The Reluctant President: Don't go there, they said

By Jerry Fairbridge

The wealth came out of nowhere. I’d just left school - no money, few prospects, and I didn’t even know my own backstory - then I was rich. But why? Anna was brilliant and beautiful and gave me the guts to fly to the belly of Africa to find the answers, and she came with me. They said, it’s dangerous and she’ll stand out with her blonde hair. They were right. I lead her into terror, trapped by a genius general with a crazy plan to unseat a dictator. There were good things - we fell in love with the boy Vimbo with his bright eyes in a parchment face. But we learned real-life terror is not like a video game. Whatever your age, you won’t stop reading until the shock ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483529707

Book preview

Juliet.

Chapter 1

The aircraft dipped towards the airport and I thought we were landing in a heaven I remembered from 11 years ago when I was just eight. We were descending into hell.

They said we shouldn’t go there, especially blonde Anna shouldn’t go there. She would be too conspicuous. They said it’s a brutal and broken country. Haven’t you heard, haven’t you seen it in the news?

I said, of course I know. I’m Canadian but my name is Khumalo, Justin Khumalo. I was born there. The people there are good people. The government is corrupt but it has no interest in Anna and me.

I was healthy, I was newly rich by a miracle I didn’t understand. I was coming home to my only good memories in a shitty childhood. And I was in love with brilliant Anna Jannson, although we weren’t lovers.

Friends mocked me for that but I didn’t care. When this journey ended I’d know who I was. That sounds strange but I’ll explain. Then things might change if she wanted them to.

Anna was there because she begged to come along to see a place that was completely different.

Her liberal parents coughed their horror into their sleeves but their child-rearing philosophy was based on letting kids find their own way, which meant they thought if you were nice, bad things wouldn’t happen. I was bad things and I had happened; they gritted their teeth even after I promised I would respect and protect her. Their disbelief, like my friends’ mocking, made me more determined.

Anyway, no one can say I took Anna to show her off.

If we’d known what was to come, her parents would have locked her up and I would have torn up the letter that called me to find my childhood in the belly of Africa.

The letter arrived in the summer after I graduated from high school, weeks after I learned I was rich - at least compared with what I had been. Rich enough to bum off to Europe, a dream of most teens just turning 19. That’s what my classmates had talked of while I stayed enviously silent and looked for a McJob where I could earn enough to flee a miserable home for a miserable basement apartment.

I was suddenly looking at the possibility of touring Europe in a BMW if I wished - and immediately was told it wasn’t going to happen.

Now we were 15 minutes from landing and my stomach churned. At this airport my father had pried me as a child from my weeping mother and sent me into an alien world where witless adults refused to admit my past or tell me I would never see my parents again.

The aircraft banked and I looked over Anna’s sleeping head out the window at golden grassland pocked with stubby trees, the sun-bleached land of my fathers, and I was on a nervous high.

Long after I was exiled, I still woke raging in my new land. I lived in Canada with an uncle and aunt I hadn’t known existed, who told everyone I was their son. When I cried for my parents, my aunt shrieked at me not to tell those ‘dreams’ to anyone or the government would send me back to Africa to be killed.

Her favorite trick when I grieved was to backhand me. Her husband sometimes lifted his eyes from the television briefly, his face blank. He wasn’t interested enough to interfere.

After I stopped weeping into my pillow, I still raged. And that was before my aunt stopped buying me clothes, telling me to find my own at the Salvation Army. Later I learned it was because she couldn’t get her hands on the money my father had sent into exile with me.

It was in the hands of a financial planner - one of the good ones. My uncle and aunt were paid enough to ensure they wouldn’t throw me out but they wanted it all and that was like acid in the apartment.

I was told about the money when I graduated from school, by which time it had grown. The day I learned about it, I left the ugly high-rise I had lived in and never returned, although my aunt sent letters professing love she must have misplaced when I needed it.

She was my mother’s younger sister, Anele, calling herself Annie. Her husband’s name was Cebisile, westernized to Basil.

In my years with them I slid into depression until I hated both those in Africa who’d sent me away and those who were raising me.

When the money came, those same friends who were going traveling told me to forget the past and have a good time. I would have if not for the financial advisor who’d looked after my money.

He was about 65 with thick white hair and a tinge of Scottish burr. His name was Robbie Robertson and I still don’t know who found him or how. He looked at me from under his bushy eyebrows - they were still black, unlike his hair.

Money doesn’t bring happiness, he said. Achievement does. Many people never learn that lesson and I’m giving it to you free.

I stared him down.

It seems like a lot now. His eyes roved over my slightly tatty clothes. "It’ll evaporate if you party it away. Then you’ll be bored, poor and probably have to work at something you hate.

