Touch (22 page)

 
On the way to the office, Miles sees half a dozen police at the Nakasero roundabout with capes and rifles. There is a tree on which five marabou storks have settled, flapping that dry drum-skin sound. It's the sound of hunger, the sound of appetite or desire. He sees the woman begging with her baby and crosses over the road, having no change. Then white clouds puffing up at the horizon in giant thermals. Kites and storks circling; a black wheelbarrow filled with purple blossom. He sees school kids hand in hand, with their green uniforms and satchels. A man lies asleep or already dead on a piece of open ground beside a termite mound of red earth. His skin is shiny as polished wood. Three women in bright gomesis with puffed shoulders sweep dust from the pavement with brooms made of bound twigs. A truck full of soldiers in olive uniforms and steel helmets goes by.

Miles sees the pavement, broken and crazed, the drift of dust across his shoes, the crystals of minerals glistening where the rain has washed them into the road. And when it starts to rain he sees a tall woman dressed in a grey two-piece suit stepping from the offices of the Stanbic Bank wearing a black carrier bag over her hair. Then he sees that he is already outside the Computeraid office and enters to make calls, check records, enter data, arrange transport. To do whatever needs to be done to make a difference.

 
* * *

 
Carol sits at Miles' desk and switches on the computer. Miles' sketchbooks are neatly filed on a shelf. Her hand falls to a tin of pencils that he keeps on the desk and opens it. Derwent Graphic. They range from 9B to H, each one a dark choco-late colour with an orange stripe. Each one ranked in perfect order. She clicks on the email program and watches it load. She clicks on the inbox. Get Mail. She waits. There is a stain on the beige carpet, almost the shape of Africa. A message appears silently with a blue dot beside it.

 
Darling, I'm working late in the office so firing off a quick message
before I sign off. It rained all morning here and then it was very
hot all afternoon and the aircon broke, so it's been pretty sticky. 
The Ugandans are lovely to work with – especially Agnes and
James – but we seem to have lost half a dozen computers that
were meant for Taibah High School. Hard to get to the bottom of
things here, as you know. I hope you're ok. Missing you and
home and this time of year in Yorkshire. The leaves must be
turning now? Say hello to the girls and tell them I'm ok and
thinking of them.

Love, M

PS I've got some Kigezi coffee beans from Bancafé, so looking
forward to our next breakfast together.

Carol presses
Reply
and then sits for a long time watching the cursor blink at her, its small pulse lost in the machine.

 
* * *

 
The ninth of October is Ugandan Independence Day and a public holiday, so Miles has some free time. He'd intended to hire some transport and go somewhere, Jjinja or Entebbe maybe, but he's been sleeping badly and the tiredness has accumulated. Most days he's woken at dawn by the muezzin's call to prayer at the local mosque. Most nights he turns in before ten and sleeps for a couple of hours, then lies awake listening to a mosquito that has got in through the torn window mesh. He thinks of Carol, the girls, of Yorkshire in October, of home, of the next day's work.

He thinks how things never get any clearer in Africa and that maybe he shouldn't be here. It's as if the real problem is always undefined. Or it undefines itself. Things are hard to explain. Things that go missing or that don't get done. The Kampala office has the best team he's worked with yet, with the most thorough records. But things happen at the edge that are inexplicable. Things – even people – simply disappear. They fall away. He's learned to accept some things: unpunc-tuality, silence, disappearance, even early death. Those are the unspoken things that lie beyond beautiful manners and perfect decorum. He's learned not to probe too deeply for reasons. It's like learning to walk slowly in the heat; like learning not to look, whilst not actually looking away.

He tries to stay in bed later than eight o'clock, but it's impossible. He showers in a trickle of water that has left a brown stain running down the bath. The bath plug has disappeared, so a soak in deeper water is out of the question and impossibly slow. He takes his Malarone and picks flaking skin from the backs of his fingers. The skin beneath is pale and pink.

