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Sarah
Herbert looked down at her from his superior height, his eyes invisible behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. “Very well,” he said after an agonizing pause, “I agree. If you find the murderer, the boy will have his operation.”
“I’ll need a vehicle,” Sarah said, “and a driver, but no one scary.”
Herbert gave her a slight smile. “All of my people are what you like to call scary. That is their purpose.”
“Well, pick the least scary, and tell him to leave off the sunglasses. “
Brenda took hold of Sarah’s arm. “We should start immediately.”
“What do you mean by we?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“I thought you had to stay here and be in charge of your husband’s harem.”
“Oh please!” Brenda rolled her eyes at Sarah. “I have absolutely no idea how to run this madhouse.”
Herbert looked at Sarah and Brenda for a long moment and then he marched out into the courtyard and summoned a conference of his henchmen.
Rory Marsden appeared from the dining room, conferred with Herbert and then retrieved his motorcycle. He smashed the crash helmet down on his head and roared out of the gate spraying mud in all directions.
“Oh,” Sarah said watching him retreat. “I planned to ask him some questions.”
“We will,” Brenda assured her. “We’ll question him at the scene of the crime. That’s what happens in all good detective stories.”
“And when’s the last time you read a detective story?” Sarah asked.
“You’d be surprised,” Brenda said. “I read all kind of books. You should remember, Swot, that you are not the only one in the family with brains. I’m not short of intelligence. I have poor impulse control, and maybe a few damaged memory cells, you know, from the sixties, but I am not unintelligent.”
One of Herbert’s immaculately suited henchmen broke away from the conference, climbed into the black SUV and started the engine.
So that’s it, Sarah thought. I’m really going to do this. She beckoned to Matthew. “Come on Uncle Matthew. It’s time to go.”
Before Matthew could move, his mother, Jubilee, caught hold of him and started to drag him away.
“No,” Sarah shouted, “let him come with me. I’ll look after him.”
Jubilee spoke softly with her eyes focused on the ground. “He must have a clean shirt,” she said.
Sarah grimaced. “He’s fine just the way he is.”
“No, madam, he must have a clean shirt, and you too should...”
“Should what?” Sarah asked impatiently.
“You should wear a skirt.”
“A skirt?” Sarah said as Jubilee dragged Matthew away. “Why on earth should I wear a skirt?”
The senior wife - Sarah realized she had never asked for her name - looked at her contemptuously. “You are not dressed,” she said. “It is disrespectful.”
Sarah looked down at her bare feet and cotton pajama trousers. She supposed that the woman was actually correct. She really was not dressed. She was still wearing the same clothes she had been wearing when she was rudely awakened by Rory’s arrival and dramatic declaration that the Peace Corps worker had been murdered.
“You need a skirt,” Brenda said.
“I didn’t pack one. I have jeans, and shorts. I don’t see the problem.”
“Look around you,” Brenda said. “Do you see anyone wearing jeans or shorts?”
Sarah looked around. Brenda was, of course, correct. The women wore dresses, or at least layers of bright cloth wound around their waists. None of them were revealing either their legs or their arms, although they didn’t seem to care so much about showing off their bosoms, even to the extent that one had held a baby clamped to her breast. Sarah surveyed the compound and realized that Matthew was the only boy at home. All of the mud-spattered children were girls in tattered short sleeved dresses. Most of the dresses were not even buttoned at the back and the waist strings were hanging down, trailing in the mud, but they were definitely dresses.
“In this country girls wear dresses,” Brenda said.
“Hey, I saw women in Kampala in jeans and pants,” Sarah protested.
“In Kampala maybe, but not here, not up country. I don’t think that’s changed in all the years I’ve been gone. If you want the women to talk to you and respect you, you need to wear a skirt and act like a woman.”
Sarah looked at Brenda in surprise. Was she was actually receiving words of wisdom from her hippy grandmother? This was something new.
Brenda smiled. “Herbert’s mother let me know how I was expected to dress,” she said. “She was an awful woman, I absolutely hated her and I think she definitely felt the same way about me, but she was right about the clothes.”
