by Maggie Gee
Great Gorilla Safaris has a basement office. She blinks, blindly, as she peers through the glass. But as soon as she enters, more Ugandan sunshine. Five different employees come and shake her hand, and smile at her as if they really like her (they are ready to like her: she did not bargain, she has paid up front, she was not too afraid to come and meet them). Every question she asks receives a comforting answer.
There aren’t really any floods: it is ‘too early’. The road to Bwindi is ‘very good’. The trouble in Congo is ‘in another part’. There are no problems with security. They ‘update themselves every day on this aspect’ (which she briefly thinks shows a degree of concern, but their smiles continue jaunty, untroubled). Her driver? Ah, David! Her driver is a paragon. They all join in to praise him. ‘An excellent driver.’ He ‘speaks eight languages’. ‘He is a graduate of Makerere.’ The hotel where she’ll be staying, the Gorilla Forest Camp, is ‘the best in the area. Comfortable.’ ‘Has it been there long?’ she asks, and seems to see them look briefly across at Mr Ronald, the Manager, as if they are uneasy. ‘Long,’ says Mr Ronald, his brow slightly furrowed. Then his smile returns: ‘Very comfortable.’
They give her an itinerary to take away. First stop ‘The Equator’: she feels excited, though the treats promised sound prosaic: ‘Comfort Break, Coffee, Certificate, Visit to Traditional Shop’. But the equator ... the equator. The middle of the earth. She is piercing, now, to the heart of things, having bobbed all her life in the urban shallows. ‘Where is the equator, exactly?’ she asks. ‘You don’t have a map I could borrow, do you?’
But maps are rare, and expensive, in Africa. ‘Ah no, sorry. Try Aristoc bookshop.’
‘So Bwindi ... Bwindi is beyond the equator?’ That makes it sound quite a long way away.
Now Mr Ronald, the Manager, gives her the full benefit of his knowledge. ‘It is half-a-day’s drive beyond the equator, beyond Masaka, beyond Mbarara, near the borders with DRC Congo and Rwanda.’
So very far away. But he’s smiling at her. Rwanda. Hang on, that’s not good news. ‘I didn’t realise we were going near Rwanda. Isn’t that where, you know, there was civil war? Between –’ she searches. On the tip of her tongue. ‘Between the Tutus and the Hotsis?’
His smile broadens, then represses itself. ‘Between the Hutus and the Tutsis, Madam. It is over now. The country is peaceful.’
And yet, as she walks back to the Sheraton Hotel, her mind is still full of nightmarish phrases: war without end, child soldiers, massacres.
Is it a boy or a man? So thin, so a-quiver. Wet African morning. He comes on, drenched and shining, and the people waiting by the track watch him, not one of their own, not acknowledging them. The big boots make his legs look like twigs of black bone, until you look, and see they are corded with muscle, but drawn too tight, with no flesh on them. And the boots look new, but the boy-man walks strangely, in a limping, crab-wise half-shuffle, half-run. Is he running from something, or running to something? He’s alone in Congo: it’s best to run.
The villagers draw backwards from the dark, intense figure, limping, loping, leaning on a stick and hop-scurrying along. Yet one whispers ‘Muzungu’. The darkness they shrink from is not the colour of his skin, which, under the baked layers of dust and dirt is definitely lighter than theirs, it’s a cone of darkness which spins from his eyes, his taut mouth, his bones, from the stick he is leaning on, which is a gun.
Or from things he has seen, things he has done. They avert their faces. Best not to see him. They shiver, glad this one travels alone.
24
Trevor wakes to pleasure: he’s survived the night. Sun on his face, though his hut has no window: sun pours in between the door’s crude hinges, a band of glorious golden light. The space looks small now, and holds no secrets, though at 4 AM it had seemed endless and formless. Good, there’s his tool-kit: and there are his trousers. Relief floods through him. He has his essentials.
He focuses on the wall beside him. It’s made of a brownish kind of plaster, uneven, probably covering wood, he guesses. Then he looks again. My God, it’s dried mud. I am really in a mud hut. That’s something! He chuckles. How Nessie would laugh about that.
