The Weight of a Human Heart E-Book

Ryan O'Neill

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A dazzling and inventive story collection from the author of Their Brilliant Careers. A series of graphs illustrates the disintegration of a marriage, step by excruciating step. A literary spat – and an affair – play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. The heartbreaking story of a Rwandan boy is hidden within his English exam paper. A young girl learns her mother's disturbing secrets through the broken key on a typewriter. Ranging from Australia to Africa to China and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart is a collection that turns the rules of storytelling on their head. 'Joyfully original… magnetic… a brilliant collection' The Independent 'Daring, intelligent, witty, full of new discoveries and exhilarations' The Guardian

Leseprobe

Published in 2018

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

First published in 2012 by Old Street Publishing (UK) and Black Inc. (Australia)

ISBN: 9781785630941

Copyright © Ryan O’Neill 2012

Designed and typeset by Peter Long

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

COLLECTED STORIES

THE COCKROACH

ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

AFRICA WAS CHILDREN CRYING

FOUR LETTER WORDS

SEVENTEEN RULES FOR WRITING A SHORT STORY

A SPEEDING BULLET

THE CHINESE LESSON

A STORY IN WRITING

THE GENOCIDE

A SHORT STORY

A ROOM WITHOUT BOOKS

FIGURES IN A MARRIAGE

LAST WORDS

THE FOOTNOTE

THE EXAMINATION

UNDERSTAND, UNDERSTOOD, UNDERSTOOD

JULY THE FIRSTS

THE SAVED

TYYPOGRAPHYY

THE EUNUCH IN THE HAREM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Collected Stories

Twelve Stories (Bearsden Press, 1966)

My mother, Margaret Hately, was a short-story writer. In the few photographs I have of her she is carrying a book, holding it against her chest as if she were suckling it. There are no photographs of my father. My mother destroyed them when he left her, a month before I was born. I only know him from the parts of him she put in her stories – a limp, a way of reading the newspaper at arm’s length. Whilst my mother wrote, my father was made of words.

When I was a child, I loved to watch my mother writing. She would sit at her scarred wooden desk under the stained-glass window in the hallway, the sunlight harlequinning the paper before her. Even now I see the top third of any page in a book as green, the middle blue, and the lower third as yellow. As she wrote, she would keep a cigarette burning in the ashtray at her elbow, occasionally blowing great smoky O’s into the air. At these times I knew not to bother her. I liked to paint, and she never minded the mess as long as I was quiet. In my childish pictures my mother had eleven fingers, one of them being the pen she always held in her right hand. The morning was for writing and the afternoon for reading. She preferred dead authors to living ones; she wasn’t as jealous of them. Still, she would weigh a book in the kitchen scales before reading it. ‘Any book that weighs more than half a kilo isn’t worth the trouble,’ she said.

I learned very early that my name, Barbara, comes from the Greek word for foreigner. It’s onomatopoeic, suggesting how the Greeks perceived the sound of other languages. Bar-bar-bar. My mother would often shake her head and say, ‘Just because you’re called Barbara doesn’t mean you have to talk nonsense.’ My father had chosen the name. Sometimes my mother would say to me, ‘You look just like him,’ but I never knew if this pleased her. I think she resented that my father had written half of me. He was killed in an industrial accident when I was six months old, and since he and my mother had never divorced, she received the compensation. With this money she was able to buy a five-acre block (her ‘Writer’s Block,’ she called it) half an hour from Newcastle, and she built a house there, with lots of rooms and cupboards and hallways and bookshelves. There were so many places for hiding and eavesdropping, it might have been designed to stage Shakespeare’s plays.

The Writer’s Block was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and had a large, untidy garden. Every day before dinner the two of us would do some weeding. I would happily pull up any green thing I saw, but my mother used some method I could never determine, taking a weed here, leaving one there. It was almost as if she were editing the garden. After dinner she would inspect my clothes to see if anything had been torn during the day, and I would stare at her eyes, which were a striking blue. The only make-up she wore was heavy black eyeliner. With her pencil, she would go over the lines again and again. Since she refused to learn how to sew, and hated to shop, she would buy all our clothes through the post. If I needed shoes, she would make me stand on top of an old, opened novel, then draw around my feet, cut around the tracing and send the footprints off to a shop in Sydney. The new shoes would arrive a few days later.