A faraway look crossed Brenda’s face. “My goodness, I don’t know how we managed to survive as long as we did. We were six stupid white kids in an old VW bus. We didn’t carry a lot of cash but we had cameras, and radios and all kinds of attractive stuff, and we girls were good looking. It was okay when we were all together because we could keep an eye on each other, but when the others left I had to learn to live like an African wife, and I had to dress like one.
I’m telling you, Swot, from bitter experience that if you want people to talk to you and trust you and if you want to get anywhere with this investigation, you’d better respect the culture. So, you can begin by putting on a skirt. I’ll give you one of mine.”
“No one’s interested in me,” Sarah mumbled, “I don’t think I’m going to be driving the men wild with lust.”
Brenda slapped Sarah’s arm. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I’m not talking about lust, I’m talking about trying to fit in. Dressed the way you are at the moment, you are nothing but a walking insult to the culture, so let’s do something about it.”
Stunned into silence, Sarah followed Brenda into her bedroom where Brenda opened her suitcase and handed her a flimsy peasant skirt and a tee shirt.
“Put them on, and let’s get going.”
“Brenda,” Sarah asked, “why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Marry Herbert?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Brenda said. “We’d been weeks on the road, bumping our way up from Cape Town and I was crazy in love with Africa - the colors, the smells, the people. I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to feel it in my bones, so having sex with an African seemed to be the best way to do it.”
“But you married him. Why not just have sex with him?” Sarah asked. “I thought you were all about free love.”
“I was,” Brenda agreed, “but he wasn’t. He wanted to marry me. He had his reasons, mostly to do with the fact that I was rich and white, and I might be his ticket out of here but none of that mattered to me. You cannot possibly believe how handsome he was, and how badly I wanted to go to bed with him. You understand, don’t you?”
Sarah stared at her grandmother feeling frustration welling up in her. “No,” she said. “I don’t understand anything.”
“But you were in college,” Brenda said. “Surely there was –”
“No, there wasn’t. There was nothing. I was all on my own. I was a child of fourteen when I went. I should have been at home. I should have been in tenth grade, doing all the things tenth graders do.”
Brenda sat down on the bed. For once, her expression was deeply serious. Words trembled on Sarah’s lips, desperately wanting to escape - desperately wanting to tell Brenda the whole truth.
“But Swot,” Brenda said, “you were a genius. We were so proud of you and you were obviously bored in high school. You had nothing left to learn.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sarah said. “Maybe I had nothing left to learn from books, but I had plenty of things to learn about how to be a teenager. I’ve never had any fun, Brenda. I’ve never been to sleepover, or tried out for cheerleading, or the school musical, or anything like that. You all pushed me up from one grade to the next, and I was just a kid. There was never anyone my own age.”
Sarah felt a tear trickling down her cheek. Was she really going to do this now? She had been nursing her secret for months, looking for the right moment to tell her family how wrong they’d been. This wasn’t the right moment but it was happening and she couldn’t stop it.
She sat on the bed beside Brenda and stared down at the floor. She could not meet her grandmother’s eyes, but she was determined to speak.
“I’m not a genius.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not. I’m smart. I have a high IQ and an eidetic memory, which makes it very easy for me to learn. All that made me very special when I was a kid. I learned to read when I was three but that doesn’t matter now because everyone around me can read, and I’m no longer three. I’m not a genius. I don’t know what I am.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Brenda said. “I brought you here so you could find out what you are. When I saw you moping around the house, obviously confused and terribly troubled, I thought that maybe you needed to understand your African ancestry, and be proud of who you are.”
“No,” Sarah said, refusing to be side tracked. “My African ancestry is not the problem. The problem is everyone thinking I’m a genius. The truth is, that I didn’t do very well in college.”
“You graduated four years early.”
“Yes, I did, but it was a struggle and my grades were no better than average, and I was lonely.” Sarah took a deep breath. “All of you, my family, robbed me of a normal life and now I don’t know what I am. When you talk about your adventures, how you drove up from South Africa and how you did whatever you liked, I’m just filled with envy.”
