41 

I saw a photograph of my father. It was printed on the cover of a newspaper pull-out section headlined TREASON TRIAL SPECIAL published by the Government Information Services. I found it on a chair on the back veranda of our house. I stopped what I was doing, sat down and stared at it.

The picture was taken from above and showed my father on his way into the high court building at the start of his trial. He was striding purposefully, alone. I peered closer and studied his features. His beard had grown back unevenly, his hair looked knotted and uncombed, he was dressed in the same short-sleeved suit he had been wearing the day he was taken away.

My stepmother's cousin Auntie Binty, who we had known in London, had come to stay with us for a while from Nigeria, bringing her children Edward and Elizabeth. She walked onto the veranda. Too late, I looked up. ‘What's so interesting?’ she asked, smiling forcefully.

I didn't reply; instead I tried to push the newspaper back where I had found it, tucked into the back of the old, broken armchair.

Auntie Binty leaned across, pulled it deftly out from underneath me and gazed at the cover. ‘You don't want to be reading that,’ she announced, still smiling, holding onto the newspaper. ‘Why don't you go outside, find the others? Go on.’ She tucked the newspaper firmly under her arm.

The trial of Mohamed Forna and Fourteen Others had opened at a special session of the high court on 10 September, two days short of Sheka's thirteenth birthday. Sheka had already flown back to England to begin at his new school. Mum had decided Memuna and I should go back to school late. We were staying on a little longer in the hope we might be able to win a little public sympathy for our father. I felt proud and unkindly I boasted to Sheka, one day when he had upset me, that I was staying to help our father and he was not.

Our father stood accused of attempting to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone, of conspiring to kill the minister of finance, Christian Kamara Taylor, the vice-president, S. I. Koroma, and the force commander, Joseph Momoh. Stevens himself had been on a state visit to Rome at the time. Our father was also accused of planning to attack, seize and take over the magazine at Tower Hill and the telecommunications exchange at Wilberforce. Standing alongside him in the dock was Ibrahim Taqi and his former adversary and army boss David Lansana. The fifteen comprised a diverse range of men: a former paramount chief, two ex-ministers, a former brigadier, a tanker driver, a shopkeeper and a cook; Temnes, Mendes and Creoles; SLPP, UDP.

I was sitting at the dining table in my stepmother's house when I came across that image of my father again. The picture was not exactly as I had remembered it. When I looked at it again two and a half decades later I saw he was not by himself. There were other people in the picture, surrounding him: armed men in helmets and battledress. I counted eleven of them. Eleven soldiers. Yet they seemed to be keeping a slight distance between themselves and their prisoner. The overall impression, despite all the people around him, was that my father was alone.

Behind me a fan pushed humid air around the room; assorted documents in front of me stirred, as though rifled by unseen fingers. Besides the newspaper cuttings, there were also seven thick bound volumes of typed manuscript on the table. The covers were dusty and brown with age, the staples that held the pages together rusted. These were the transcripts of the trial, obtained, finally, from one of the lawyers who had defended several of the other men.

Mum's search to find somebody to represent our father had taken weeks and ended the night before the trial opened. Old lawyer Yilla, whose main qualification was his willingness to accept the brief, had demanded cash up front. Shineh Taqi, only just qualified as a lawyer herself, was part of the team representing her husband and some of the other defendants, and she alone among the lawyers had managed, just once, to see the men in prison. Using her every resource she had wrung a court order out of a judge to grant her access. Even then the director of prisons refused to allow her inside the gates until he had direct authorisation from the president himself. He had even threatened to have her arrested. That's how the law worked in Sierra Leone. Stevens controlled everything; nothing happened without his sanction.

In the days that followed the announcement of the charges Mum and Auntie Shineh went from one set of chambers to another trying to find someone to represent their husbands. Suddenly every lawyer in the city was unavailable – too busy, they said, or else about to take a last-minute vacation in Europe. One evening the two women drove together to the Sierra Leone Telecommunications Office, behind the bus depot in downtown Freetown, where they placed a long-distance call to a senior Sierra Leonean lawyer, the former attorney-general under Albert Margai, now living in the West Indies. Berthan Macauley had even successfully defended himself against charges of treason arising out of the fiasco of the 1967 election, at a time when there was still some semblance of judicial independence. He remained unafraid of the APC. He agreed to fly to Freetown and take the case. My stepmother and Auntie Shineh left the SLET offices relieved, jubilant almost, unaware that an operator had eavesdropped on their call and the information was already on its way to powerful men in the government.