At bedtime my mother would lie beside me, and instead of ‘The Three Bears’ or ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, she would read aloud the story she had been working on that day, making corrections as she went along. Drifting into sleep, I listened to the stories in her first collection many times. When she wasn’t at her desk, she was always making notes. I heard from one aunt that my mother had been writing about childbirth even as my head was crowning. She wrote ideas on cigarette packets, newspapers, even in the fog on the window. She would often forget where she had written something and then we would both search the house for hours, examining every scrap of paper we could find.

When I was five years old, I wrote my first and only book and gave it to my mother for her birthday. It was called ‘The Horses of Rainbow Valley’ and it was five pages long, bound with a piece of string I had found in the garden. It was full of drawings of fairies and spiders and flower petals. I presented the book to my mother, then watched as she took her red pen to correct the spelling and punctuation. Having written over almost everything, she returned the book to me. ‘The structure is unsound, and the pacing is too slow,’ she said. ‘If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to rewrite.’ I tore the book in half and started to cry.

There was one story in her collection that my mother never read to me at bedtime. It was called ‘The Zebras of Cloud Valley’ and it told of a young girl cheering her sick mother by writing a book for her. Critics consider it to be one of her most moving stories and it has often been anthologised.

A Serpent’s Tooth and Other Stories (Penguin, 1980)

By the time I was thirteen years old, I had come to realise I would always be a minor character in my mother’s life. She had never done more than sketch me in. When I found my birth certificate one day, while helping to recover more of her lost notes, I was thrilled. I had always hoped I was adopted and on the certificate, my mother’s name was listed as ‘Charlene Boag’. But when I showed her, she just laughed. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘Would you rather read a book by Charlene Boag or Margaret Hately?’ She had become her pen name.

As a teenager, I was sick of books, sick of writing. I didn’t like to bring my friends home because of the way my mother looked at them. She unconsciously measured people for a story as an undertaker might measure them for a coffin. One time, at dinner, after she jotted down something I had just said onto the tablecloth, I shouted, ‘Can’t you stop writing for one minute? I’m talking, not dictating!’ I was old enough by then to understand her stories, and I hated the way she had killed my father in one of them, and how she had stolen the birthmark on my wrist and given it to a fictional girl, prettier and more bookish than me.

Once I was older, I began to notice my mother’s cigarettes often contained something other than tobacco. When I asked her, she said, ‘I’m researching a drug scene.’ In the mornings when I found her asleep on the couch with two empty wine bottles, she would say, ‘I’m researching alcohol.’ I never introduced her to David, my first boyfriend. No men ever came to our house. My mother said the only men she wanted in her life were Hemingway and Salinger.

She eventually met David three days after my sixteenth birthday, when she came home unexpectedly from a conference. He and I were in bed together. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ my mother shouted and I screamed back, ‘I’m researching fucking!’ She left without another word. That scene became the climax for ‘A Serpent’s Tooth’. I read it in Sydney years later, after I left home.

I had no desire to study English as my mother wished. In fact, I was in danger of failing the subject at school. I just couldn’t bear to open the books. I think my mother secretly hoped that by the time I went to university, her stories would be part of the curriculum and I would be required to read them along with Lawson and the rest. But I was a feminist. I didn’t want to study the words of dead white males. (‘I don’t care about women’s rights, only women’s writing,’ my mother said.) I wanted to be a doctor, and I was accepted to study medicine in Sydney. On the day I was to leave, my mother was sitting at her desk as usual, the light through the stained glass colouring the smoke that hung over her head.

‘Ah, Barbara,’ she said. ‘What do you think of this? Is it too much?’

‘I’m going now, Mum,’ I said, shouldering my bag. ‘David is giving me a lift to the station.’

She looked down at the paper in front of her.

‘Wait, don’t go yet. I love you,’ she said.
‘What?’ I said.

She turned to look at me, breathing out cigarette smoke.

