THE SHOEMAKERS OF NAKASERO

The call of the Imam woke me. His voice was distorted by the speaker system, like the bit on that single by Cher where she sounds like she’s singing down a drainpipe. What was it called? Another blank one. I lifted my head. The pillow was damp. Jesus. No aircon in the university guesthouse but the room was pretty cool. My tongue felt like last night’s pit latrine. I couldn’t remember much about how we’d got home, just the taxi lurching over potholes and someone spewing out of the back window. McKenzie. My clothes were crumpled on the floor like a man hunched into a foetal position. They looked how I felt. I took a swig from the bottle of water beside the bed and dozed off again. When I woke, my head was banging. I searched for my watch, but I was still wearing it. The hands glowed in the light that filtered through the mosquito netting. Eight-thirty. Fucking hell!

This was supposed to be a rest day. Saturday morning in Kampala. I wondered what Helen and the girls would be doing. It was still early in the UK. They’d probably have breakfast then pile into the car to see her parents at Saddleworth. Her parents who’d never liked me. I wondered if she was still seeing that guy from the Building Society. Gary? Gordon?

When I tilted my head, a pain shot from side to side as if I’d just touched two wires together. I let it sink slowly back to the pillow. Believe. That was the name of the record. Weird, how things come back.

I must have dozed for another hour and was woken by the sound of a croaky American voice using the phone in the guesthouse lobby. I love you too honey. Give my love to the kids. Yeah, yeah. Love you too. Sometimes he was on the phone at three in the morning, calling his family in Colorado, driving me nuts. Always the same droning accent. And love, love, love. He’d been out here for a couple of months fitting a new X-ray system at Mulago Hospital. Long enough to get lonely. I was just back from three days up country with McKenzie and we’d got wrecked at Al’s bar, firing down Nile Specials and playing pool with the young prostitutes. I had a vague memory of McKenzie dancing on the table to Queen with his arms round a nineteen-year-old called Grace who had a bare midriff, small breasts, and was high on ganja and free beer. Another one bites the dust.

We’d been taking readings and rock samples from the river below Jinja where they were planning a hydro-station a few miles down the White Nile to sort out Kampala’s knackered power supply. There was already a dam at the Owen Falls, but that wasn’t enough any more. We’d spent three nights in a tent, McKenzie moaning about the heat, mosquitoes eating us alive. I told him how the crocs crawled out of the river at night and could take a young antelope in one lunge. How they dragged and drowned their prey before eating it. That quietened him a bit. I saw his wind-up torch flickering at night through the tent fabric. Fortunately we had a tent each – me, McKenzie, and James. James was the driver and cook: tall, elegant, and a genius on pot-holed roads. He was from western Uganda, near Mbarara. Cattle country. He spoke Runyankore, Luganda, and Swahili and three or four other dialects, including English of course, so he was pretty useful.

We’d got stopped at a roadblock on the way back to Kampala: boy soldiers in camouflage fatigues and maroon berets looking through all the boxes of rock samples in the back of the truck. The corporal looked about eighteen and the kid who swung open my door had his worn-out AK47 slung and pointing at my thigh. They wanted me to unpack my theodolite. Christ knows why, but they were good-natured enough. James chatted away in the corporal’s own language. It turned out he was a westerner, too. We gave them a crate of warm beer – something small – and after shaking hands they let us bounce back to Kampala past the tea and sugar cane plantations spaced out along that fucked-up road. Back to running water and flushing toilets and clean sheets. McKenzie had got bitten by mosquitoes all over his arms and he sat behind me in the truck scratching away and hissing through his front teeth. I caught James’ eye once or twice and could have sworn he was smiling as he drove, humming gospel songs. McKenzie was new to Africa, all freckles and ginger hair and blue-eyed naivety. But I’d worked with worse. I’d worked with Armstrong for almost six months and he was an arsehole. Pure and simple. I wondered where Armstrong was now. Last thing I heard he was checking out an irrigation scheme in Zambia, but who knows? I liked to think that worse things might have come his way.