Berthan Macauley arrived in Freetown a few days later and checked into the Paramount Hotel in the centre of town. Shortly after his arrival he was visited in his room by S. I. Koroma. S.I. knew that Berthan Macauley was related by marriage to Adelaide Dworzak, who was still detained at Pademba Road. He proposed a deal: Adelaide's freedom in exchange for the lawyer's promise to drop the case and leave the country.

Macauley telephoned Shineh Taqi in her office. She listened to what he had to say; she could not advise him. Her disappointment was acute, but she would understand, she told him, if Adelaide was more important than the case.

By then Adelaide had been in the women's block of the prison for six weeks. In all that time she had neither washed nor bathed, except with an occasional bucket of water. With no idea what was happening beyond the door of her cell, she received the news of her release without warning. This is what she told me. She was led to the prison gates; her blouse was filthy and torn under one arm, her hair was matted. Her bra had been taken away and not returned. For most of the time she was held in a cell too dark to even see the plates of food pushed through the door. Blinking in the sunlight, she found herself being driven by Berthan Macauley directly from Pademba Road Prison to S. I. Koroma's Freetown residence at Hill Station. S.I. himself greeted her, offered her a seat and opened a bottle of XO Cognac. He held the bottle up to her; she accepted and he poured her a triple, murmuring words of consolation. They sat together while he appraised her and made meaningless small talk. Only then did he permit her to go home. Less than a week later Berthan flew with Adelaide out of the country.

At some point, not all that long ago, I learned to be careful of people who said they had been great friends with my father: people whose faces I didn't recognise, whose names I had barely ever heard. It took me a while to analyse the suspicion that flared with the sound of those words. In time I put my finger on it. There was a difference between the way those who claimed friendship spoke about my father, and the way his true friends talked about him. Or, to be more precise, it was the fact that his real friends, in conversation with me, spoke of him. The others talked about themselves.

‘I was great friends with your father,’ declared Berthan Macauley the day I telephoned him at his offices in Kingston from my home in London in 2000.

The lawyer, who still practised despite his advanced years, denied the rumours that had persisted through the years: that Adelaide Dworzak's freedom had been traded in exchange for an assurance to the vice-president. S.I. had released Adelaide quite by chance, he said. The visit to his hotel room, the curious audience with Adelaide, none of these things had any bearing on why he had suddenly lost interest in the case. We spoke for a few minutes and I kept him on the line with questions. He sounded as though he was in a hurry. Gradually, the irritation in his voice became plain. He thought I was impertinent, that much I could tell. I asked him straight: ‘So why did you pull out then. If it wasn't because of Adelaide?’

Way down the line from Jamaica the pitch of his voice rose suddenly. ‘I didn't defend your father because he had no money. They hadn't paid me a single penny. I even paid my own hotel bills. I had taken time away from my work, flown all the way from Jamaica. I'd been in the hotel three nights and then I discovered nobody had any money to pay me!’ It was all delivered in one indignant rant. I waited. Then he said: ‘Your father was an old, old friend of mine.’

‘Then why wouldn't you help him out?’ I asked. ‘I mean, if he was such a good friend you'd want to help, surely?’

He didn't reply. Instead he moved on: ‘S.I. was surprised I wasn't taking the case, especially as Adelaide was a girlfriend of your father's.’ I wondered if this was calculated to throw me off, if he thought perhaps I didn't know. ‘And I was a good friend of your father.’ He was beginning to repeat it like a mantra.

I'd had enough. ‘Please would you stop saying that. Just stop saying that,’ I said. I didn't wait for a reply. I said goodbye and put the receiver back on the hook.

When I called Berthan Macauley I believed some kind of deal had been done to win Adelaide's freedom – even Adelaide herself had said so. As I sat at my desk afterwards I pondered our conversation, wondering what on earth had motivated Berthan Macauley to change the story, if that was indeed what he had done. What would make a man think it was better to say he had failed to defend a friend because that friend couldn't afford to pay him than to admit he had been placed in an impossible situation? Yet there had been in his voice no hint of sorrow or of regret, no evidence of a sense of duty, professional or personal. It was as though our whole conversation had taken place in a moral vacuum.

