The Go-Away Bird

Dad is chuckling. At first I think he has noticed what I am doing and I feel my face get hot, but then he says, ‘Bikindi! That man is so naughty. How does he get away with it?’

‘Habimana is as bad,’ says Mum, squeezing her lips together, trying to stop the smile growing on her face. ‘Listen!’

And I realize that they are laughing at the radio, at the song that has just finished and the announcer who is now talking so fast I can barely understand him. Habimana, Mum called him.

‘Habimana is my name,’ I say.

‘No,’ my dad is still chuckling, ‘Kantano Habimana. That is the name of the announcer.’

‘And never was a man so wrongly named.’ Mum rises to collect our plates. ‘He is a little devil.’

I do not know why the announcer is so naughty, but I know what my mum is talking about. My name Habimana means ‘God exists’.

‘And if ever a girl was so perfectly named, it is you, angel.’ Dad rises too and kisses my head. Pio pretends he is choking on his isombe. ‘Ah, do not fear, my soldier.’ Now Dad is squeezing Pio’s shoulders tightly – if Pio’s smile was not so wide, his scrunched-up eyes would make me think Dad was hurting him. ‘Your mother and I never forget that we were blessed twice, and that before Clem came we had our first-born, Pio Sentwali.’

Sentwali? Courageous? Ha!

Pio’s chest swells over the table, but I do not wait to see it grow further. The naughty announcer with the same name as me is still firing words from the radio faster than fruit bats fly from the caves at twilight. I think he says something about Inyenzi, but perhaps I misheard because that means ‘cockroach’. Then the singer starts his song again and n’umututsi is the phrase that jumps out at me. But I think every time you learn a new word, as I have done today with Tutsi, you feel like you hear it everywhere. Perhaps it was always there, perhaps it was just a sound that meant nothing before. But I am not concentrating on noisy songs from the radio, I am trying to catch up with Dad as he leaves for the cabaret.

Of course I am not going to the cabaret with Dad – at least, no one knows when I am there. The cabaret is for the men, where they go to meet their friends after a hard day in the fields. Where they drink that disgusting beer made from banana and sorghum flour, urwagwa. I know because I had a sip once, when no one was looking – just one sip and I was nearly sick. It was like drinking the smell of cigarettes. I wanted to cough and shout the taste from my mouth, but that would have given away my hiding place.

I love to walk with Dad, to ride on his shoulders and to hear his stories. His journey to the cabaret is usually our time for this. This morning, coming up from the river, was an extra treat – Dad does not usually come to the river to collect the water. The cabaret he goes to is only on the other side of the village, so the walk is less than two miles. It is the same place we go to buy rice when we need to, and potatoes. Joseph also sells underwear and some other clothes, and beans, oil, batteries, shampoo…Some people say that Joseph can get you anything you need.

‘Tell me a story, Daddy!’ He has just helped me down from his shoulders so I know we must be close to the time when he tells me to run home. He has been quiet for most of our walk, but if I get him to tell me a story then perhaps we can stay together just a bit longer. But he says,

‘A story…Mmm…Once upon a time there was a little angel called…’

I look up at his face. It is getting hard to see now the sun has gone, but I know his eyes are bright, I know what he is going to call her.

‘…Clementine.’

Yes!

‘She fell from her home up among the stars one night.’ Dad looks up to the sky and the millions of twinkling stars light his face so I can see it much better. ‘And if she does not get back home soon, the devil will take her out on this lonely road.’

He reaches down to tickle me and shoo me off home. I laugh – I cannot help it, I love it when Dad tickles me – but I scrunch up my nose, my thin nose, to make sure Dad knows that I am not really happy with his story or the idea of going home now.

‘Hurry home, Clem! And do not find too many distractions on your way. Mummy will be angry if you are late.’