True, the brick-built, tin-roofed structure next door where at first he had been meant to sleep with Mary had neat check curtains and a proper bedstead. And a paraffin lamp, two stools, a table. The bed would just about have held them both, if they had really been a couple, as Mary’s less-sensible sister Martha had presumed: this house belongs to the other sister, who is taking her daughters to boarding school. Mary’s face when she realised they had put them together! There was a lot of shouting in Luganda. ‘I am telling them you are not my husband!’ she briefly explained to him, without dipping her volume. ‘They have confused you with my first husband, just because poor Omar was also a muzungu.’
‘I thought he was Libyan?’
‘Yes, a muzungu.’
He’d agreed to his billet in the hut alongside (which was usually the home of an aunt-by-marriage who looks after the sensible sister’s children) to calm things down, though Mary did a lot of tutting. ‘Their level of culture is low,’ she said. ‘I myself could not live at this level.’
In the middle of the night when the rain had poured down he had wondered if the straw roof could take it. It seemed impossible: that black roar of rain. Waking up, though, this morning, he feels quite happy. Maybe a mud hut is all a man needs.
Lists! Maths! Vanessa’s standbys. When life presents obstacles, Vanessa will surmount them, with the aid of new ropes, axes, crampons. Adrenalin starts to spurt through her veins. Bwindi is simply an emergency for which due preparations must be made.
Some of them are harder to do in Kampala. Phone: her mobile is useless here. The Femrite writer has explained that it’s simple, she just has to change the chip inside, get a new chip and a new Ugandan number. Right, that’s obvious, she’ll do that first (but she doesn’t do it: too busy making lists). Now she rules two columns in her notebook, ‘To Do’ and ‘To Buy’. At once she feels better.
Her socks and pants must be washed: that’s easy. She washes them with soap in her hand-basin, and spreads them on the balcony.
(Later the wind will blow them away, flying like clumsy birds, spiralling downwards, ending up on the Sheraton’s wide green lawns, from which the gardener removes them, tutting, for every weekend there are weddings here, they will come in their dozens, the snowy-white brides, English-style, who have never seen snow, with their glowing dark faces and small matched bridesmaids in pinks or blues or sunflower-yellows, and everything must be perfect for them, and the trains will be spread like dazzling pale paths for the photographers to capture, and sometimes the bridesmaids sit on the trains; so the gardener’s always having to scare off the storks, great ribald things dropping shit and mocking him, and hardly stirring till he actually attacks them: or else removing objects that fall from the skies, the wrappers of expensive foreign chocolates, a selection of odd socks and knickers and vests, even shirts and blouses, which his wife appreciates – they’re quality goods, and they have five children – or distasteful things like used condoms, which would soil the snowy-white thoughts of the brides.)
When Vanessa returns from Great Gorilla Safaris and finds her underwear is gone, she knows the maid has stolen it: at first she is furious, but then she considers. The girl must be poor, so she will say nothing. She adds ‘Socks and pants’ to her To Buy list.
To Do: break in her new walking boots again: (since she’s been here she has only worn them once. But £100 boots! They will keep her safe ...) Soon her list has two neat complete columns that will surely translate her straight to Bwindi.
But no sooner has she finished, than she starts again, propelled by electric shocks of dismay. Her digital camera needs new batteries! She ought to have another waterproof notebook! Her insect repellent is running out! There will be millions of insects in Bwindi! True, used sparingly, her cream might last a week, but the thought of not-t
horoughly repelled insects swarming all over her sensitive flesh, which has always been preternaturally attractive to insects, makes her shudder and return to her list. (She remembers Rome, long ago, with Trevor, when the two of them lay awake most of the night, Trevor because he was passionate, she because she was tormented by mosquitoes, and in the morning, with him smugly untouched and her a dotted canvas of bites, he’d said, ‘Vanessa, you’re the perfect woman: you’re a fabulous lay and you keep off insects!’)
The memory sends her scurrying off by private taxi to Garden City for insect repellent, underwear, socks, batteries, and she ticks off each item with a sense of achievement, a tiny bright victory over chaos (why is she going off into nothingness, a place without shops, lights, artefacts?).