A moral vacuum. That's what it was like, back then. The day the case opened in Court Number One Red Shirts heckled and spat upon members of the defendants’ families as they made their way into court. The defendants were brought in a prison truck, handcuffed and chained. The stench arising from them was so terrible the courtroom had to be sprayed with disinfectant twice every day, before they arrived and after they departed. Ali Badara Janneh, the social welfare minister, had ordered the removal of all toiletries, combs and toothbrushes from the prisoners’ cells and denied them washing facilities. Back in 1971, Janneh had stood on the platform before the crowd at an APC party convention and said the UDP leaders, then in detention, ought to be shot.

None of the defence team, who were each representing several different people, such was the dearth of lawyers willing to take the case, had managed to meet their clients. Yet the judge refused their request to do so. When the lawyers threatened to withdraw he tried to forbid it. He granted them an hour. When, at the end of the recess, the lawyers insisted on being given more time the judge accused them of being obstructive. One lawyer walked out. The judge conceded a day. A single day to prepare the defence of fifteen men in a capital case.

The jury was packed with APC supporters; my stepmother even recognised two of S.I.’s first cousins. The defence used the right of each of the fifteen defendants to challenge a juror, but it was like fighting a Hydra. One government stooge was removed and another rose instantly to take his place.

One thousand and seven pages, typed on an old typewriter with slightly irregular keys. The trial lasted sixty-seven days. The documents are a crude facsimile of justice. On and on it goes: numbered paragraphs, applications, replies, rulings, submissions and objections litter the pages. The text is interspersed with lengthy legal arguments. The verbosity of the judge is offset by the frequent errors of spelling and phonetic renditions of the court stenographer. There are pages and pages of evidence, descriptions of alleged meetings, volumes of names, some of which I recognised, others which meant nothing to me at all. At first I found myself forced to refer often to the list contained at the front of the first volume to remind myself who was meant by the references to the Second, or Fourth or Seventh Accused, the names of PW3, PW5 or PW12. By the end of a whole day I had begun to memorise the names of the fifteen accused, the eighteen prosecution witnesses, the fourteen defence witnesses, the four defence lawyers and the seven lawyers representing the state.

Outside the window came a rhythmic knocking, of wood against wet cloth and stone. The women next door were making gara, tie-dyeing sheets of cloth to create elaborate patterns, pummelling the finished product with wooden bats to raise a shine before they took it to the market. The women sang as they worked. The occasional horn sounded from the road beyond, as vehicles approached the sharp bend outside our house. The cook laid and cleared the table around me. Ola curtsied on her way to school in the morning, and found me there when she came home in the middle of the afternoon and bobbed again. By then I hardly noticed her. Everything around me receded from my conscious thoughts as I read on, plunging deeper into the trial.

Day one opened with the testimony of Christian Kamara Taylor, the acting vice-president. He swore he was at home, woken by an explosion in the early hours of the morning. He described how he had collected his children from their beds and fled the house, encountering two of his ministerial colleagues who were on their own way over to investigate the blast.

Then the prosecution produced four witnesses, one after the other; each gave evidence against my father. They placed him at the centre of the supposed plot to overthrow the government, claimed to have seen him at dozens of meetings inciting soldiers, proposing the assassination of the president, producing wads of cash to buy ammunition and uniforms. Between them they spun a story of a plot, masterminded by my father and Ibrahim Taqi, costing thousands of leones, involving dozens of soldiers and huge caches of arms.

The lead witness was the former soldier, Morlai Salieu. He swore before the court that he had visited my father's offices and there been given money to plan a coup. On 29 July he had gone to a house in Murraytown belonging to Habib Lansana Kamara. They waited there until the dead of night, when they had travelled to a nearby cemetery and met up with a large group of soldiers in combat clothes. The men were split into groups and issued with sticks of dynamite. The first group, said Morlai Salieu, set off to attack the home of Christian Kamara Taylor with orders to seize the minister and hold him. The second group of men was to do the same at the house of the head of the army, Brigadier Momoh, and the third group of soldiers were given orders to kill the guards at the army magazine and seize the ammunition supplies. Morlai Salieu himself was part of the fourth band, which was dispatched to attack the house of the vice-president, S. I. Koroma. As they departed to carry out their missions, he told the court, Mohamed Forna wished them all luck.