We both start walking in opposite directions. Dad is striding fast into the dark, eager to see his friends and taste his urwagwa. I stop after only three steps and watch him until he is almost out of sight. Then I follow. ‘Women do not go to the cabaret,’ Mum said to me once. ‘And it is certainly not a place for a young girl.’ What is so special about the cabaret? What is so secret there? I thought. I could not resist trying to find out, so I have been there three or four times now. It is funny to hear the men gossip about their wives and about other men who are not there. It is funny how their eyes begin to change, as if they are about to cry even though they are very happy, and how they become unsteady on their feet when they get up to piss in the road the more urwagwa they drink. Many of the men have been drinking at the cabaret for a long time before Dad arrives – you can tell by the way they sway on their stools. But I am never sure if Dad becomes like the others, because I cannot stay too long, otherwise Mum will be angry.

Joseph lives in a house like ours behind the cabaret. The cabaret is really just an extra room on the front of his house. The back wall of the cabaret, where all the cases of beer are stacked, is really the front wall of his house. But he has built extra walls – adobe, like the rest of his house – that come out only a bit further than the counter, where all the bottles are lined up. From there, the corrugated metal roof turns into a thatched one and the walls become fences of woven papyrus and grass. There is no wall at all at the front, just a big old sofa and stools around a low table, where most of the men like to be, if it is not raining. Once Dad has finally stopped shaking everyone’s hands at the table and they have finished shouting out his name and saying things like, ‘Hey, Jean-Baptiste, you are late tonight, working too hard again, eh?’ and he has gone to the counter to buy his drink, then I can run to the fence and hide in the grass there. The weaving on the fence is so loose that I can easily see through it and hear everything the men say, even if it does not always make sense to me.

‘So Leonard has escaped, Jean-Baptiste! Paul tells me he has flown to England, is this true?’

‘Mmm.’ Dad pays Joseph for a bottle of urwagwa and nods his head as he takes a sip through the reed straw.

‘Lucky bastard! I wish I could get that far away from my wife sometimes!’

Everyone laughs at once and it sounds like the roar of the beast that killed Sebwgugu – it makes my heart leap and I sink my nails into the grass and the old newspaper that is lying there.

‘So, Jean-Baptiste, did he take that sexy little whore with him to England?’ That is Paul speaking. He is sitting in the middle of the sofa with his arms spread out along the back of it and his legs spread wide so that there is hardly any room for the others to sit. I think he thinks that the old sofa is his very own throne. I do not understand who he is talking about – I have never thought that Auntie Rose could be sexy and I know that Dad would not allow anyone to call her a whore. I do not like the way Paul speaks. I do not think Dad does either.

‘Now, Paul, I think that is enough on that subject, don’t you?’ Dad takes another sip and passes his bottle to Augustine sitting next to him.

But Paul goes on. ‘I just wanted to know if she was still around here, so I could go and take my turn.’

Most of the men are smiling, some of them are also making sounds like they have been punched in the stomach, but they are clearly enjoying themselves. Dad is saying nothing, but staring straight at Paul.

‘Hey, hey!’ says Augustine. ‘Leonard is a—’

‘An alcoholic fool? A coward?’

‘A brother of Jean-Baptiste. He is his family, so respect that. You know that family is everything – even you, Paul. Or should we start talking about your family?’

Augustine passes Dad’s bottle to the man next to Paul, but keeps his eyes on Paul. Paul looks as if he is searching for a piece of food stuck between his teeth, then eventually he jumps up and shouts, ‘Another beer! My round, I think,’ and he marches to the counter. ‘Please, Joseph…’ and Joseph prepares another bottle.

‘Not joining us tonight, Adalbert?’ Paul is talking to the only other man at the counter, who is sitting at the end of it on a high stool, but he is making sure everyone can hear what he is saying.

‘No thank you, Paul.’ Adalbert is looking embarrassed. ‘I am still temporarily strapped. I must watch my money carefully for now.’

‘What happened, my friend?’ says Paul, but I do not think he sounds like a friend to Adalbert.

‘You know, my field just seems to be failing again this year.’

‘Bloody Tutsi cattle trampled your crops, I suppose.’ Paul says this more to everyone else than to Adalbert – half of them laugh. Dad smiles to the ground and shakes his head.

‘No, no. Just one of those things. But I’ll have to ease up on the urwagwa for a while, that’s all.’

‘Then how do you manage to still look so bloody drunk, my friend?’ Paul slaps Adalbert’s back as he says this to his audience and everyone laughs, even Augustine and Dad.