I got up and took a shower. There was a trickle of warm brown water and I washed the soap off carefully. There was no shortage of cold water and it cleared my head to have that sheet of ice gushing over my face. Africa could be dangerous in unexpected ways. Once I’d slipped in the shower and shot out like a greased pig. There was more chance of dying from a broken electrical socket when shaving or in a shagged-out taxi after a few beers than being eaten by wildlife.

No shave today. I dried myself off, pulled on some clean clothes and dropped last night’s shirt into the laundry basket. It stank of sweat, mosquito repellent, smoke and dope. Swigging water and remembering to take a malaria tablet, I checked the fridge. A row of Bell’s lager bottles gloated. The pain in my head pulsed. I swung the door shut and pulled on some shoes. Yesterday evening we’d stashed the gear at the company compound, drawn some cash – a satisfying wad of Ugandan currency in ten thousand shilling notes – then cleaned up at the guesthouse where we were staying this visit. I hated the Sheraton and the tourists who frequented it. There was something down to earth and unpretentious about Makerere University and its accommodation. I liked the staff too; they were attentive without being obsequious. It was James’ idea to go to Al’s, which, for a born-again Christian, was pretty cool. After a steak and a couple of beers and a quick spray of Jungle Formula we were ready for the night – which turned out to be more than ready for us.

I went down the corridor towards breakfast. CNN news was on the television in the dining room. The usual stuff: an earthquake, a financial crisis, diplomacy in the Middle East. I took bacon, sausages, and two pale yellow eggs from the tureens. Then plenty of strong coffee. A sign above the picture of President Museveni advertised Bell lager with the stylized rays of a rising sun lighting up one customer’s happy face. The idea seemed to be that you woke up feeling good. The waiter, Moses, took my plate.

– More, sah?

I shook my head. No way. He’d worked here for years and never seemed to find anything better. I nodded to Sister Agnes who was talking the hind leg off the guy from Colorado. He had a grey moustache and the sagging features of a Bassett hound. She was in full rig. I got up quickly before she caught my eye. Having breakfast with her was like sitting down with the headmistress to talk through your school report.

McKenzie would be spark-out half the morning, so I decided to walk through Wandegeya and into town. I picked up my bush hat, stuffed a roll of bank notes into my pocket, and took a bottle of water from the fridge. The power had failed again and the water was at blood heat. I walked out of the compound. Past the acacia trees at the entrance. Past the guard with his ancient bolt-action rifle. Past the mosque where a row of slippers was lined up at the entrance. Then down the red dirt track that ran beside the road into town. The air was sickly with diesel fumes and charcoal smoke from the braziers where women roasted maize cobs and sold them to the students on their way to Saturday classes at the university. They came in a steady stream in freshly pressed clothes, smart and eager to learn.

The track was uneven, rutted with rainwater. Open storm drains were clogged with rubbish beside the road. I saw a dead lizard curled in the dust. The kind that were supposed to cast a spell on pregnant women. I stubbed my foot and scuffed the toe of my shoe. They were pretty shot anyway. My dad always used to say that he couldn’t afford cheap shoes. When he died I found boxes of them stored in the pantry at home, never worn. Grensons, Loakes, Crockett & Jones, Cheaney’s. He must have combed every charity shop in town. Some were brand new and all were two sizes too small for me. Towards the end he’d developed bunions. His big toes had crossed over and he’d only been able to wear trainers. When I went to see him in the hospital his feet were yellow and twisted like roots.

It was about that time when things in the UK had gone wrong for me. I’d been made redundant when my firm downsized, so I’d gone freelance. First a pipeline in Cameroon, then Kampala, Nairobi, Llilongwe, Accra, Harare, Joburg, Kano and Lagos. I had this dream, that somewhere in one of the marketplaces – maybe in Kano or Nakasero – I’d find an old man making shoes by hand. He’d be a product of empire, crafting the finest veldtschoen from buffalo hide for army officers who sought him out from their retirement homes in the UK. Each would have his own last, carefully numbered, and the shoemaker would store them in the shady back room of his shop, even after the ex-colonials had died out, one by one. Every year he’d send a few pairs of hand-stitched shoes to the UK and a cheque or bank order would come back by return.

