* * *
I perch on the end of my bed.
I need to draw a line or I will turn into a drooling idiot. I slide my hand into the shadow of the bedside cabinet. Tamba’s cell phone is still where he tossed it yesterday. My fingers close on the plastic. If he catches me, I will say I was playing Fruits against Ghouls, the game the packers loved to play at lunch break.
I sit down on my pillow. The door seems to shiver in anticipation of Tamba flinging it open. I creep past it to the bathroom, slide the concertina door shut.
* * *
The bathroom air is still pale with steam. I crouch in the shower, take refuge in the white tiles. The damp wall sticks to my shirt. My spine ticks against the porcelain. My white sneakers grip the slippery floor, still stained with yellow drops of antiseptic fluid. I switch on Tamba’s phone, listen to the cheerful Samsung tune. I key in his three stars, press the Glossia icon. A text box opens up, clean and white.
Oh, God. Words. I love them.
I choose cursive to smooth my shocking story. Take a terrible breath.
My fingers are white-tipped and scuffed from their mild detergent burn, but they learn the keyboard arrangement easily.
I had just turned fifteen. We had finished our geometry with Mr Zakari. My father was reading us Elizabethan sonnets, urging us to notice the chauvinism beneath the music of the words. He said it was like a violin playing to a rugby scrum.
The letters take my pain and roll it into mystical shapes. Full bellies and slashing swords, rolling waves peaking, sometimes with pinpricks.
Hamri strained his wiry body towards us. His sheer intensity, as usual, had us listening:
‘See how these rhyming couplets hide the fear of women in the sixteenth century.’
A quavering question came from Paulus, the tall one. ‘What were they afraid of?’
Hamri smiled mysteriously. ‘The richness of their wombs. Perhaps of their love?’
Some of us giggled uncomfortably.
‘Look how Wyatt compares the woman he desires to a stag in a hunt . . .’
A face appeared at the door. Noble bones. Not ugly. His eyes were a deep red, a trick of the sun reflecting off the red brick. A man as thin as fish gut stood behind him.
‘Shut up!’ he growled at us, but our hearts had already flung themselves onto our breathing pipes.
The guerrillas entered gracefully, their movements composed like a brutal sonnet, their rifles like devil birds perched on their shoulders.
For an instant, the men seemed relieved to find shelter in our sunny classroom. They knelt among us, stabbed their AK47s into our ribs. I will never forget the smell of their breath. Fermented pig and death. They had been living on hippo bones from the rubbish dumps.
The thin man crouched in the front, spoke softly in Kapwa, ‘Yinawa kani unmiyu.’ Eyes front. He put his rifle to my father’s knee.
‘Carry on teaching.’
Hamri read mellifluously, as he always did, but we heard the terror pushing against it.
‘The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind. Yet may I by no means my wearied mind draw from the deer, but as she flees before, fainting I follow . . .’
Even with the rifle in my ribs, my father’s words brought the scent of jasmine that wove between the grass stalks alongside the river.
‘There is written her fair neck round about: “Noli me tangere . . .”’
Touch me not.
Templeton Security clattered to the door. Men recruited from the village, many of them fathers of the silent hostages in the classroom.
‘Someone saw men on the hill.’ Erniel’s father inside his bulletproof vest, a tortoise too small for its shell. His voice was high with fright. ‘Any sign of trouble?’
Hamri gazed through the mouth of his cave, the terrified air singeing us still, silent children. The copper eyes of his tribe, the golden sleekness of his shaved cheek as my loquacious father, for once in his life, spoke a single syllable.
‘No.’
They rattled away with their machine guns, their illfitting vests squeaking like mice.
The guerrillas rose up and opened fire through the window. The Templeton fathers did not fire a single bullet. Their fingers stayed frozen on their triggers, refusing to risk killing their own daughters and sons.
The guerrillas shot the men to mathematically irregular pieces.
They filled the children with lead, pinned them to the walls as if with the steel pins my father used to stick up his favourite quotations. The demons laughed with the lurid pleasure of killing, the screams of the children feeding their monstrous lust to shatter, annihilate. Our blood was their simplest triumph.
I sink to my bum. The water soaks my khaki trousers as the violence, the horror take their place in the sentences, pose as calm fact, as if gently blotting the blood where it pooled on the linoleum and began to grow a skin.
The guerrilla next to me pulled out a machete, shoved the toe of his boot be tween my teeth. The stink of detritus, the clawing for breath, then the razor tip of his blade across my tongue. He turned me into a fountain of blood.
The scab in my throat tears free and chokes me. I cough and cough.
I stop, touch with my finger where my tongue should be. I see no blood.
I return to my screen, hunt among the memories, find some air to breathe.
The children’s teeth flew like corn chopped off the cob. Their stomachs were like soft animals, cowering, bleeding out. The children clasped their bellies as if each were harbouring a vulnerable creature, perhaps a puppy.
Kontar did not even duck.
