The Last King of Scotland (1998) (9 page)

“Any sign of Nestor?” she asked, from over a tray piled high with golden-brown triangles.

“Not yet.”

She put the tray down in front of me. “I did some cheese ones too.”

As she stood looking into the garden, with her hands on her hips, I bit into one of the crisp parcels – and immediately took a sharp intake of breath as hot cheese burned my tongue.

“Nestor! Where is he, Spiny?” she exclaimed. And then, to me: “We have terrible problems with servants here. Stealing and so on. Let me know when you’re ready to get one and I’ll put out the word. Otherwise you’ll just get someone one of the other expats has sacked.”

“I don’t know if I’ll really want one,” I said, finishing my molten mouthful. “I think I’d rather look after myself.”

Merrit snorted. Spiny. I wondered whether the nickname was from the streak in his hair.

“Everyone thinks that when they first arrive,” he said. “You’ll change your mind soon enough, when you have to wash your own clothes by hand.”

“And in a way,” she added, sniffily, “you’re doing them a favour. They’re very keen for the money, you know. They earn a lot more from us than they would on the plantations or going down to the tobacco estates in Rhodesia. Nestor!”

Just as the word left her lips, Nestor – I guessed – materialized out of the night, carrying a hurricane lamp. He was a bent and wrinkled old man, with a khaki greatcoat hanging loose about his bony shoulders; a former soldier, I thought to myself, realizing, as a tobacco smell came to me, that he must have been the ghost-like inhabitant of the hut at the gate. He saluted smartly as he approached us.

As Mrs Merrit gave Nestor instructions, her husband questioned me at length about what I’d seen of the coup.

“Were you scared?” he asked. “I’d have been scared if it had happened when I first arrived. That was over twenty years ago, mind, when it wouldn’t have happened.”

“More bewildered than scared,” I said. “It was scarier with the soldiers on the bus, really.”

“Spiny,” Mrs Merrit said, having sent Nestor off, “it’s terrible that Nicholas has had to find his way here in such a haphazard way. I think you should send a memo to the Ministry.”

“There’s no point, darling, they don’t listen to me. Don’t worry, we’ll soon get you fixed up. You’ll find it as comfortable as England once you’ve settled in.”

“Scotland,” I said.

They laughed – together, in that harmonic way of long-standing couples.

“That’s exaggerating,” she said. “It’s quite a hard life here. I often wish we could go back.”

“Why couldn’t you?” I said.

“There’d be no point. We’re African now.”

“No, we’re not,” her husband said. “And we will go back. When the time is right.”

“There’s nothing for us there, Spiny. You know how depressed you got on our last leave.”

“Hmm.”

He looked cross, and then she turned to me, her lapis ear-rings gleaming. “England has changed so much since we left. You’ll find, if you stay here a few years, that half your mind is back in the UK. You’re living in two places at the same time. And then you do go back there and you realize it’s a different place altogether from the one you had in your head.”

“It is the same,” he said grumpily, getting up to fetch more drinks, “and, as far as I know, you can’t be in two places at one time…”

“Don’t mind him,” she said. “He gets bad-tempered when he thinks about the future. We haven’t got a pension, you see. It’s a bit of a worry. I think he should go into private practice in South Africa, but he won’t agree. Anyway, why am I bothering you with all this?”

Merrit came back in and poured another half-bottle of beer into my glass. I watched the Simba picture turn on its head as he tipped the bottle. The lion’s design put me in mind of those black-and-white films (with titles like
Safari!
or
Return of the Hunter
) I had watched as a child – but it was stylized, too, like a heraldic sign from long ago.

Rex rampant, I thought later in their guest room. Mrs Merrit’s crisp sheets were wrapped around me and the thin white gauze of the mosquito net obscured my sleepy view of the blue suitcase, across the other side of the room. It was dusty on the bottom, from where Nestor must have put it down on the way. Rex rampant, I said to myself again as my eyelids closed, rex rampant and leopard couchant…

T
he following morning, we had a delicious breakfast of coffee, home-made bread and oranges. The malaria pills sat in a little saucer in the middle of the table, and Merrit made me take one. I’d checked it out before leaving Scotland and knew I wasn’t headed for a high-risk malarial district, so I hadn’t planned to take daily doses. But he demurred.

“We’re not exactly plagued by mosquitoes here, like in the areas we spray, but you can’t be too careful.”

