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Brenda
The doctor hurried in through the outer door clasping a brown paper bag. “You are leaving?” he asked.
“I have sent for the first wife to care for the patient,” the bishop said.
“But you are leaving,” the doctor said eyeing Brenda disapprovingly.
“Yes, I’m leaving,” Brenda said. She studied the doctor’s face and found no compassion, or caring in his expression. This was the same doctor who, even in a crisis, had refused to go to the government hospital and help the injured. If he could disapprove of her, she could disapprove of him.
The doctor turned toward the inner room and Brenda stopped him. “Wait a minute.”
The doctor hesitated.
“Do you have the change?”
“Change?”
“From my friend’s money.”
“Ah, yes,” the doctor felt in his pocket and handed a wad of money to Frank.
“And the receipt,” Brenda said.
“Ah.”
“Forget it,” Frank said. “Just let it go.”
“No, I’m not letting it go. We need the receipt.”
“This doctor is an honest man,” the bishop said soothingly.
Brenda held onto her anger. “If he’s so honest how come he’s not down at the hospital treating all the other people - people with no money?”
Frank took hold of Brenda’s arm. “There are some things you can’t fix,” he said. “Is this really the hill you want to die on? Is this the place where you want to make your stand?”
“I just want him to know that I’m onto his game,” Brenda said.
“And now he knows,” said Frank, “and it doesn’t make a scrap of difference. Let’s just thank God that this man is available to take care of your husband, and he seems to know what he’s doing. Perhaps God is preserving your husband’s life for some special reason. Perhaps he has a special task for him to do. Perhaps God has something special for you to do, but I doubt that his grand plan is for you to be distracting this doctor.”
“Must you bring God into everything?” Brenda asked.
The evangelist smiled. “He’s already in everything. He doesn’t need me to bring him in.”
“So, it’s God’s fault that Sarah’s been kidnapped?” Brenda said.
“I wouldn’t put it like that but —”
“But nothing,” Brenda said. “You talk to God if you want to. I’m going to talk to Rory Marsden.”
Frank’s driver returned Brenda and Frank to Rory’s house and they went in through the unlocked front door. The flickering oil lamp revealed Margaret still snoring on the sofa but Aguma was nowhere in sight. The door to Rory’s inner sanctum was still firmly closed. Brenda brushed past Margaret and thumped on the door.
“Open it,” she shouted. “Open this door you bastard.”
The door rattled. Someone was pulling back a bolt. The door swung open but the figure that emerged was not Rory Marsden - it was Aguma.
“What are you doing? Where is he? “Brenda asked as she shoved her way into the room.
“He has gone,” Aguma said.
“But how?”
Aguma pointed up at the ceiling where a panel had been removed. “Across the rafters, into the bedroom and out the back door. I entered the room the same way he left.”
“How long has he been gone? “Brenda asked.
Aguma shrugged his broad, eloquent shoulders. “I don’t know.”
Brenda looked around the room. The equipment was dead with no red lights or green lights or flashing lights. The screens no longer glowed.
“He turned everything off.” Brenda said. “Does anyone know how to turn it on again?”.
“I have tried,” Aguma said. “But without success.”
Frank crowded into the room behind Brenda and looked around. “Where’s the phone. Did he take the phone?”
“He did,” said Aguma.
Frank patted Brenda’s shoulder, “I think this is good news.”
“How in the world is that good news?” Brenda asked.
“It means that he’s gone to get the children.”
“No,” said Aguma, “he doesn’t know where they are.”
“But he could use the phone to find out,” Frank said. “He told us that he could home in on Matapa’s signal.”
“It’s not that simple,” Aguma said. “He would need a satellite signal locator.”
“You seem to know an awful lot,” Brenda said. “How come you know so much?”
Aguma ignored her question.
“If he really knew where Matapa has his camp,” he said, “I believe he would have gone to rescue your granddaughter. He is honorable in his own way.”
“How can you say that after everything he’s done?” Brenda asked.
