Read Online Terroir by Graham Mort - Free Book Online Page A

had left. Ellen put the candle down and sat down on the empty bed, hugging herself, feeling the chill on her legs, letting her cold fingers stray to her belly. She put her hands together to pray and the light of the moon brightened again, casting shadows from the headstones in the graveyard, tearing clouds open, looming, unstoppable.

THE SHOEMAKERS OF NAKASERO
    The call of the Imam woke me. His voice was distorted by the speaker system, like the bit on that single by Cher where she sounds like she’s singing down a drainpipe. What was it called? Another blank one. I lifted my head. The pillow was damp. Jesus . No aircon in the university guesthouse but the room was pretty cool. My tongue felt like last night’s pit latrine. I couldn’t remember much about how we’d got home, just the taxi lurching over potholes and someone spewing out of the back window. McKenzie . My clothes were crumpled on the floor like a man hunched into a foetal position. They looked how I felt. I took a swig from the bottle of water beside the bed and dozed off again. When I woke, my head was banging. I searched for my watch, but I was still wearing it. The hands glowed in the light that filtered through the mosquito netting. Eight - thirty. Fucking hell!
    This was supposed to be a rest day. Saturday morning in Kampala. I wondered what Helen and the girls would be doing. It was still early in the UK. They’d probably have breakfast then pile into the car to see her parents at Saddleworth. Her parents who’d never liked me. I wondered if she was still seeing that guy from the Building Society. Gary? Gordon?
    When I tilted my head, a pain shot from side to side as if I’d just touched two wires together. I let it sink slowly back to the pillow. Believe . That was the name of the record. Weird, how things come back.
    I must have dozed for another hour and was woken by the sound of a croaky American voice using the phone in the guesthouse lobby. I love you too honey. Give my love to the kids. Yeah, yeah. Love you too . Sometimes he was on the phone at three in the morning, calling his family in Colorado, driving me nuts. Always the same droning accent. And love, love, love. He’d been out here for a couple of months fitting a new X - ray system at Mulago Hospital. Long enough to get lonely. I was just back from three days up country with McKenzie and we’d got wrecked at Al’s bar, firing down Nile Specials and playing pool with the young prostitutes. I had a vague memory of McKenzie dancing on the table to Queen with his arms round a nineteen - year - old called Grace who had a bare midriff, small breasts, and was high on ganja and free beer. Another one bites the dust.
    We’d been taking readings and rock samples from the river below Jinja where they were planning a hydro - station a few miles down the White Nile to sort out Kampala’s knackered power supply. There was already a dam at the Owen Falls, but that wasn’t enough any more. We’d spent three nights in a tent, McKenzie moaning about the heat, mosquitoes eating us alive. I told him how the crocs crawled out of the river at night and could take a young antelope in one lunge. How they dragged and drowned their prey before eating it. That quietened him a bit. I saw his wind - up torch flickering at night through the tent fabric. Fortunately we had a tent each – me, McKenzie, and James. James was the driver and cook: tall, elegant, and a genius on pot - holed roads. He was from western Uganda, near Mbarara. Cattle country. He spoke Runyankore, Luganda, and Swahili and three or four other dialects, including English of course, so he was pretty useful.
    We’d got stopped at a roadblock on the way back to Kampala: boy soldiers in camouflage fatigues and maroon berets looking through all the boxes of rock samples in the back of the truck. The corporal looked about eighteen and the kid who swung open my door had his worn - out AK47 slung