Stone Kingdoms (18 page)

Outside, the world is grey and the windows look as if they should still have their curtains closed, because it feels as if the greyness pressing against the house might flow into the room. And my mother busies herself making sandwiches, arranging them in a plastic container in the way she does, using all the space without bruising or forcing anything. As I rub the sleep from my eyes my father drinks his tea and watches me over the rim of his cup and the cup looks too small for his hand, as if at any moment it might crack and the tea splash over the wooden table. Then he stands up and tells me again that it is a long way and to make sure I finish my breakfast and go to the toilet before we leave. And when he goes out to load the car I hear the click of the lock and the scrape of the bolt and when the door opens there is the soft murmur of the sea and for a second I
think
it will flow into the house through the open door. But then my mother comes and sits beside me and tells me that I can sleep in the back of the car, and she smoothes my hair back from my eyes.

When we leave the house everything is grey and the sky and sea seem as if they are joined, and I shiver in the coldness as my father closes the gate behind him and looks for the car keys. And he has to look in every pocket and he pats his side pockets with the palms of his hands, and then in the stillness there is a jangle and he says that which is lost is found, and he opens the driver's door and the light inside yellows the white dome of his head. My mother folds her seat forward and I climb into the back and lie down on the red tartan rug and rest my head on the cushion she has brought for me. But before we move off I sit up and look out of the back window of the car to see what the world looks like early in the morning, but all I see is the grey light pushing in on us and the only colour is the yellow dot of light out on the Point. And as always when I think of the convent out on the Point I touch my hair and try to pretend to God that I like its colour and am grateful for it. Then I wonder if there are fishing boats out in the greyness and how the fishermen see to catch their fish or find their way home, and I remember the time my father took me to Burtonport and we watched the boats unloading and I see the bright shiny eyes staring up from beds of ice and I feel the cold again and snuggle into the rug. When my mother tells me to sleep I close my eyes and pretend.

I pretend because I think they will talk as if I am not here and I will be able to listen and understand the life they alone share. But for a long time no one speaks and there is only the bump of the car over roads my father likes to complain about, and once my mother starts to hum a tune but stops and as she turns to look at me I close my eyes tighter and do my best to pretend. Always I think there must be something between my parents which is kept secret from me, which is kept only for them, like
the
secrets box I keep in my room. I grow tired of its secrets from time to time and take them out and they are no longer secret, but between people I think there must be big things which only they can share and which can never be thrown away. And when I am loved I will know what these things are.

When my father talks it is of money, and my mother tells him everything will be all right and that they will get by. And getting by is something I have heard her talk of before and then she talks of making do for another year and rain falls so lightly at first that the wipers scrape drily across the glass but then it gets heavier and the drops are fat splotches and the wipers flick faster. It starts to drum on the roof and I curl up tighter and the lights from the dashboard shine red and green in the gloom. Then I stop pretending and fall asleep even though the red tartan rug is itchy on my legs and smells musty. And when I wake the rain has stopped and the greyness is gone and this time it is my mother who calls me sleepy-head and my father makes a joke about Lazarus. The musty smell is in my mouth, and in the driver's mirror I see the print of the cushion on my cheek. I hang on the back of my mother's seat but my father tells me to sit down and so I flop back and watch the world.

But I see nothing new, only endless roads seamed by stone walls and beyond the walls clumped billows of yellow gorse or brown beds of heather and beyond that humped and stone-saddled mountains. We pass a reed-fringed lake and my mother points out a swan sitting on a nest, and then the road winds itself more tightly and we climb higher, leaving behind the stone-littered fields with their smattering of wind-blown sheep, and burrow deeper into the mountains through black valleys where the mist streams as if from the burnt earth. This always makes the car feel small and vulnerable and I pull my knees up quietly on the seat so my father doesn't hear me and tell me to put them down again, and when I angle my head to the window I can see mountains stretching beyond themselves into their own shadows and sometimes their sides are patched
and
scabbed with quarries and grey scree. When we pass the rows of peat trenches I try to count the full yellow plastic bags which lean against each other but there are too many, and sometimes at the side of the road there are crazy-angled trees with black bark and branches, hunched over the collapsed remains of stone cottages.