My dad was a wrought-iron worker and could make anything out of metal. He used to belt us and his hands were as hard as ingots. You learned never to let him come up behind you. Once he smacked my brother’s head so hard that it hit the plasterboard partition between our bedrooms and cracked it. He got another smack for that. In those days most men had a trade and in our row of terraced houses we had a joiner, a painter and decorator, an electrician, a mechanic, and a violinist. And my father, of course. Together they could have built the Ark and entertained the animals.

My father liked to walk when he had no work – which was most of the time as he got older and more cantankerous. He’d stump angrily into Manchester and back, placing small ads in newsagents, saving on bus fares. He liked those metal pieces nailed to the heels of his shoes – segs – so he rapped his way down the pavements. When we were little, my dad was the creak of leather. You heard him before you saw him. Luckily. Once he had a pair of shoes repaired and the leather wore through in a few weeks. I asked for bullhide on these not bullshit, he told the cobbler, slamming them down on the counter. He had a nice turn of phrase when it suited him. For a man of five foot two, he was the most intimidating person I ever met. But then, he was my dad. Enough said.

I waited at the only working traffic lights in the city. The sun was melting the sky. An amputee went by on a hand-operated tricycle, his face shiny with sweat. This was my fourth visit to Uganda – a six-week stint in Kampala, with occasional visits ‘up country’ – as the Brits call it. Up country can be pretty much anywhere, even down country. I never really figured that out. McKenzie was the geologist and would be with me for this last two weeks of the survey. The heat was blistering now, the sky almost white with heat. A few black kites soared in thermals above the shantytown to my right. I passed a group of boda-boda riders straddling their Chinese motorcycles and hoping for a fare. Then down Kampala Road, slackening my pace a little. I’d had to learn to walk slowly. Heat shivered on the tarmac like white spirit evaporating. There was a dead dog at the kerbside, bloated with heat. The stench was a stifling muzzle of decay, sickening. A few years ago the same road had been strewn with human bodies.

I walked past the area they called Bat Valley where thousands of fruit bats roosted at night. I’d watched them earlier in the week from the guesthouse terrace, flying in their thousands, flapping into a yellow tropical storm. I passed a half-built hotel clad in bamboo scaffolding that never seemed to get any bigger. Then a Shell garage where security guards in blue tracksuits and baseball caps lounged in the shade with cheap, pump-action shotguns. I saw a woman with dust in her hair, blinded by cataracts, sprawled under a blanket, too weak even to beg. I put a few coins into her hand and she stared through me as if I didn’t exist.

The sun was really bending my head. Usually I made a point of never getting drunk in Africa. For obvious reasons. One was to avoid doing something stupid. The other was feeling like shit. But that would pass. Hangovers do. There were worse things here and you didn’t have to look far to find them. I bought some more water from a boy lugging a box of Rwenzori Spring and walked on past the tennis courts where two Brits were playing a feeble game of doubles with a couple of local girls. They didn’t look as if they knew one end of the racquet from another. I bent down to tie a lace and saw the leather was cracking on my shoes. I had an idea that this visit I’d find what I was looking for.

I turned off the main drag to the market at Nakasero, teeming with Saturday shoppers and piled with cheap household goods: bolts of cloth, clothing, electrical plugs and sockets, pots and pans, plastic ware, knives, fruit and vegetables. The food was piled up neatly in pyramids – oranges, peppers, pineapples, watermelons, eggplant, cassava, passion fruit, tomatoes and Irish potatoes. Then an open-air butchers where goat meat darkened in the sun. Then a whole area dedicated to plumbing and tiling, its chrome and enamel gleaming. Coils of copper and plastic piping. Baths and toilets and bidets lined up against the pavement. Bidets? It was hard to find a bath plug in most hotels. The marketplace was pure sensory overload. A press of humanity from all over Uganda and beyond. A daze of sweat and heat and talk. Muslim. Christian. Poverty-stricken. Laughing. Proud. Abject. Above all, on the move. It was Babel. It was Kampala. It was the pulse of Africa. The pressure of life; the pull of death.