At breakfast the Brits are nowhere to be seen but a red-haired woman has joined the big American. They're talking quietly and earnestly. Miles folds a banana skin onto his plate and drains his coffee. Maybe it was too easy to judge people, after all. Freddie arrives with more coffee and flashes a delightful smile. On previous visits, Miles had stayed on the Makerere University campus, where he'd met a constant stream of professionals: teachers, agronomists, surgeons, nurses, educational researchers. They all seemed to be focused on what mattered, on what was worthwhile. Cutting-edge developments. Sustainable projects. Even the creation of understanding itself. It was hard to feel a part of that. A teacher from Iowa had once said to him that everyone had to find their own reason for being in Africa. But finding is one thing, believing another.

Miles finishes his toast and coffee, says
thank you
quietly to Freddie and then walks out of the compound and down the hill to buy a newspaper. The Sheraton is surrounded by a steel fence and every paling ends in a spear point. Today, soldiers in camouflage gear with automatic rifles guard the fence. Troop carriers are parked opposite the entrance, one with a heavy machine-gun mounted. Policemen with walkie-talkies are spaced all the way down the hill to Nakasero. He asks a European in khaki fatigues carrying a video camera and tripod what's going on.

‘Coup-prevention. The president's giving a speech. They don't take chances.'

The journalist sounded as if he was from Australia or New Zealand.

‘Where, at the Sheraton?'

‘Where else? The president of Burundi's with him.'

South-African, after all. That made more sense once he'd placed the accent.

‘Ok. Thanks.'

Miles had thought of going in to the hotel to use the broadband link at the business centre, but it's too much hassle. The troops wave him on. The policemen eye him cynically. He walks inside the carapace of his whiteness. His birthright of superiority. It would be so easy to believe that.

 
Miles shakes his head at the boda-bodas. He puts up his hand self-deprecatingly towards the taxi drivers:
Suh! Boss! Taxi
Boss! Suh!
He puts two hundred shillings into the hand of the woman with the baby, though he notices the scabs on the baby's mouth and its suppurating eyes. The city is the quietest he's ever seen it. Apart from Easter Sunday that time. The time when he'd shaken his head at someone approaching his elbow, someone in the corner of his eye. Only to find it was a small boy carrying his baby brother and begging. By then they'd already turned away and were swallowed up in a crowd of impeccably dressed Ugandans emerging from a church on Kampala road. He'd left his drink at the café table. How could you survive when you were your brother's keeper, when you were only nine years old? Miles had found them eventually and put some coins into the older boy's hand. He'd looked proud and distant. Miles knew then that he'd always be there, in the corner of his eye.

Miles walks to Bomba Road and buys a
New Vision
for two hundred shillings, an Independence Day issue. He turns into the Bancafé and orders a fresh lemon juice and a medium latte. The tables are made to look like rough-hewn tree trunks, glass-topped, the cavity beneath filled with coffee beans. The juice is sharp and sweet, the coffee mild and smooth. He reads the paper idly, then leaves the café and turns left past the shops selling suits and shoes and shirts, towards Nile Avenue. He feels for a coin when he sees a beggar on the corner: a dark shape sprawled on the pavement, crooked limbs bent under him. He wears a stained blue shirt and ragged trousers torn off at the hem. The man's hair is tangled and dusty. He cups his fingers when Miles leans down to drop the coin into them and their hands brush together. The man is about forty, though it's hard to tell. His fingers touch Miles' and pull them, tugging them gently towards himself. So that Miles has to look. The man's face is thin, meek and lined, his sternum twisted, his body a nest of black, broken sticks in which his life is huddled. His eyes are dark, the pupils ringed with bluish cataracts. His expression is one of indelible desolation. Yet he is thanking Miles. Thanking him for the worthless coin he's put into his hand.