“He has been serving his country,” Aguma said. “I cannot agree with what he has done, but I can understand it. He is correct when he says that Uganda stands at the cross roads, and the West is very worried about us and the possibility that we will become a Moslem nation. That would change the balance of power of the whole continent. The US government is very worried about that. Is it so surprising that a man like Rory Marsden would try to stop that?”
“Not with the lives of children,” said Brenda.
Aguma shook his head sadly. “African children,” he said, “do not have the same value in the eyes of the world.”
“Oh, that’s just nonsense,” Brenda said.
“Not from what I’ve seen,” Frank said.
“So, are you going to just stand here and justify Rory’s behavior,” Brenda asked, “or are you going to do something?”
“I am going to talk to the King’s soldier,” Aguma said as he shouldered his way past Brenda and into the living room. “Matapa has been operating close to Sergeant Okolo’s home and I believe that the sergeant may know more than he realizes. I will question him.”
He looked down at Margaret who was now drooling in her sleep. “Stay with her,” he said, “until I return. Perhaps she knows something.”
“Not on your life,” said Brenda. “I’m coming with you.”
“No,” Aguma said, “you are not. It is a Moslem guest house and you will not be welcome.”
“I am not asking for a welcome.”
“We will learn nothing if you go there and make your mazungu demands,” Aguma said with a definite edge to his voice.
So far he had been polite but firm but Brenda had a feeling that he was reaching the end of his ability to be polite and his true feelings were leaking out around the edge of his stoicism.
“I just want to hear what he has to say,” she protested.
“If you come with me,” Aguma said, “you will cover your head. You will walk one pace behind me and, you will —”
“I will do no such thing.”
“Then you will not come,” Aguma said.
He swept past her and out of the door without another word.
“Well, he told you, didn’t he?” Frank said.
Brenda fought back memories of another time in another Africa. “Things are not the way they used to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Frank said. “This must all be very hard for you.”
Brenda was surprised to feel tears pricking at the back of her eyelids. She turned her back on the Irishman’s sympathy. She didn’t need sympathy, not now. Now she needed something to do.
She distractedly examined the books on Rory’s bookshelves. He had a collection of out-of-date paperbacks, with yellowed pages and dog-eared covers and he had only one framed photograph. She pulled the picture into the light. It had faded over the years but she could still make out six laughing white kids lined up in front of a battered Volkswagen mini-bus.
She handed the picture to Frank. “That was us.”
“You haven’t changed much,” Frank said, “that’s you, isn’t it?” He stabbed his fingers at the tall blonde in the center of the frame.
Oh yes, Brenda thought, that was her with her hair an unruly mass of yellow curls, her neck swathed in several layers of chunky beaded necklaces and her legs hidden by a chiffon skirt.
She remembered the skirt so vividly that she could almost feel the fabric in her hands. She had tie dyed it herself by using stones from their campsite, and a package of red dye she had found on a dusty shelf in the back of a general store in Bulawayo. She knew that she had made quite a mess of the sink in the Ladies washroom and she had walked away from the mess without cleaning up. She had been walking away for her whole life - always leaving others to clean up her mess.
“No,” she said to Frank, “I haven’t changed much. I’m still hanging onto my youth. Pathetic isn’t it? When that picture was taken you weren’t even born.”
“I meant it as a compliment,” Frank said.
“I know.”
Frank pointed at a figure lurking in the background of the picture. “Who’s that?” he asked.
Brenda squinted to get her eyes in focus. Even if nothing else had changed her eyes had most certainly changed, and not for the better.
“That’s Margaret,” she said. She couldn’t see the face clearly but she recognized the flower printed shirtwaist dress and the tightly controlled brown hair.
“She looks unhappy,” Frank said.
“Your eyes must be better than mine,” Brenda said, “but you’re right, she didn’t approve of us. We had come for a good time and she had come to minister to the heathen. She would have approved of you.”
Brenda returned the picture to the bookshelf.
“There’s nothing you can do here,” Frank said.
“I’m well aware of that,” Brenda said sharply, “everyone has made it very clear that they don’t need my help.”
“I thought that perhaps you should lie down for a few minutes and try to get some rest.”
“Oh, that’s right, let the old lady take a nap. Perhaps there’s a rocking chair.”