I’m told you’re intelligent but in today’s world there’s a tyranny that controls entry to work where you use your brain. I suppose it’s inevitable in a competitive world. If you start with the right boxes checked off, you may lead an interesting and fruitful life. If you don’t, it’s likely you won’t.

He held up his hand. "It’s pointless to argue that it shouldn’t be like that. Pay your dues then set out to do something worthwhile. You have the ability, you’ve been handed the means; if you go to university and your grades stay decent, there’ll be enough allowance to enjoy the experience and for a daily dram of Scotch."

I said, I hate Scotch, and knew how childish it sounded, especially coming from someone who’d just been handed riches.

He tilted his head. If you don’t agree to get an education, you won’t get any money for at least three years and you should look for a job flipping hamburgers. It’ll be good experience for when you’ve blown through your funds.

I was thinking of getting a lawyer to sue this turd when Peter Eddy entered the office.

Peter Eddy taught me math at high school. He singled me out in class one day and I muttered he should go fuck himself.

Any kid can tell you teachers are like students: A few inspire you, many muddle through doing an acceptable job much of the time, and some do as little as they can get away with. Just like in any other profession, I suppose. An occasional one can be among a school’s worst bullies. One made me distrust the Irish for years although it was only by chance she was Irish.

In my Salvation Army used clothes, with none of the things others had, I was desperate to stay unnoticed. She interpreted shyness as arrogance. She was the type of bully who sniggers at you, baits you and encourages her gang to intimidate or ignore you, which is the same thing.

I’d made a mistake of correcting her grammar - she was an English teacher but knew less grammar than I did, probably because I couldn’t afford electronic games, therefore I read to escape my misery.

She didn’t have the imagination or guts to keep a class in order. In every class a few students disrupted lessons and ignored deadlines while getting a blind eye and a pass mark because the system’s solution was to move the problem on to someone else.

She self-righteously condemned physical correction but if she didn’t like you she’d happily get you tossed out of school or even to the justice system to be tainted forever. Not liking you had little to do with the quality of your work.

I suffered through a year in a standoff with Mrs. Worram waiting for me to explode so she could escalate. When I told Peter Eddy to fuck himself, I thought I’d done it. But he didn’t react with the surge of adrenalin that had fueled me. Rather than an obnoxious rebel, he saw a chronically withdrawn teenager.

He lowered his hands in a calming gesture and said quietly, Stay cool, Justin. I sat. There were puzzled looks but the class continued as if nothing had happened. He gave me time to think about my demons and that taught me what suspension or expulsion wouldn’t have done. Later, he came alongside me in the corridor briefly and said, Talk to me if I can help.

Athletes get respect, right or wrong. He pushed me into the football team and I was never great but I was OK and it made me part of a group for at least some of the time. He’d come up with kit I couldn’t afford and say it had been donated or the school had found surplus supplies. I think he paid for it.

Why he took an interest, I don’t know, but in the end I idolized him as the father figure I didn’t have. When Robbie Robertson told me I had money but couldn’t spend it, and I glared and wondered where I could get a lawyer, Peter Eddy walked in and my anger was gone. When I thanked him later he said I could pay him back by doing the same thing for other kids one day.

I pretended I had hay fever because I hadn’t cried since I was 11. Two rare people, Eddy and Robertson. Because of their faith in me, I applied to go university to study chemistry and physics and maybe become a teacher.

I chose Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Northwestern Ontario, on the shore of Lake Superior, partly because it was far from the bad memories of Toronto. Also, in my years in Canada, the northern forests had seemed magical and I’d hardly seen even the Great Lakes though we lived not more than 15 minutes from Lake Ontario.

When Robbie Robertson told me of my inheritance, he allowed me enough to move from my detested aunt and uncle to a one-room apartment in west-end Toronto. Also to get the driver’s license I’d longed for as a symbol of independence. The area I moved to had a youthful population. My world had turned sunny and they saw my grin and smiled back.

When I phoned to tell Robertson I wanted to go to Thunder Bay to check out Lakehead University, he promised the money. He also told me he had a letter for me from Africa. I took the subway to his Bay Street office to collect it - the letter that tipped my life upside down. I took it with me on my two-day drive to Thunder Bay.

The highway winds north past Lake Huron and then Lake Superior through spectacular rocky, forested country. I’d dreamed of seeing it but my mind was on other things as I drove my rented car.

When I arrived on the evening of the second day, I read the letter again. Then I walked aimlessly much of the night, looking out over the great inland sea at the Sibley Peninsula, which legend says is a sleeping giant, Nanabijou. I absent-mindedly slapped at mosquitoes and furiously tore at the mental scabs of my old pains.

The letter said I’d want to know about my parents’ death. It brought them back and vaporized them in one sentence. And renewed my angry despair over why no one had ever talked about them and why they’d sent me away.