Half-way through the meal, Merrit got up to fiddle with the dials on a big Eddystone short-wave, pointing out to me the aerial wire draped on the avocado tree outside. It was then I heard for the first time the BBC’s ‘Lillibullero’, a tune with which I would become familiar when I sent off for my own Grundig Music-Boy through a coupon in the
Uganda Argus
.

“This is the BBC World Service…” Always an upper-class English voice, except for those football Saturdays with Paddy Feeney. It was he who kept me sane later, when things got bad with Amin: amazing how you can get everything in perspective, even a dictator, when you hear just a single mention of Raith Rovers.

After the pips, the news came on. Gathered like one of those families you see in pictures from the war, the Merrits and I listened to the broadcast. Another British Ambassador kidnapped by guerrillas, this time in Uruguay. The post strike still on at home, and telephone lines between East and West Berlin reconnected for the first time in nineteen years.

Afterwards, Merrit took me over to my own bungalow. I noticed a wasp’s nest attached to one of the wooden fascia boards under the eaves. Its greyish material made me think of papier mache, of the rough dolls I had made at primary school. Cows and pigs. Humans.

“We’ll have to get rid of that for you,” Merrit said, seeing me look. “Smoke them out.”

We went inside. I dumped my suitcase in the centre of the empty lounge. Our feet were loud on the bare floorboards as we walked around. The bungalow was light and airy in a desolate sort of a way, with its bubbly, whitewashed walls, crude wooden furniture and – strangest of all – a concrete bath. One item bore witness to Merrit’s suspicions about malarial incidence: a mosquito net, its coarse muslin ruched up into an iron hoop hung from the ceiling. Yet I felt, on that first day, that I might be happy there. Clean lines, that’s the phrase – bungalow number six certainly had those.

“Why the bars on the window?” I asked, going over to look out, through the ornate, curled-iron bars and the insect grille, at the green valley and mountains beyond.

“Kondos,” he said, “what they call armed bandits here, and the usual petty theft. I had my toothbrush stolen the other day. Someone actually put his hand through the bars on the bathroom window and filched it out of the mug.”

“It’s a beautiful view,” I said.

“They call it the Bacwezi valley. It’s just swamps really.”

We went back outside into the early sun and began the climb up towards the clinic. On the way, Merrit stopped to lace his shoe, and I looked down at the shrinking compound below me. It had been hastily thrown up, obviously, but was quite pleasant none the less: three sets of three uniform dwellings, tin-roofed and settled neatly among the high-banked flower-beds, with paths weaving in between and a high steel water-tower glinting above. The blades of its rotor moved slowly in the wind.

Each bungalow had a white picket fence around it, which added a villa-like note to the communal – that is, fenced, with a curlicue of barbed wire on top – feel of the place. I wondered what the Africans (there were some passing by below, on the track between the fence and the banana plantation) must have thought of this strange encampment in their midst. It was a little like those dinky almshouse squares you sometimes see from a bus and wish you could live in.

The clinic was basic: nothing but another fenced circle of one-storeyed buildings on wooden stilts, partly shabby Western brick, partly built of clay, with drooping banana-leaf roofs in the local fashion. I’d hardly have credited it as a medical establishment if it hadn’t been for the line of patients (women with squealing babies, old men, the occasional soldier) waiting in the queue that stretched from the main door down to the outside gate we came through.

“Ah,” said Merrit, as we walked in, “the hordes are upon us. Well, Nicholas, welcome to my parlour.”

I noticed that the patients had plywood boards with numbers painted in white hanging round their necks, or were putting them on; this process an energetic young man in a lab coat was organizing, handing out the splintery tags from a box hung over his shoulder and remonstrating with those who wanted to go before their number came up.

“Morning, Billy,” called out Merrit, ignoring the cries of the patients when they saw him and pulling away from a woman who tugged at his sleeve.

“Bwana,” he replied, solemnly, nodding his head as we passed.

“The architects wanted us to build it two-storey but I refused. It was like that where I was before, in Blantyre – Nyasaland when I was first there, Malawi they called it later – and you just tire yourself out dashing up and down stairs in the heat. Right, I’ll show you round. We’ll do the outside first and then go in.”

He waved at a couple of whites – both with dark curly hair and wearing red shorts – getting out of a dusty Peugeot.

“Those are our two Cubans, Chiric and Canova. They’re alike as peas in a pod. They always remind me of those twins from that cartoonist my elder son liked. You know, Tintin.”

