The Last King of Scotland (1998) (8 page)

“How dare you come to me like this?” he said, quietly. “What good are you to me now? You said nothing when you should have come forward. The soldiers, they would not have harmed me, or taken money from these people if you had stepped forward. They are afraid to hurt white people.”

“But they took money from me as well,” I said, rather too defensively. “Look, let me just see to your wound. You’re losing blood.”

I pulled some lint out of the kit and moved to press it on the gash. But the Kenyan, to my surprise, hit my hand away. The watching group gave out a little gasp. Several of them started shouting at the Kenyan.

He stood next to me, great gouts of blood coming out from where the flap of skin hung.

“I do not need help from you,” he said. “You did not step forward when you had the power. You say you are a doctor but in fact I think you come to Africa to take from us, like all muzungu.”

He gave a dignified nod on finishing his speech and then sat down, oblivious to his wound. I didn’t know what to say. The heat in the bus made me feel slightly faint – the heat from the sun, from the press of the bodies behind me, and the hot uproar of the engine coming through the soles of my shoes. I stood for a moment, looking at him there, the flap of skin hanging on his bleeding face, embarrassment and confusion rising in mine.

And then I thought – I’m almost too ashamed to put it down – I thought of reaching over and pulling the damn thing off, pulling it off his face in one swift, uncompromising movement. As if I were removing a plaster.

I don’t know what came over me, I really don’t, and I don’t remember getting back to my seat, only the consoling and dirty looks for him and me from the other passengers, who had launched into a discussion. Some, I think, may have been sniggering, whether at me or the Kenyan I didn’t know.

Boniface was kind, though; he appreciated my predicament. “Do not be sad, sir,” he said, rubbing my arm. “It is not his fault. Since the soldiers came, it has been like this everywhere.”

T
he matatu arrived in Mbarara at about four o’clock in the afternoon. It was a dusty sort of a town. Bonney, having made me promise again to come and visit his family as soon as possible, showed me to a hotel. The Agip Motel, it was called; the Speke seemed quite luxurious by comparison. After checking in and taking a shower, I tried to ring Merrit from the front desk. But the phones were down.

So I set off to find his house, asking people in the street for directions. Everyone seemed to know who he was and where he lived, but it still took me quite a long time and a number of enquiries. On the way I passed an army barracks and a group of government offices with tatty signs: ‘Central Bureau of Forestry’, ‘Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (South-West Rehabilitation Project)’, ‘Centre for Continuing Education (Makerere Outreach Unit).’ A little more imposing – ‘Local Government Court, Southern Province Kikagati ⁄ Ibanda Sub-Districts’.

As I walked, I collected a wondrous group of small boys about me, running alongside and calling out.

“Muzungu, muzungu!”

They capered around.

“Where are you from?”

Several of them were pushing along little toy cars, about the size of shoe-boxes, twisted out of steel wire. They bowled these along showily in front of me. The toys had an ingenious steering device, involving a bicycle spoke attached to the front axle of the toy and a steering wheel at waist height. You would never, I thought, see kids making that kind of thing at home.

“Muzungu, are you married?”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Are you?”

They giggled, spurring on their vehicles to ever more deft manoeuvres in the dust. The more sophisticated models had mannequin drivers made of stuffed cloth; one even with a soldier’s camouflage uniform, perfect down to the peaked cap perched on top and the deathly grinning face marked on with charcoal.

“My name is Gugu,” the driver of that one said. He was a snub-nosed little fellow in a grubby T-shirt, with an infectious smile. I glanced down at him, at his big eyes and perfectly rounded head, his dusty knees and surprisingly aged-looking feet. The price of going barefoot, I supposed.

“Why do you want doctor?” continued the boy. “Are you sick?”

“No. I am a doctor. I am going to work here.”

“I am going to be a mechanic,” he said, proudly. “This is my car. It is a VW Beetle.”

“It’s very good,” I said, “but shouldn’t he be driving a tank or a jeep, if he’s a soldier?”

“What is tank?”

“One with a long gun at the front.”

The boy nodded sagely, and then pointed at a gated fence surrounding a group of buildings.

“Doctor there.”

