Touch (21 page)

 
* * *

 
Carol is in the staffroom, lost in the drift of conversation. It's almost the end of lunchtime. A stack of blue exercise books stands in front of her. She puts the pencil down and clasps her hands, pressing down on the tabletop.

‘Carol, are you ok?'

It's Maddy, the head of English.

‘Yes. Sorry, just daydreaming.'

Her mouth is sour with the taste of staffroom coffee. The table is digging into her.

‘What's next?'

‘3C. Speaking and listening. I'm doing that passage from
Kes
.'

‘Ok, sounds good. Best of British with that lot!'

Carol rises and gathers the books into her locker. She picks up her bag and makes her way through to the corridor, to the smell of school dinners and the yells of children in the play-ground outside her form room. She might get two minutes to herself without anybody asking her anything. She looks at the faded map of the world and finds England. She finds Europe and then Africa. She finds Uganda, Lake Victoria, Kampala, tracing the creased paper with her finger. It's like old skin. Elephant skin. Then the door is forced open and the kids spill in upon her.

 
* * *

 
The Shangri-La hotel and the Shanghai restaurant share a compound with the Kampala sports club. Tonight, Miles decides to eat in the restaurant instead of going out. The traffic is so bad now that taking a taxi is slow and means suffocating in diesel fumes. By seven o'clock, the power has failed across Kampala and all the bars and shops are lit by candles and kerosene lamps. Load-shedding. All because someone built a dam in the wrong place. Miles sits at a balcony table under lights that ebb and brighten. The generator throbs somewhere. He's finishing his fried rice and is sipping soda water when a white rabbit appears on the lawn below. It's nibbling the coarse grass and looks up, seeming to watch him. The faint light makes it look like a mythical creature, a golden hare fallen from some constellation in the night sky.

Later, Miles is trying to send an email from the hotel's business centre. It's maddeningly slow. He sees that all the tables in the hotel garden outside the window have candles burning on them. The email system crashes over and over. He waits for a connection, watching plasma crawl across the bar at the bottom of the screen. Then a voice floats up, husky and plangent. A woman is singing, solo. He strains to hear the words…
Oh God thou art a light to me…
She is joined by other voices, male and female, swelling confidently into harmony. He watches the tiny hourglass blink on the screen. The voices sink and rise and go on. There is a lull filled with conversation and laughter and sudden ululation. Then one voice hums, picks up a melody and words, until the whole garden resonates in three-part harmony. They sing in English, yet it is quite unlike anything he has ever heard. This language has the thickened tone of loss. Or maybe he imagines that. Candles flicker in darkness beyond the mosquito netting. The connection fails again.

When Miles goes into the compound to breathe the humid air, the night-watchman greets him softly.
Good evening, Sah
. Miles answers awkwardly, smells the rain; sees the moon parting silver clouds. It is rising like the head of a bright mushroom. He thinks of Carol under the same moon. He misses her now. He is alone but not lonely. He is wherever he goes when he is this far from home, somewhere beyond loneliness. He feels beside or beyond himself.

 
* * *

 
Carol's school is six miles from the village. It's a five-minute drive from the house to the main road. Today she's late and gets stuck behind the school bus, which stops at every lane end and farm gate and village to pick up children who clamber aboard in their dark-green uniforms. Even at this time of year hardly any of them wears a coat. A group of third-formers crowds the back window of the bus and waves at her. She waves back, trying not to smile at their delight.

A tract of mud spreads across the road where the traffic for the pipeline has crossed. She slows down for the tempo-rary traffic lights, watching a yellow digger slew out a wave of clay as it turns in the field. It's hard to imagine the landscape ever healing. A group of Charolais bullocks are crowded by a gate as she slows for the roundabout just before the school. The bull is silhouetted against the horizon, shoulders hunched into its massive neck. Its balls hang heavily beneath, swinging as it lunges at the grass. A pair of crows rises from something on the road.