The Garden City pharmacist’s a disappointment. His insect repellents do not contain DEET, the only thing that works against malarial mosquitoes, and so she buys, randomly, what he has: coils of incense to burn like tiny spiral turds and strange plug-in things which hold repellent tablets (and too late, she wonders: are there sockets, in the jungle? Is there actually any electricity, at Bwindi?) Her plastic bag bulges with useless acquisitions, and the man doesn’t even want to give her a bag, for suddenly the government is banning kaveera. ‘I’m sorry, Madam, but it is Museveni. He wants to clean up the city for CHOGM.’
Buying things briefly makes her less anxious. But not for long. Then it starts again: did you buy enough? Did you buy too much? Or perhaps the wrong thing? Back to the shops for more buying. But she’s going far beyond the reach of shops.
Back in her room, Vanessa decides to spread out everything she’s going to pack on her bed. That enormous bed, so white and blank. It stretches out before her, strange, lonely, bare as the canvas of her life, for Justin is married and Trevor is gone ...
The room is silent, but outside the glass a low wind is moaning, a skyscraper wind, the breath the earth blows at high buildings, saying Why are you here? Testing its strength. Why, why? You won’t be here for ever.
Is it Death, she thinks? Is it back again?
Why am I here? Vanessa wonders. How has my life brought me to this? If I’m going to die, why is no-one with me?
The day slips past, the light slips away, as she checks, discards, rethinks, amasses. Till the whole white duvet is a grid of possessions. A city in miniature: her fortifications. Seen from above, it’s a labyrinthine puzzle, a piecemeal shell for some small white snail. Where does she fit in, in this chaos of detail?
By the time she’s had supper, her notebook by her plate, Vanessa has ticked off everything she needs to take, and has crammed it, with an effort, into her rucksack. She can lift it, yes, but not carry it far. Never mind, her driver will carry it. That’s why he’s there: to look after her.
She thinks, I’ve cracked it. Well done, Vanessa. Only 9 PM: it has gone well. Now she can relax, look at the map, read the papers. And yes, of course, she should ring home.
And then she remembers, with a little shock of fear, she hasn’t done the most important thing. Her phone: too obvious to put on the list. She can’t possibly go to Bwindi without it. With a phone, she can summon an air ambulance, or alert British police and politicians. Thank God, there’s an MTN shop in the foyer, where a listless employee sits every night till 10, fluorescent-lit as blind guests troop past her.
I must speak to Justin: I must, I must. I must know how little Abdul Trevor is ...
And Trevor. He won’t mind me having a word. After all, he might never see me again. I ought to say something nice to him.
And she’s knocked off her feet by a flood of regret. It washes across her, the lonely thought of her maddening ex-husband, so far away in England, going about his business as normal, perfectly content on his own, without her – talking to Soraya, or watching TV – maybe (it hurts) in bed with Soraya – with no idea what Vanessa is facing. Not admiring her courage or rooting for her. He would have wished me luck. Yes, he would have worried. He might have told me not to go, and then allowed himself to be persuaded.
But by the time she’s gone down and fixed up the phone, it’s already 10.30. 12.30 in London: too late to call him.
There’s a lump in her throat, a globus of terror. To calm herself, she starts to read the paper.
M7 DENIES TROOPS MASSING ON BORDER
25
Trevor, in bed without Soraya, a mere 100 miles away from Vanessa, has decided Uganda’s a brilliant country.
The day has gone so much better than expected. For a start, Mary Tendo had managed to get the whole well situation arse over tip. The village already has a well: it is basic, a pipe in a basin of concrete, but whoever put it in, knew what they were doing, which is more than he would, starting from scratch. More of a protected spring, really. What he sees straight away, though, is why it’s hardly working, just a dribble of fresh water in a sea of brown. The concrete is cracked, and the area is filthy: mud, twigs, pebbles. The ground around the basin is sodden and smelly. Mosquitoes hover. (He has taken his pills, but he suddenly thinks about Vanessa: if she were here, he would be all right: all insects make a bee-line for Vanessa.)