The car feels small as a toy, and sometimes the wind buffets it and my father asks if anyone wants to get out and walk, and then as we keep winding our way upwards we suddenly break into a shock of space and look into a distance riddled by spears of light and the scud of cloud. Then the car seems to grow bigger and my mother and father start to talk and there is a lightness in it and sometimes it includes me. My father tells me to put my feet down off the seat but I do not mind because they have been there a long time and he doesn't say how many times have I told you, it's almost as if he says it out of habit and doesn't really care. Then we drive through places where people live and he points out bungalows which are painted colours he pretends to laugh at, but sometimes I think they are only bright colours and I see no harm in them. And we pass chapels with cars parked double on the road and sometimes on the pavement, and then we have to slow right down and he complains of the time we waste.

When we have been in the car a long time he pulls into a lay-by and my mother pours out tea from a flask and offers us sandwiches from the plastic lunch box, and I never like to take the first sandwich because it breaks the pattern but if my father takes two and we take one each then sometimes the pattern becomes perfect again. The windows begin to steam up and he wipes the windscreen with the back of his hand and it makes a squeaky noise, then he puts on the heater and before long it is clear again. And when we have all finished our tea we hand him our cups and he opens the door just wide enough to reach out his arm and pour out the dregs and then my mother takes them, rubs their insides with a paper hanky and places them back
inside
the polythene bag which she stores at her feet. It won't be too long, my mother says, brushing crumbs off her skirt, and we set off again as the rain returns, firing across the windscreen in fine sheets, and the wipers start their slide and swish.

My father says we are in good time, but then something happens that has never happened before on the long way. We find ourselves joining a trail of cars which is hardly moving, and on the narrow roads cars are parked on both sides and so there is only room to follow the car in front. Sometimes the line of cars ahead comes to a halt, and there are other cars behind us so even if we wanted to turn round we couldn't, and my mother looks at my father but he doesn't understand. He sees no chapel and it is too early for football or hurley and he doesn't understand which makes him nervous, and he drums his fingers on the steering wheel. It is my mother who sees them first. Long lines of people on the mountain, moving through the wind and rain, some of the lines climbing upwards, others making their way down. As we get closer we see the wind blowing out the tails of coats like flags and the long hair of young girls streaming behind them like banners. And my mother says it is a pilgrimage, it is as if the whole side of the mountain is moving and then people start to flow alongside the car or in front of us and I see that many are barefoot and some of them limp and some have bleeding feet and I feel something that feels like sick. I ask my father what it means but he doesn't answer. My mother tries to explain and she tells me that it is their faith, what she calls a penance, a pain that they must suffer because they think God will be pleased. And now I feel frightened because there are so many people, some of them old, many women with their wet hair hanging lank and lifeless, and some have bleeding feet that leave prints on the road. I stare out from the back of the car as they walk in the cold of the morning and I feel frightened because they think they have pleased God and because I do not know this God.

Inside, the car grows quiet, as if we have stumbled into a
world
we do not understand. As we finally reach open road I look back at the moving mountain with its top brushed by cloud and the winding lines of people hoping to please their God. And my father drives the car faster, saying we have to make up for lost time, but I think it is because he wants to get away from this place and these people, and then he starts to say things which he hopes will cheer us up. He tells us that the people who get most out of the day are the traders who lug their cans of drink to the top of the mountain at the crack of dawn and then charge everyone four times the normal price, but I don't know if he has made this up or not and my mother just stares through the side window. And nothing he says stops the feeling that we are strangers in this world, and I wonder if it is because God is angry with us because we never climb the mountain. Then my father says it's a strange religion that lets people do whatever they want and then be forgiven if they light a candle, or say some verses, or kiss a stone, but my mother still says nothing.

