NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND
By ED O'LOUGHLINTHE OVERLOOK PRESS
Copyright © 2009Ed O'Loughlin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-295-1
Chapter One
Ten years ago I became a hero, and when I came home my old paper tookmeon again. They thought I'd be an ornament. Ten years now working four shifts a week, six hours a shift and six weeks off each year. If you can call it working. At any rate, I get paid. It took me a while to get used to it here again, this northern estuary. Why do I say that? I'm still not used to it. It rains a lot, and there always seems to be a wind. The days and nights mill round like mismatched fighters, short and long, long and short, from summer to winter to summer again: it would make you feel dizzy. Then in September they rest for a while, leaning together, equatorial evenings, and next comes October, when the trees drop their leaves before a sky filled with remote patient light - the light of a highveld winter, following me halfway round the world. Nights come early, the low buildings shrink from them, and I remember that most of this city is built on silt, and that out past the sea wall the waves are still hissing. It's time then for the kids to light fireworks and bonfires, to hold the perimeter, keep the living from the dead, until November relieves us with its numbing east wind.
By then the basin behind my house is crowded with migrant birds driven down from the far north. People throw bread in the water, and the ducks and swans reward them with hustle or grace. Each to his own.
This town is, you might say, a forgiving place. Big enough to hide in, small enough to support a familiar cast of tramps, screamers and congenital syphilitics. Here people call them 'characters' and give them freedom of the streets. And the streets are full of stories - other people's stories, not my own, and for ten years now that's been fine with me. When I came back from Africa they wanted me to write again, but I told the interview panel, with a straight face, that for the time being I'd prefer to explore avenues of production and management. From time to time I still churn out the odd worthy think piece - global affairs; the big picture; filler, really, rewritten from the wires - but mostly I just mess with other people's copy, working backbench on the night shift.
It seems, though, that Cartwright may have screwed things up for me. Hugh says he needs someone to replace Cartwright, to put manners on the newsroom, and he seems to think it's me. Nor is my boss alone in this belief: there is a story going around that Cartwright was secretly grooming me, had been for years back, without my knowing it. And even now, knowing him as well as I did, having seen him at his weakest, as nothing at all, even I have to admit that Cartwright was somewhat uncanny. The evening he died a strange wind blew from the south and pasted rain and red mud onto every flat surface and every parked car. The rain was still falling as I left the police station, and streaks of wet dirt swallowed the blood spots on Cartwright's folder when I took it from hiding in his old leather bag. I needed to see it again, right there on the street, outside the police station.
I went into a bar - not the usual one, this would need some privacy - and opened the folder and started to look through it. Later, when I stopped reading for a while, the TV in the corner was talking about a storm in the Sahara, dust blown thousands of miles by freak currents in the air. I ordered another drink, just for stage business, though the bar was almost empty. At the other end of the counter a barman was reading the evening newspaper in the glow of a fake carriage lamp. An old man stood in the hallway, just inside the open door, the smoke from his cigarette curling into his eyes. Above the door a fan of glass had stained the evening sky dark mauve. I've seen that before, I thought, and I remembered Katey, and a thunderstorm.
Cartwright's folder was still open in front of me, at a page clipped from the New York Chronicle's magazine, dated ten years ago. Most of the page was taken up with a single colour photograph, a picture I hadn't seen since it was taken. I looked at it again now.
In the photograph Fine has his arm around Tommo's shoulder and the two of them are leaning against a blue Mitsubishi. Funny. I don't remember it being that colour. I could have sworn that it was green. Tommo is frowning a little, his arms folded across his chest. He thought it unlucky for colleagues to take each other's pictures.
Fine is smiling, but with that faintly puzzled look which, for years now, has been all that I can see of him. It was the look that just about saved him from seeming too arrogant. To the left stands little Charlie Brereton, the image on his T-shirt still stained with blood and snot. Behind him, beyond the Mitsubishi, appears the cab of an old Bedford army truck, punched through with bullet holes. The crude swastika painted on its door seems to grow from the back of Brereton's balding head, and he is leering at the camera like he means to start a fight with it. Off to the right, just a little apart from Fine, stands Beatrice. She is staring at the camera, staring out of the photograph. She is staring at me. I took the picture, with Tommo's favourite camera.
I closed the folder and thought for a while. More people had come in - a girl and a boy, a group of young men in suits with hot red faces, two ladies with shopping bags looking for gin. I had to stare past the TV so as not to seem alone. It was talking about the dust again. I put the folder back into Cartwright's bag and leaned it against my stool, and then I had another drink, and I was halfway to the next bar - the usual one, where I was going to meet Hugh to arrange Cartwright's funeral - before I realized that I'd left the bag behind me. It was night now, still raining, and the wind picked at my collar and slid fingers upmysleeves. I stood for a while on the corner, watching the cars wash past, and then I turned and limped back and found the bag where I'd left it, at the corner of the bar. The place was quite crowded now, so I stayed for another drink.