I know what Paul is talking about, because from where I hide I can see behind the counter and there, by Adalbert’s feet, Joseph has placed a huge water can full of homebrew. Homebrew is another kind of beer I think, but it is very, very cheap. Many of the men say that it tastes awful. I do not know why they have to keep it hidden behind the counter. Every time Adalbert wants to take a mouthful he has to ask Joseph’s permission, then suck through the very long reed that stretches from the can, up behind the counter. And after all that, he makes a face that says it was horrible, as if he has just taken medicine from Ruzi, the healer. Poor Adalbert! Even without the funny face, he always seems to look ill – he is very thin – too thin – and his short hair has patches missing at the back.

At least the atmosphere in the cabaret is happy again. I look down at my hand, stroking the rough newspaper beneath it. There’s a cartoon. Perhaps a good story too. I fold it up slowly and quietly – I can read it in bed tonight. Paul sits back in his throne and passes his bottle to the man next to him, who has to shuffle to the end of the sofa as Paul spreads his legs again. The squashed man says,

‘Did you hear Kantano Habimana tonight – he was funny, no?’

There is a mess of sound as all the men answer at once and all seem to have different answers. Paul’s answer is,

‘Yes, put the radio on, Joseph! Let us see if there are any more good things on.’

Some of the men groan, but Joseph disappears into the house. I suppose he is going to get the radio. The men start to talk in smaller groups. Augustine is asking Dad how Mum is. Paul is trying to get the other men on the sofa to sing a song. It is no good when they start doing this – it is so difficult to hear what is going on when there are too many conversations. I think about slipping away home when a great Hiss! is spat out of the darkness behind me. I become still as stone. And although I fear for my life, I’m not sure what would be worse – to be killed alone here in the dark by a snake, or to cry to my dad for help so that he would know I was here and know I had disobeyed him.

But as the hiss turns into a long crackle and the smell of cooking goat meat fills my nose, I realize that Joseph has just thrown the meat en brochette onto the grill at the back of his house, ready for the men when they are hungry later. It is a wonderful smell. I stay still in the grass a moment longer – to make sure that Joseph has gone and to enjoy the smell a little more. Even though it is not long since we had our isombe, my stomach starts to grumble. We do not eat meat very often at home, so before my stomach gets too excited, I start to slither away through the grass back to the road – now I am the snake!

Joseph must have found the radio because I recognize the voice of Kantano Habimana, as if he has joined the men in the cabaret for a drink.

‘We began by saying that a cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly. It is true. A cockroach gives birth to another cockroach…The history of Rwanda shows us clearly that a Tutsi stays always exactly the same; that he has never changed. The malice, the evil are just as we knew them in the history of our country. We are not wrong in saying that a cockroach gives birth to another cockroach. Who could tell the difference between the Inyenzi who attacked in October 1990 and those of the 1960s? They are all linked,’ his voice does not sound as if he is looking for laughs any more, ‘their evilness is the same. The unspeakable crimes of the Inyenzi of today recall those of their elders: killing, pillaging, raping girls and women…’

I do not understand what he means. What attacks? What cockroaches? Why is he talking about Tutsis too? I feel scared and, as if it is reading my mind, the radio starts spitting out some scary, noisy music. The singer is Simon Bikindi again.

‘I hate Hutus, I hate Hutus…’

Lord, now it seems like there is something wrong with the Hutu also!

‘…I hate Hutus that do not think that Tutsis are snakes.’

I stop sliding through the grass. It is as if Bikindi is singing straight to me. I was being a snake! I am Hutu! I am Tutsi! What have I done? What should I do? I run to the road and I keep running towards home. The lovely smell of cooking meat that filled my nose and lungs before soon changes – it is replaced by the feeling that Joseph has thrown my lungs onto his grill instead of the meat. I am not halfway home yet, but I have to walk the rest. I walk fast. Taking big gulps of air, squeezing the newspaper in my hand with each gulp because I need to hold on to something, my chest swells in front of me and I remember Pio at the table as I left the house. I wish I had stayed with him and Mum tonight.

