Joanna Glen - The Other Half of Augusta Hope

Graham Cook and I sat with our red plastic buses in the unexpected sunshine, and he seemed comforted and hardly made any strange noises at all. Julia couldn’t move from her position at the Lucky Dip over by the outside toilet, but she smiled at me in that way she had.

My father came over to me and, once Barbara Cook was out of earshot, he said under his breath, ‘For God’s sake get up, Augusta. You’re making a fool of yourself – and people will think you’re a bit …’

‘A bit what?’ I said.

‘A bit …’ said my father. ‘A bit, you know, not all there. Spasticated .’

‘I’m staying right here,’ I said, ‘in solidarity with Graham Cook.’

Then my father took hold of my upper arm and dragged me upwards with a big tug, which made me feel as if my arm and my shoulder were going to come apart from each other, and in a strange tight voice, quite menacing, he whispered in my ear, ‘Get over to the Lucky Dip and help your sister.’

Graham Cook moaned and wailed and tried to run away, so Jim Cook had to hold him in an arm lock.

I shut myself in the outside toilet and cried and cried at the shock of it all, and when I came out, with my red bus, there was a long queue, and Angela Dunnett said, ‘We were about to call the Fire Bwigade. We thought you were locked in.’

I felt really bad that Angela Dunnett was being so nice to me, and had gone and bought me a cupcake with butter icing from the cake stall to help cheer me up, and I determined that I would never ever again make jokes about the way she said r.

My friend, Ian, turned up and he bought the ugly ragdoll with the yellow plaits as a joke, and we went behind the outside toilet and had a tug-of-war with her – and all her stuffing fell out of her middle.

Then I went and stood next to Julia at the Lucky Dip holding the red bus. Julia didn’t ask me why I’d been crying. She just reached for my hand, but when my father came by, his face all tense and contorted, she let it go. He did another loud whisper in my ear which said, ‘Put that damned bus down.’

Julia bit her lip and she puffed up the sawdust in the Lucky Dip to bring the remaining prizes to the surface.

All the happiness had seeped out of her face.

I remember the day I met Víctor, the Spanish priest, out on the road on his bike. We started talking, and I found that things came pouring out of my mouth, things I’d been storing up inside, not knowing what I could do with them.

I told Víctor that, the week after Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated, my father, Melchior, died too.

‘The soldiers came to our colline ,’ I said. ‘And my father turned his cheek because he wanted to break the chain.’

I told him that the next time they came, Wilfred the English missionary stepped in front of our pregnant neighbour, Honorine, so that the soldiers would shoot him instead of her.

‘I’ll never forget the way he was smiling, though he was dead,’ I said. ‘He was lying there amongst the daffodils his mother had sent over from England. I felt so bad about what our country had done to her son.’

Víctor nodded.

‘My mother went with the women to the rubbish dump,’ I said, ‘and they made daffodils out of old tin cans to put around his grave.’

I took a deep breath because I didn’t want to speak about Claude.

I’d told Claude to run when the soldiers came with flaming torches, 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.’