Sarah suddenly felt the warmth of Brenda’s arm around her shoulders, and her breath on her cheek as she planted a light kiss.
“Thank you,” Brenda said.
Sarah turned to look at her. “For what?”
“For telling me the truth. We can’t fix the past, but we can certainly change the future. We’ll discuss it with your family when we get home. Now, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and put on this skirt. It will change your life.”
“How?”
Brenda winked. “You’ll see. Africa is very sexy, and so is an almost see-through skirt. Put it on, dear. Try it out.”
Sarah wiped away her tears. She had finally told the first of many truths. There would be more truths to come, but she had made a start. Her problems would not be solved by putting on a skirt, but she had lost her usual desire to argue with Brenda.
She pulled on a clinging tee shirt and stepped into one of Brenda’s many diaphanous peasant skirts. She stood in the middle of the room as Brenda adjusted the drawstrings at the waist.
“How do you feel?” Brenda asked.
Sarah rolled her eyes. “I’m not exactly Cinderella going to the ball.”
“You’re a work in progress,” Brenda said, ushering her out of the door.
Sarah walked out onto the verandah feeling the light fabric of the skirt floating around her ankles. She found herself picking up a corner of the skirt to keep it out of the mud and feeling suddenly very feminine. She wondered how she looked to the people around her. For her this was an entirely new sensation. For the first time in her life, she considered that maybe she was not just plain ugly, maybe she was exotically attractive. She stood up straight and held her shoulders back thrusting out what little bosom she possessed. Cinderella going to the ball.
As usual, Sarah didn’t get her own way. The black SUV was not only driven by a decidedly scary dude in sunglasses but another scary dude in sunglasses was literally riding shotgun in the front seat and cradling a menacing weapon.
“Why is he here? Sarah asked. “Who on earth wants to shoot me?”
“No one wants to shoot you,” her grandfather said, “but you are riding in my car and there are people who would very much like to shoot me.”
“Perhaps we could walk,” Sarah suggested.
“You are welcome to walk,” Herbert said, “but if you do, you will be followed by children and beggars. You will be driven into the ditch by passing traffic, and you will be eaten alive by mosquitos. But, you are welcome to walk.”
“We’ll ride,” Brenda said decisively, scrambling into the back seat of the car. Matthew climbed after her with great enthusiasm. He was wearing clean shorts, a very white shirt, and a big grin. Sarah was sure that he was delighted to be going anywhere at all away from his stepmother.
“Get in, Swot,” Brenda said and Sarah, for once, did as she was told.
The vehicle bumped and splashed its way out of the compound and onto the red mud road - if it could be called a road. The driver took up a position in the center of the slippery track presumably, Sarah thought, to keep them out of the deep ditches on either side.
She wondered what would happen if another vehicle came from the opposite direction and it was only a few seconds before she found out. A battered truck loaded down with what looked like green bananas came at them out of the rain, also riding on the crown of the road. Their driver stuck to his path and for a few moments they were involved in a game of demolition derby chicken. Before they could actually collide with each other, the shotgun guard wound down his window and extended the barrel of his gun. The approaching truck veered off the road and into the ditch, tipping at an impossible angle. The guard wound up the window and they blew past the wrecked vehicle.
“Shouldn’t we help them?” Sarah asked. “We just drove them off the road?”
“They are accustomed,” the guard said, resettling his weapon between his knees.
The road passed between scattered patches of crops. Sarah had no idea what was being grown but she could see that the land was somewhat cultivated and protected by hedges. After only a few minutes they left the crops behind and passed into what Sarah could only think of as jungle. The trees closed in around them, brushing against the sides of the SUV. If someone were to come the other way along the road now, their previous intimidation technique would obviously not work. Someone would have to stop and someone would have to back up. Sarah was pretty certain who would be doing the stopping and backing up, and it wouldn’t be her grandfather’s driver.