And so on it went. The second, then the third, and the fourth witness swore they had seen him at Murraytown cemetery issuing orders to soldiers the same night. Bassie Kargbo, an army orderly, insisted that Dr Forna had once proposed a plan to assassinate the president as he left a reception at the Cape Sierra. Saidu Brima, the houseboy at the PZ compound, claimed he had seen Dr Forna at Habib's house in Milton Street in a meeting during which the government's downfall was plotted.

That the witnesses were planted and coached I had already been advised. Two lawyers – Eke Halloway, who had defended several of the accused, and Serry Kamal, who represented a number of the soldiers during the court martial which followed (Serry Kamal was the same man who had taken my father aside a few months before to warn him he was being watched) – told me a child could have spotted it: the repetition of key phrases, the absence of detail; under pressure the witnesses buckled and declared they could not remember. When that happened the judge would accuse the defence lawyers of harassment and order them to desist. At the end of the day the witnesses were herded into a separate vehicle back to the CID headquarters. After several hours they were transported again to Pademba Road, where they slept together in the same cell. The judge himself was seen going to visit S. I. Koroma each and every evening of the trial.

One by one the statements of accused men were read aloud by officers of the CID. The statements dramatically compounded the damage done by the witnesses. Habib Lansana Kamara claimed my father and he had met and finalised details of the coup on the day before – the Sunday, the very day we had spent with our father and Nuhad Courban at her beach house. My father was put in two different places at the same time on that day, one clear across town from the other, and neither anywhere near the beach where we had swum and played. On the night of the 29th he was reported in four separate locations. The prosecution lawyers were so confident they couldn't be bothered to take care of the details.

After the reading of the second statement the defence lawyers asked for permission to see the documents for themselves. Judge Marcus Cole denied the request, described the application as irresponsible and accused the defence, not for the first time, of attempting to obstruct proceedings. That was the way it went. Whenever the defence made an application, no matter how reasonable, it would always be dismissed and the objections overruled. At the end of the prosecution's case lawyer Yilla stepped forward and spoke on behalf of all the defendants and their lawyers. He submitted a plea of ‘no case’. The judge dismissed it out of hand.

At home we waited in the abandoned house for Mum to come back. She left every morning by eight. Often she was not back until nine in the evening. Though sometimes she went alone, most days Sullay drove her to the court building. She came to rely on his silent support when she faced the crowds outside. Sullay was related to our father on his mother's side, and he stayed by us through the trial despite the warnings of his relatives. At the lunch-time recess a woman judge would sometimes provide Mum with an hour of sanctuary, allowing her to wait in her own office, away from the jeering Red Shirts, until the afternoon session opened. The only people who kept company with us still were Mum's trio of girlfriends. There was Auntie Fatu: four foot nought and plump, she giggled compulsively even during the worst of times; Auntie Marian, stately and cerebral; pretty little Auntie Posseh. I would jump up from whatever I was doing to run outside every time I heard the sound of an engine. Almost always it was one of the aunties, delivering a covered dish of plassas, fried plantains, or a basin of pap, coming to check on Mum to see how she was coping.

One afternoon Mum came to us. She said she was going into the prison to see our father.

‘Can we come?’ we asked.

‘No. Only one person can go in. But you can write letters, I'll take them with me and make sure he gets them.’

‘Can you take a present? Wouldn't Daddy like a present?’

‘Yes, but just one each. And it will have to be something small.’

It was agreed. The next day was Saturday and we would go into town, for the first time in weeks, to choose our gifts. I remember how I sat in my room that afternoon, chewing the end of my pencil, trying to work out what to say in my letter. I decided to begin by decorating the piece of paper. I drew flowers on the border with a red pencil. Red petals and a yellow centre. Yellow petals and a red centre. I added more, bluebell-shaped flower and then a huge sunflower in the bottom corner. Gradually I began to fill up the paper entirely, leaving virtually no room to write. I stopped. I crumpled the piece of paper up and threw it into the bin. I took another of the sheets Mum had given me and I wrote, ‘Dear Daddy.’ I paused. What should I say? What I wanted to do was to ask the horde of unanswered questions that played in my mind, which I hadn't even managed to formulate into thoughts, never mind words, or even sentences. I wrote: ‘I hope you are well.’ I stared at the sentence. I started all my letters the same way, but now I was struck by how silly it sounded. I went back to Mum to fetch another sheet of paper and began again. This time I stuck to facts. I began to describe how I had trodden on a snake one day, and how the local people burned the scrub until they flushed it out. Actually, I had been horrified at the time. A snake was seen as a bad omen. The mob caught the snake and skinned it alive as I watched from the balcony; all the while I held myself responsible for the creature's agony. An afternoon or two before, I had felt the movement underfoot, glimpsed the flash of scales through the bushes as I wandered back from the slaughterhouse stream. I went there all the time, now there was no one to stop me. Later, I had told Morlai about the snake. For the rest of the afternoon after the killing the snake's corpse lay on the side of the road, glistening pinkish in the sun, next to the smouldering scrub. Even the vultures wouldn't touch it.

