Free The South Lawn Plot by Ray O'Hanlon Page B

with the hurricane lamp that was just about keeping at bay the pitch darkness inches beyond the rotting verandah.
    John, the dissonant priest, and Pender had spent many hours by the lamp discussing all manner of things. Sleep was impossible unaided. The dead air conditioner was a casualty of three civil wars. So they had sipped Johnny Walker from chipped china cups and matched the alcohol intake with an equally significant consumption of nicotine.
    John, whose priestly calling had been revealed to Pender after about a week spent at the old mission, had a taste for a strong French brand. He had laid responsibility for his habit on an old Belgian priest, a Father Jules. The man was a seer who had claimed that his chain smoking was merely a last ditch effort to counteract the legions of night insects. After forty years of defending himself, with a fair degree of success, Fr. Jules had succumbed to emphysema.
    â€œIt was a fair enough deal,” said Father John. “Four decades of not being bitten to death for a few rather uncomfortable months at the end.”
    Pender, sucking on his American brand, had nodded in agreement at this weighing of relative agony.
    â€œRight now, I'm all for the ciggies,” he said and blew a smoke ring in the general direction of the ceiling fan which had quit, again.
    Pender had been wary of the priest when he had first answered the question as to his calling in life. Father John, whose surname he had never discovered, had evidently detected this because he had quickly qualified his answer with claims of coercion by his mother. Priests, he acknowledged, were not generally known for stating they had taken Holy Orders simply because they had been betrayed by a lover.
    Pender had replied that he had initially thought Father John was a civilian aid worker. He admitted to being unaware that his lodging, set up for him by a contact in the capital, had once been a mission. It bore none of the usual trappings, people being the most noticeable absence. But other things had been missing too: crucifixes, pictures of the pope, a saint or two; even Jesus.
    The civil war had been to blame, Father John explained. A priest was precious little protection against an assault rifle, especially an English priest with a less than convincing command of French and absolutely no words in the local tongue.
    The school and the clinic had been mothballed after customers had fled to the capital 150 miles away. Lacking any clear instruction from his order in England, Father John had decided to hang on in the hope of better times. An elderly local man, with some unpronounceable biblical name, who had lived atthe mission since an orphan childhood, was the only other inhabitant. Pender's arrival, naturally, had been an event.
    And so the two men had settled into the routine of staying as cool as possible in the heat of the day and as sane as possible during the heat of the night.
    Pender's assignment had been to get to meet and photograph Jonas Sem, a rebel leader who had been steadily gaining ground against government troops. Because of this, he had been arousing a degree of western media interest, not least on the grounds that he had once attended the Sorbonne and had appeared to have a remote idea how a shell-shocked nation such as his might somehow settle down enough to give its children a chance of reaching twenty.
    But time had passed, and different stories had started to filter out of the bush where Sem was holed up with an army estimated at five to as many as ten thousand fighters.
    Nobody had paid too much attention to the first reports of Sem's praise for some of Africa's more dubious national leaders. Sem was known for having a good sense of humor, so comparing himself to the likes of Idi Amin was taken with a pinch of salt.
    But there were soon other stories, reports of torture and of so-called war games in which Sem pitched one unit of his force, often boys not much older than twelve or thirteen, against