by Maggie Gee
‘Justin lad. It’s Dad. How’s Abdy? I only just picked up your message.’
‘I’m at the hospital at the moment. It was awful last night. He might be stabilising now. Whatever stabilising means. I only just got hold of Zakira. She was in Brussels. They’d switched the hotel. There was no-one in the office. Total cockup.’
It’s a flood of misery. He sounds exhausted. ‘The boy’s all right?’ Trevor shouts, anxiously, aware they are half the world away, and Justin moves the phone six inches from his ear. He’s out in the hospital car park, smoking, though he gave up smoking a year ago. The smoke is bitter, but also a relief, like the air on his face after the warm soupy ward. At least Abdy’s alive, and Zakira’s on the train, speeding back towards the Channel. But he’s still on his own, still very worried.
‘You don’t have to shout. Where are you?’ he says. ‘The thing is, he’s apparently got measles, which sounds like nothing, but they say it’s dangerous, cos it went to his brain and made him sleepy. Encephalitis. We thought it was meningitis, at first. Well, first of all Zakira decided it was eczema. We never got him vaccinated. But at least his temperature’s down this morning. It looks as though he’ll be OK. It’s the first time I’ve come out and got some air. Can you come over, or have you got jobs all day?’
‘Thing is, boy – I’m in Uganda.’
A long beat of silence, across lands and oceans.
‘You can’t be!’ Justin says, trying to understand.
‘Mary Tendo asked me to keep it a secret.’
‘What do you mean, Mary asked you to keep it a secret? Mum’s in Uganda as well. For a conference. And I know Mum was going to see Mary.’
‘Your mother’s in Uganda?’
They both take it in. Trevor feels dizzy. Vanessa in Uganda! Not possible.
‘We’d better come back, if Abdy’s ill. Where is she, in any case?’
‘Kampala. No, actually, she must have left. She’s on a gorilla trek. Some posh safari place. I can’t remember ... The Gorilla Forest Camp.’
‘The Gorilla Forest Camp,’ repeats Trevor, dazed. ‘The Gorilla Forest Camp. It can’t be.’
PART 5
Heart of Darkness
38
In the border towns of Kisoro and Katwe, and in the villages along the edge of Lake Albert, where there was the recent unfortunate incident between Congolese and Ugandan forces, the atmosphere is tense and subdued. Lorries of smartly dressed UPDF soldiers are rumbling down the flood-softened roads, going west, west, always westward. The men get out and hastily pile rocks and uprooted trees under flood-destroyed bridges. Nothing must stop their grim progress towards DRC and the designated war zone. Young women walking to work in the country look up, sideways, at straining lorries and the lean muscled arms and black-booted ankles of very young men, who want to be heroes. In fact they are just excited, afraid, in uniforms too big for them. An old woman’s sprayed from head to foot with muddy water as the lorry gathers speed, and she shakes her wrinkled fist after them. Soldiers: they never bring good news. The skies are dark. The eagles gather. In Kampala, Mr Museveni is shouting down the telephone, his small, impish face made heavy with blood.
But Trevor – Trevor is on a mission. Trevor has bought the best map he can find in the Mweya Lodge gift shop, which is run by an improbably beautiful, six-foot tall Ugandan woman, with tiny features, languidly graceful, not interested in him. ‘Will this show me how to get to Bwindi?’ he asks her, trying to open up the map on the counter.
She looks at it, regally, not focusing. ‘I do not like maps,’ she says, ‘I do not use them. You really want to go to Bwindi?’
‘Yes,’ says Trevor. ‘I need to go today.’
‘Maybe now is not a good time to go to Bwindi,’ she says, eyes lowered, re-folding the map.
‘If you have to go, you have to go,’ says Trevor.
He tries to explain this to the man from Mary’s village, but Bwindi is a step too far for James. ‘I have to go back to my village,’ he insists. ‘You can find another driver. There are many.’ Trevor gives him money for the bus trip back to his village, and money for driving him to Mweya, then offers him double to come on with him. ‘I’d feel happier, see. You’ve got the language.’
‘I do not know the language of the Bakiga. In Uganda we have over fifty languages.’