“I didn’t mean —”
“Oh yes you did.”
Brenda could not stay in the room any longer with Frank and his unsettling insights into her past. He wanted her to go and lie down. Well, that’s what she would do. She wasn’t tired - the golden girl in the tie-dyed skirt would never be tired. Reality was hard to accept. She wasn’t the golden girl. She was an old, woman finally facing up to the fact that she had never done anything really useful in her entire life. All she had done was ruin the lives of other people.
She stumbled into Rory’s darkened bedroom and flung herself down on the bed, squeezing her eyes closed. The picture of the six travelers laughing and Margaret scowling, seemed to be projected on the inside of her eyelids. She focused in on Rory standing there smiling nonchalantly. Had the whole journey really been a lie - a cover story so Rory could spy for his father? Had they all been tools of the CIA?
Her exhausted brain tried to grapple with the thought that everything, even her marriage to Herbert, and the birth of her daughter - even Sarah’s very existence - could be laid at the feet of the CIA. She was too tired to be angry and too tired to feed any more fuel into the fires of her anger or to hold onto her straying thoughts. She slept.
When she awoke the sun was shining at full strength through the bedroom window and the sounds of an African morning filtered into the room. Women called. Children laughed. A goat bleated loudly and then was silenced. Rattletrap vehicles passed by on the road, but no roosters crowed, no birds sang. Brenda sat up, filled with panic. Had she slept through the dawn bird chorus and the morning alarms of the roosters? What on earth time was it?
She stumbled out into the living room where she found Frank coaxing Margaret to drink the cup of tea she was clutching in her skinny hands. Her eyes were rimmed in red but she was calmer than the night before and more connected to reality.
“Any word?” Brenda asked.
Frank shook his head.
“What time is it?”
“Past eleven.”
“What?”
“You needed the sleep,” Frank said.
Margaret stood up shakily and handed the tea cup back to Frank. “I’m going home,” she said.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Frank asked.
“They have what they want,” Margaret said, “so they don’t need me. They already have Brenda’s granddaughter.”
The look she gave Brenda contained some small shreds of sympathy.
“Do you want my driver to take you?” Frank asked.
Margaret shook her head. “I have my bicycle.”
“No, you don’t,” Brenda said, her mind clearing as she remembered that Margaret had come with them in Herbert’s car. “You weren’t riding your bicycle.”
“It has been brought here,” Margaret said, “and anyway I have another one.” She stopped abruptly. “I have two bicycles?”
To Brenda the last remark sounded more like a question than a statement, as though Margaret could not understand why she had two bicycles.
“I need to go,” Margaret said. She set the teacup down. “Thank you for your prayers,” she said to Frank, and then she let herself out of the front door.
“So, you’ve been praying,” Brenda said. “Wouldn’t you have been better off looking for Aguma, or Rory, or talking to the police?”
“I don’t know how to do those things,” Frank said, “but I know that God does.”
“What did you pray for?” Brenda asked. “How could you even put it into words? There’s so much?”
“There’s never too much for God to handle,” Frank said. He pulled a small battered Bible from his shirt pocket. “The Lord has given me a word,” he said.
Brenda rolled her eyes. Possibly, just possibly, she was beginning to feel a need for this God who had sent Frank to the back country of Uganda, but she wasn’t ready for phrases such as the one he had just used. The Lord has given me a word, indeed! How corny was that?
“Aguma isn’t coming back for us, is he?” she asked.
“Apparently not,” Frank said, thumbing through his Bible.
“And we don’t have any other plan?”
“No,” said Frank.
“So, we’re screwed.”
Frank leaned forward with his Bible open in front of him. “God gave me this from the Psalms,” he said.
“What do you mean by gave you?”
“Sometimes God gives me a chapter and a verse from the Bible.”
“I still don’t understand,” Brenda said, wishing that she could.
“He puts it into my head,” Frank said. “Just listen. “Psalm 104: O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.”
He closed his Bible.
“That’s it?” Brenda said.
“That’s it.”
“What does it mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you find that comforting?” Brenda asked.
“Yes,” said Frank.