Beggars reached out from where they lay, twisted legs on the stained earth. There were skips piled with rotting vegetables, marabou storks picking over the rubbish. A stench of decay and diesel fuel. Charcoal sellers laboured, grey with dust. I passed a group of women cooking matoke and beef stew in huge aluminium pans. They were laughing, eyeing me up as I went past. Mzungu. The only white man walking in the market. Mzungu. Sometimes they called it out as a joke. Hey, Mzungu! At the heart of the market was the bus station, glittering with glass and steel under hoardings advertising Guinness and Nokia where hundreds of mini-bus taxis – matatu – gathered like a migratory herd. Their touts were busy doing business, soliciting passengers, heaving their bags into place. From here to anywhere.

Beyond Nakasero and the bus station lay Owino market, equally vast and equally hot and tumultuous, where you could buy anything from clothing to crockery, baskets to bicycle parts. There were sacks of maize meal and rice, bunches of plantain, sugar cane, soap, woven mats, baskets, tools, tapes of Congolese music, leather belts and cheap shoes. There were cheap shoes everywhere. Clever imitations of Reebok trainers and Italian style shoes with pointed toes and plastic soles. In Owino the light was so bright it was like walking into polished blades. There wasn’t a stitched or welted shoe anywhere, not even above the markets in the commercial district around the Crane Bank, where our office was. Where men in smart suits mingled with the crowds and street hawkers. Where the same man lay asleep every day on the pavement – barefoot, drunk, drugged or dying from Aids – his skin gleaming like oiled wood.

All the time I was in Nakasero I thought about the mill town of my childhood. The factories were still there but King Cotton had died, as all dictators do in the end. The mills were mostly empty hulks staring into algae-infested lodges. The cradle of industry. That was the cliché they’d fed us at school. Now the factories were rented out to engineering outfits or catalogue sales companies that went bankrupt after a couple of years. Or they lay empty, giant nurseries for the rats that took to the town’s sewers and culverts at night.

All through my childhood the chimneys came down, one by one. A red brick forest became a clearing. It was strange to think of that in the centre of Kampala. Well, maybe not so strange, here in the old empire where the Nile rose a few miles away and flowed north to water the plains of Egypt. I remembered old Mrs Stead, our next-door neighbour, speaking lovingly of the Sea Island and Egyptian staples that she’d spun with my grandfather. Purple veins stood out on her crippled hands.

It was only a brief flare of synapses, a blush of memory in the chemical brain, to connect Nakasero or Owino market in Kampala to Tommyfield market in Oldham, or the little market behind the swimming baths in Chadderton, or the famous market in Bury where you could buy black puddings and yards of worsted or cotton cloth.

After their retirement my parents had loved to take a day-trip to Skipton or Halifax, wandering through the markets in search of bargains, buying a nice piece of rolled brisket and having fish and chips for lunch. Every so often my father would return home with a pair of shoes, a bargain from the Age Concern or Oxfam shop. Those shoes had the scent of death and decay about them, a coolness to the touch as if body heat had just evaporated. Once he bought a mobile phone, a year or two after my mother had died in Crumpsall hospital, but he’d never learned to use it. Another gadget – like the TV remote – he never got the hang of. A problem he attributed to things that were fucking rubbish, rather than to himself.

Now here I was in Owino, a sweaty mzungu among thousands of Africans, wandering towards Nakasero in my bush hat and cargo pants, thinking about the dark little cobbler’s shop I’d visited as a child.

