Dream of Darkness, page 3
3
‘You must learn to love your dreams,’ said Vita Gray, with no trace of irony. She was the most serious person Sairey knew. Her rare smiles were sunlight in a rainy country.
For the first time in her life, Sairey had described the Dream in detail to another person. Vita Gray’s reaction had been disappointing, merely nodding as she made a brief note, then going on to ask about other dreams.
‘I think you’re missing the point, Vita,’ Sairey had protested. ‘I’m absolutely terrified!’
And this is when Vita had started her little lecture.
‘Dreams can be terrifying, but they are not sent to terrorize,’ she went on. ‘Their function is to remind, or to warn, or to reaffirm. A child’s mind is like an inexperienced voyager preparing for a long journey. Choice has to be made. Much that will turn out to be useless is lugged into the cabin and unpacked in full view, while much that will later prove essential to the traveller’s wellbeing, or even survival, is stored far out of reach in the depths of the hold and marked “Not Wanted On Voyage”.’
The phrase stuck in Sairey’s mind, though it didn’t seem to her, ten days later, that Vita was having much luck sifting through the luggage.
Phsyically, she was in better shape. Vita permitted the sparing use of some tablets which, for a couple of hours at least, could put her deep beyond the reach of the Dream. And she got plenty of fresh air and exercise, as many of her sessions with Vita took place outside and on the move.
Sometimes they strolled round and round the Masham Square park. Whenever they passed the flaking summer-house, Sairey thought of the wounded boy. She had never dreamed of him again, but when she told Vita about him, the psychiatrist seemed far more interested than she had been in the Dream of Sairey’s mother.
Occasionally, for a change, they headed further afield. Once they went to Kensington Gardens and watched the children sailing boats on the Round Pond.
‘Do you remember, you and I once came here together before you went to Africa?’ said Vita.
Sairey shook her head very vigorously, as if denying the truth of this assertion rather than just her own memory of it.
‘Oh yes, we did,’ said Vita firmly. ‘We sat on that bench there, and waited for Sarah.’
Sarah was Sairey’s mother. The pet form had differentiated the two, and there had been no attempt at upgrading since the need for differentiation vanished.
They sat on the bench indicated. Sairey waited a moment, as if seeking a message through the contact, then said, ‘I really can’t remember anything of those days. How should I? I was a baby! What should a baby remember?’
‘Much,’ insisted Vita. ‘Babyhood isn’t about blankness, it’s about total sensitivity, about reception with, as yet, no built-in jamming.’
‘I can’t remember anything,’ insisted Sairey.
‘What about the voyage out? Did all those days at sea make no impression?’
‘None, because we went by air,’ said Sairey triumphantly.
Vita Gray smiled briefly, a glimmer in the rain-forest, and Sairey said, ‘Was that a trick question?’ rather angrily.
‘No trick,’ said the older woman. ‘Except insofar as all questions are tricks.’
She met Sairey’s puzzled gaze with her customary alert passivity. Was she beautiful, wondered the girl? Her rather square face was framed in a coal-scuttle helmet of vigorous brown hair which, if not quite unkempt, was a long way from being kempt. There was no attempt to disguise the rather coarse texture of her skin with makeup. Heavy breasts and a thickening waist were neither concealed nor accentuated by a belted leather jacket over a heather-pattern wool skirt. She looked neither younger nor older than her forty-two years. Sairey knew the age because Vita and her mother had been born within a few weeks of each other, though how she knew this was not so certain. They had met at Cambridge, Sarah Lightoller and Vita Gray, became firm friends in their first year, shared a house in their second and third. Sairey had seen photographs. She was able to look at them with equanimity because her mind could form no link with the laughing girl with long, bouncy blonde hair, who always struck an outrageous pose as soon as she sensed the camera upon her. All memory of her mother was now compressed into that single, terrible dream image.
‘I’ve remembered something,’ she said suddenly.
‘Yes?’
‘In the Dream, her hair, it’s smoothed down. Not like in the photos. It’s flat. Like it was wet or something.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Vita.
