The Other Half of Augusta Hope. Joanna Glen
but as I counted everyone in, behind the bush by the stream, he wasn’t there. We found his burnt body too late, cowering in the corner of our hut.
‘Wilfred’s still got the rope around his ankle,’ I said to Víctor. ‘The one that used to join onto Claude’s ankle. He won’t take it off, and I can’t ask him why because he won’t speak any more. Not a word since Claude died.’
I told him that my mother wasn’t feeling too good, but she wouldn’t go and see the doctor because all doctors were Tutsi and she didn’t trust them.
Things went on pouring out of my mouth, and Victor went on nodding.
He told me some things about his life. How he was setting up a school for deaf and blind children, up the hill, bringing them out of the shadows so that they wouldn’t feel ashamed of themselves any more. He invited me to come and see them, and I shook their hands, and Víctor gave me mango fruit chopped up in porridge in the little kitchen of his house.
‘Is Spain really over there?’ I asked him. ‘At the top of Africa and over the sea?’
I felt light coming into my body at the thought of this country that was real and full of peace and sunshine, and not so very far away.
‘It really is over there,’ said Víctor.
‘What’s it like?’ I asked him.
‘There’s sea pretty much all the way round, and people take picnics to the beach in the summer, and go swimming. We have festivals in the street at Christmas and Easter, when the men wear felt hats, and the women wear spotty dresses and roses in their hair – and we have this dance called flamenco.’
‘Did you ever dance flamenco?’ I asked him.
Víctor nodded.
‘I wasn’t always a priest,’ he said, laughing.
‘Is it like our dancing?’ I asked.
‘It goes something like this,’ said Víctor.
He got up off the little wooden chair and threw his hands in the air, and he started to dance about, with his hips swaying and his feet stamping.
‘The woman dances like this …’ he said, and now he was really laughing, and so was I, and he looked very funny with his big grey beard and his pinky skin, and his baggy trousers, swaying his hips and turning in circles and swishing out his imaginary dress.
A man called Nelson Mandela came on the radio.
Víctor stopped dancing and turned the volume up.
This Nelson Mandela had a voice you didn’t forget – kind of soft but hard underneath – like wool with steel inside it.
Nelson Mandela had made a suggestion to President Buyoya that the Tutsi and the Hutu could take it in turns to lead the country because this might stop Burundians fighting each other and dying all the time.
Víctor clapped his hands and said, ‘Yes! Yes!’
I said, ‘It’s so obvious. Why didn’t anyone think of it before?’
‘Because nobody likes to share power,’ said Víctor.
Power-sharing was proving a trial in Willow Crescent as, a year after the first Craft Fair, the committee prepared, with renewed vigour, for the second.
Janice Brown brought up the subject of whether the Craft Fair really was the best place for Graham Cook, and Barbara Cook got straight up from the table, and, as she did so, her wrap-around Indian skirt started to unwrap itself, revealing her large white pants and her spongey right buttock.
A terrible silence fell on the committee meeting, as the front door slammed shut.
My mother said, ‘Oh dear.’
Then the others all started saying that when you are on a committee you have to have difficult conversations, and you couldn’t hide from the truth, which was plain to see, that Graham Cook put off buyers from buying.
Julia and I were sitting there, good and quiet. She was pressing flowers in a wood-framed flower press, and I was leafing through my book of Latin phrases, when out of my mouth came the words, ‘If this Craft Fair is to help Graham Cook, then he might rather you didn’t bother so much about how much money his school got, and you just let him come.’
Julia raised her hand, the way my mother used to do when my father didn’t brake early enough in the car.
My mother sat completely still as if someone had pressed pause on her, before Hilary Hawkins said, ‘Nobody ever told me that this was about raising money for Graham Cook’s school.’
‘Who got the money last year?’ I said to my mother. ‘Didn’t it go to Graham Cook’s school?’
Now Julia took my hand in hers, which meant shut up.
‘I’m not sure,’ said my mother. ‘I’m not the treasurer. The treasurer is Janice Brown.’
Julia looked at my mother and then at me and then at my mother, and I knew that my mother had lied to my father to get him to agree to hold the Craft Fair in our garden.
‘Perhaps we could give a percentage this year,’ said Janice Brown, blushing, and also glowering at me when she thought my mother wasn’t looking – and thus not loving her neighbour at all, like it said on the white plastic sacks in which she collected our old clothes to send on to African children.
After that burst of noise, there was an even bigger silence, and into that silence came the noise of the train. We let the train blast into our silence. We were quite used to it. We didn’t know that Barbara Cook had gone for a walk to compose herself. We didn’t know that she’d got stuck the other side of what everyone in Hedley Green called, with a sigh, the crossing.
Hedley Green Level Crossing was always in the news – it caused people to give birth to babies in their cars and miss their A level exams, and it was a temptation to school boys, people said, and there were always bunches of dead roses tied to the fence where a boy called Fatty Jenkins had died playing with his friends at the crossing. Except, once he was dead, you were supposed to call him Frank Jenkins, or even Francis, which was the name he was christened.
His mother had a plaque nailed to the gate, and she would often be seen there, polishing it and watching the trains go by and staring about the place as if there was some small chance that Fatty Jenkins might come walking out of the long grass, after a very long game of hide-and-seek.
Francis Jenkins, 1980–1992, who died at the crossing and is now with the angels.
To me, sitting on the colline, trying to think of a way to change our future, the crossing meant the little stretch of water between Africa and Europe.
It meant peace and hope and the chance of a new life.
The train passed and the crossing gates came up – and Barbara Cook marched back through the door, her face set, her skirt done up, and she said that she was resigning. My mother said that of course she wasn’t, and they’d all agreed that Graham Cook was most welcome at the Craft Fair, and they went on having their committee meeting as if nothing at all had happened.
This time, I’d asked to be in charge of second-hand books. Amongst the tatty Enid Blyton paperbacks, I found an old leather book of Victorian children’s poems and