Sarah Myles began to write fiction after graduating in literature from Monash University, and studying at the University of Western Australia. She has trained and worked as a nurse, travelled through Europe, the Americas and Africa. She is the author of Transplanted. Currently she divides her time between writing and family, living in inner Melbourne and on the west coast of Victoria.

  First published in 2018

  Copyright © Sarah Myles 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  The epigraph is a two-line excerpt from the poem ‘Feared Drowned’ from Satan Says by Sharon Olds, © 1980. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76063 251 9

  eBook ISBN 978 1 76063 719 4

  Cover design: Romina Panetta

  Cover image: Matt Champlin / Getty Images

  For my family, everything

  Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

  —Sharon Olds, ‘Feared Drowned’

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Northern Uganda

  8 March 2008—Morning

  Tessa stood with the men, women and children who had gathered in the centre of the compound—some forty villagers, jostling, talking. There was dust in her throat and her heat-swollen feet were tight in her hiking boots. The braids she had plaited that morning hung like weights. She watched the boy’s family approach him; among them was a lean man in a yellow shirt followed by a woman whose lips had been cut—punishment by the rebels for accused treachery and in accordance with their reading of Psalm 12:3, May the Lord cut off their flattering lips and silence their boastful tongues. The man was the boy’s father, and he carried a basin of water in one hand and a broad-bladed panga in the other, his face solemn, his eyes fixed. This was ritual, a tribal affair. There was none of the glossy exoticism of tourist guides, no drums or dancing, or women in bark skirts with jingling gara on their legs. This was village business.

  Dominic Oculi stood nearby. He wore an open-necked shirt, which revealed the gold chain and crucifix that hung around his neck. He touched the tiny gold body of Christ then lifted his head. Tessa caught his eye, and he nodded, but without his usual calmness. His eyes darted from one person to the next in a way that suggested he was unsure how this ceremony would go.

  They had brought Oraako, a twelve-year-old boy from the rehabilitation centre, here. Driving for more than an hour through grasslands dotted with kigelia trees, their odd sausage-shaped fruits hanging like Christmas decorations, the jeep had bumped over the powdery red road while Oraako nursed his festering foot and pressed his face to the window with the same vacant look he’d had since returning from the bush.

  Tessa watched him now. He was small for his age, with brambly hair and a stalk-like neck, but above his top lip there was a fine nimbus of hair. He looked into the distance as though he would rather be somewhere else and, balancing his weight on his good foot, Tessa could see tension in the way he held his shoulders, the way he listened. People here wanted to know: had he turned into a bedo lee lee, a wild thing, after so many years in the bush, or was he still a dano adana, a human person?

  As his father shuffled forward, the crowd pressed closer. Behind him was the boy’s mother, whose scarred lips formed an ugly inward pucker. They had healed, but they were lumpy, a keloid reminder of what should or should not have been said. All the while she kept up a soft mournful moaning which seemed to come without any movement from her distorted mouth. In her left hand she carried a chicken whose feet were bound, although its wings were free and it flapped wildly, making a frantic bawking sound as it struggled. The crowd talked loudly, but as soon as Oraako’s parents came to a halt they fell silent.

  The boy’s father nodded and Oraako sat down on the branch-swept earth. Placing the bowl at his son’s feet, the man dipped his gnarled hand into it and sprinkled water on Oraako’s wounded foot, then took the chicken from his wife and with one deft spin broke its neck. Tessa watched. She would record the details later, noting the way the boy’s father laid the bird on the ground, how he used the panga to cleave it in two, then wiped its blood and faeces onto Oraako’s hands and infected foot.

  The boy flinched and straightened. Tessa felt the sting too. Would such a ritual make his infection worse? She thought of the antiseptics her mother, a doctor, had insisted on using for the smallest cut. Tessa tightened her arms against her chest and looked on in silence. Faith is one thing, she told herself, science another—or perhaps they are the same; you just need one to rule the other out.

  The crowd formed a close semicircle around the boy and began a rapid chant in Acholi as the suppurating wound was caked in chicken shit. The panga, which the boy’s father placed on the ground, shone in the sun. The blade was sticky with blood and had already begun to attract a swarm of tiny black flies that congregated in a dark line along the sharp edge. Again, Tessa recalled the way her mother tended wounds, whether a deep knife-cut or a jagged laceration; how her brow would gently furrow with concentration, and how she had once removed a fishhook from Stephen’s forefinger. Stephen had howled that day, his blood dripping into the bait bucket. The sound of her older brother’s gulping cries had made Tessa bold. You’re such a wimp, she had said daringly, although she winced now as Oraako held his foot. The boy’s nose oozed with snot; he stared at the blood that soaked into the earth in a dark irregular shape then looked back at his father’s hands. A flicker of alarm crossed his father’s face, but at last he nodded and Oraako bowed his head before limping back into the crowd, where he seemed to dissolve into the shadows of those who surrounded him.