‘This dialogue from the story. “Wait, don’t go yet. I love you.” Is it too much, do you think?’

‘No, Mum. It’s not too much,’ I said. ‘It’s hardly enough,’ and I left.

‘Don’t get pregnant,’ she called from the window as we drove away.

I wasn’t surprised when my mother killed me. The first time was a plane crash, the second I was burned alive, and the third was a swimming pool drowning. Even the critics took notice, with the Sydney Morning Herald, in its review of A Serpent’s Tooth (‘In just two collections, Hately has become our foremost short-story writer’) wondering at the number of young women dying in her stories. It was uncomfortable visiting home around this time, thinking that even as she made small talk, or made lunch, my mother might be planning another murder. But there must have been a limit to how often a mother could kill her daughter, as after my fourth death (from choking on a chicken bone, in a story published in Meanjin), she let me live.

The Abo and Other Stories (Hately Press, 1986)

In my third year at uni, after I had read my mother’s latest story (in which I lost my virginity yet again, and my father died once more), I decided to get a tattoo. I got drunk one night and went to a parlour in Kings Cross. Leafing through a book of designs in the cramped, dingy waiting room I eventually picked out a gothic ‘Daddy’s Girl’. The tattooist was only two or three years older than me, and he had a nervous way about him, as if he were afraid of being caught travelling through life without a ticket. I noticed he had paint under his fingernails. He looked at me and asked me if I was sure this was what I wanted.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I want you to misspell it.’

‘What?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

‘To make my mother angry.’

‘She won’t be angry enough if you get a tattoo?’

‘No, only if it’s misspelt.’

He laughed and I said, ‘Stop looking at me. Do you want to paint my picture or something?’

‘Maybe I do,’ he said. He wouldn’t give me the tattoo, but told me to think about it and to come back in a week’s time and ask for him, Mark. If I was still sure, he said, then he would happily misspell and badly punctuate my arm. When I returned the next week, I didn’t have the tattoo after all. But I went out with Mark. He was an artist. The only tattoo I have is of his name, which I had done the day before we were married. (My mother wouldn’t come to the wedding. She was busy on a new collection, she said.) After the honeymoon I took Mark to visit my mother for the first time. It was two years since I had last seen her. She had grown wrinkled, like the spine of a book that has been opened too widely. Her hands were leprous with ink and nicotine, and the grey was showing in her hair. The garden had become overgrown, the colourful patches of native flowers choked by a strain of American rose that my mother had planted years ago. Mark at once offered to cut the bushes back, but my mother said, ‘I like it like that. It reminds me of the modern short story. Would you like a beer, Mark?’

‘No thank you,’ Mark said. ‘I don’t drink.’

As soon as we were inside, I had to go to the bathroom. (I didn’t know it then, but I was pregnant.) I sighed when I saw that there was no toilet paper, only a copy of the Arts section of the Australian. If my mother found an uncomplimentary mention of her work, this was her revenge. When I came out, and sat with Mark and my mother to afternoon tea, she at once noted the tattoo on my arm.

‘So you sign your work,’ she said to Mark. ‘Are you sure I can’t get you a beer? Wine? Something stronger?’

‘Mark doesn’t drink,’ I said. ‘He’s told you that already, Mum.’

‘I thought Aboriginals liked to drink. Aren’t you an Aboriginal, Mark?’

‘An Aborigine,’ Mark said, glancing at me.

‘And Barbara says you’re an artist? I must say, Aboriginal art reminds me of those children’s join-the-dots books.’

‘Mum, don’t,’ I said. Mark took my hand.

‘Well, Mrs Hately, they say a picture is worth a thousand words,’ he said, looking at the rows of books on the wall. My mother lit another cigarette.

‘I don’t mind that Aboriginals didn’t invent the wheel,’ she said. ‘But that they didn’t invent the pen is a little backward, you must admit.’

‘We also didn’t invent Zyklon B, or nuclear weapons,’ Mark said, watching my mother. She sat perfectly still, as if for her portrait.

‘Well, the fact that we are talking in English right now, and not simply grunting at each other, shows which is the superior culture, don’t you think?’