I didn't tell him any of that. Or how we thought we'd lost Pusu, the kitten we had named after Musu, and how Memuna went out into the rain crying and didn't reappear for hours, by which time everyone was searching for her. Instead I wrote about our visit to the Van der Weydens, schoolfriends of ours whose parents were newly posted through the British high commission. Mum dropped us off in the morning and I'd been really looking forward to it. With the trial on it had taken a long time to find a day when we could go. But the visit hadn't gone well. Exactly how or why I can't recall now – just a memory of blonde Mrs Van der Weyden and how she seemed to stare at us. At the end of the day Mum turned up, late, looking tired, and Mrs Van der Weyden called us down from Jeannie and Diane's room and said goodbye as if she was in a hurry. We weren't invited back. I told my father about how much fun we'd had. I kept my letter deliberately bland, filling up the rest with an imaginary trip to the beach and a catalogue of which tunes I had mastered on my recorder.

The next morning we went to town. I took fifty cents from my dressing table. The money had stayed there through the constant raids and searches by the CID. I kept the five ten-cent coins deliberately within view, just waiting for one of the invaders to steal it, then I would have something else to hate them for. We didn't go to PZ this time; instead we browsed among the smaller Lebanese stores. What would be right? Not socks or a tie or anything like that. Over on a shelf, behind the imported refrigerators wrapped in plastic, I found a miniature yellow and red fan. The shopkeeper found some batteries and showed me how it worked: he placed it on the counter, tilted it upwards, so that the air blew into my face. Memuna and Sheka were equally entranced. We checked with Mum whether the prison cells were hot. Very hot, she said. So in the end we bought three, one from each of us, imagining he could place them all around his cell for maximum efficiency. I discovered later, much later, that the cells at Pademba Road are cold.

Mum wasn't allowed to carry anything into the prison, as it turned out. She spent twenty minutes waiting in the visitors’ reception. When our father was brought in they were forbidden from touching. They sat opposite each other at a table. Two guards remained close by for the duration of the thirty-minute visit. Our father had lost weight, and he was unwashed and unkempt, but his spirits were good. Mostly they talked about us, not the trial. Mum needed money for our school fees and the trial was costing everything we had. When they parted he told Mum to cheer up. Things may not be as bad as they looked, he had said. He had not entirely lost faith in the judiciary, who still had time to demonstrate their independence from the government. It might yet all come right.

My father was on the witness stand for three days. It was the talk of the town. Three whole days, and Tom Johnson, special prosecutor for the state, never succeeded in making him contradict himself once. He even resorted to using my father's old resignation letter to try to prove he had a grudge against the government. My father described how Morlai Salieu had visited him in his office several times, starting in March, each time begging for money or for help. He said he'd been to Milton Street twice, once to check on a rice consignment and another time to drop off malaria pills for Habib Lansana Kamara. The second time he had been accosted by a man called Kemoko Suma, who claimed to have known him during the APC's period of exile in Guinea. Kemoko had a sick child. My father gave him fifteen leones for medicine. Kemoko was one of the people whose statements were read to the court: he claimed the money was given to buy arms. Kemoko Suma was with Bassie Kargbo when they approached my father at his office in July. Bassie was a Temne and, assuming him to be on a visit from up-country, my father had asked them all to wait for him at Abu Kanu's flat above the store in Kissy Road. Bassie and his colleagues, three young privates, had indeed spoken of a coup and tried to canvass his support. My father warned them off and sent them away. They had not returned. All the other accusations he refuted, and he flatly denied being anywhere near Murraytown graveyard on the night of the 29th.

Tom Johnson asked whether he trusted Habib Lansana Kamara.

‘Habib has always been honest with me,’ my father replied. Tom Johnson read out the section of Habib's statement which implicated him, and asked if it were true.

‘No,’ replied my father.

‘Have you no conscience to say that your loyal and trusted business agent is telling a lie against you?’