  All around, women’s voices lifted in high-pitched ululations—discordant at first, like instruments tuning in an orchestra pit, until together they found their fast pulsing rhythm and the crowd moved together and began to clap.

  When Dominic closed his eyes, Tessa was unsure if he actually swayed or it just seemed that way. Of course, this kind of thing helped to heal. The Acholi people were deeply superstitious. How else could the Lord’s Resistance Army have gained such a stronghold in this country if not for a willingness to believe? ‘People want to be led, and for many Joseph Kony is a god,’ Dominic had told her. ‘His followers say he is invested with the power of the Holy Spirit, that bullets do not harm his soldiers.’

  Tessa had heard the stories, and pursued them. She wanted to understand the mess that nightly news reports claimed brought children back without a childhood. There were so many questions, they nagged, they burnt. She stepped closer to Oraako’s mother, who wore a loose-fitting gomesi in a swirling pattern of blue and green. It was faded and frayed, except for the patch of plaid on the sleeve that had been carefully sewn on with red thread. As the clapping quickened, Oraako’s mother lifted her arms as if to pull the strength of the sky towards her son. She was not old, although she looked it. Her mouth like melted wax, her body stooped. She moved towards Oraako, who stepped back into the crowd, and her eyes filled with tears, then suddenly—in a gesture that seemed part lunge, part dance—she held out her arms to her son. Oraako’s grave expression did not change; instead it suggested that he had no idea who she was. But then without warning he dropped to the ground and another woman took him by the arm and urged him to stand again, her loud wailing like metal scraping over metal.

  A warm breeze had picked up and Tessa could feel the sweat evaporate from her skin. Her own tangy scent filled the air. She had tried several times to interview Oraako—once on her own, and twice through an interpreter. He answered in Acholi with a smattering of English, but for the most part he did not want to speak to her about what had happened to him. All she knew were the accounts others, particularly Beatrice, the social worker, had given—that when the rebels abducted him they cut his mother’s lips and forced him to watch, that he had been gone for more than three years, raiding and killing across the border, but had escaped several weeks ago, his feet shredded and ulcerated from the long distance he h

ad walked.

  Two months earlier, when Tessa arrived in this part of northern Uganda to overwhelming hospitality and constant questions, huts of mud and thatch, red earth under cloudy skies and low hills, it smelt like nowhere else she’d ever been—sour cassava, dusty cow manure, frank sewage, burning rubbish. There were things that unnerved her: the raw stump of an amputee, the blind eyes of a child—smoky white orbs, like the eyes of a baked fish. For all her travel and education, a privileged world had filtered the details of the lives she was only beginning to witness now. She half listened to the advice her parents gave her and nodded at the cautionary tales from her colleagues and friends, but mostly she wanted to understand more. She was trying to find a way into her work and wanted to make her research count. In the early 2000s, when images of thousands of children taking refuge in the town of Gulu first hit mainstream television, she had watched from a distance. Now her research in post-traumatic stress in children had brought her to these former child soldiers. It was estimated that upwards of twenty thousand children had been abducted in the last two decades of civil conflict. These children had been indoctrinated and damaged, yet some were less likely to develop post-traumatic stress than others.

  Why? Because they had family support or were naturally resilient or, as some argued, they were predisposed to violence? She was collating data and wrote her observations in the academic language she’d learnt, drafted and redrafted to shape the material she felt was required of her. It was slow work, invisible work, and she had to check her impatience. Sometimes, when it was going badly, she wondered if she was pushing too hard, looking for conclusions that didn’t exist. What she wanted was to be authentic. There was pressure to be original, to do more fieldwork, and she had been advised that in order to get a postdoc position, she would need to publish at least one substantial paper. Something groundbreaking. She was unsure and anxious, but she had been lucky enough to get a small university grant and had self-funded the rest. Her networking had brought her here, and then there had been a generous offer by Dominic to stay as long as she needed.

  As the chanting continued, Oraako’s father smeared blood on his son’s chest, his long finger moving in an arc just above the heart. For some time he let his fingertip rest there—a light, almost tender touch—then slowly he took his finger away and washed his hands in the basin of water. Afterwards, he spilt what water was left onto the ground and immediately the earth changed colour, the dry soil becoming a deep fertile crimson.

  The sky was overcast. Long grey clouds marbled the west. The day’s heat was building. Soon the wet season would come and the weeks of billowing red dust would turn to a dark sticky mud. People had been making offerings for good rains too. In the middle of the night food was left in certain trees where it was believed their ancestors’ spirits were most active. Ceremony, ritual, seasonal shifts—Tessa was increasingly drawn to such markers. The passing of time was becoming a drumbeat: What are you going to do with your life? Perhaps it had always affected her in this onrushing way, but it was stronger now, brewing—a heart-in-the-throat feeling that came with a wave of panic in the knowledge that today was her birthday and already she was thirty.

