter, they bundled her into an ambulance with her bleeding leg and brought her to Mulago. Paterson and I were on duty.

We looked at the girl, who was face down on the trolley in front of us. Moaning into her pillow, she was already togged up in green gear by the nurses, with the relevant area of her thigh exposed, where black knots of dried blood had gathered round the sutures the North Koreans had made.

“We better put her under a general,” I said. “There’ll be hell to pay if she says we butchered her.”

Paterson looked at the girl, and then looked at me, and then clapped his hand to his forehead. “Nick, I’ve just realized, we don’t need to go digging around. We just need to run the X-ray over her. They’ll stand out bright as the Queen of Sheba’s ear-rings.”

So that was what we did. No joy again. Well, nothing showed on the film.