‘It’s not interesting, it’s awful!’ shouted Sairey. ‘When are you going to do something about it?’
‘We’ve started. You’re up and about and able to face the world.’
‘Yes, but inside I still feel … oh, I don’t know. And I still have dreams. The Dream. When am I going to get better?’
‘Perhaps when you decide what better really means.’ ‘Oh shit. You enjoy playing the sphinx, don’t you?’ exclaimed Sairey angrily. She intended insult, but as she spoke she realized how apt it was. The massive calm, the impenetrable mind – even the helmet of hair was not unlike the fabled beast’s head-dress. There was no problem in recognizing Vita from those old photographs. Even at nineteen she had stared out seriously from the side of her posturing friend. Yes, she was beautiful. Sairey answered her own question, and, with the answer, wondered why there’d been any need to ask in the first place.
‘We sat on this very bench,’ said Vita, with a typical, dislocating leap to an earlier track of conversation, ‘and saw your mother coming along that path.’
Sairey glanced round. There was a woman some distance away approaching them. She said, ‘I can’t remember anything,’ and turned away to look across the pond. It was an overcast, blustery day with the water shivering to shrug off the wind. A few children played by the water. There weren’t many adults, but there was someone standing on the far side of the pond with an absolute stillness that, at first, made him difficult to see but, once spotted, impossible to miss.
In this light, at this distance, it was hard to be forensically sure, but Sairey was certain it was the golden boy she’d left wounded in the park.
‘It is you! I thought I recognized you. Hello!’
Sairey must have cried out in alarm, for the woman who had stopped to address Vita looked at her with open curiosity. She was middle-aged, perhaps older, slightly built, with a narrow, anxious face and wispy hair.
Vita said, ‘Mary, how are you?’
‘I’m pretty well, I suppose, as long as I keep moving.’ But she showed no eagerness to keep on moving, rather regarded Sairey with interested, questioning eyes.
Perhaps she’s some old flame of Vita’s who reckons I’ve supplanted her, thought Sairey. It was an idea only slightly more charitable than her immediate suspicion that Vita had tried to contrive a bit of shock therapy by talking of meeting her mother, then having this woman approach along the same path and address them. But size, age, and colouring were all so wrong that she couldn’t believe such a stickler for detail would have picked such a poor decoy.
‘Sairey, this is Mary Marsden, an old friend. Mary, Sairey Ellis.’
‘Ellis. Sairey Ellis … not …?’
Vita nodded.
‘Good Lord,’ said Mary Marsden, sitting down beside Sairey. ‘My dear, I knew your mother.’
Immediately, Sairey’s suspicions flooded back.
‘How?’ she asked with aggressive abruptness.
‘I supervised her thesis. Did she never mention me? Of course not. Stupid of me. A doctoral thesis would hardly be the kind of thing you’d talk about with someone as young as you must have been when … oh, I’m sorry … it really was a first class piece of work, first class. She could have done so much.’
She looked rather wildly at Vita, who showed no sign of helping her out of her self-created predicament.
Sairey said, ‘It’s all right. But I think we ought to be going, Vita. Fanny said Daddy would like a word when we got back.’
‘Perhaps another time,’ said Mrs Marsden. ‘Vita, we must keep in touch.’
She fluttered away. Sairey and Vita looked at each other in silence, then they, too, set off.
As they walked away, Sairey glanced across the pond.
There was no sign now of the golden boy.
Back at Number 28, they found Nigel and Fanny having tea.
‘Vita, come in, sit down, have a muffin.’
It was plain to Sairey that her father’s hearty friendliness concealed certainly dislike and possibly fear. Fanny’s welcoming smile wasn’t so readable. She examined her stepdaughter, then said to Vita, ‘She’s looking awfully well. What do you think, Vita? A few days in Kent with Celia to blow off the last cobwebs before she gets down to her swotting again?’
She made it sound like a game, but it was hard to take offence as she made most activities, including her husband’s memoirs, sound the same.
To Sairey’s surprise and slight consternation, Vita did not disagree.