Chapter 5

The sun was out and it even felt like I might be a bit overdressed with this coat on. I could just hear Dad, ordering everyone about in the garden and congratulating himself, ‘See? I knew i’ would turn ou’ nice for a family bar-bee. May bank holiday weekend – gotta be done! Listen to yer Uncle Tel, he knows best!’ It seemed a shame to ferret my way down the Tube with the rest of the rodents, but it was quicker, so I could drop the stuff off at Jimmy’s and still have plenty of time to get to Dad’s before I started getting slagged off for being the ‘prodigal son’.

No police with dogs at the barriers – handy. As the Northern Line train rattled into the station, I stuffed my headphones into my ears and pressed the tiny ‘Play’ button, followed by the ‘Random’ one on my beloved Discman, before shoving it safely back in my coat pocket. The clanging and scraping and groaning of the train quickly faded out as bluesy Fifties electric guitars faded in, then an electric bass like something out of Grandmaster Flash reminded me that we were in the Nineties and the drums kicked in and we were off.

I used to find travelling round the city such a stress, I tell you, but now with my own personal soundtrack pumping through my head it’s just like being in my own music video. People don’t seem so threatening any more – they’re just actors in my video. A funky song from Prince and I’m strutting through the crowd like a Sexy MF, a ballad from Boyz II Men (hey, don’t knock ’em, they’re great vocalists; cheesy, I know, but they can sing) and I’m sauntering through the street annoying everyone trying to get past me who thinks that I must be a tourist otherwise I’d be scurrying along as frantically as them. And as I stared at the wooden slats that made up the floor of the train, I imagined I was on a pier – not Brighton or Southend, Christ, no! Somewhere a bit more…classy, romantic even…I don’t know, on a quayside in Miami or Venice Beach perhaps – this music was transporting me. And now this voice, sighing goodbyes, stabbed in the guts by the inevitability of dying love. Looks like Melody Maker actually got something right for a change when they said that this debut by Jeff Buckley was important, a future classic album. There’s not much coming out these days with powerful songwriting and great singing, I tell you. It’s either great singing and crap songs – Boyz II Men. Or crap singing and great songs – Oasis. Buckley’s voice was…beautiful…got to try this out with some of my students. The song was sad, but I was enjoying the technique and feeling a bit superior that I had not made the same mistake as the character in the song – getting involved.

As the song just continued to build, without looking back, one crescendoing chord sequence after another, I became self-conscious for a moment that my exhilaration might be showing a bit too much on my face – I wasn’t sure if that was a smirk from the girl sitting opposite me from inside her cave of black hair, as black as the little mice in these tunnels, their fur dyed by years of grime and fumes. Funny…I couldn’t’ve cared less if she was a minger or twice my age. But she wasn’t, so I grabbed the discarded newspaper on the seat next to me (luckily it was the Guardian and not The Sun) and I held it up to my face.

UN troops stand by and watch carnage

said the headline. I read it probably ten or fifteen times without taking it in, as my mind was still on the passionate end of the ‘Last Goodbye’. But then another track started, all harp-like guitar and choirboy falsetto. I checked the track number on the Discman: 8. I laid the newspaper on my lap and pulled the CD’s booklet from the inside pocket of my coat – I never leave home without the booklets, I tell you, I’m the kind of music anorak that has to know the track titles, who wrote them, who played drums, who produced, blah, blah, blah…This one was ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ by Benjamin Britten, apparently. I stuffed the booklet away again, flicking my eyes ahead to try and see without really looking if the girl thought I was sad…Is that a stud above her lip or a mole? Either way it’s…I hid behind the newspaper again…saucy.

The classical vibe of the track swelling in my ears and its almost unintelligible words meant I found myself focusing on the words on the page in front of me instead.

French and Belgian forces are evacuating expatriates but leaving members of the Tutsi minority, including local employees of international organizations, to their fate, reports Mark Huband in Kigali.

A few yards from the French troops, a Rwandan woman was being hauled along the road by a young man with a machete. He pulled at her clothes as she looked at the foreign soldiers in the desperate, terrified hope that they could save her from her death. But none of the troops moved. ‘It’s not our mandate,’ said one, leaning against his Jeep as he watched the condemned woman, the driving rain splashing at his blue United Nations badge.

