Dada 145

'Each one of them would turn their evidence if offered the chance or if they were on trial here today' he said. He jeered at Shabela and Iskra. ‘ Only one has had the decency to come forward and stand before you with an honest heart.’ he said. You could still hear a rack of sobbing from the court but I could not look at the place where it was coming from. It was like the weeping noise of the stream behind the hut that fateful Sunday; the gurgling sound of the woman who gushed out her truth to me like broken waters around a rock. She could be my auntie, my mother’s sister, my Dada’s daughter, my mother? The prosecutor’s words seemed to make much effect on the jury and the public. My lawyer merely shrugged his shoulders and wiped the sweat from his forehead but you could see he was rattled. Mo’s words had not been good. Then the court rose like a flapping of wings. As I was being taken from the courthouse to the prison van, I was conscious for a few brief moments of the once familiar feel of a Spring evening out of doors, the cool and the rain were there of course, we would never escape that, but there was a lightening sky west of the river that sprang from the south China Sea and momentarily set everywhere pink. Sitting in the darkness of the prison van, with the rain drumming on the steel grilles like some form of corrugated chorus, I recognised that after this light there would be a sunset. With all that came the characteristic sounds of the place I loved, the buzz and thrum of the docks, the gangs swarming to the ships and those in from the country for the early markets walking through the dusk. This certain hour of the day I had always enjoyed and walked home in the thought of food and the television and the rain, and of the sun spreading across the island from the rivers in the west to the forests of the south. The shouts of newspaper boys, dressed all in plastic above their shorts, their papers protected, the call of the gulls on the wharf or starlings in the city gardens, the cries of the hot noodle stalls and squeal of the trolley buses that ran between the water and the central districts, the sounds that came down from the upper town of my prison and how they met with the sounds rising up from the suddenly still harbour come to form a sort of whispering chorus that became quieter and quieter until the real darkness hammered itself down upon me.