“Thompson and Thomson,” I said, recalling with a flash my own enjoyment of the strips when I was young. “I think there was even one about Africa.”

“That’s right. Belgians. It was banned on grounds of racism in Nyasaland, I remember, when the Banda regime came in. Richard was terribly upset when we had to burn his copy. Tears for weeks. Tintin, short skirts, long hair and pornographic magazines. An odd mixture to outlaw. But Banda wasn’t such an angel though, not by a long shot.”

We walked towards the path that went round the perimeter, past an outhouse where a generator was yammering away, shaking the leafy roof and staining the air with the smell of diesel.

“Anyway, they’re brilliant surgeons, those two. Canova especially. I must tell you the story of Canova’s heart one day. He actually performed a minor cardiac operation – herel Astonishing. I couldn’t have done it.”

“But what are Cubans doing in Mbarara?”

“Castro sends them everywhere. Like Guevara to the Congo. I don’t mind, they keep themselves to themselves at work and then chat up girls in town in the evening. But this is how it is, Nicholas. If they’re funded, we take them, American, Israeli, whatever. Can’t afford not to. Same with you, I’m afraid.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. We had stopped underneath a tall steel structure with fans – like the one in the bungalow compound, only bigger.

“This is our borehole,” said Merrit, patting one of the struts affectionately. “The water’s pumped up into the tank and filtered through silver catalysts on the way down. Cleanest H²O around. Though that’s not saying much.”

“Why are the buildings on stilts?”

“We had terrible problems trying to find the right site. The land round here is relatively boggy and in the end we had to sink in wooden piles to shore up the foundations…Look, there’s the hospital Land Rover.”

He waved, calling loudly. “Waziri, come and meet our new recruit from Scotland.”

The vehicle, its white paint covered with bright red dust, slowed down as it came towards us, turning around the central flower-bed in the little car-park. It pulled up close to us. An African with grey sideburns and a safari shirt held his hand down to me out of the open window.

“Hello,” said the man, smiling broadly. “So, another Scotsman. I think Scottish doctors must be taking over Uganda. You know of Mackay, presumably, who set up Mulago, the big hospital in Kampala, way back when? I was trained there by Scottish doctors myself, before I went to the US.”

“We get about,” I said, squinting against the sun above the Land Rover roof.

“Nicholas Garrigan, William Waziri,” Merritt announced grandly. “William’s mainly in charge of our field trips – we do vaccination and spraying programmes all around the villages here – in fact I was thinking it would be good, William, if you took Nicholas out on one soon. Familiarization.”

“Certainly. I’m going out again next month.” He smiled at me again. “Come along, by all means. See how the wananchi live.”

He drove off, the spare wheel case like a badge on the back: Cooper Motors, Kampala.

“What are the wananchi?” I asked Merrit.

“The common people. The citizens. It’s like a term of respect.”

We continued our tour of the perimeter. “That’s the X-ray darkroom. We made a mistake putting it on the eastern side. When the sun is at its highest, it beats on the wall. Makes it like an oven, spoiling the negatives. We haven’t got the money for much radiology anyway. You’ll find you have to be quite sparing here, equipment-wise. And with drugs.”

“How do you get supplies?”

“Billy Ssegu, he’s our business manager, the one who was doing the queues. He goes up to Kampala in the Land Rover once a month to beg from the Ministry. He does his best but sometimes we can’t even get antibiotics or simple analgesics.”

We were right at the far edge of the fence now. I noticed that there was a funny smell where the ground dipped unnaturally – in the way a grave does after a year or so, when the earth has settled down.

“But all my other problems pale in comparison to this,” said Merrit, pointing at the subsiding ground, which was covered with grass except for an uneven brown crust at the edges. I moved forward, wondering what he was going on about.

He grabbed my arm. “For God’s sake, be careful. It’s not solid. Well, it is solids.” He chuckled. “This is our cesspit, Nicholas. It may not smell like it now but, believe me, it does when the water-table’s up. The problem’s the marshy ground. The stuff doesn’t drain away and in the rainy season water comes into the pit from the surrounding area and makes it overflow. Tidal wave of shit. Very unhygienic. On the worst days we have to close the clinic down until an engineer comes from Kampala to siphon it into a tanker. We really need a proper septic tank but I can’t see it happening in my lifetime.”