Terroir by Graham Mort Page B

on the curtains and caught the scent of cut grass where the gardeners were busy with sickles. A woman in a bright yellow gomesi was brushing fallen petals from the path with a broom. It made a soft, sifting sound, repetitive and soothing. A couple of cattle egret pecked at the lawn and a pied crow was mithering something that had died in the night.
    After breakfast I walked down to the gate to buy a newspaper from one of the boys who gathered there, working the traffic and passers by. I hadn’t seen much of McKenzie since Friday night. I wasn’t surprised after his performance at Al’s bar. All that beer and brown sugar. My new shoes felt good. Supple yet strong. They already had a layer of red dust. A woman passed me carrying a fat little girl in a frock made of pink gauze. She was sweating and cross. I could already hear hymns rising from the university chapel. One day I planned to give up fieldwork and teach somewhere. Maybe here where they needed engineers and surveyors and you could live cheaply. There was nothing for me at home now. Not since Helen had left me and taken the girls. For no reason, actually. I’d been faithful, but she didn’t think so. I missed Emma and Tracey. Every Christmas I got a letter from them as if she’d stood over them with a whip.
    Emma was the youngest at seven. Tracey was just nine. Emma had a harelip and cleft palate which had been repaired after a couple of operations. The surgeon had done a pretty good job. Helen even blamed me for that because it ran in the family as far back as my dad’s uncle. I don’t know what Helen thought I got up to when I was away. Not much but work, actually. I suppose you couldn’t blame her, stuck with two kids when my job was a whole continent away. The guys I met who worked out here were mostly fucked up and mostly divorced. A lot of them went with young black girls. But I didn’t want to be loved for money.
    My new shoes felt good against the crumbling footpaths and pavements of Wandegeya. Nayanprit Singh . That was his name. A gentleman. A gentle man with a shoe emporium. His breath had smelt of peppermint in that dark little back room. I’d tried to memorise the location of the shop, the alleyways that my Ugandan guide had taken me through. It wasn’t easy, though I remembered the touch of the old man’s hand against mine, soft and insistent.
    When I got back to the guesthouse I found McKenzie, still looking sheepish, sitting over a late breakfast on the terrace, watching two African boys play tennis on the clay court. They ran like deer, retrieving the ball from impossibly angled shots with vicious topspin. I tossed McKenzie The Monitor and ordered some tea. Then I stretched my legs and leaned to wipe the dust from my shoes. My father would have loved them. Maybe shoes were the only things he had loved. Not my mother, not me or Steve. Certainly not sheet metal or iron, which he beat with deepening hatred.
    I looked across town to where the tower of a mosque leaned against the sky. It had never been finished. It needed pulling down before it fell down. I’d done some calculations once and worked out that it shouldn’t be standing at all. But this was Uganda, where the impossible happened every day, where red tape could be finessed with something small.
    A couple of brown parrots were quarrelling in the bushes. The leather of the shoes had a deep burnish where I’d wiped the dust off. I thought about Nayanprit Singh, serene in the depths of his shop. I thought of the shoemakers of Nakasero and of my father. The last circle of hell would be an everlasting absence of good footwear. I thought about Helen and the girls and how I could have tried harder. Maybe. I’d call her when I got home, get some presents for the girls in Wandegeya where they sold banana - fibre dolls, hippos and giraffes carved from wood.
    McKenzie was smiling at something in the paper. Moses appeared at my elbow carrying a