They rounded a corner, a maneuver that left Sarah terrified because the driver barely slowed as they went around the curve. Ahead of them three men stood in the road. They were wearing uniforms and carried weapons. Sarah noticed that the shotgun guard in the front seat squared his shoulders and muttered something to the driver. The driver increased speed. The men in the road stood their ground for a moment and then scattered aside. Within seconds they were lost from sight among the trees.
The guard muttered something to the driver. The driver replied. The muttering continued for some minutes as the vehicle flew down the tunnel of green jungle, spraying mud in all directions. The guard turned round and looked at Sarah and her grandmother and then muttered something else to the driver.
“What are you talking about?” Brenda asked impatiently.
“It’s nothing,” the guard replied.
“Oh, it’s something,” Brenda retorted. “Who were those men?”
“It is nothing to worry about,” the guard insisted but Sarah saw that he kept his hand on his weapon.
“I’ll decide what to worry about and what not to worry about,” Brenda announced. “Who were they?”
“Bad characters.”
“Bad characters? What kind of bad characters? What is your name, young man?”
“I am called Aguma,” the guard replied.
“Well, I am your boss’s wife,” Brenda said “and I won’t be spoken to as if I was eight years old.
Aguma muttered under his breath, and Brenda was wise enough not to ask him for a translation but she still wanted an answer to her question.
“Well, who are they?”
“They are from Matapa’s Army,” Aguma said.
Sarah waited, but no further information was forthcoming. She looked at Matthew. “Who’s Matapa? “
Matthew was wide-eyed. “Bad,” he said. “Very bad. Everyone is frightened of Matapa.”
Aguma turned around and made a kind of clicking sound that frightened Matthew into silence.
“Hey, “Sarah said, “don’t be shushing him. He’s just trying to tell us what’s going on.”
The guard took off his sunglasses and looked Sarah in the eye.
“Matapa,” he said, in his deep African voice,” is a terrorist committed to the destabilization of Uganda. He commands a small army and he relies on intimidation to keep his people loyal. He captures children and makes them into soldiers. He takes girls, such as yourself, as sex slaves”
He looked at Brenda and then at Matthew. “Old people and cripples are of no use to him,” he said, “so they are killed. He burns villages, and crops. He rapes, he steals, and he moves so swiftly that he cannot be caught.”
“He uses magic,” the driver added over his shoulder. “Witchcraft and curses.”
“Well,” Sarah squeaked in a suddenly small voice, “thank you for telling me.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Brenda commented.
“You are American and Americans don’t care,” Aguma said. “Some people care. He is wanted by the International Criminal Court, but they will never catch him.”
The driver looked over his shoulder again, “We were not aware that he was in this district,” he said. “This is not a good thing.”
“His soldiers were just there in the middle of the road in broad daylight,” Sarah said. “Are you going to tell someone?”
The guard adjusted his grip on his weapon. “When service is restored, we will phone Kampala, but by the time they come, he will be gone. Tonight the people will suffer and then he will move on.”
“Can’t anyone do anything about him?” Sarah asked. “Do you just let it happen?”
Aguma shrugged his shoulders. “He will not touch us.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not just about us, is it?” Sarah commented. “What about people who don’t have big black cars and guards with guns?”
“They will pray,” Matthew said.
“Oh, sure,” Sarah said, “praying will do the trick.”
“Jesus is their only hope,” Matthew said firmly.
“God, I hate this country,” Sarah muttered. She settled back in her seat and scanned the trees and jungle on either side for men with guns.
She was able to relax a little when they finally arrived at a road that showed signs of once being paved, although obviously not recently. They sped along in relative comfort and were soon in a small town with an actual crossroads with an actual traffic light, although it was not actually working. The driver blew through the crossroads without stopping. People took one look at the black SUV and scattered out of his way.
Brenda stared intensely out of the window. “I remember this place,” she said. She turned to Sarah. “This is Budeka. We camped here.” She shook her head. “There was almost nothing here and now look at it. Everything’s changed.”
“Sixty years,” Sarah said.
“Don’t rub it in. We were so ridiculously young.”