The Devil's Garden by Edward Docx

was my son – the oldest – Kanari,’ he said uneasily, raising a thumb in the direction of the banging. ‘He was the one
who suggested this. He liked the idea.’
    ‘Did you like the idea?’ Kim pressed.
    Tupki finished his beer. ‘It’s the same with the soldiers as it is with the narcóticas . Once one person is in, then everybody is in – the whole family. They come
for sons, they come for daughters. You must choose.’ Again the sweep of the bottle to indicate the area, the buildings, his homestead. ‘Perhaps I would not have said anything myself.
But Kanari . . . he’s at the age where I cannot tell him what to do. Or, if I do, he does the opposite.’ He sighed. ‘So now we are a military family and we have a satellite dish.
The problem is we need a new television to work with it. And that is a lot of fishing.’ He spat.
    I do not know if we would have ever been asked to look at Yolanda had it not been for Kim inveigling her way into the washing-up circle with two of Tupki’s daughters.
Their mother had just set down the fruit when one of these girls came over, holding both her arms in front of her and trying to shake the soapy water from her hands. She must have been eleven or
twelve and she stood before us with that same mixture of defiance and solicitation that I had noted in her father.
    ‘The lady says the Mister will look at Yolanda,’ she said, simply, in her broken Spanish, addressing her parents. ‘The lady says he medicine.’
    Beneath the brim of his hat, Tupki’s eyes registered anger but they were caught and held by those of his wife with such a silent intensity that within a second he was swigging from his
bottle and looking away. I exchanged glances with Kim who had quietly followed the girl over after eliciting the information.
    ‘Yolanda is your sister?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And Yolanda is sick?’
    ‘Yes.’
    This, then, was the real reason for our invitation. And now, at last, there was an expression of relief and alertness on the face of the girl’s mother. I looked across at Tupki again. But
he was picking at the label of his bottle. Neither spoke. Perhaps there was too much anger, too long tended between them; perhaps they had arrived at a place where their children were not merely
their unique physical enterprise but also their sole remaining conversation. It struck me that the girl was articulating exactly what they would have wished to say – if only they could have
communed again and somehow spoken with one voice.
    ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
    ‘Virima,’ she said. ‘Yolanda is bad sick. Mister is a doctor?’
    ‘I am not a medical doctor.’ Now it was my turn to feel uneasy and embarrassed. Her face began to fall. ‘But . . . but let’s go and look. Maybe it’s something
we’ve got medicine for.’
    Closely attended by wife, daughters, sons, a chastened José and a sister-restrained Mubb, we followed Tupki up the stairs inside the main house.
    The rooms were interconnected by open door frames that ran the length of the building. The first was a kitchen of sorts, no more than six paces long by three wide – dark, crowded and
cramped with cracked crockery and a makeshift freestanding cupboard. Unknowable pots and jars and vessels were arranged side by side with cheap branded tins of cooking oil or salt or beans. I had
the sense that Kim was trying to shrink herself out of politeness. Diptera skittered every surface.
    We passed through into what I assumed was the room Tupki shared with his wife – a giant bed and little else save for two crooked shelves resting on a row of huge nails hammered into the
wall and a series of wicker baskets containing clothes.
    The third room seemed at first to be similarly a huge bed, though as we edged along the wall in the semi-darkness, I saw that it was in fact broken up into little areas – each presumably
given to a different child. Brightly coloured rugs and tattered blankets lay in faded piles and