I had reached the compound. It was by now about six, and quickly getting dark. Next to the gate stood a building, a sort of mili tary pillbox, except that it was made of mud and straw. A list of names and numbers was painted on a board, nailed into the dried mud of the hut. A hurricane lamp was hung on another nail. Its breathy roar seemed too quick, too bold, for the faintness of its light.

1. Waziri
   
2. –
   
3. Canova
   
4. Chiric
   
5. Ssegu
   
6. –
   
7. Seabrook
   
8. Merrit
   
9. Zach
   

The boys, who had stopped in a ring behind me, suddenly scampered off as I was reading.

“Bye-bye, muzungul Bye-bye!”

There was tinkling laughter as they tumbled down the hill. I thought of elves. Then, smelling tobacco smoke, the word Woodbine wound into my head. I realized then that there was someone in the pillbox. Wisps of smoke a-coming out of it that I could smell.

I peered inside. A boot, a fold of cloth, the glow of a pipe. There was a presence there, for certain – the sweeter smell of long occupation overlaying the harsh tobacco – but nothing was said to my intrusion. So I carried on blithely into the compound and knocked at number eight.

The man who opened the door had a moustache the colour of rust. He looked at me for a moment, startled.

“I’m sorry…” I began, conscious of it being too late just to turn up on someone’s doorstep.

“Goodness!” he said. “You must be Doctor Garrigan.”

I shook his hand. He was about fifty, and slightly overweight, with a bizarre white streak down the middle of his brown hair.

“We’ve been expecting you for ages,” he said.

“Oh – I thought I was here on schedule.”

“Spiny, don’t make him feel it’s his fault,” said another voice.

A woman in a blue dress was standing behind him. “The Ministry said you were coming last month,” she explained as he stood aside for her. “We sent them a telegram but they didn’t reply. So we didn’t know when you were coming.”

“Anyway, I’m Alan Merrit. Come in. Pleased to have you on board. This is my wife, Joyce. I’m really embarrassed you’ve had to hunt us out like this. Let me get you a drink, then we can sit down and talk. Sorry about the mix-up. This place is completely bloody, you know.”

The living-room was dimly lit, except for where it opened on to the veranda, through a pair of louvred doors. Insects flitted under a row of spots beyond the doors.

“We’re out here,” Mrs Merrit said. “Come through.” She was wearing a pair of heavy lapis lazuli ear-rings that caught the light as they swung.

“What would you like?” said Merrit, calling from the kitchen.

“A beer, please, if you’ve got it,” I said.

There was the rattle and heavy clunk of a fridge door being opened and closed. Mrs Merrit motioned me to a cane chair and then sat down herself, crossing her legs. A curl of green pressed powder was burning on the table, attached to a wire stand. Next to it, a packet: DOOM Mosquito Coils, Van der Zyl pvt, Bloem-fontein, RSA. The trickle of smoke rose directly up into the rafters. It smelt perfumed, oriental.

“Now, I want to hear all about your trip,” she said. “Where have you left your things?”

I told her about the man on the matatu, about Boniface and the Agip Motel.

“Oh, but it’s horrible there,” she said. “There’s no question. You must stay here. We’ll send the watchman down to collect your bags.”

She walked to the edge of the veranda and shouted into the night. “Nestor!”

Merrit came in and put a beer down in front of me, the glass foaming, with the half-full bottle alongside it, and opened another for himself. The legend on the bottle said simba, across a painted picture of a lion with its mouth open.

“Nestor!”

“What are you shouting about, darling?”

“Nicholas is booked into the Agip, he can’t stay there, can he? I’m going to send Nestor down to collect his bags.”

“Look,” I protested feebly, “there’s no need. I’ll go back later.”

“Don’t be silly,” Merrit said. “It’s dark. You’ll fall into the ditch. Stay. We’ve got plenty of room since the kids left.”

“That’s very good of you. Are you sure?”

“Of course,” he said, nodding his head. With the white streak down the middle, he looked a little like a badger.

Mrs Merrit stood up, rubbing her palms together briskly. “Now, have you eaten? We already have, I’m afraid, and the house-boy has gone home, but I could rustle something up for you. How about a toasted ham sandwich?”

“That would be great,” I said, realizing that I was quite hungry.

“I’ll just go through and make it,” she said. “Shout for him again will you, Spiny, it annoys me he takes so long.”

