Ahead of the Shadows, page 1
Ahead of the Shadows
By A.B. Kyazze
This edition first published in 2022 by Humanity in the Landscape Publishers
86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE
www.humanitylandscape.co.uk
© 2022 by A.B. Kyazze
All rights reserved.
The right of A.B. Kyazze to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior 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.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All photographs © A.B. Kyazze
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-7395908-1-9
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-7395908-0-2
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Part II
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Part III
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Part IV
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
About the author
Acknowledgments
Also by A.B. Kyazze
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Dedication
To KMSK, who changed my world completely when he came into it.
Part I
One
Bene
Funchal Airport, Madeira, Portugal
21 June 2022
From his small oval window Bene can’t see Aunt Magda anymore. She must have stepped out of sight when he boarded the plane. He wonders if she is sad or relieved to be left alone again after all these years. He tightens the grey nylon seatbelt around his waist. The pilot starts the engines and the plane glides back from the terminal. It pivots slowly, and he can see the mountains of Madeira revolve away.
The plane takes off and then tracks a course to the mainland. He strains backwards to see the port. The familiar streets and rocky volcanoes of the island shrink into the distance. His eyes are drawn to the sea, wind whipping up the waves. It would be a good day for surfing. The wind is offshore and the waves are rolling in perfectly. He has never been far from this coast in his whole life. He knows its smells, its rhythms and seasons. He doesn’t know anything else.
He takes out his sketch pad and favourite pencil and starts to draw his right hand with his left. Despite the small bumps and jerks as the plane gains altitude, the drawing is half decent. He always comes back to this old exercise as a warm up. Gives him a chance to centre his thoughts. His first sketch is of a clenched fist, from the side. The drawing looks like the whorl of a snail shell, and he quickly turns the page for a different one. This time, a more relaxed hand, with the same cracks and lines and chickenpox scars that he’s always drawn. The engines get louder and he wonders what the pilot is doing. If he concentrates enough on getting the shading and curves just right, maybe he won’t think about the chances of this little propeller plane falling out of the sky.
He forgot to check how long this flight to Lisbon is. Is there food? Probably not, on this kind of plane. Then he has another, larger plane to Paris, and a third one to Nairobi. At seventeen, he pretends he is a world traveller, but he has never been on a plane by himself before. Come to think of it, he’s never been in a different country than Mum, before now.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Mum had planned it as a surprise, a trip for them both to go to Kenya as a reward for his passing his exams. But then she got the call about her old friend Lucian’s emergency surgery in London, and she hastily changed the plan. Bene had to go on ahead, or else they would have lost the money on both tickets. She would come later, as soon as she was sure that Lucian had pulled through.
Bene runs his hands over the seams and wrinkles of the envelope Mum gave him. He doesn’t know what to expect, but it isn’t this. Photos tumble out and he spreads them onto his tray table. There aren’t many, just seven. He lines up the edges, but they’re not all the same size so it’s a bit haphazard. Some are faded and look like they were printed a long time ago. Others look newly printed but from old negatives. The black and white ones have rough edges. He can tell that Mum cut them herself with the guillotine in the darkroom. In all of them the same black man is framed from different angles. In most of the photos he is with other people, and he seems to be tall. He is bald, and has an air of authority. People would probably think he was handsome. In one of them he is talking to people, pointing at something in the distance. Seems to be someone who explains things. Probably a good leader ‒ that’s what he looks like.
In another photo he is in a large group shot. Black, white and Asian people are in it, a real mix. The lighting is harsh – must be direct sun – and all the white people are squinting or holding up an arm to shade their eyes from the glare. But not him. He is proud and African and not bothered in the slightest. But he’s not really smiling either. Not a real smile. More of a grim expression. He looks a bit stressed, to be honest.
In only one photo does he actually look happy, and it’s not a black and white handprinted one. It’s got faded colour, and you can tell it’s old because Mum is in it as a young woman. She’s got this long braid like a hippy and there’s no trace of grey in her hair. Her face is like a girl’s; he almost doesn’t recognise her. She’s looking at the man from the side, her mouth slightly open with a laugh. He also is happy, but it’s more subtle. Like he’s just told a joke that others may take a little while to catch on to. Mum’s got it, though, she’s always quick like that.
The man looks directly at the camera, with a cheeky knowing look, and it’s the eyes that do it. Nothing else really looks that much like Bene, but there’s something there.
But does that make a man a father?
No. He’s still just a stranger.
