For example, I chose the right cleaner! Today I was very happy with Anna. A good cleaner can change your life.
Because today, when Justin was making her coffee, Anna asked him if she could clean his room. And to my surprise, Justin said, ‘Yes’. Because usually he does not want anyone to enter. Of course, I sleep there, so I have cleaned the dust, and made it healthy for me to sleep, but I do not tidy Justin’s things, just take away my duvet and pillow each day. The room is very messy and confusing, and Justin is too lazy to tidy it.
And while Anna was cleaning, Justin sat in the garden. It is the first time he has been out of the house. He screwed up his eyes at the light like a baby, and nearly came straight back inside. But I brought out a chair, and told him to sit down, and then I fetched him the morning paper — I had never seen him reading a paper.
(In Kampala, there are fewer papers. New Vision is expensive, and does not tell the truth, and the government keeps closing down the Monitor, or forcing them to run ‘corrections’, or print long speeches by the President. In England they are lucky to have so many papers. They sit on the underground reading them, not looking at each other, rustling the pages, and sometimes you sit opposite a curtain of papers. Vanessa’s house seems stuffed with papers, so the box for recycling is always spilling over, and Anna has to jam the rest in the dustbin.
In Kampala it is very different. The vendors sit there, on the hot pavement, selling single copies of old magazines. Maybe two months old, maybe six months old, each one weighted with a big piece of glass, dusty broken glass that gleams in the sunlight, in case the precious things blow away. And Ugandans buy them, although they are old. We know that most things change very little. We value the stories, we value the pictures. Some people stick the pictures on their walls. But here in England they must always have new ones. Although mostly they write about plastic surgery, or film-stars divorcing, or diets, or depression, or how happy women can be without men, which I think must depress young men like Justin.)
Justin sat and read a story about Tony Blair, the prime minister who likes war so much, because he does not live in a country like Uganda, which has four wars going on at once. It is strange how Mr Blair is always smiling (he seems happier than anyone else in Britain!). And he likes our President Museveni, and so does Mr Bush, who came to visit. They all like war, and so they all get on, and no one tries to stop the bloody war in the north, which is killing so many Acholi children, and others, also, who try to pass through, and it is like a curse we cannot escape from; like a swamp that sucks us down.
I was glad to see Justin sitting out in the sunlight, reading a paper like a normal Englishman. He spread out his paper in the breeze like a prince and ate the lunch I had made for him. Later he can do all these things for himself, but at the moment he is still like a baby I was glad to see him outside at last. His curls were like an angel’s, fine and golden. The sun shone on his milk-white skin.
These people do not know how lucky they are. War never seems to happen here. And yet I love Justin. It is not his fault. I want him to be well. I cannot hate him.
Anna found several things in Justin’s room. First of all, she found he had a television. It was hidden underneath a dressing-gown, which he had draped cunningly over the screen. It was on, but he had turned the sound down. She asked me whether to turn it off. I went upstairs and had a look. I had never seen this television. He was watching a programme called ‘Parent Swap’, where real children choose to swap their parents. So now I know Justin is not sleeping all day.
If this is how he spends his life, perhaps he is doing it to annoy his mother. When he was little, she always complained if she found Justin watching television. “Surely you are not watching TV again? — as if most people only watched it once.”
I wonder whether Miss Henman knows her son is interested in swapping his parents.
But the other thing Anna found is more important. It shows me I have made a major error, but all detectives sometimes make errors. A good detective will learn from them.
Under the bed Anna found a photograph, and left it on Justin’s table, where I found it. A picture of a beautiful black woman. On the back of the photograph is written ‘Zakira’. And as I look at it, the face changes, and I see it is the woman with the orange headscarf who stood on the doorstep in Canaan Gardens. The woman who was holding the purple flower.
31
Trevor has found My African Journey. He sits in the garage, under a bare bulb, browsing through the book which he had liked so much. It was written in 1908, which isn’t really so long ago.
Winston has a brisk, manly style. When he’s got something to say, he doesn’t hang about. The first chapter is called ‘The Uganda Railway’. Winston seemed very impressed with this, which ran from Nairobi to Lake Victoria: ‘Here is a railway, like the British Fleet,’—he’d be shocked by how small the old Fleet is now, thinks Trevor—“not a paper plan or an airy dream, but an iron fact grinding along through the jungle and the plain, waking with its whistles the silences of the Nyanda. Trevor likes that phrase, ‘an iron fact’. And the way Winston made himself a butterfly net out of telegraph wire and mosquito net. Once the British were good at making things. These are the, kinds of facts Trevor likes. His clients have airy fairy ideas, but he has to work them out in practice. Nessy is airy fairy too. That’s why he does all her donkey work.
Winston had fallen in love with Uganda. Its polite, clever people, its animals. Not just the animals he could shoot. He really took to the butterflies. “Swallow-tails, fritillaries, admirals, tortoise-shells, peacocks, orange-tips…flitted in sunshine from flower to flower, glinted in the shadow of great trees, or clustered on the path to suck the moisture.” And yet he also saw the horror of it. Mosquitoes, tsetse flies, death and destruction.
Trevor wonders what Mary will make of Winston. The book seems to change when he thinks of her reading it. “What an obligation, what a sacred duty is imposed upon great Britain — to shelter this trustful, docile, intelligent Baganda race from dangers which, whatever their causes, have synchronised with our arrival in their midst!”
Didn’t Mary say her language was Luganda? That probably means she is one of these Baganda. Mary is not what you might call ‘docile’. Winston might get right up her nose.
“Let us be sure that order and science will conquer, and that in the end John Bull will be really master in his curious garden of sunshine and deadly nightshade.”
Trevor has mixed feelings, reading this. Of course, it must have been great to know there was an empire, so any old schoolboy could dream of a future, instead of being on benefits.
Though maybe it was only public schoolboys. And Uganda wasn’t really our garden…
Winston’s confidence shone out from every page, yet the world he imagined never came into being. And he was a bloody clever chap, so what hope is there for the rest of us? The man believed the railway would make everyone rich, yet according to Mary, the line has been abandoned. No more trains from Nairobi to Uganda. They’ve got AIDS, apparently, and old John Bull didn’t even sort them out with clean water.
Trevor switches off the light and goes back in to the house, leaving his shelves of books in darkness. What must life be like in today’s Uganda?
32
From The Life of Mary Tendo