Then there was guilt: Could I have helped them? Of course not. But when I was starting to hate them, were they already dead, or suffering just as I was because of our separation? The letter gave no information. It just said I might want to know things. I raged, of course I want to know. Tell me!

I spent a day in Thunder Bay, doing few of the things I’d gone there for, and drove two days back to Toronto. I went for coffee with Anna: She wouldn’t make light of my torment.

There are few friends like that. Most want to be entertained. When I said I was going to burn the letter, Anna asked, Why not go? I said, because of what they did to me and she said, You have to find out why.

I said my homeland was controlled by thieving, murderous politicians. She said there were lots of countries like that. Anyway, it would only be for a short stay.

Then she asked, could she come with me? As a friend, you know? She laughed. No benefits. I stared at her, shocked, and said OK, if her parents let her. I didn’t think they would. They called a meeting and their expressions would have driven me off if she hadn’t been between me and the door.

I swore not to touch her and meant it but when they finally said yes, I thought they were stupid. If you want to be polite, you’d call them naive. We were all naive. Fucking ignorant.

I showed the letter to Robbie Robertson and he stood at his window for a while. Go, he said, "If you think it’s safe. You won’t be happy if you don’t come to terms with your past.

I wish I could tell you what happened but I don’t know. You should be back for the first semester but it won’t kill you if you have to put off university for a year. May do you good.

So we went and I had more faith in myself because Anna came. She had a steady gaze on the world. Perhaps the pedestal I put her on was too high but she deserved at least a small one. Ever since I somehow started talking to her after a game when the team went to Tim Hortons for coffee one night.

She was overloaded with food orders and I helped her carry them to a table where she was sitting with girlfriends who’d been skating. The next day at school she offered to buy me a coffee and I spilled something about my unhappy home life.

We became friends - maybe she saw me as a charity case. Whatever, I was grateful for her friendship and when friends kidded me, saying there was no such thing as a platonic friendship between a male and a female, wink wink, I ignored them.

She was a few months younger than I was, a Nordic queen whose hair was almost as light as a snowy winter although her eyes were as dark brown as mine.

In Canada she blended. She wouldn’t blend where we were going even though she said her great great grandfather had come from somewhere in Africa, landing in Norway from a ship and marrying a Norwegian girl. That’s where the brown eyes came from.

Dark genes are meant to dominate but the rest of her was from the north, with the slightest tint. She was truly a golden blonde. For the flight, she wore a shirt that looked like linen and brought out the gold, and blue jeans that hugged her body.

Her eyes opened when the sound of the engines changed as we started our descent. She yawned, brushed a curl from her forehead, and looked out the window. I expected jungle down there. Are there lions?

I laughed. Yeah, like the polar bears in Toronto.

I was dreaming of lions. I was walking in New York and the leader loped out of an alley. He was beautiful - all male and very scary. The pride was in a line behind him, then they were buses. Her laugh was interrupted by the warning to raise our tables and seat backs.

When it ended, I said, We were over lion country while you were dreaming. Here you get men with guns. They’re more dangerous than lions.

It wasn’t the thought of men with guns that made my guts liquid like when you stand up to make a speech. It was my memories and the question of why the man who wrote that letter - I knew him a long time ago - why he wanted me back so badly he’d offered to pay. I could afford to pay my own way now but the offer had added to the puzzle.

Anna was saying she’d like a gun if there were lions. Did my father have a gun when I was a child in the village?

We had spears, I said. We’d throw one at the lead lion and it would fart out the spear which would take down the next lion. While she was saying I was a moron who couldn’t even tell good jokes, we landed and walked to the airport building through scorching heat and found men with guns.

The building was a new one, Chinese built with a phallic tower, but there weren’t many travelers. There’d been about 15 on our flight from South Africa. An immigration officer left his discussion with other workers and beckoned the first person in line. We were fourth and there were a few couples behind us.

I noticed the customs officer glancing at us several times but any man would look at Anna.

At the counter, he hardly looked at our passports. He picked up an old-fashioned black telephone and barked into it then smiled and ushered us into an ambush because six police in brown shorts and uniform jackets came from a side corridor.

They didn’t hurry. Two were smoking and two wiped their mouths on their sleeves as if they’d been drinking or eating. The feet of two of the officers were leaking from their worn boots. They were coming for us.

Chapter 2

It happened in a haze of jet lag - afterwards it seemed like a dream. I was more puzzled than afraid. I reached for Anna’s hand but missed because one of the cops grabbed her left upper arm and hauled her towards a door labelled PRIVATE. His breath stank of alcohol.

Two constables grabbed me and pulled me the other way but, though I’m average size, football had made me tougher than the cops. I broke free and surged forward and cops shouted and Anna elbowed the man holding her. He cursed, spit