Where I grew up there were four spinning mills, built at the turn of the century when cotton really was king, and money was still spewing from the frames and looms for the mill owners. My grandfather had been employed in King’s Mill as a mule spinner until he’d lost three fingers from one hand and worked out his days on the roads for the Corporation. He died six months before retirement, leaving a sweet-jar full of sixpences he’d saved. He didn’t even live long enough to see his son buy his first car – a Morris Seven with a second-hand prop-shaft and differential. We had some old photographs of my dad with his mother on the front in Morecambe – a stout woman in a beret leaning on the bonnet and licking an ice cream in the wind.

The cobbler’s shop was below the mills. Below the fishmonger’s and the corner-shop butcher’s and the Co-op where we bought ammunition for our peashooters, where my father had begun work just before his fourteenth birthday. In the window was a pair of clogs and on their soles a pair of flamenco dancers had been picked out in nails and hand-painted. I remembered how the woman wore a crimson frock and the man tight black trousers. The clogs had brass toecaps and were made of oiled leather.

As a child my father had worn shoes rather than clogs, a fact he’d always been proud of, as if it marked him out as special. The other kids had clogged seven bells out of him and, despite the shoes, labour had stuck to him all his life. The cobbler’s shop had a doorbell that jangled over your head on a metal spring, bringing Carson limping from the back room in his grey apron. He’d lost a leg at Monte Casino. The shop counter was dark mahogany and the shop smelled of tanned leather, neat’s-foot oil, Dubbin, heelball and brown paper. All the accoutrements of the cobbler’s trade. Bullhide not bullshit, my father had said right there at the counter, with a light in his eyes that was the blue flash of thunder. I’d always wondered what Carson’s artificial leg was made of. As far as my father was concerned, he had a job where he sat on his arse all day.

– Sah?

You’re right that it makes no sense – harking back to a mill town in the 1960s when I was walking through an African marketplace in the twenty-first century and mixing it all up together. As if Carson might limp from one of the shop doorways or leap up from one of the treadle-operated Singer sewing machines that were everywhere. Just like the machine my mother had used to make our clothes when we were children.

– Sah?

A meat fly landed on my arm and I brushed it away. Maybe it was those black enamelled machines with their gold lettering that had sent me back, recalled my mother sewing clothes for the neighbours, or pinning up my father’s trousers as he stood on a chair and ranted. My mother who could make any garment with her hands. My father who could shape even the most recalcitrant piece of metal. The cobbler who turned over a freshly repaired shoe in his hand to show the new leather gleaming. Good for a few more miles. It made no sense, admittedly, but then maybe that’s all the sense there is. To be everywhere and anywhere at the same time. Somewhere and nowhere. To be outside yourself.

– Sah?

The man’s voice – a soft, insinuating voice – startled me. When I did look up I saw a small Ugandan man in a ragged tee shirt and khaki pants. He looked about thirty, but it was hard to tell. He had a wispy beard and his skin was paler than that of most Africans. His eyes were the lightest brown eyes I’d ever seen, like honey poured over almonds. Beautiful eyes that slanted down with slightly hooded lids.

– Shoe, sah?

He was holding out a pair of refurbished casual shoes. You saw them all over Kampala. Dead men’s shoes re-cycled. They were made of tan-coloured leather and had plastic soles and had been polished until even the scuffmarks gleamed. They were shit. You needed good shoes in Kampala where the roads were broken and gave way to red dirt and pot-holed tracks. I shook my head. The man held the shoes closer, as if I hadn’t looked at them properly.

– Good shoes. Try them. Try them, sah?

A marabou stork flew over the market and its shadow crossed the man’s face. Darkening those amazing eyes for a moment. His arms were sinewy and the veins stood out on his hands.

– Not for me, thanks.

– Not for you? No shoe? They your size. See?

The man smiled incredulously. He thrust the shoes at me again, then looked down at my shoes, a pair of knackered brogues made in Dundee. Good shoes once, they had a coating of dust from the market and were stained with salt. Sweat was trickling from my hatband and down my neck.

– Sah, you come!

He tugged my sleeve and dragged me into a gap between two stalls.