Lena
Malanje, Angolan Highlands, May 2002
It looked like how she remembered. Dry, dusty highlands with the colours of the land muted and subtle. Mile after mile with few signs of life. Just the parallel sets of hill tracks you could see from the plane, the marks left behind by the tyres of the lorries that crossed the distances to deliver relief aid to the camps. And the marks from the armoured vehicles, delivering soldiers to the outpost towns in the provinces to provide security, as promised in the peace accords.
It was a bizarre time, the end of a war. So many pledges were made by governments and officials. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people needed urgent humanitarian relief. The UN was involved at all levels. The airport was full of planes from the World Food Programme, and lorries with large loads linked together left the hangar at all hours. It was a strange thing to witness. Stranger still trying to make sense of it. Maybe she’d lost the habit of close observation, the constant learning and decision making that comes with being a photographer in a conflict zone.
She chided herself: it had only been three months away, after all. The weeks of feeling the intense fevers and sickness, and then the slow recovery. Malaria was a grisly disease. She was grateful to be done with it. She’d had a mild case, the consultant had said, shaking his head at the consequences of her going off her malaria medicine that time. Even though it was just for a night or two. It was unplanned, unsafe and had consequences.
But she had recovered, and now she was on her way back. To a man she loved. Yes, it felt right, saying that to herself. And a job – a real, salaried job! At the age of twenty-four, she finally felt that she had a purpose. She was to be a full-time communications officer. For the international aid organisation Community Water Angola, run by Kojo Appiah. They would have to figure out the proper management structure, she supposed. Everything would be strictly professional, in public.
Would it be the same between them? After their intense time just as the war ended, she’d had to be evacuated because of her high fevers. Since then, there had been phone calls, but that was not the same as being in the same place, living through things together.
Kojo’s letters on thin airmail stationery had found her in the UK when she came out of hospital. His handwriting was unfamiliar, but he wrote with the same rhythms and mannerisms as his speech: formal, self-effacing and calm. He was a close observer of other people and shifts in dynamics. Humour laced through the words, even when the meaning was serious – about their work providing water, sanitation and health clinics to displacement camps throughout the north of Angola.
She remembered what they had shared, and the details of the humanitarian work. But when she was back in London, that life seemed utterly foreign. She couldn’t explain it to her old friends, even ones like Lucian who had known her all her life.
Did she have all Kojo’s letters? Six had arrived, haphazar
She had written too, when she was strong enough. When her brain regained the clarity needed to form sentences, to think about how her words might be received so far away. But at first, she couldn’t. Not when the fever had burnt out all her energy. When sitting up was a struggle, and blinking felt like a chore. She remembered closing her eyes and resting her vision. Awake, and still sensing things around her, but with the shutters down. Then there was no longer any responsibility to process visual information. For a photographer, it was a surprise that at the height of her sickness the main feeling when her eyes were closed was relief.
Now, it was the opposite. She couldn’t wait to see his face again, to start taking photos, to be useful and back in the action. She didn’t want to miss a thing. Adrenaline flowed through her and her attention was heightened to the details. She recognised the smells of the small plane, burning up fuel on the approach to Malanje, the scent of sweat on the worn leather strap of her camera bag. Out of the window she saw the edges of the frontier town coming into view. The dark stripe of the matted dirt runway was up ahead.
She was re-entering a tricky post-war context. Like all the aid workers, she would have to do the dance of the unpredictable. She was determined to make a success of this. She would never forget her pills or her mosquito repellent again, not for anybody.
Two
Bene
Paris, 21 June 2022
This is really going to be a challenge. What was Mum thinking, booking him a night alone in a Paris youth hostel? She always has such faith in him. Maybe too much. She treats him as if he is capable of anything, without stopping to ask if he can actually manage. She should have come. Or maybe given him a ticket for one of his friends. That would’ve been more fun. On his own, his schoolboy French isn’t very good. He can read street signs and ask for a croque-monsieur and that’s about it. Not nearly as good as his English and Portuguese, of course.
The hostel seems alright, though. It’s an international chain with bright signs and an all-night vending machine. There are kids about his age hanging about reception, not looking too shady. Probably backpacking across Europe or something. He’d like to do that with friends sometime, maybe next year after he finds out if he gets into uni or not.
He takes a top bunk in a room for six, but it doesn’t seem like the other people will show. Or maybe they will come as a group, and he’ll be the odd one out. He doesn’t want to stick around to see. He would much prefer to be on the move, not waiting around to be scrutinised.
He packs away his suitcase in the locker, taking with him only his backpack with his camera, sketchbook and important papers: the tickets, his passport and Mum’s letter. If the hostel goes up in flames or something, he will still be able to keep going.
