Chapter Three

From Strings to Decks

Been multitasking since I was seven years old. Your favourite mandem never could. And you yourself will never have the range.

~ Little Samz

Circa 1986, Graham House

I gave up playing instruments after doing A-level Music. A lifetime of theory, practicing, studying and performing gone in a flash. I'd sang in my school choir, played the piano, cello and double bass, the latter I taught myself. The first time I picked one up again was at the encouragement of my foreign correspondent boyfriend, thirteen years later. We'd go to a little bar in Kampala close to the lake where they had a house band full of house drunks. Who welcomed us with open arms.

A bass guitar sat there unused as did a keyboard. I would play the former (the bass guitar is basically just the double bass turned on its side) and he the latter. He was the type to be good at anything. I was the closest person to him and yet had rarely seen him read a book. Somehow he was still able to have a cogent answer, argument, conversation and charm everybody he encountered. And was always always the smartest person in the room.

One week in our first floor flat that gave us a view of the lightening that would crack across the sky at night and over looked miles of marshland until it came to Kampala’s prison which stood next to an unused train track, we both got obsessed by a novel.

We’d curl up next to each other on our handmade sofa that I had ordered when I first arrived in Kampala and take turns reading a few pages. We’d pass it back and forth until we finally finished two or three days later, emotionally drained. I forget the title now, but remember a distressed, middle class man in reduced circumstances who at one point, with no alternative, was forced to eat dog food.

My foreign correspondent boyfriend had facts and figures at his fingertips. It seemed easy for him. I was often in awe unless he used it for bad. Which he very easily could. A devil’s advocate with a taste for alcohol and whatever drugs he could get his hands on.

On one occasion before we both moved to East Africa, I had introduced him to an old friend of mine, someone I had in the past spent a lot of time with. He may have picked up a vibe, I still don’t know to this day why he tried and did destroy him. Picking up on anything he said, making my friend look either silly or stupid. It was his bad side. His jealous side which only a few months into the relationship I had not clocked. But it came up again. And again.

I assumed his ability to be a devil’s advocate, argue for any side whatever that might be was the result of his private schooling. But now I think it was mostly just because he was very very clever. He’d gone to private school on a scholarship. Years have passed now and I think about something that's ascribed to Michelangelo, "If you knew how much work was put into it, you wouldn't call it genius." Did he have to try and I just didn't know? I always felt inadequate next to him. Maybe that's what kept me so close.