‘Not our mandate’ – what’s that supposed to mean?

The 3,000 foreign troops now in Rwanda are no more than spectators to the savagery which aid workers say has seen the massacre of 15,000 people – mainly from the traditionally dominant Tutsi minority. The killing started after President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart – both from the majority Hutu tribe – died in a rocket attack on their plane while returning from peace talks. His presidential guard and the Hutu-dominated army unleashed a campaign of terror. Opposing them is the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, dominated by Tutsis.

The Belgian and French troops are here to get foreigners out. So far they have ferried about 1,000 from an assembly point at the French school to military aircraft. Rwandans, including staff of international organizations, are left to their fate.

About 275 Rwandans staying in one hotel have been barred from leaving on European military aircraft, a Belgian Red Cross employee said yesterday. ‘All of them are Tutsi. They are going to be assassinated. It’s disgusting that they don’t take them. We have all their names and we are going to publish them when we get to Belgium,’ he said, before being evacuated with his Rwandan wife.

Sick!

Less than a mile from the airport yesterday, army trucks filled with foreign evacuees were blocked when they drove into a massacre where machete- and knife-wielding Rwandans lined the roads smiling as their victims lay dying.

On the way to pick up the evacuees, the convoy had passed the bodies of two newly killed men sprawled in the muddy courtyard of a house. As the convoy returned past the same house less than an hour later, the body of a woman and two more men lay with the two already dead, their eyes wide open. The woman had had one of her legs cut off.

On the other side of the road the bodies of three men lay with fresh wounds. Watching the convoy were the killers – young men, two women with clubs, old men and children. Close to one body stood a man with a clipboard in office clothes. Beside him stood a well-armed government soldier in smart uniform. Halfway up the hill lay a pile of corpses. From nearby houses women, old and young, were casually led to the pile and forced to sit down on it. Men with clubs then beat the dead and dying bodies which surrounded the women as they sat, screaming, pleading for their lives…

The music in my headphones was too mournful, too perfectly suited to reading about such awful things. It was as if a gushing tap had been turned on in my chest and it was quickly filling up. Once my chest was full, the warm water had to flow up my neck and into my head, and if I didn’t do something about it quick, it would overflow from my eyes. I chucked the newspaper back into the seat that it came from and popped the headphones from my ears like a couple of corks that let the vintage 1994 Northern Line plonk fill up my world again.

Phew! That was close. I flicked a look at the girl opposite to see if she’d noticed anything. She stretched her green and white striped sleeves, gripped them and buried her hands between her thighs as if she was trying to keep warm. It wasn’t cold in the train. I was probably giving her the creeps. Camden Town couldn’t come soon enough. I jumped up before the train stopped – a split second before, so did she.

Oh, great, now she thinks the creepy bloke is following her!

I tried to get ahead of her, so she couldn’t possibly think I was after her, but just succeeded in colliding with the people in the flood coming the other way. So I tried walking slowly, so she would quickly lose me in the crowd, but that just got me a barrage of ‘tuts’ and huffs aimed at the back of my head. So now I was walking side by side with the girl and I had made myself just about as conspicuous as possible – as conspicuous as an average-looking bloke can down Camden Tube on a Saturday with its time-warp tunnels of skinheads and punks from the Seventies and cyber-Goths from somewhere in the future in their black PVC macs, fluorescent green dreadlocks, and platform biker boots.

When we got to the escalator I tried to let someone get on between me and her, but as I tried to stand to one side I became the head of a chain of zombies bumping into the person in front like some Marx Brothers moment. After about two seconds, the chain was nearing twenty zombies long, so I gave up and found myself face to back with the girl and her low-cut top. I held my breath in case she felt it on her skin and found my headphones dangling round my neck. I stuffed the cork back in this dodgy sparkling wine and, since I hadn’t bothered to press ‘Stop’ when it was all getting a bit emotional back there, Jeff Buckley was still going – and this time he was rockin’! Led Zeppelin would have been proud of this hard, dirty groove and it injected some conviction back into my step as I slid off the escalator – so much so that I almost forgot to get ready to slip back down again if the barriers were crawling with police and sniffer dogs.