‘My God,’ Mark smiled. ‘I knew you were a sour old bitch from reading your stories, but I had no idea ...’

‘Are you sure I can’t get you anything, Mark?’ my mother interrupted. ‘Pornography? Some petrol?’

‘Mother, that’s enough!’ I cried, and I stood up, letting my cup of tea fall to the floor.

‘It’s all right, Barbara,’ Mark said. ‘At least she’s saying it to my face. Usually her kind just whisper it as I walk by.’

‘If you’ve read any of my stories, Mark, you must realise that I prefer direct speech to reported,’ my mother said. She scattered some pages of the Australian onto the floor to soak up the spilled tea.

‘I’ve read all your stories, Mrs Hately,’ Mark said, taking down one of my mother’s books, ‘And you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe every one of your characters is as white as the paper they’re printed on. For all your theories about Aborigines, I’m sure of one thing. You couldn’t write a convincing Aborigine.’

‘On the contrary. That would be as simple as an Aboriginal drawing of a man,’ my mother said.

‘Then that’s one story of yours I might actually enjoy reading,’ Mark said. ‘Barbara is upset. We should be going. I don’t believe that we’ll meet again. But rest assured, I’ll be happy to come for your funeral.’

‘My dear boy,’ my mother smiled, ‘with the life expectancy of your people, I will probably come to yours.’

Mark shook his head and laughed.

‘You’re better with words than me, Charlene,’ he said, and my mother flinched. ‘I’ll admit that. But maybe some time you’ll see one of my paintings.’

I didn’t say a word to my mother as we left. On the drive back to Sydney Mark was very quiet, and I was afraid he was angry with me. ‘No, I’m just thinking,’ he said, and kissed me. As soon as we got home, he locked himself in the spare room to paint. He stayed there for almost three days, calling in sick to work. Finally he allowed me to see the finished painting. It was a portrait of my mother, with a cruel, ugly look on her face, the same look she had had on our visit. Her features were exaggerated and grotesque, and yet somehow remained remarkably close to life.

‘What do you think?’ Mark asked.

‘It’s like The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ I said.

‘If we didn’t need the money I’d send it to her for her birthday,’ he said. ‘I’m calling it White Australia.’

I vowed never to speak to my mother again, unless she apologised to Mark. But with a baby on the way, and Mark giving up his job to pursue his painting, we were desperately short of money. Though Mark’s work was being exhibited in several galleries, nothing had been sold yet. When our rent was six weeks overdue, I called my mother. Neither of us mentioned the visit. At first, she insisted on asking me some medical questions for one of her stories. ‘What are the symptoms of meningitis?’ ‘If one of my characters has gout, what medicine would he take?’ I patiently answered all her queries. When I began to ask for a loan, she refused at once, and said that she had to go. ‘I’m busy with another collection, tell your husband. This time all the characters are as black as the ink they are written with.’ I hung up.

Two days later Mark came home with a bottle of champagne. His White Australia had sold for almost five times its asking price in the tiny gallery in Ryde where it was being shown. The sale was even mentioned in the press, and drew attention to Mark’s work. From that time, we never had to worry about money, and I was glad my mother wouldn’t have the chance to refuse me again.

No publisher would take on my mother’s new collection, The Abo and Other Stories. In the end she had to publish it herself. Mark kept clippings of all the reviews. I think he was more pleased with my mother’s notices than with his own. ‘Atrocious.’ ‘Disgusting racism.’ ‘Ridiculous characterisation.’ ‘A literary embarrassment.’ Mark’s favourite was in Australian Book Review, which said, ‘I’ve read toilet-stall graffiti that is more creative and less offensive that Hately’s latest collection.’

I went to a bookshop and bought The Abo and put it on the kitchen scales. It was six hundred grams, so I didn’t bother to read it. My mother didn’t speak to me for nine years.

The Good Daughter and Other Stories (Scribe, 2003)

From time to time I would see one of her books in the bookshop, or read her name in the newspaper. (At a creative writing conference in Launceston: ‘A female writer, if she wants to be truly great, should have her tubes tied at age sixteen.’) I had disappeared even from the margins of my mother’s life, as I had finally disappeared from her books. And then one day, I answered the telephone and it was her.