‘Soon, perhaps. There’s a conference I have to attend, so I would need to suspend treatment in any case. But as for swotting, as you put it …’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Ellis. ‘How would it be if we put off Cambridge? It would have to be for a year, of course. You can’t just miss a term, especially your first one.’
‘Could she do that? Would the college agree?’ wondered Fanny.
‘Oh yes. Nowadays, they seem to prefer undergrads to have had some experience beyond school. You know, travel, a job, VSO, that sort of thing.’
He’s checked it out, thought Sairey. He’s got it all fixed, if that’s what I want. What do I want?
She glanced at Vita as if in search of an answer, just as her father said, ‘What do you think, Vita?’
Why the hell doesn’t he ask me? But before she could voice her indignation, Vita said, ‘What do you think, Sairey?’ and she found herself thinking with equal anger, that’s typical! She always puts it down to me!
The incongruity struck her immediately, without lessening her annoyance, though she was no longer sure of its target.
She said, ‘Yes, I think that would be fine. Also, I think it would be nice to go to Aunt Celia’s. Vita mustn’t let me get in the way of her real work. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go and have a lie down.’
It was childish, she knew, but she felt as if she’d been treated as a child and she was not sure yet what the adult response ought to be.
Fanny spoke as she reached the door.
‘By the way, dear, the oddest thing. That raincoat you lost in the park that night. It’s turned up in a plastic bag on the doorstep. It looks as if it’s been dry cleaned. The oddest thing.’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Sairey, not catching Vita’s uncurious blue eyes.
The coat was lying on her bed. She examined it closely, went through the pockets. There was nothing. She stretched out on the bed and pulled the coat over her like a blanket.
After a while she fell asleep.
When she woke up she felt refreshed, and it wasn’t till she was standing under the shower that it occurred to her that, for the first time since her return from Spain, her drugless sleep had been completely dreamless.
OP ANTENOR CO-OP 17/33/7 RESTRIC (NON ATT)
DOC 4 AA/FE
ORIG a dream of darkness TYPSC pp 36-42 (PHOTOC)
At seven o’clock prompt, the door opened and two army captains came in, wearing full dress uniform. They were Nubis, with thin Nilotic faces and watchful eyes. One of them motioned Shem and me to stand close together. The other went quickly through the suite to check that we were alone. No attempt was made to check for listening devices, and I could only hope that this had been done earlier.
Satisfied, one of the Nubis went out into the corridor. There was a short pause, then Major General Idi Amin came in.
The first time I’d met him, I’d been a lieutenant in the KAR and he’d been a corporal. There’d been a lot of him then. As he soared up the promotion ladder after Independence, he seemed to put on weight with rank, and I reckon his general’s uniform contained enough cloth to fit out a small platoon.
‘Major Ellis,’ he said, using my terminal rank. ‘Nice to see you, Major.’
‘Plain Mr Ellis now, sir,’ I said, snapping him a salute. ‘Nice to see you too.’
This struck the right tone and he shook my hand, grinning. His palm, however, was damp and I knew there was still work to do. Everything was perfect for a coup except Amin’s nerve. Obote was in Singapore at the Commonwealth Conference, demanding that Britain should be chucked out because, within a month of Heath becoming Prime Minister, it had been disclosed that the UK was contemplating renewing arms sales to South Africa. This provided both the final provocation and the perfect opportunity to get rid of him.
‘I’m glad to hear that your overtime dispute has finally been settled,’ I said heartily.
Amin regarded me with that look of utter blankness with which NCOs the world over try to conceal utter incomprehension, then understanding dawned and he laughed loudly and said, ‘Oh yes, Uncle Felix got that fixed OK.’
Felix Onoma, Amin’s uncle, Minister of Defence, and Secretary General of the UPC, had just issued a directive saying that unless officers took leave in lieu of overtime payments immediately, they would lose it. By this device he had got most of those potentially loyal to Obote (mainly those from the northern tribes of the Acholi and Langi) separated from their troops. The Nubis (that is, Nubians, the army’s non-generic name for the West Nilers who comprised most of the rank and file, and from whom Amin had caused officers loyal to himself to be promoted) naturally had not taken up the offer.