  Then, as if a stage direction had been given, the clapping slowed and the women’s tongue-trilling cries crescendoed before softening again. Oraako’s mother carefully scooped up the slaughtered chicken’s liver and its stringy intestines and placed them in an empty bowl while the other villagers watched and continued to stamp their feet. When Oraako’s mother walked away with the bowl of entrails balanced on her head, a large man in a shirt with an elaborately embroidered collar lifted his hand and the crowd began to break up into smaller groups. They dispersed, and Dominic moved through the crowd to join her. He looked in the boy’s direction. ‘You saw that this boy, Oraako, was not getting better?’

  Tessa nodded and Dominic continued. ‘We have to be open to the beliefs of the child and those of his family when they trust that this will cure him.’ He spoke in the soft manner of his people, his English strangely formal. He reminded her of an old-fashioned teacher, someone who believed in politeness. She liked him—he had acted as her guide and taken time with her. He was kind, but possibly a bit damaged too. He said his dreams plagued him.

  ‘They are worried he has cen,’ Dominic added. ‘That evil spirits are in his head. The intention is to cleanse him of any demons that will cripple him in the future.’

  Tessa looked at Oraako, who remained with his father and the man in the embroidered shirt. ‘Will he go back to the hospital and get them to care for his foot there?’ she asked tentatively.

  Dominic shook his head. ‘That is not possible; the hospital is overrun. Besides, he has already had a course of antibiotics.’

  Tessa tried not to sound argumentative although it probably came out that way. ‘True, but those drugs were more than four years out-of-date—and what’s to say it’s not a fungal infection or that it hasn’t got into the bone?’

  ‘I thought you were a doctor of psychology?’

  She allowed herself to smile. ‘Yes,’ she said sheepishly, ‘I am.’

  ‘Well then, you know that this is not just about tribal medicine, it’s about the boy being accepted back by his family. His father and his uncle here believe that because his wound will not heal, it is a sign of his wrongdoing. They are ashamed by the killing he has done. Most important now is reconciliation. That is true healing.’

  The men’s voices rose then sank again to a murmur. Oraako looked on. His arms were thin, although his hands were large and callused. He had picked up a stick and was using it to spread the blood that had spilt on the ground.

  ‘You know we are desperate for peace,’ Dominic continued. ‘After more than twenty years we would try anything to close this chapter of hatred—I would try anything.’ As he spoke, he made a gesture of insistence, tapping his own chest so that the thin fabric of his shirt stretched and the crucifix was knocked aside.

  He was an Acholi man, he had grown up in the township of Gulu, and although only ten years older than her, it seemed as though he had been dealt a terrible blow and absorbed it. She’d heard a rumour that he was a returned soldier himself. For a while she wasn’t sure whether he’d been with the government forces or the rebels until one of the staff members at the centre mentioned that he had been with both. Apparently it was not that uncommon.

  ‘I like to read,’ he told her when she first arrived. ‘Reading is my passion. In Kampala, I bought myself the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and now I’m reading it little by little. I cannot eat without reading. When I eat, I like to have a book lying open in front of me.’

  She had seen him do this and admired his self-taught education, his patience. There were books in his office to rival those in her father’s study: The Rape of the Nile, the Bible, Dante’s The Divine Comedy. In pride of place he kept a tattered blue board edition of the Acoli Macon which, he told her, was a record of his people’s tribal history. It contained myths and stories compiled by some missionary or other. He invited her to borrow his books, which she did, drawn to the Acoli Macon but also to The Divine Comedy, so gruesomely realised by Gustave Doré’s detailed illustrations. She had leafed through each page, followed each canto, a witness to so many terrifying punishments that she had yearned for the end and the place where the two tiny pilgrims could once more walk beneath the stars. The Christian idea of legge del contrappasso—the law of retribution or equal suffering in retaliation for a crime committed—seemed at odds with any notion of reconciliation or forgiveness.

  When Oraako’s uncle walked off, the boy’s father picked up the bloodstained panga, wiped it carefully across a stone then slung it into his belt. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and Oraako raised his head and moved forward, hopping on one leg with a skill that adjusted itself to his injury.

  ‘Timokeca,’ Dominic said, bowing as they walked past. ‘Now you begin again.’

  Oraako’s father nodded, but the boy showed no sign that he had heard Dominic.

  Tessa watched them walk across the compound. ‘Timokeca?’ she asked.

  Dominic turned to her. ‘You have heard this word before? It means to pardon.’

 

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