– Come! Come!

We ducked under a carousel of leather belts, past a stack of watermelons with their sweet, sugary smell. Then we were in a narrow alleyway between buildings, catching the tang of human shit. A beggar held up his fingerless hand, but we brushed past and turned left into a narrow street and into a shop doorway that gaped under a blue and white striped awning and had yellow cellophane in the widow.

– Come sah, come sah!

The shop was piled up with fabric, saris and shalwar kameez and made-up suits hung from mannequins, the glass-fronted display cabinets were piled with ties and collars and socks and – yes – shoes, though of a kind I’d never buy. We entered a gloomy back room where an elderly Sikh gentleman with a white beard and a maroon-coloured turban was watching a black and white television set. Gentleman? There seems no other word. My Ugandan guide spoke to him in Swahili and the Sikh eyed me carefully. He held out his hand to shake mine.

– You are welcome.

– Thank you.

– You are looking for shoes?

I shrugged, slightly helpless and more than slightly intimidated. The Sikh gentleman bent down and examined my brogues carefully. He drew a finger across the toe of one, making a line in the red dust.

– I have. Come.

The Ugandan man had taken the Sikh’s place and was screwing up the volume on a Kenyan soap opera. I felt a tug on my sleeve and followed the proprietor into another room at the back of the shop.

At first glance the room seemed to be draped with curtains but as the Sikh pulled the curtain back I saw that the walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were filled with boxes. Shoe boxes. I remembered the sharp smell of my father’s pantry – a mixture of shoe polish, turps and Swarfega – where he kept his shoes neatly stacked on shelves made from old fruit boxes. The old man stooped in the gloom and pulled out a box, pulling down his spectacles on his nose to check the label.

– You are a nine?

It was a good guess.

– Yeah, nine.

He straightened up and handed me the box.

– Here. You try. Very good shoes.

I noticed that he was wearing light leather slippers that allowed him to shuffle almost noiselessly from room to room.

– Come. Come to the light.

He led me back to the room with the television where my Ugandan friend was now eating from a Tiffin tin of matoke and tilapia stew. He ignored us both. The food reminded me I was hungry.

I took a seat and opened the box. Inside was tissue paper, then two velvet bags and inside each bag was a shoe of unmistakeable quality. Dark brown stippled leather, richly oiled. Double-welted soles. The tongues were stitched into the shoe at the side to form waterproof webbing. Genuine veldtschoen.

– I am Nayanprit Singh.

The proprietor smiled at me a little shyly.

– These are good shoes, eh? Good shoes. You like them?

The shoes were kid-lined and the soles were solid leather, each heel laminated from thin sheets. They had that old smell that brought the ringing of the bell of the cobbler’s shop in my hometown to my head. Flamenco dancers and the smell of lamp oil sold from a big metal drum under the counter. The stump, stump, stump of Carson’s artificial leg. When I put my hands inside to feel the linings, they were soft and supple. There was no name inside, just the number nine hand-written on each tongue in black ink. They were probably the most beautiful shoes I’d ever seen and when I slipped them on and tied the laces, they fitted as if they’d been made on my personal last. I reached for the roll of cash in my pocket.

When I woke on Sunday morning, after a quiet night sipping tonic water on the guesthouse terrace, it was to the smell of new leather. No hangover after a quiet night. No work until tomorrow. I’d grown to love Sundays in Kampala when the city took on a sleepy quality, like a 1950s English suburb. Well, like I imagined that to be. No wonder the British had loved it here. I pushed on the curtains and caught the scent of cut grass where the gardeners were busy with sickles. A woman in a bright yellow gomesi was brushing fallen petals from the path with a broom. It made a soft, sifting sound, repetitive and soothing. A couple of cattle egret pecked at the lawn and a pied crow was mithering something that had died in the night.