‘I have a heart and a conscience, my lord,’ replied my father. In the same way he refused to condemn Abu Kanu or the other men whose words were used against him.

Lawyer Yilla called no witnesses in his client's defence. Nuhad was gone. Adelaide, who might have been able to provide who knew how many alibis, was far away in the West Indies. Sorie Dawo, who was with him all day on Monday at a time when the prosecution claimed my father was in various parts of town finalising details of the night's coup, was lying in a cell in jail.

Then came the turn of the fourteen other defendants. Abu Kanu had protested bitterly as his statement was read to the court. Judge Marcus Cole ordered a trial within a trial. Francis Ngobeh, the officer from the CID who had written Abu's statement, was called up to the witness stand. Abu Kanu, he insisted, had cooperated of his own free will. Next Abu Kanu took the stand and graphically described his suffering at the hands of the CID officers. His evidence runs to five pages. At the end of it, on the bottom of page four hundred and sixty, are the judge's findings: ‘In all circumstances I am absolutely justified beyond reasonable doubt that the said statement Exhibit L of the Sixth Accused was made voluntarily. Objection overruled.’

Every single defendant attempted to withdraw his statement. Habib Lansana Kamara, upon whose statement the prosecution had relied heavily to build their case against my father, declared he too had been tortured. Of all the men, he appeared to have suffered the most. His hands, feet and waist were bound with rope and he was pistol-whipped shortly after his capture at Lungi. When the vehicle that brought him from the docks arrived at the headquarters, officers of the CID fired jubilant shots in the air and taunted him, calling him ‘brigadier’ and ‘colonel’. One of them tripped him up at the entrance to the building and they thrashed him where he lay on the ground. On four different occasions he was tortured, until he begged Bambay Kamara to let them kill him. The judge ordered the jury out of the room while he listened to an account of the interrogation from the officer in charge, who swore the prisoner had been cooperative. In the case of every defendant Marcus Cole overruled the objections of the defence. The statements stood. The accusations against my father were reported every day in the ‘Treason Trial Special’, naturally, but not the protests of the men who had made them.

The defence switched tactics. Under cross-examination Albert Tot Thomas told the court Bambay Kamara had offered him freedom in exchange for implicating Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi. There was no banana tree at Milton Street, he insisted. Unfa Mansaray, the last defendant, closed the case for the defence. His statement from the dock was short and simple. He maintained that he had never met Mohamed Forna, and knew him only by reputation as a government minister; nor had he ever attended a meeting at a house in Milton Street. On the day of the supposed coup attempt he had even been at a funeral with Bassie Kargbo, one of the main witnesses for the prosecution. I read through his account twice. It was, in every way, exactly the same as the story he had told me, more than twenty five years later.

The account I read was not the way 1 had imagined my father's trial at all. I imagined – well, what exactly? That the prosecution's case would have been much more ingenious, more inventive, I suppose. Instead there it was: seven volumes in which the end was written before the start, in which every word demonstrated a contempt for the truth that was brutal, undisguised and arrogant. My father had not been facing one man or even a government, but a system, an entire order, in which everyone from judge to juror knew their role. I understood now why my father only ever cooperated in his trial, no more. Ibrahim Taqi produced several alibis to prove he was somewhere else, drinking with friends in a bar, at the time. And he gave a passionate speech from the dock. But it was useless. There was no law, no justice, just the legal trappings of a corrupt colossus that moved unhaltingly forward, engulfing everybody in its wake.

One evening I stood, dressed in my shorts and my sandals, on the open road at the front of the house watching for the car bringing Mum and Sullay home. The light was fading fast, turning from yellow to amber. I squinted to see if I could spot the telltale swirl of dust, away down the road beyond the houses. In the distance I could see bats leaving the hills, flying silently, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, towards the city and the sea. Way off I heard the sound of an engine and I listened as it drew closer. I began to walk down the lane towards it. A car came round the corner. Not ours. I stepped back to the side of the road to let it pass. The car slowed and a woman leaned out of the open window. She looked as though she were about to ask me something and so I turned towards her. She drew back her head. I thought she had changed her mind. Her neck snapped forward and a great glob of spittle flew through the air and landed at my feet. The car swept on past me, following the track round to the right, towards Nancy Steele's house, while I stared down at her spit, writhing and shrivelling in the dust like a jellyfish on the beach, changing shape and drawing in at the edges almost as though it were alive.