It’s a warm night, but not hot. He’ll be okay in jeans and a t-shirt. He catches a view of his reflection in the storefront glass on the way out. He knows he hunches his shoulders; he can’t help it. He’s tall; people always think he’s at least a couple of years older than he is. His short twists are still holding, just. The air was so dry on the plane, they might fuzz out. Funny thing, being half-Ghanaian and never been to Ghana or anywhere in Africa. He has always expected Mum to take him there, and instead she’s sending him off on his own, without a clue.
With Mum, it never serves to ask directly about the past. You have to do it gradually, maybe while looking at photographs, or if a news item comes on the telly. You have to let her tell you things in her own rhythm. Years ago, he realised he had to keep his own reactions in check if he wanted to get any information out of her. He feels like he understands her now, and since she is half of his genes, that means he comes closer to understanding himself. That’s better than it is for a lot of people, he figures. It’s just that there are pieces missing.
Usually, they don’t have to say much when the two of them are together. But other times they are both bursting with reactions to a headline or a work of art and they stumble over each other. That’s what can happen, he reckons, with a single mum and an only child. The connection runs deep, an odd symmetry. But that doesn’t mean that everything has been said, because it hasn’t.
He sees a poster announcing La Fête de la Musique, le 21 juin 2022. He knows what the words mean – a music festival. But what is it? And where? It could be cool. He should check it out.
He feels like a tourist, and shrinks further into his shoulders. He knows, from growing up in Funchal, there’s a clear divide between people who know, and the tourists who have no clue. Those who have done the research, and have the books and the maps, they know even less than the others. They don’t know what they don’t know. The local reasons and rhythms and things – you can’t translate that. And you can’t read about it. You just have to live it.
Will people know he’s a stranger here? He keeps his head down. He looks at his trainers – quite beaten up. He wishes he had brought that brimmed hat he left back home. It would have been perfect here. But sometimes strangers get weird about brown-skinned boys wearing hats. Make all sorts of assumptions about them, read too much into it, whether it’s a woolly hat or a broad brim or a baseball cap like the Americans. Like they would instantly rob them or something. It’s like, chill out, people! It’s just a hat.
But he can’t say that, not to the strangers who give him that look. He may not know the language so well, but he knows that look. Those who slip a hand to check that their bag is zipped closed before he passes by. When he sees people like that, if he does happen to be wearing his hat, he likes to raise a hand to it, like a gentleman in the old days. Sometimes he even stops to say something to strangers that they wouldn’t expect. That’s the great thing about that brimmed hat. You put that on your head and you can trick people, do anything at all.
Last time he wore that hat, he surprised a couple – just off a cruise ship, you could tell in a second. He tipped it up and said to the woman: ‘Good day to you, m’lady!’ Using the poshest kind of British accent. The tourists had no clue it was fake. Sunburnt and sweaty, clothes clinging to all the wrong places in the heat. But their faces transformed, just with a tip of a hat and a fake accent. People can be so funny about strangers. They struggle to hide their initial reaction, and then try to overdo it with the niceness. He can’t stand it. He walked away quick as he could after that.
He holds a picture of the map of Paris in his head. His memory is good in that way, like a camera. A few seconds looking at something and bam, it’s there for him when he needs it. In his mind, he can travel the map, twist it in space and see where he needs to go. There’s something spatial to his memory, and he’s only recently realised other people don’t have it – Mum, for example. It’s quite hard to describe to her the way his brain works. It’s something like seeing all three dimensions of anything, whenever you need it. No matter which way you look at it, you know there’s a depth or distance to it. You can just turn it around in your head.
He starts to run, to get the blood flowing and work some of the kinks out of his legs from the plane journey. Some heads turn as he goes by, his backpack banging softly against his back, but he’s moving too fast to care. He imagines himself a blur flying past the students and the tourists and the snooty women with the tiny dogs. He wants to explore ‒ doesn’t need anyone’s approval to do that. He’s chasing the daylight, and today, the longest day of the year, he has all the time in the world.
He tries to remember when sunset is. Sometime after ten, he’s sure of that. Paris must be pretty safe after dark, he figures. It looks so manicured and perfect. He can’t imagine that they’d let it get rough. He follows the diagonal Boulevard Saint-Germain until he cuts left and arrives at what looks like a country castle all out of place on the corner of busy Paris streets. He submits to a bag search, shows his student ID card and ducks inside the Rodin Museum. As he promised Mrs Penani, perhaps the oldest, and definitely the best, art teacher his school has ever had, he has come to pay homage to the great sculptor himself.