On the way past the Sheraton Miles pushes a five thousand shilling note at the woman's hand as she cradles her baby. He crushes the newspaper, feels a prickle of heat attack his neck, that blush of sweat at his groin, behind his knees. He sees the man's face in the dust, in the blazing void of sky. He feels as if a layer of skin has been flayed from his body. He sits on the bed in the dark hotel room, the curtains pulled against the sun. That night he'll eat a pizza in the Nile Hotel just a hundred yards from where the man is sprawled. Armed guards will keep the beggars away and he'll be safe behind the fence, surrounded by ex-pats who hunch over their laptops, over their important work. He knows that as darkness falls the man will crawl towards shelter. That he will wake – as the woman with the baby will wake and the small boy, and the girls who'd surrounded him with outheld hands – to another day of eternally passing time, of hunger, of thirst. A thousand contingencies make up their days. Better not to look. But he had looked and the man – a man younger than him with his life already spent – had touched him in gratitude.

Tomorrow he'll eat a toasted sandwich with a glass of fresh lemon juice and a latte. And the beggars will wait outside on the pavement where they are caught in the slowly cascading dust of time. Like the traffic bollards and the termite mounds and the cracked pavements sinking back to desert under his heels.

 
* * *

 
Carol imagines the lump. It's part of her, so she has to love it, because it could easily be benign. There is a medical practice in the village, at the old vicarage where a huge copper beech drops its leaves on the parked cars. The GP had used that word when he referred her to a specialist.
Benign
. It sounded like kindness. Like a form of charity. And so she thinks of it as a pearl. Uganda is the pearl of Africa and so maybe she has a little bit of Africa inside her. There it is, hard beneath the skin. It glows with a radiant and unexpected light. It offers no sensation. It gives no clue to its real nature or why it has mysteriously appeared. So precious, so secretively asserting itself. It is as if it has always been there and she simply hadn't noticed.

They'd joked about such things when she went for her medical at fifty. She and Cathy, the nurse practitioner. Her breasts. The need to make regular checks. Now she is an oyster and some tiny piece of grit has become a pearl growing inside her, a rare and mysterious part of nature. Of
her
nature. Now it's got between her and the world. The way secrets do. The way they take away the everyday and remake it as something profound or precious. She has to go to that other world to exist outside the everyday. Cherishing the precious thing that had taken root in her and that can't be ignored. Her own cells are dividing, growing in some glorious saturnalia, the natural order all topsy-turvy. But for no good reason. For no reason at all, when it came down to it, except that they could. Miles would be home in three days. He sounded strangely happy in his African world, inside his own shell that was burnished by equatorial darkness, wrapped in a spangled cloth of African nights.

When she is dressing for work, fastening her bra and looking from the bedroom window, she sees that the lawn is strewn with poplar leaves. The grass would need cutting one last time.

 
* * *

 
Independence Day again. But now it is evening. It's been forty-four years since the country gained its own flag then sank into war and poverty. Terror and corruption had ruined the most fertile country in Africa where it was said that even a stick planted in the ground would grow and bear fruit. That old cliché. The traffic has increased for some reason. There is smog of diesel fumes and darkness. Miles walks quickly, the way a muzungu walks, head down, always in a hurry in case they see something they'd rather not. He's wondering about the beggar on the corner of Nile Avenue above the Bancafé, but the man is not there.

He sees headlights sweeping the dense air; a father walking hand in hand with his small son; an open lorry loaded with long-horned Ancholi cows; a man in a three-piece suit carrying a briefcase in one hand and a live hen in the other. Two boys try to sell him some eggs from cardboard trays, but he has no use for them. He sees the moon, huge and golden, nibbled away at its lower edge by termites, rising above the royal palms in the Sheraton gardens.

A tall, slim woman approaches him along the pavement. She is carrying a bible and holding hands with two little girls. The youngest is about six and wears a pink frock. When she sees Miles she breaks away from her mother and skips towards him through the dusk, holding out her hand. He takes it and she curtsies daintily. Miles introduces himself to the mother, who is wearing a knitted pork-pie hat. She is very beautiful, her cheek bones picked out by the lights of passing cars.

‘Hello, I'm Miles. How are you?'

The woman shakes hands with a smile.

‘I am Beatrice. How are you?'

That odd East African greeting that he's learned is not really a question. The older girl holds out her hand.

‘This is Nancy.'

Miles shakes hands and looks down to the little girl who is looking up at him with huge eyes. The woman speaks again, enquiringly.