‘Hello, Barbara,’ she said. ‘I have an important question. It’s for a story. If one of my characters has difficulty swallowing, feels fatigued and is losing weight, what might the disease be?’

I was silent.

‘Well, Barbara, are you there?’

‘If your character also coughed up bloody sputum, it could be lung cancer,’ I said stiffly. ‘That’s nice and dramatic.’

‘Ah. Then it seems I have lung cancer,’ she said.

I drove out to see her that weekend. She was waiting for me at the door. Old age had made her a caricature of herself so that she looked more like Mark’s painting than ever. As we embraced, she quavered like her pen above a blank page.

‘To die of cancer,’ she said. ‘Christ, what a cliché. I never thought doctors actually said you had weeks to live.’ She had already chosen the words on her gravestone, even the week she would die, a pessimistic month before the oncologist’s estimate. (She was right.)

She made tea for us, never once mentioning my son, Michael, whom she had never seen. Instead she preferred to speak about my childhood. It was interesting to see how she had re-plotted it, working up nostalgic themes. I was conscious of every tremble on her face, as if I were watching it projected on a cinema screen. The beautiful blueness of her eyes had faded. Perhaps she had given it to too many characters. Her hands were twisted with arthritis, which she insisted was merely writer’s cramp, and her skin was grey. She didn’t ask me to stay, but I did, nursing her and trying to ignore her whispered asides about Mark.

At last, when she muttered something particularly vile about him, I swore and ran to my old bedroom. I threw my clothes into a bag, intending to leave her to herself. But when I kneeled to pick up a blouse from the floor, I caught sight of the edge of a picture frame tucked behind the wardrobe. There, amidst dozens of small footprints cut from novels, was Mark’s painting of my mother, White Australia. I hid it again, then went back and told her that if she mentioned my husband again, I would leave. She nodded, white-faced, and asked me to listen to her chest. Worried, I placed the stethoscope under her nightgown.

‘Your heart sounds fine,’ I said.

‘It’s just so you know I have one,’ she coughed.

In her last days she lay in bed, and I read to her. At first I tried Dickens and Hawthorne, but she said that she was sick of dead writers now that she was so soon to join them. I went to the library and borrowed some contemporary books. In between Alice Munro stories she told me, ‘I have no money left after putting everything into that ... that book. There’s nothing for you in the will, I’m afraid. The bank will take the house. There’s hardly enough to pay for the funeral.’

I told her I didn’t care, but she seemed not to hear.

‘I don’t regret anything, you know. Not a thing,’ she went on. ‘Even now there’s a pen in my hand. You just can’t see it. I feel sorry for you, Barbara. If you don’t know how to write, then you don’t know how to live.’

She told me the corrected proofs of her last collection, The Good Daughter, were sitting on her old desk. I went and looked. The stained glass had faded, and there was only a faint blush of colour across the pages.

As my mother was dying she quoted herself, lines from her stories, as if she wanted them to be her last words. But her last words were ‘It hurts’, something I heard every day that I worked in the hospital. At the end, I told her that I loved her. I don’t think she understood, but the sound of the words seemed to comfort her.

The following months were strange ones for me. I felt free, and a little frightened, as a character in a story might feel if they could look past the final full stop. I sent the proofs of The Good Daughter to the publisher and over time they kept me informed of all the awards that it won. But I never read it, or the reviews. I was too afraid the title was ironic.

A year after my mother’s death, Mark bought a copy of The Good Daughter and gave it to me. I read and re-read the title, then went into the kitchen and put the book on the scales.

‘Well?’ Mark asked.