I could just as easily leave Cartwright out of this. He never went anywhere, the twisted old fucker. He never knew any of the others. But he's forced his way into it, dust reassembling itself. Beatrice stared at me, and I took her picture. It seems I can't escape that. And then there's the joke, which I'll have to learn to savour: years after I stopped caring, after I gave up all the play-acting, I find that someone else was watching all along.
* * *
Tommo's favourite camera was a manual 35-millimetre single-lens reflex, old-fashioned even then. When Fine talked me into taking that picture Tommo had to show me how to turn the focus and aperture rings, and how to balance the exposure in the viewfinder. I suppose that by rights the Chronicle should have paid me for that picture when they published it, but I never went after them for money. After all, the snap was taken on Tommo's film, which the Chronicle had paid for, and the Chronicle did fly me out of there, in the end, after Armitage showed up. And it was Armitage's piece that made me famous, or at least famous enough to land a cushy job back home. So no complaints there.
We read from left to right. Charlie Brereton stands on the left. He's even uglier than I remember him - I must have got used to him in the end - but his face is the one I'm drawn to first, avoiding the other frozen gazes. Seeing him again I still can't help smiling.
Charlie Brereton was maybe ten years older than me, balding and squat, with a flattened nose and heavy shoulders, and if he hadn't been almost a midget he'd have looked like a thug. Which would have really pleased him; he came from a good home in Warwickshire and spoke very proper English, but he liked to toss in the odd glottal stop when trying to impress. He had a way of worming his way to the front of a crowd or the middle of a conversation, and when he got there he stayed there, bobbing up and down like a cork in a stream. He always pushed in.
Right, so: to begin. Charlie Brereton looked like a gargoyle, and the first time I met him he lent me a pen. I was newly arrived in eastern Zaire, standing at the back of a United Nations press conference at the Htel des Grands Lacs in Goma, flapping my notebook, digging in my pockets, and a pig-ugly little Englishman leaned over and handed me a biro, then took another for himself from a leather satchel that lay at his feet. The pen he lent me was covered in teeth marks, even though you weren't supposed to put anything in your mouth or near it, what with all the cholera in town. I tried to thank him but he waved me away, face screwed up so he could listen to the briefing. Every minute or so the UN spokesman had to stop talking while an Ilyushin or a C-130 passed over the terrace on final approach, flying so low you could smell the spent fuel. In those mornings the air on the terrace would still be cool from the night. The evening sun would find gold in the dust from the volcano. At night you could see the fan of red light that rose from its crater, the cherry on the cake.
It was my first foreign story and to me none of it looked real - the light, the volcano, the polythene-green banana trees, fat Warsaw Pact freight planes sinking down from the sky. Our own Beechcraft had dropped from clear air into a cloud of black dust and when the ground appeared again I was born into another world. Dazed people wandered zombie-like along the runway; the pilot had to gun his engines to scare them off so we could land. In the long grass by the airstrip Rwandan refugees squatted down in the first rush of illness, beside the dying and the dead. Cargo jets bumbled around the apron on their fat bellies, unguided, looking for clear spots to vomit their loads, while the boys from the town played dare in the wash from their engines: how close can you get before you're blown off your feet? Inside the terminal the Presidential Guards and the customs agents fought for the chance to shake down the passengers. I heard later that the airport was charging each aid plane seventeen hundred dollars in landing fees. Outside, bright nylon bell tents had sprung like fungus around the satellite feed-point and the French army's briefing tent, and just beyond the shiny new coils of razor wire the refugees, hundreds of thousands of them, were shuffling north towards the UN's new camps. Underneath the wire, only feet from the tents, lay little yellow cylinders bundled in straw sleeping mats. The bundles lay in two files, one on either side of the road, stretching with occasional gaps for thirty miles north past Katale. They were the hardest things of all to believe in. Mummified by cholera, they didn't even smell.
The story had been strewn along the floor of the Western Rift Valley like rubbish in a run-down theatre. The cone of Nyiragongo was a black plug blocking the valley to the north. To the south stretched Lake Kivu, its deep waters saturated with deadly gases waiting to fizz up and kill thousands. To the east, almost lifelike, loomed the high green hills of Rwanda, and off in the west, when the day was clear, you could see the jagged black heads of the valley's far rim. A few years later this scenery came apart at the seams and buried half the city under liquid lava. I watched it on TV, the British world service.
