Gabriel hears the ship’s engines falling quiet, and he notices that the lurching of the ship is becoming less violent. He hears people shouting to each other, and then the shouting becomes increasingly urgent. For a moment Gabriel wonders if this is the afterworld, and then he realises that it is his own name that is being shouted out. He opens his eyes. The ship is approaching a coastline that looks like a long, thin black shadow decorated with speckles of white light, and Gabriel blinks repeatedly, for the sea water is burning his eyes. He can see that Bright is gesturing wildly to him, but there is no sign of the other man. Bright now clings onto the metal chain with just one hand, and with the other hand he is pointing to the black water. “Jump!” Before Gabriel has a chance to reply, Bright leaps down into the water and Gabriel jumps after him. As he hits the water Gabriel feels his leg snap back, as though it has struck something hard. The pain shoots through him like a bullet, and Gabriel opens his mouth to cry out in pain, but water rushes in. Bright is already swimming towards the shore, and Gabriel begins to flail after him although it causes him intense pain to do so. Gabriel decides to turn on his side, and he trails the leg behind him as though it were a semi-discarded article of clothing. As he thrashes his way towards the lights, the cinema of his mind fades to black and then it is suddenly flooded with disturbing, yet familiar, images.
We were the smaller tribe. We worked hard and we did not harm anybody. We tried to do what was best for ourselves, and what was good for our young country. We wanted only to live in peace with our brothers, but it became clear that this was not possible. My father told me they were jealous of us, for our people ran many businesses; not just in the capital city, but in our tribal land to the south. We formed the backbone of the economy, and therefore we had much influence. It was only after one of our people was elected to the presidency that the real trouble began; the killings. The army rebelled, and the government troops spilled out from their barracks and cruised the streets in vehicles with machine guns pointing out of the windows. They began to drink and kill, and kill and drink, and soon my terrified father had little choice but to take me to one side.
“You are my eldest child. My only son.” My father looked directly at me as he spoke, but on his breath I could smell wine. Father did not know how to cope with this new situation, and there were portions of his cheek that he had forgotten to shave. “My son, these people are roaming the streets in aimless packs like disturbed hounds. This morning I saw with my own eyes as they took a woman, wrapped her in a blanket, poured kerosene on her and watched her burn alive. Out on the beach, beside the piles of rotting garbage, I saw this with my own eyes.”
I stared at my father who began now to shake his head.
“Power has not gone to the heads of these soldiers, it has gone to their bellies. They are fat and fleshy. They do not know how to fight, only how to kill. You must go to the south and join our people there. Soon they will kill our president and their army will take charge. I feel this in my blood. Our one hope will be you men in the south.” He paused. “You must go now. You are my only son and it is my duty to send you to the liberation army. You will be trained to become a soldier, and the day will soon come when you will march triumphantly into the capital with your head held high. On this day I will throw petals at your feet, and strangers will rush to you and embrace you with tears of gratitude in their eyes. Your mother and your two sisters will weep with joy, for it is this day that we are all dreaming of. It is this day that we are waiting for.”
I was twenty-nine years old when my poor father said these words to me. The next morning, before dawn, I clambered up and onto the back of a truck with four other “recruits.” My occupation was that of messenger clerk, and before this I had worked for many years at a hardware store. I was not prepared for the life of a soldier. My job as a messenger clerk was to run errands for civil servants and ministers in the government; I worked for the type of men who drove large foreign cars and who travelled freely to Europe and even to the United States. I would take them an envelope, or a pot of soup, or a new cell phone, or whatever it was that I was told to take to them, and I would wait in case they had something that they wished me to take away for them. In this way I hoped to gain influence and to one day secure for myself a position as a junior civil servant. This is how the system worked in my country. One had to be patient, but some days it was very difficult for I was no longer a young man.
Every day I would go into the ten-storey government headquarters, and up the urine-stained steps, for we were not permitted to use the elevator. I would climb through the miasma of piss, and up the unfortunate stairwell where rats played in the corners, and then enter into the brightness of the neon-lit outer offices that were crammed with secretaries and typists, girls who spent their money on hot combs to make their stubborn hair smooth, and who wasted hours using skin-bleaching creams in the hope that they might render themselves more attractive to the men who promised these over-scented women a cosmetics shop of their own, or a half-dozen sewing machines, in exchange for their agreeing to lie back clumsily like upturned buses. I knew the names of some of these women, but such women would never be seen with me. They were goods in a shop, but I had no money. These fat men with greasy skin, who sweated underneath their tight western suits, they had already made a down payment on ruby-lipped Madonna, or fat Baby, or Pleasure with her blonde wig. These women did not consider me to be a man. A messenger clerk is not a man: I was a thing to be tolerated, a creature in a T-shirt and torn pants who was not much better than the cockroaches that skittered noisily across the floor. What did I know of Johnnie Walker Black Label? If the minister or civil servant had nothing for me to take back down the rotten stairwell, then one of these women would dismiss me with a flourish of her red nails and I would once more join the other clerks who squatted in the street rolling dice or playing cards, and I would sit and read until there was another message to be delivered. And then one night my father spoke to me, and in the morning he took me to a truck with no side mirrors, and with no indicators or windscreen wipers. Everything that could be peeled or ripped off from the truck had been taken, and he shook hands with me and reminded me that I was going south to become a soldier and wage war for my people. He pushed a crumpled pack of cigarettes into my hand. He knew that I did not smoke, but he told me that I might be able to use the cigarettes as currency with which to bribe somebody and perhaps smooth my path for what lay ahead. There are, he reminded me, men who value tobacco more than bread.
Never before had I left the capital. As we passed through the shanty towns which clung to the edges of our main city, I stared in disbelief at the corrugated tin shelters which sprouted out of what looked like foul rubbish dumps. Although I had not seen these places with my own eyes, such tin-roofed slums, where beggars patrolled the streets, were widely known to be home for the disabled and maimed, places where huge rats bred freely and roamed by day and by night. I continued to stare in disbelief. This was our city? We soon passed into the countryside and sped south along the narrow strip of asphalt that had been laid clumsily over loose earth. The frayed edges of the asphalt had already been chewed by the red soil, and it was clear that at some point in the near future this “road” would disappear. I looked to either side, but there was nothing except a dark curtain of bush.