Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

chapter 19 (1)

There was mounds of paperwork to clear up. The authorities had wanted to bury them immediately in the local Muslim tradition, wrap the bodies in shrouds and put them in the ground with a branch to mark it. But they were Christians so they lay in a cement morgue at the back of the hospital, their bodies decomposing. Alex bought ice from the Holiday Inn, put it in plastic bags himself and laid it around them.

Finally, a little baksheesh helped speed the necessary stamps on the police reports, the death certificates, the customs and export papers. Alex didn't care what it cost. He didn't want them to rot in the heat. Someone went from the British Embassy and bought dry ice from the University science lab supplies and took it over to the morgue and had them place it next to the bodies, inside the cloth they'd wrapped around them. Seven days later, somehow automatically functioning, obsessed with the task at hand, Alex got them on a plane to London. A Funeral Home. Elizabeth's father had contacted one who was used to the business and had all the clearances, was to collect the bodies at Heathrow and re-embalm them, arrange a proper burial.

Alex rode on the same plane, their bodies together in a rough coffin-shaped crate. The altitude would keep them cool. That was his only luggage, his wife and child. They'd lost everything else when the ferry went down. He just hoped the plane would not be hijacked or something go wrong, something to delay them.

When they were disembarked and finally in the terminal, Alex phoned Elizabeth's parents and they met him at the airport. They drove him to the house where he related in detail what he remembered had happened, how it had been, how he'd tried to save them all and had been pulled from the water unconscious.

Elizabeth's father had some connections. He was going to investigate it, see if the company had been negligent with the safety of the ferry. Alex didn't care what he did. It had been an accident. It had happened, was over and they were not waking up again. He felt guilty that he had invited them for the holiday, tortured himself over and over that if only they had not got on that particular ferry it wouldn't have happened. It had been his idea. Elizabeth didn't like boats. If only he could change it, fix it, do it over again and have them waiting in the now empty house.

It was a small funeral closed caskets. They were buried out in Hampstead, side by side, in plots the family owned. That day it was cold. Tears poured down his cheeks, the salt, washed off by the rain.

For a month Alex stayed in their house and bought fresh flowers and went to the graveyard every morning to place them there. It was a ritual, a cleansing. He threw the amulet the juju man had sold him, which had been around his neck since he'd arrived in Africa, into the Thames.

Elizabeth's parents and sister were cold. Maybe it was his imagination but they appeared to blame him for taking them back to Africa again, for taking their lives. He and Elizabeth hadn't got on near the end, but he loved her and perhaps it had been just growing pains. He wished he could have lived it over, taken it back to do over again. All his life, things never seemed to work out.

After nearly two months of this mourning, Alex disposed of their possessions. He had no need of them -- he was alone. And there was no reason to stay in London. He had stopped going to the graveyard; the healing process had set in. He thought it best to get out, get away from England, block out their memory. He would run, escape.

Alex walked into Stirling Estalda's office on Fulham Road, asking for a job, willing to go anywhere to get out of his depression, get his mind cleared. The company personnel officer informed him they had a project -- building several paved roads through the states in Northern and Northeastern Nigeria. He knew the area, had lived there. It wasn't so bad - there were worse places.  It would be like going home in a way, so he signed a new contract and a week later, caught a British Airways night flight to Kano.

At the airport it started again -- the bombardment to his senses, that struggle for survival. Out of necessity, Alex got caught up in it, in the immediacy of the present. There was no room for not thinking, not concentrating. It worked, took his mind off any dwelling on the past.

He got through Customs easily and found himself in a taxi heading for the Central Hotel. Traffic seemed less chaotic than he remembered on Kashim Ibrahim Road in from the airport. There were several road blocks, one by the Queen's Cinema, another at the round-a-bout near the golf course. The military was back in power now, companies would get paid on time. Things looked to work better, more smoothly.

Once at the company compound, he settled into a routine, worked overtime when he could. They had hundreds of kilometres of road to base up and surface. Alex now was glad to be in Africa, glad to be in the sun and with the warm people who greeted him, asked "Ina gida?" of his family and then said, "Sorry." The people were not used to work, but were used to human suffering, had time to think of these things, were not in any rat race. He found the sunsets in the savannah, because the camp was far from town, peaceful. It was wide open space and flat and he could see for miles and the night sky was quiet and full of stars.

It helped to have a job to do. He was constructing something, building a road over sand and dried clay. And taking care of people, training them, giving them needed work. There was a sense of fulfilment, of accomplishment. The roads would help them get cattle and groundnuts and other products to the market towns, expand trading, improve the economy of the north. Soon, taxis and vans and cattle trucks would speed across the asphalt ribbon from Hadeja to Kano. It all had a filtering effect. People's lives would improve. It gave meaning to the long days, a reason to be alive.

Once, he had to go to Kano and had lots of time and side-tracked through Ngami to visit his old school, where he'd taught over four years ago now. He turned into the pot-holed road by the railway going to the school and drove  the gate, past his old house on the staff quarters. The papaya tree he had planted and watered so diligently rose above the walled compound, above the peak of the slate roof. He drove around the circle, past the remains of Malam Bukar's house which had been doused with kerosene and burned to the  ground in an act of juju revenge by the steward's crazy wife from Bendel State who had wanted to nurse her child in one of the rooms and been refused by Malam Bukar. She had fled and the flames had licked up the painted cement brick walls and caught on the tarred roof beams. He remembered it had been a windy day at the beginning of Harmattan and nothing had been saved, not an iron bed or a cooking pot. There were no fire-trucks, no water hoses, and all the students had run out of the classrooms to stand on the road and watch it collapse as it burned.