Now Shem Seligmann spoke.
‘It would be surprising if the Minister of Defence’s success did not inspire the Minister of Justice to greater efforts. I believe the investigations into Brigadier Okoya’s murder and the army fund embezzlement case are both nearing conclusions.’
For a second I thought he’d gone too far, but I should have known my man. Shem was a soft-spoken Israeli who never started anything he was not confident of finishing. Just what evidence Mossad had implicating Amin in these crimes I don’t know, but clearly the General acknowledged its strength. He took half a step towards Seligmann, with a look on his face which seemed to promise that in the next couple of minutes Shem was likely to become, in Amin’s own favourite phrase, ‘a gone case’. Then he relaxed.
‘Major Ellis,’ he said. ‘This fella Heath going to give guns to B. J. Vorster, what’s he going to give to me?’
We’d been through it all before. I rapidly reiterated that, in my strictly unofficial opinion, it seemed likely that HM Government would rapidly recognize, and thus help legitimize, any new Ugandan government which commanded popular support, and that future levels of aid would certainly not sink below past levels. The details had, of course, been hammered out with the politicians like Onoma. But Amin wasn’t interested in those details even if I had the time, and he the brains, to understand them. What he wanted were promises that at the first sign of any threat to him personally, Britain and Israel would send in planes and tanks to put down the opposition.
My heart sank. A coup needed a figurehead but this could be a real mistake. I’m not saying I had any premonition of what was to come, but in my experience, a man who is brutal in authority and terrified in adversity is not good ruler material. As I looked at him, his great melon face oozing nervous sweat, I recalled the night of the 1968 attempt on Obote’s life. A colonel went to Amin’s house to tell him what had happened. Seeing soldiers pulling up outside his door, Amin panicked and made off out of the back, gashing himself badly as he clambered over his own security fence. It was after that, that his family name of Dada, which is Swahili for ‘sister’, came to have a mocking significance, though not many people mocked him to his face. Brigadier Okoya had tried that and he and his wife had ended up murdered.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, Shem Seligmann didn’t share my scruples about giving reassurance. To his threats about incriminating Amin, he now added promises to protect him with whatever he needed, from ju-jus to jets.
Ten minutes later, we all shook hands, and Idi and his entourage resumed their interrupted journey to the night-club on the sixteenth floor. We were in Kampala’s top hotel, the Apolo, changed after the coup to the Kampala International because Apolo was Milton Obote’s middle name. It had been Shem’s idea to meet here. As he said, when you’re built like Amin, it’s no use having secret meetings on a park bench. Shem, under his cover as an American businessman, had booked the suite on the tenth floor and Idi had simply stepped out of the lift and into the room.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘A schlemiel. Let’s hope you can control him.’
‘You mean, we can control him, don’t you?’
‘Come on,’ he grinned. ‘You Brits still think of this as part of the family estate. You know why Obote finally got up your long thin noses? It wasn’t because his Common Man’s Charter was too Marxist, it wasn’t because neither you nor the Kenyans want another socialist state tacked on to Tanzania.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘why was it?’
‘Because the bastard ploughed up the Kampala Sports Club’s cricket pitch to build his OAU Conference Centre!’
‘Very funny,’ I said. ‘You staying?’
‘Why not?’
There’s going to be a revolution, remember?’
‘Bloodless,’ he said. ‘We were promised bloodless.’
That just means the winners don’t intend to get hurt,’ I said. ‘Shalom.’
Toodle-oo,’ he said.
I went down to the lobby. It was full of tourists. At the desk, a couple of Americans were debating whether to take the earliest flight to Cairo, which meant leaving that night. Hang around, I thought, and you may have a story to bore your friends with for years. They must have been telepathic for they decided to stay. I asked the clerk to get me a call through to Nairobi. I planned to be back there myself before the fun started, but I knew Archie Archbell would be sitting at the end of the line.