Given that much of it is gone now, what's the point of describing Goma as it was back then? I could be imagining it, not remembering. I could be making it up. Anyway, let me say that there were rusting tin roofs and shuttered lock-up stores and workshops, and mottled one- or two-storey concrete commercial buildings with rusted steel rods sticking up from the roofs. There were shanty towns built of sticks and cardboard and flattened tins, broken streets in the commercial quarter, littered waste ground in the once-grand traffic circles where flowers flamed on unpruned flamboyants. By the lakeshore stood the big residential compounds left by the Belgians, surrounded by gum trees and wood or steel fences. And everywhere there was the sweet sick smell of human sewage and the toc-toc of machetes cutting living trees for firewood. Hutu soldiers, disarmed now but still in their uniforms, lurched about with their arms around each other. You couldn't tell if they were drunk or merely dying.
After a few days of this the Zairean army woke up and chased the refugees out of town into the new UN camps, returning the city to its filthy street kids, its market women in proud twists of cotton and its sharp-eyed hipsters in high-waisted jeans. They rushed about on foot, on motorbikes, shopping for food, looking for work with the aid agencies, for advancement, for a gathering of souls, a street parliament where they could get drunk on talk of politics or find someone to buy them a Primus in one of the invincible bars whose music jangled, all night long, through all the shifting curfews. I'll bet they're there yet, most of them, building again on the lava flows.
I'd been in town for two days already when Brereton found me. We got talking after the press conference, and it turned out that he was already an old hand in Johannesburg, my next destination, where I was hoping to set myself up and find some freelance strings. It was Brereton who invited me to Mitzi's Bar. You might say he inducted me; I'd never have found it myself - a real Belgian restaurant, in a place and time like that.
The dining room and bar were full of foreigners, mostly press but with a fair number of aid workers, and Brereton ducked and barged his way to the corner of the bar. He bought us each a beer and took a long, silent drink, and then he lit a cigarette and turned to face the room, his elbows hitched up on the counter behind him.
'See those people over there?' he said after a while, nodding at a group of older men. They wore neatly pressed jeans and shortsleeved shirts and cotton waistcoats with lots of bulging pockets. Laminated ID cards hung on chains round their necks. 'Network pussies. From the States. See the one in the middle, with the bush hat and the combat boots and all the knives and pouches and stuff on his belt? The fucking survivalist? He's actually a satellite technician for ??/? News. He never leaves the feed-point.'
'Ah,' I said wisely. I was already terribly impressed by Brereton. I'd seen his byline in a big London paper.
Brereton was looking past me now. He had to lean out from the bar to do so because I was at least a head taller than him. He fixed his stare on a big round table where a heavily tanned man in a blue polo shirt was addressing a circle of listeners. Some of them were taking notes.
'And that', said Brereton, 'is Michael Brady, from Alarm International. He's telling them that the Western countries should all send soldiers into Rwanda right away to rescue these poor Hutus from the evil Tutsis. I don't know where he gets that from - the French, I suppose - but he's been saying it all week. And some of these idiots are actually filing it. They're no-budget hacks who could only get here because Alarm flew them out for free and is putting them up and driving them around the place. In return they give it wall-to-wall coverage about all the black people it's saving and about all the money it needs to raise to save more. Most of these idiots will never go near the genocide story. It would only confuse their readers back home.'
I lit a cigarette while I thought about what he'd said; it helps to build confidence, I don't care what they say.
'Well, you know,' I said slowly, 'I came here from Nairobi on a free flight with Think of the Children. They're letting me sleep on the sofa in their compound. And they let me use their office for free, otherwise I'd have no way to file. I can't afford a sat-phone of my own.'
Brereton stared at me for a long moment and then his face broke out in a triumphant leer. 'I know,' he said. 'I saw you at Think's compound yesterday when I went to steal some biscuits.' He raised his glass to me. 'Jambo karibu.'
We stood by an open window looking out over the gate of the compound. A little group of bundles lay in a row on the other side of the dark laneway, the straw flaring yellow whenever a car pulled in. There were six of them, two adults and four children, judging by their size - a whole family, perhaps. When we left the bar that night Brereton staggered across the lane and gave names to each of them. I can't remember what he called them. Next day they were gone.
Brereton had just made a name for himself, somewhat late in his career, by filing from inside Rwanda when the killings were still going on. He was now getting so many hard-news commissions that he could no longer do much feature stuff - his bread and butter when he'd been a part-time stringer. He passed one such assignment on to me, to help me get started. It was a story about Sun City, for his newspaper's travel section, and a lens monkey came with the job. Brereton had found him a couple of weeks before, on a jaunt to Angola, and wanted to give him a try.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKINDby ED O'LOUGHLIN Copyright © 2009 by Ed O'Loughlin . Excerpted by permission.
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