“Probably asleep.”

Merrit – why, I’d been wondering, did she call him Spiny? – got up and walked down the steps into the garden, going a little way round the corner of the building.

“Nestor! Nestor!”

“Will you have mustard?” his wife called from the kitchen. “I can make some up. We get Colman’s powder from the duty-free shop in Kampala.”

“Oh, don’t bother, I’ll be fine.”

“Nestor!” His voice grew fainter as he ventured deeper into the garden.

She came back out holding a bowl of peanuts. “Here’s something to keep you going.”

“Thank you,” I said, as she put the bowl on the table.

“And do have some mustard with your ham. I think the powdered version’s nicer than the bought stuff back in UK, actually. More oo
mph
to it. It’s the kind of treat you’ll miss when you face the shops in town. Even the Indian dukas only have the very basics.”

“All right, then,” I said, grasping a handful of peanuts.

“If we’d known when you were coming, I’d have got you a proper meal,” she said. “The Ministry are hopeless like that. I’ve made sure they’ve cleaned the bungalow up for you, though. It’s one of those across the way.”

She pointed over the flower-beds, where I could see the outline of another three houses. “The middle one. It’s fully furnished, but you’ll need to get bedding and so on from the market. I can lend you things for the time being. And you must eat here till you’re organized.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said. My voice sounded distant – all I could hear, inside the bones of my head, was the noise of the peanuts as I crunched them.

“Oh, don’t worry, I know how hard it is when you’re setting up somewhere. I’ve done it enough times. Now, I’m going to toast your bread.”

She went back to the kitchen. I drank some of my beer, enjoying the sensation of bubbles on my tongue after the stickiness of the peanuts.

A few seconds later, Merrit came up the steps, puffing. “I don’t know where the old bugger is,” he said. “Perhaps it’s time to get someone younger.”

He sat down, and we talked. I noticed that he had that peculiar waxiness of skin which certain men get as they pass out of middle age. When I told him about the incident which had taken place on my journey, he just laughed; and then – the froth of the Simba gathering on his moustache – took a sip from his glass, as if to wash the laugh away.

“It’s just Africa nonsense, Nicholas. You’ll get used to it, or you’ll get used to not being used to it. You have to see the funny side, or you’d go mad.”

“I suppose I will,” I said, wondering how what had happened could be thought funny at all. “I think I’ve got a lot to learn. You feel like you can cope with it all and then something like that happens and everything seems impossible again.”

“Not really, it’s very simple. This place – chaos, you just have to expect the worst. You think it’s a matter of it getting worse for it to get better, but actually it just gets worse and worse. Take this new business with Amin. I hear they’re all happy as sandboys right now up in Kampala, but it’ll end in tears, I promise you. Our own stupid fault, of course.”

I reached for the peanuts and he sipped at his beer again. Simba.

“Lion,” Merrit explained, when I asked. “It’s a Swahili word, simba’s king of the beasts; there’s even a Simba battalion in the army. Their barracks are in town. Sometimes they come into the hospital for treatment.”

“Bullet wounds?”

“Well, more often syphilis.”

I picked up the bottle.
The beer of strength and quality
, that’s what the label announced, underneath the lion picture.

“They don’t really speak Swahili round here, though,” he continued. “Not as such. It’s from the Arabic…
sawahil
– people of the coasts.”

Merrit said
sawahil
in an affected voice, twisting his mouth down so it came out as ‘sour heel’. He frowned as he did it, his moustache looking funny-fierce.

“Mombasa, Zanzibar, down there. Where the slavers came in. I went there once. It’s all narrow alleys and overhangs. They have some very beautiful carved doors on the houses. Arab, hundreds of years old. Here they’re mountain people. Totally different, with a totally different language. Some do speak Swahili, though, as a lingua franca, and if you’re going to learn any language in East Africa it might as well be that.”

He took another mosquito coil from the packet next to the peanuts, fixed it into the springy steel holder and lit it. It flared and then settled down into a comfortable glow.

“Syphilis, too, actually. That came up from the coast as well. Trade routes.”

“Do you think I should learn?”

“You’ll pick things up. In Kinyankole, too, that’s the local one. But to be honest, you’re fine with English.”

He looked up at the doorway. “Here’s Joyce with your toasties.”