Excerpt from Cry of the Justice Bird

Chapter 1



I first met Chloris at the funeral of Smallboy Mushewa. Temba and I had arrived with the intention of arranging it but we were too late – AIDS had beaten us to it. So all we could do was watch while Chloris and a straggly group from the Rahab Centre stood around the grave as Father Kaze mouthed the Christian burial the little bastard didn't deserve. Instead of burying him we came back that night and dug him up. We’d wanted him alive very, very badly, but dead had to do: we weren’t going to let it spoil our carefully arranged plan and, looking ahead, it seemed a good idea to get some practice in. So we drove him a couple of miles out into the bush and, by the light of the two Maglite torches I’d bought, organized him and our kit on a groundsheet.

It took us a couple of hours to take him apart. We did it very slowly and very neatly, just like we’d have dealt with a rabbit on the school’s dissecting table, not because we wanted to prolong the process but because we both teetered on the edge of a screaming, murderous breakdown and, if we hadn’t been so tightly controlled, we might have lost it completely and smashed his remains to a bloody pulp – which would have rather spoiled the point of the exercise.

All the time we talked to him. We explained who we were. We reminded him of Rebecca and Annabel and what he’d done to them. We listed a fair number of his other achievements, stuff that Alice and the girls had given us. We didn’t know all the horrors because, in the years he and his mates had rampaged across Boromundi, there must have been so many, and so much misery, but the ladies had collected a remarkable amount of detail. Telling him helped us keep control of ourselves. There’s also the point that, if Chloris was right and the little bugger had, because he’d confessed his sins, made it to heaven, the angels welcoming him might have heard and been quite interested in what we had to say.

When we’d finished we loaded his bits into a couple of plastic bin-bags and chucked them into the back of the school truck. Being Boromundi, by that time it was raining, which didn’t prevent Temba from driving us through the village while I sat in the back and scattered Smallboy’s remains along the main street. The place must have heard us coming because it was deserted and in darkness as we passed, but the pye dogs welcomed us and seemed quite pleased with what we had to offer. We stopped twice. At the village shop I climbed onto Temba’s shoulders to arrange Smallboy’s testicles so they dangled artistically over the front door. Then on our way out, we left his head sitting in a bloody puddle on the top step of the Rehab Centre, his eyes staring out across the countryside he’d so abused.

Chloris told me later that she'd been sickened by what she saw. Temba and I felt sick too, that Smallboy hadn’t been alive to appreciate what we'd done to him.

Smallboy was only fourteen. There are people who will say that it wasn't his fault he'd turned out so rotten, that, as a kid, he’d been deprived, traumatised, brutalised, bestialised and brainwashed. Personally I don't give a shit what had happened to him or whose fault it was. Smallboy wasn’t thick. He had plenty of chance, like all the rest of us, to behave himself in a civilised fashion. He chose not to because he thought he could get away with it and, because we failed to catch him alive, in a way he did.

After Smallboy’s funeral, as the others trailed back towards the Rehab Centre, Chloris suddenly headed towards us. Dressed as we were, with our artistic, black and white faces, and with Temba carrying that evil American M16 carbine of his, we might have done better to make ourselves scarce, but neither of us was going to be seen running from a nun. But what confronted us was no ordinary nun. She was young, my age, medium height, and, as best I could tell, slim. The coarse black cloth of her habit suited her because it contrasted wonderfully with her pale, flawless, almost doll-like skin, and with deep, sapphire blue eyes set in the softest and gentlest of faces.

As she talked to us, as she described the exhausting hours spent nursing her ‘poor little Hezikiah’ through bouts of screaming agony, diarrhoea and vomiting, her innocence, her transparent virtue, her cloud-cuckooland otherworldliness suddenly infuriated me. Breathlessly beautiful she might have been, but she was so utterly naïve, such a suicidal innocent in a land ravaged by monsters, that I stood, staring at her, struggling with an insane urge to grab her by the throat, drag her to the truck, and sit on her head until darkness fell, when I would force her to witness the justice which, given the chance, Temba and I would have meted out to a living Smallboy ‘Hezikiah’ Mushewa.

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