This is going to be a mucky old job. But he’s a plumber: he can deal with mess. It’s what he enjoys: making things right. (Like the time he went round to sort out Zakira, which was how she and Justin got together! And his little grandkid – that smashing little boy – if it weren’t for Trevor’s plumbing, he might never have existed.)
Ask them if anyone taught them to look after the well,’ he says to Mary.
She fires a succession of rapid questions at the men who have come with them, and nods her head, slowly, as they reply. ‘Of course the engineer taught a woman to do it, and she taught another woman, and so on. But the first woman got sick, and then the second woman did it, but she didn’t remember everything. Then the second woman’s daughter became ill, at school in Kampala, so the second woman had to go to the city, and she taught another woman, before she left, who was clever, but the woman after her was not clever. There is a Water Committee in the village, but they are too busy, and so they do not meet.’
‘Didn’t anyone write down the engineer’s instructions?’
‘Trevor, some of these women cannot read,’ says Mary. They look at each other, with their shared possession of so many things the villagers can’t take for granted.
‘Never mind,’ says Trevor. ‘I can sort this out. And I’ll write down the instructions, and we’ll give them to the head teacher. She can bloody read, I hope,’ he says sotto voce, and Mary giggles.
‘She will charge a lot of money.’
‘I could have it up and running by lunch-time, Mary,’ he says, getting down into a plumber’s crouch. ‘But really, the whole system needs disinfection. It needs something called a chlorine shock. So I’ll give it one, with that bleach we bought. The water won’t be usable for a few days. And then they’re going to have to see to the apron. It’s cracked, see, here, and there. That’s why there’s hardly any flow. But any decent local builder could see to that. And maintenance – they’re going to have to do that. If there’s a Water Committee, I need to meet them. I’m going to have to explain to our friends that it will need a look-over, every single day. Looks to me as if cattle have been around here.’
Mary fires orders at the villagers, who look impressed, and smile at him.
‘Maybe not every day,’ he concedes. ‘But when you get really heavy rain, like last night.’
‘Oh no,’ says Mary, decidedly, ‘that rain was not at all heavy, Trevor. You do not understand Ugandan rain.’ And she turns and repeats what he has said to the men, who laugh at Trevor, heartily, and look at Mary Tendo with their own shared knowledge of so many things these bazungu only guess at.
By one o’clock, he is stunned with heat, and surrounded by children from another school, the Catholic one, in yellow uniforms, this time, who watch him delving in the bowels of the concrete, the ones at the front reporting his progress to the ones behind, with much pushing and
shoving.
‘Lunch-time’ turns out to be a bit optimistic. A teacher joins the children, to shoo them back to school. He speaks to Trevor in English. They are very pleased the well will soon be working.
‘So where do you get your water at the moment?’ Trevor asks him.
‘There is a well in the next-door village. But that well is four or five miles away. Of course, my school is very lucky. We also have a tank.’
‘Oh yes?’ says Trevor, frowning up at the sunlight. He has never worked in heat like this: it’s a hammer, knocking, knocking at his brain. Nothing will stop him finishing this job. Yet he’s swimming across a great coma of heat. His neck, back, biceps are drenched in sweat. He knows his head is getting burned, because he can’t stop his silly bloody hat falling off, and his hair is not quite so thick as it was. ‘Tell me about it.’ He’s thought of something.
By teatime – he glances at his watch, and its sharp little numerals swell in the heat, swell and retreat, he is falling asleep ... by English teatime, such a long way away, egg and chips, he is happy, dreaming, a nice Swiss Roll or a couple of biscuits, Vanessa fussing with her flipping Earl Grey: it was cucumber, yes, cool cucumber sandwiches, she liked to make those, and I didn’t turn my nose up: cucumber sandwiches, both of us young, long wet grass because I hadn’t mown the lawn, but she didn’t object, she let me in, the grass was shining and I heard her moan, sort of soft and low like a wood pigeon: were either of us ever so happy again? – ‘Trevor! Trevor? Are you finishing?’ – he’s almost ready to pack up his tools and get the chlorine into the system. But the well, on its own, won’t solve the problem. He has another idea about that.