When we get to the church where my father will preach, it looks and smells the same as our own church but there are yew trees in front of it and a clock in the spire. Because my mother doesn't have to play we sit together in the middle of the church and there are some people around us but not many. The light shines on the dark varnish of the pews, then splashes against the gold-coloured plaques on the side walls and makes the engraved writing move. When someone coughs, the noise echoes in the vault of the ceiling and as always I wonder why God should choose such a place to live in and why he wants his house to be like this. But when my father speaks I listen because it is a sermon I've never heard before; he tells us of God's mercy and when he speaks of this mercy he calls it infinite, and he reads a story about God and Abraham and he reads it in his other voice. My mother puts her hand on my knee to stop me swinging my foot but I am listening and for a while I forget the moving lines on the mountain. The story is of how God wanted
to
destroy a city because the people's sin is what the Bible calls grievous, and Abraham asks God will he destroy the righteous with the wicked? And then it is like a game with numbers and it starts at fifty and comes down to ten and God tells Abraham that he will not destroy the city if it even has ten righteous people. My father calls God's mercy bountiful and infinite and says that God will not destroy the world even if there is one righteous person, and we don't have to go on a pilgrimage to be righteous because Christ had made a pilgrimage to Calvary on our behalf. When he says this I think he is looking at us but I'm not sure, and sometimes his voice drifts a little into the great spaces of the church and vanishes into the stone corners.

Then he tells us that the world we live in is full of wickedness and he gives the examples he always uses and the two women in the pew in front nod their heads in agreement, and when he has finished the world seems a bad place, so bad that it deserves to be destroyed. And he tells us that righteousness exalts a nation and says that our nation has forgotten this, and he speaks as if he is one of the righteous, one of those who saves the world from destruction. Then I don't listen any more and lean my head against my mother's arm.

When it is all over and we have had our lunch in the house of one of the parishioners we set off on our journey home, and the rain has stopped and the sun makes the roads steam a little. When we pass the mountain there is only the drift of mist and cloud. Then it starts to rain again and my mother keeps her face angled to the window and sometimes when she rubs it clean with a piece of tissue, little bits of white paper stick to the glass like snow.

15

During
the next week, most of those who had survived Baran arrived at the camp. Some were wounded, all were in various states of trauma. Slowly, painfully, we were able to piece the story together. One day, in mid-afternoon, two trucks arrived bearing about two dozen men who said they were from the new army of the people and that they had come to give protection against government troops who would soon be arriving from the capital. None of the soldiers wore uniforms but all carried guns and most, said the villagers, were high on
khat.
Ordering everyone to assemble, they told them that if government troops came very bad things would happen and that everyone must flee into the bush and not return until they were told. While the leader of the men spoke to them, others went inside and took anything of value, saying it was to help the people's struggle. When the head of the village clan tried to argue with them he was brought out and made to kneel on the ground before being beaten, and as some of those watching became hysterical, the soldiers seemed to lose control and one took a pistol and shot the old man in the back of the head. Then as everyone fled towards the bush they turned their guns on them, firing bursts again and again, spraying the fleeing, screaming villagers.

Those who made it to the bush kept moving until they felt far enough away and then found hiding places and stayed there, too frightened to go back to the village or escape in any other direction. Many of their wounds were badly infected and Rollins and Wanneker worked long into the night, the yellow
lights
from the clinic framing it in the darkness. With Nadra and some of the others we gave out the few tents that were left, some food and water, and sat with them, listening to the shuddering rush of their words and the great silences which would suddenly shake their bodies. The children cowered in the corners of their tents, cradling themselves or clutching some object they had picked up, and when I tried to touch them they cringed and slithered away as if my hand might hurt. There was one young girl, maybe eight or nine years old, who had lost her mother and she lay where the light broke into ragged splinters, tightly curled into herself, her eyes open and unblinking. She wouldn't look at me or drink any of the milk I tried to give her. I struggled to stop my mind wondering which corpse had been her mother, remembered with shame that I hadn't been able to bring myself to touch them or help Aduma, tried also to stop that smell of burning from re-entering my senses. Her father was in the clinic with a flesh wound in his leg and although Nadra told her again and again that he would come back, I suppose she thought he too was going to leave her. I sat close to her for a long time, talking, offering her the milk. She looked at me for the first time, studying my hair under the light from the lamp and then she spoke. ‘She says you have red hair,' Nadra said as the girl stretched out her hand for the milk, but I made her come for it and then she let me take her in my arms and nurse her, her wetness printing itself on my skin. Her clothes were soaked with urine and when she had finished I helped her change into clean ones and then she climbed into my arms again and I rocked her for a long time until she fell into a shallow sleep.