‘It’s three hundred grams,’ I said. ‘The weight of a human heart.’

the cockroach

The girl watched as the cockroach scurried over Rwanda, entirely covering the small town of Kayonza as it paused in Kibungo province. It then followed the thick, dark blue of a river to the Tanzanian border, and off the map. Crawling down the whitewashed wall it settled on the floorboards in front of the bakery, where it resembled another knot in the rough wood, before disappearing into the darkness under the shop. The girl’s father had laid the floorboards and carved the large wooden map that was mounted on the wall. He had let her draw in the rivers and colour the red dots of settlements, teaching her all the names at the same time. The girl liked to look at the map whenever she came to the market, though it saddened her that someone had sawn away the southwest of the country for firewood.

She was wearing her primary-school uniform, a plain blue dress. One corner of the skirt was twisted in a knot, and in the knot were her identity card and the money her father had given her to buy food. Barefoot in the mud, she turned and picked her way across the busy marketplace, ignoring the clatter of gunfire that came from a small shack showing action films on an old video recorder. In the noon sun she had to squint and the market transformed into a riot of colour. Hundreds of women in rainbow sarongs bargained and laughed under multi-coloured golfing umbrellas, while the men argued in clothes faded by the sun. On the nearby road, taxi buses with photographs of NWA or Lucky Dube taped to their windscreens idled noisily, awaiting passengers. ‘Kigali! Kigali!’ the convoyeurs called.

The girl walked past the men repairing bicycles, the rows of cheap digital watches, the tomatoes and onions piled into small pyramids. Carefully, she stepped between the thickening pools of blood where cows had been slaughtered that morning. Ranged around the market square were a handful of shops and bars, where the big men laughed in the shade. The girl waved to two of her cousins queuing at the water pump with their yellow dog. As she bargained for sweet potatoes, an albino knelt in front of her. He was a small, horribly sunburned man, with pink eyes, peeling lips and a raw nose. Timidly, he held out his grubby hands and whispered, ‘One hundred francs. One hundred francs to eat.’ The girl hesitated, then loosened the knot in her dress to give him a fifty-franc coin. The man took the money and stood.

‘Cockroach!’ he hissed, and spat at her.

As he limped away the girl stooped to gather some mud to throw at him. But he was already whining against the legs of some Muslims on their way to the mosque, so she let the mud slip from her fingers.

She bought the sweet potatoes, and some tomatoes and onions for lunch. Then she walked warily across the market to the shop where her father was haggling over the price of a new hammer. A man on the radio was singing a song about squashing all the cockroaches and her father listened, frowning, his eyes inflamed with sawdust. But when he saw her, he smiled. He was tall, broad and bull-necked, and he wore a pair of patched overalls that were crusted under the armpits with the salt of his dried sweat. He paid for the hammer, took the bags from her and led her away from the marketplace into the shade of the lane that led to their house. The girl walked very slowly but pretended she didn’t. Her father had a limp and she knew that he didn’t like her to walk ahead of him.

‘You did well to get all of that for five hundred francs,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘A beggar in the market called me a cockroach,’ she said. ‘And on the radio, on RTLM, all they talk about is killing cockroaches.’

As they walked, her father gently tapped his bad leg with the hammer, as if he could mend the badly knitted bones with it, in the same way he mended almost anything else.

‘It’ll be OK, you know,’ he said. ‘Once it was the Christians who were the cockroaches, and everyone tried to hurt them. Then for hundreds of years, it was the Jews. And now it’s we Tutsi.’ He winked at her. ‘But when they call us cockroaches, they forget. No matter how hard you try, you can never get rid of cockroaches.’ The hammer rested against his side. ‘Still, I don’t like all this talk either. Maybe tomorrow we’ll take the bus and go to visit your uncle in Kampala. Would you like that?’

The girl nodded.

‘Good, it’s settled. Now, what is that there in the sky? In English.’

‘A cloud,’ the girl said, proud of herself.

‘And in French?’

‘Um ... Un nuage.’

‘Excellent! And what is the date today, in French?’

‘Le sixième d’Avril, dix-neuf quatre-vingt-quatorze.’

‘And in English?’

‘The sixth of April, nineteen ninety-four.’

They soon approached their house. The girl and her father lived in a small mudbrick hut with purple doors, overlooking the valley. The dull tin roof was warted with stones, thrown to scare away noisy crows. A workshop leaned against one wall of the house and inside were several half-finished desks and bookshelves. The shafts of light that shone through the cracks in the walls were so full of dust they seemed almost solid. When her father was busy in the workshop, he would absentmindedly stoop to avoid them.

