My only pictures of Ting are on it! How could he have taken it?! He knew, with that awful, mind-reading trick, he knew how much Ting meant to me! How could he have done that?! That monster … that absolute monster! Why, he is the—
‘Dr Green? May I come in now?’
The voice on the other side of the door forced her to gather her fear-scattered thoughts together.
‘Uh, just hold on, gimme thirty seconds,’ she yelled as she hurriedly pulled on the military fatigues.
There were also some sturdy canvas army boots at the foot of her bed, along with a clean pair of socks. Margaret put the socks on and squeezed her feet into the boots, which, once laced up, seemed to fit quite comfortably. She then glanced at her reflection in a polished bronze mirror. Never before had she dressed in any clothing that had had any sort of militaristic connotations, not even in childhood, for games or dress-up parties; devout Jehovah’s Witness parents had seen to that. However, something about how she now looked in the camouflage gear appealed to a deeply repressed part of her subconscious, despite her overt anti-war leanings. Perhaps, she surmised, it was yet another embodiment of rebellion against her parents and their religion, both of which she had turned her back on over three decades ago.
It felt good to be in clean, crisp clothes again, even if their cut and style happened to represent everything that she stood against in the world. She ran her fingers through her hair, which, for the first time in months, was silky and grease-free. Her skin felt soft again; scrubbing it with a pumice stone in the bath had seen to that. Despite the circumstances, she allowed herself a quick smile.
‘I’m ready, you can come in,’ she announced.
The door opened, and a thin teenage boy attired in one of the ornate Victorian-style uniforms entered the room, his steps measured with brisk precision. He stared straight ahead and, it would seem, refused to make eye contact with Margaret, his face a mask of false serenity, bronze-cast in its immovability. He performed a stiff military salute with his right hand.
‘Dr Green, the General has sent me to escort you to the dining hall,’ he said in his freshly broken voice; he seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the still-alien baritone notes that emerged from his larynx.
‘I, er, thank you,’ she stammered.
She noticed that the teen had a pistol holstered on his left hip, while a machete was sheathed on his right, and a number of throwing knives in bands were strapped around both thighs. The boy’s frame was willowy and insubstantial, but there was nonetheless a powerful solidity to his wiriness. Margaret immediately noticed that the deep ebony skin of half of his face and most of his right arm was a molten-looking ooze of horrendous burn scars. She couldn’t help herself – she had seen so many similar wounds and scars – so she turned to face the teen directly and spoke to him.
‘What happened to your arm and face? Those are war wounds, aren’t they?’
The youth’s blank expression did not waver.
‘Yes. The Lord’s Resistance Army did this to me,’ he answered calmly. ‘They came to my village, raped and murdered my mother, sisters and cousins, beheaded my father and older brother, and then poured petrol on me and set me alight. I was six years old.’
‘That’s horrible,’ Margaret gasped, her jaw slack and her voice hoarse with genuine pathos and sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry, kiddo, I really am.’
The boy shrugged, his expression as coolly neutral as ever.
‘I try not to think too much about it. It was in the past … and it is best to let go of the past.’
She thought it odd that this child soldier’s English was so good, even down to his accent, which was a reasonable simulacrum of that of a British public schoolboy, and thus far more intelligible to her than those of most of the Congolese she had encountered in her time here. Again, she couldn’t resist the desire to satiate her curiosity.
‘How did you learn to speak such good English?’
‘All of us can speak many languages fluently. We are taught here in the city, at a school that we attend six days a week. We have teachers from Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Norway, Russia, Brazil, The UAE, Japan, India and China.’
Margaret raised an eyebrow and took a few moments to digest this surprising information. She stared again at the boy’s scars.
‘Would you mind telling me a little about your experiences prior to coming here?’ she asked. ‘If you don’t mind, of course.’
The boy continued to stare straight ahead, still avoiding eye contact. He spoke calmly and fluently as he answered her question, but no emotion whatsoever seemed to colour his speech.
‘The LRA came to my village late at night, a few hours after dinner, when we were all preparing to sleep. My parents tried to hide us children under the bed and in the closet of our hut, but the LRA soldiers who broke the door down found us anyway. Then … then they did all of the things I told you about.’
Such stories had become all too familiar to Margaret in her time spent working here, and at this stage all she could do in response was to sigh and shake her head.
‘The General saved me,’ the youth suddenly announced, unprompted.
‘He did?’
‘The LRA soldiers left me to die in the jungle after they massacred my village and burned me. I lay in the bush for two days and nights, trapped between this world and the next. A great elephant came to me. I thought that he was a spirit from the afterlife, coming to escort me through the doorway called Death, into the life that comes after this one. But he wasn’t … and he