After breakfast I walked down to the gate to buy a newspaper from one of the boys who gathered there, working the traffic and passers by. I hadn’t seen much of McKenzie since Friday night. I wasn’t surprised after his performance at Al’s bar. All that beer and brown sugar. My new shoes felt good. Supple yet strong. They already had a layer of red dust. A woman passed me carrying a fat little girl in a frock made of pink gauze. She was sweating and cross. I could already hear hymns rising from the university chapel. One day I planned to give up fieldwork and teach somewhere. Maybe here where they needed engineers and surveyors and you could live cheaply. There was nothing for me at home now. Not since Helen had left me and taken the girls. For no reason, actually. I’d been faithful, but she didn’t think so. I missed Emma and Tracey. Every Christmas I got a letter from them as if she’d stood over them with a whip.

Emma was the youngest at seven. Tracey was just nine. Emma had a harelip and cleft palate which had been repaired after a couple of operations. The surgeon had done a pretty good job. Helen even blamed me for that because it ran in the family as far back as my dad’s uncle. I don’t know what Helen thought I got up to when I was away. Not much but work, actually. I suppose you couldn’t blame her, stuck with two kids when my job was a whole continent away. The guys I met who worked out here were mostly fucked up and mostly divorced. A lot of them went with young black girls. But I didn’t want to be loved for money.

My new shoes felt good against the crumbling footpaths and pavements of Wandegeya. Nayanprit Singh. That was his name. A gentleman. A gentle man with a shoe emporium. His breath had smelt of peppermint in that dark little back room. I’d tried to memorise the location of the shop, the alleyways that my Ugandan guide had taken me through. It wasn’t easy, though I remembered the touch of the old man’s hand against mine, soft and insistent.

When I got back to the guesthouse I found McKenzie, still looking sheepish, sitting over a late breakfast on the terrace, watching two African boys play tennis on the clay court. They ran like deer, retrieving the ball from impossibly angled shots with vicious topspin. I tossed McKenzie The Monitor and ordered some tea. Then I stretched my legs and leaned to wipe the dust from my shoes. My father would have loved them. Maybe shoes were the only things he had loved. Not my mother, not me or Steve. Certainly not sheet metal or iron, which he beat with deepening hatred.

I looked across town to where the tower of a mosque leaned against the sky. It had never been finished. It needed pulling down before it fell down. I’d done some calculations once and worked out that it shouldn’t be standing at all. But this was Uganda, where the impossible happened every day, where red tape could be finessed with something small.

A couple of brown parrots were quarrelling in the bushes. The leather of the shoes had a deep burnish where I’d wiped the dust off. I thought about Nayanprit Singh, serene in the depths of his shop. I thought of the shoemakers of Nakasero and of my father. The last circle of hell would be an everlasting absence of good footwear. I thought about Helen and the girls and how I could have tried harder. Maybe. I’d call her when I got home, get some presents for the girls in Wandegeya where they sold banana-fibre dolls, hippos and giraffes carved from wood.

McKenzie was smiling at something in the paper. Moses appeared at my elbow carrying a tray. I’d forgotten to order English tea and there it was, African tea with the milk already in the pot.

– Tea, sah?

It didn’t matter. Nothing did. Kites turned in thermals above the city. White clouds puffed up at the horizons. The voice of the Imam sent a pair of doves fluttering from the trees. It was going to be a beautiful day. Tomorrow we’d clear some emails then load up the truck and James would drive us to another river. Up country. Later on today we’d get the maps and plan a route. Then James would change it, the way he always did.

A dragonfly hovered by the toe of my shoe, a blue rod of iridescence. What was that song I kept remembering and forgetting? It was on the tip of my tongue. Believe. That was it. McKenzie looked up, surprised. I must have been thinking aloud. He raised a ginger eyebrow. I shook my head.

– Nothing.

– Didn’t sound like it.

He folded the newspaper then cracked his knuckles. Which reminded me of Armstrong in a way I could have done without. Then the gate of the tennis court clanged shut and the boys were walking past us with their racquets. There was something vacant about McKenzie in the end. As if he had no imagination. As if he was just here, now, and nowhere else.