By the time Carol gets to school the bus is already empty and pulling out of the gates. The driver is an ex-pupil. He has a head of blond, almost white hair, fine as cotton strands. One of those boys for whom school was a waste of time because he already had employment with the family firm. He'd had a job as soon as he was born. She feels old, watching him turn the wheel, watching him pull away into his new life. Ironically, it brings him back to school twice a day. Carol pulls on the handbrake, checks her lipstick in the mirror; drags her briefcase from the passenger seat. Another day. She wonders what more there is beside work. The school bell peals its din of hammered iron as she climbs the steps. Inside, she sees her face gliding inside a glass cabinet of silver cups. She hurries on.

 
* * *

 
Now he's on Nile Avenue, the Sheraton to his left, the Grand Imperial and the Speke Hotel on his right. It's already dusk and traffic is swarming. The air is dense with diesel fumes and the dirt paths beside the road chock-full of school kids on their way home. He's passed the woman with her sick baby laid on the pavement. He looks straight past the cripple who clings to a cut branch. There is something biblical and stark in the crudely hewn crutch. A legless man sprawls on a square of cardboard and Miles finds something of interest in the towering blue panes of the Workers' Building that dominates Nakasero. The road dips down and becomes dual carriageway. He crosses over and turns right at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation where boda-boda riders gather and a woman sits under a parasol with cigarettes and bags of sweets and newspapers laid out under pieces of glass to tempt office workers on their way home.

He's had a long day, checking serial numbers on the second-hand computers they've imported from the UK against the recorded numbers, assigning them to schools, arranging for new software to be installed. Miles works for a UK-based NGO, Computeraid. He works mainly in Harrogate, but also in Uganda, Malawi and sometimes Kenya. He retired from the bank at fifty, bored but with a decent pension. Then he replied to an advert in the
Yorkshire Post
and a new life started. An unexpected sense of purpose. He'd never been out of Europe before that first trip to Nairobi. Now his passport is full of African visas and he has a life that no one else knows about. Not even Carol. A life that he doesn't talk about, because he can never quite find the right words or the right time. But it's part of him, growing relentlessly, pushing at his other life. In the space of that first drive from Entebbe to Kampala something had changed for good. Or for ever, it was hard to tell.

Miles thinks about a walk around the craft market and a beer in the National Theatre before eating at the Chaat house on De Winton Road. But he's skipped lunch, so goes straight to the restaurant. He orders a Nile Special, spiced lentil cakes with yoghurt and a mutton and spinach curry with garlic naan. The restaurant is just a small café, really. There are a couple of Asian families in there and three Australian back-packers with rat-tail dreadlocks. The waiter remembers Miles from his previous visits. He welcomes him –
Hello Sah!
–brings the beer first and snaps the cap off. The restaurant is Indian, but all the waiters are Ugandan. There is still tension between them, a hierarchy that leaves the Asians on top. Miles has come straight from the office and forgotten his insect repellent. He rolls down his sleeves and buttons the cuffs, then takes a sip of the beer, breaking pieces off his pappadom and scooping up chutney and chilli sauce. He drinks the cold beer too fast and orders another. The starter comes, swimming in spiced yoghurt. He likes this place. It's familiar, scruffy, safe from ex-pats for the most part.

Miles walks back through darkness to the Shangri-La, passing three prostitutes on a street corner who smile at him. The dusk of diesel fumes burns his throat. The boda-boda riders beep at him enquiringly. But he shakes his head and walks on, stumbling and narrowly missing an open manhole. A woman passing murmurs,
Oh, sorry!
He rights himself, murmuring,
It's ok, thank you
. He remembers the bag of needles and sutures he carries, as recommended. They're back at the hotel. So what use are they? It's hard to say. Just that it's advised to carry such things in Africa. In any case he doesn't fancy a visit to Mulago hospital.

He walks on. Three small girls surround him in the road, their mother waiting nearby. He gives them some change and waves them away when they persist. He's heard they are Karamajong women widowed in cattle raids. AK 47s have replaced spears and sticks and the northern tribes are slaughtering each other. On his last trip he met a German tourist who'd had his Land Rover stripped of its tyres, so that the warriors could make sandals.

On the pavement near the Sheraton a small boy sits alone in the dark, almost invisible, holding out his hand.

‘Sah, Sah!'