The girl went into the bare, clean kitchen, peeled the sweet potatoes, then lit the Primus stove. Her father went into the workshop to sand some chairs. She could hear him listening to the BBC on his shortwave. Leaving the potatoes to boil, she went back outside and sat down at one of the desks with a biology book her father had bought for her. As she went from page to page the flesh dropped from the man in the book, then the muscles and the nerves, until all that was left were his bones. She turned back through the pages and clothed the skeleton once more in skin and hair. Behind her the steep hills dropped away in terraces, like steps cut for giants.

She was still sitting at the desk when her father came out of the shed. He had the radio, but it was turned down very low and she couldn’t hear it properly. Standing in front of her he was very still except for the hammer that beat against his leg, so rapidly the girl thought it must hurt.

‘What are they saying about the president on the news?’ she asked.

Her father turned off the radio.

‘Never mind that,’ he said sternly. ‘You know Haji?’

The girl nodded. Haji was an enormous, cheerful man who worked in the commune office. He had been a Christian before converting to Islam. Her father often joked that Haji had done so only because they had built a mosque next to his house whereas the church was ten kilometres away, on the brow of a hill. He said that if you surprised Haji he would turn Christian out of habit and call on Jesus.

Her father looked over her shoulder. The girl climbed onto the desk, shading her eyes against the sun. Down in the valley, two kilometres away, she could make out the neat, redbrick commune office. It stood at a crossroads among the fields of Irish potatoes and cassava. From all directions the girl could see pick-up trucks converging there, crowded with men standing in the trays. Her father struck the desk with the hammer and she started.

‘You must listen!’ he said, but when he saw that he’d frightened her he put the hammer down and went on more quietly. ‘I want you to go to Haji’s house now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you must go. A bad thing is happening.’

They watched as the trucks stopped outside the commune office. The men jumped down and went in. When they emerged they carried in their hands things that flashed in the sun.

‘Why do they have mirrors?’ the girl asked.

From the office, half a dozen of the men set off across the fields to a nearby hut. They went inside, and when they came out they were laughing and dancing and the things they held didn’t glint anymore. Then the girl and her father heard a truck slowly churning up the steep track that led to their house.

‘They’re coming,’ he said. ‘You must hide.’

Her father pulled her from the desk and carried her into the workshop. It was hot inside. Thick sunrays of dust fell across the clutter of tins, nails and screws, hammers, lathes and saws.

‘When they leave, run to Haji’s,’ he said. ‘He’s a good friend. He’ll help you get away.’

The girl laid her head on his shoulder and began to cry.

‘Shh. Everyone knows you here. Go down to the border, to Tanzania. It’s only sixty kilometres. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.’

The sound of the engine grew louder and her father set her down gently behind two half-finished desks.

‘Come, be quiet now,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens, after these men leave, you go.’

‘Where will we meet?’ she whispered.

Her father ran his fingers down her cheek, as if feeling the grain of her skin. There was a large blue plastic tarpaulin on the floor, with the letters ‘UNHCR’ printed on it, and he pulled it up and covered the desks with it. Then he went outside to face them.

The girl looked through a small tear in the plastic. From her hiding place she could see them, a dozen men in ragged clothes, carrying machetes. She recognised only one of them. Augustin. He was a bald little man with bulging eyes and a wide nose. He was wearing the same grey suit that he wore to the church every Sunday. Augustin was a carpenter too, but not a very good one. His small hands were scarred and pitted and he had lost two fingertips in an accident with a chisel. He had a tight-lipped smile, as if he were holding nails in his mouth. He was smiling now. Her father stood at the doorway of the tool shed, the hammer in his hand again, tapping his knee.

‘You! Fat man!’ he shouted at one of the men by the truck. ‘Don’t touch that!’

Surprised, the man stepped back from her father’s tool belt, which was hanging from a chair. But when his friends laughed at him, he turned and kicked it into the dust.

‘Augustin,’ her father called.