His voice is a mere susurration. Miles finds a five hundred shilling coin and presses it into sticky fingers.

‘Zankyou.'

The boy smells of shit and sweat. Miles wonders if he's being watched? Whether a bigger boy will take the money? Where he'll find shelter for the night? Earlier, outside the theatre, a Down's syndrome boy had politely begged a few shillings to buy a Fanta. Why had that affected him so much? The trick is never to look. Last year in Kano he'd been stuck at traffic lights and his car had been surrounded. A couple of ragged men without legs clinging to home-made skateboards, others pressing their stumps to the windows. Where to look? Away? Nowhere? That was the trick. The driver was impassive, flicking his head to one side. One of the men had dirt on the stump where his hand should have been. Miles could never get that out of his mind. He'd earned his thousand-yard stare.

Back at the hotel Miles switches on CNN news. He watches the slaughter in Iraq where the insurgency is out of control. American troops drag bloodstained bodies to a flatbed truck, a man's head bouncing as he is dropped. Miles runs a bath from the trickle of water the tap produces. He lies in a few tepid inches, working the soap, hearing TV's blare down the corridor. He towels, cleans his teeth, sits on the bed, flicking through his notes for tomorrow. He can hear the smack of squash balls from the hotel sports club. He'll remember that too: the inane flapping of rubber against cement. A gecko is broached to the wall above the TV. He waves at it ironically, pulling the sheet over himself.

Miles switches on the lamp and gets up to root through his jacket. In his wallet, tucked between his credit cards, he has a photograph of Carol taken at Widdup Moor just before he came out that first time. They'd had lunch at the Pack Horse after a long, boggy walk. She'd had her hair cut short. The pale roots were just showing. A purple scarf, a wistful smile. Maybe that was just impatience at his incompetence with the camera. Her way of saying,
Get on with it, Miles, for God's sake
. She'd always been better with a camera than him. She's fifty-two. Hard to believe. Apart from those lines running from the corner of her eyes, she looks just the same to him. Strange, how he'll always see the girl in the woman. Grey eyes, like her mother's. Beautiful as the light catches them. And she'll be ok, after all. She'll be fine, because maybe it didn't hurt to be apart. Maybe that was a good thing.

Tomorrow, he'll go to the craft market on Buganda Road and find her some tribal earrings, a matching bracelet, maybe an unbleached cotton cloth for the kitchen table. Today, he'd like the fridge in his room to work so that he can drink cold water. He'll ask Freddie to look at it, knowing that Freddie has no fridge, that Mary will never have a fridge. Still, he'll ask them to look into it.

In the small hours of the morning he's woken by the clatter of heels from the room next door. Then voices. A woman politely thanking a man. A man laughing. The male voice is low, its tones almost indiscernible. When he peers through the curtains, a girl in a short dress, deeply scooped at the bosom, is talking to the night watchman and blowing smoke from a cigarette. The moon casts her shadow onto curled jacaranda leaves.

 
* * *

 
Carol sits on the edge of the bath. Her feet are touching each other and the enamel is cold under her thighs. A chill is seeping through the windows, though the gas boiler is rumbling in the kitchen below. She'd been woken in the night by mewling cats. Their cries were eerie, visceral and frightening like the hunger of babies. She shifts along the bath, reaching for a towel, remembering how the girls had cried in the night, pulling them from sleep. From each other.

Dawn is a bubble of gold melting onto frosted glass. The shelf above the sink is a jumble of shampoo bottlers, conditioner, bath oil, shaving foam. She notices some dark snips of hair at the base of the taps from the last time Miles shaved. She's wearing a pair of his old pyjamas with the cuffs and trousers rolled up. They don't smell of him exactly, but of
them
. She'd worn them the last time they made love. He'd undone the buttons so gently, one by one, a kiss for each. Then he'd touched her belly, kissed it in little circles, his lips pressed against her, grazing her skin.

A bird brushes against the window, a shadow from the world outside. She unbuttons the collar of the jacket and slips her hand inside. It's cold: a stranger's hand or a doctor's. The little lump under her left breast is still there, like a marble under the skin. She undresses, switches on the shower, steps into heat and steam.

 
* * *