Trevor digests this information, impressed. ‘Oh well then, you’re no better off than me. I’ll be OK. I am not a bad driver.’ But he feels a little lonely as he watches James’s back, thin, slightly lopsided, in a bright pink shirt, getting smaller in the distance. He’d been a friend. Two blokes together were better than one. James is walking fast, as if he knows where he’s headed, as if he is keen to get away, as if western Uganda, where Trevor’s going, is the last place on earth he would want to go.
Trevor’s on his own. But there isn’t any choice. Trevor must go and find Vanessa.
Soon he is driving through sheeting rain. Charles’s little Toyota handles quite well, but it was never meant for unmade roads. The windscreen wipers flap gallantly, forlornly at the oceanic slurry of water, blurring and hazing every outline, hissing and whispering you are nothing. Life is a detail, a mere detail in the sweep of this rain. In the north of Uganda, schoolchildren are drowning as their playing-field crumbles into a river that has suddenly turned into a roaring torrent, a hungry mouth that will suck them down. Trevor thinks, I must stop, or I’ll drive off the road, and that won’t bloody help anyone, will it.
He stops, and eats some chocolate he finds in his pocket, melted and re-set again in strange new shapes. It tastes delicious once he prises it off the paper. He thinks about his life. It’s so unexpected, him, Trevor Patchett, out here on his own, in the middle of a game park on the edge of Uganda, driving to find the woman who divorced him over thirty years ago when they were both children.
We were both children. We knew nothing. It’s true. Maybe we’d have made a fist of it, if we’d met later, but as it was ... She was very pretty, and very clever, and perfectly mad, as well. I couldn’t put up with any of it. It was feminism all day long. And yet in bed, she was this gorgeous soft thing ... as if all the angles melted away. We were all right there, and all wrong everywhere else. But she broke my heart when she chucked me out. Since then I’ve never really had a heart to break. Losing her and the boy. How do blokes get over it? So I just stuck around, and took the shit, and had the odd lady friend, of course. Who all deserved better than what they got, which was half a man, if that.
The rattle of the rain on the roof of the car is suddenly so loud that he looks up, worried, to make sure the roof is holding up. He wishes he still smoked, and had those fags that Mary Tendo had pretended to buy him (and Mary was puffing away, in the village! Although she gave most of them to the men.) It’s all so fragile. We are bloody small. What if the road gets washed away? There wasn’t much of it to start with. And Abdul Trevor ... He can’t bear to think about it. No-one in the world knows where I am. He flicks his phone on, but there’s no reception.
Perhaps he’s set off on a fool’s errand. There’s not been a lot of time to think about it. As soon as he put the phone down on Justin, he was ringing Vanessa, and getting nothing. Her phone was still on answer. That maddening message. So he’d found the GFC number, and tried to phone there. Everything seemed to be a muddle. At first someone told him she had gone home. Then there was an argument in Reception, and another voice came on, speaking better English. ‘Good morning, Sir. Mrs Henman has not gone home. Mrs Henman is chasing the gorillas.’ (He sees her little white head, butting through the jungle, begging the gorillas to come back.)
‘Why did they tell me she had gone home?’
A pause, then a slightly awkward answer. ‘Sorry, Sir, it was an error. Mrs Henman’s driver has gone home.’
‘Why on earth has her driver gone home?’
‘Perhaps there was an argument.’
Oh dear, oh lord, that sounded like Vanessa. And in a split second, Trevor had d
ecided. There was war, and machetes, and she’d lost her driver, and he has to tell her about Abdul Trevor. And now he’s halfway, and it’s all clear as mud.
By the time the rain, with a sigh, grows lighter, the windows of the car are completely misted up. He sits there in a cocoon of steam, blind to the world, not sure about the future, and it comes to his rescue, the old cheerful Trevor. He’ll just get on with it, whatever comes. He’ll take whatever life throws at him. The last patter on the roof dies away. Of course the boy will be OK. He opens a window to let out some steam, and it’s staring at him, huge as the sun, dark-haloed, the strangely familiar face of a lion. And then its breath, bitter, meaty.
‘Fuck!’ He winds the window up, hasty, clumsy, and as he does it, the lion makes a move, and the car rocks, oh fuck, fuck, the fucking great animal has jumped on top, vibration of its feet as it treads the metal, then an extraordinary sound like showers of coins, going on, on – what’s the bloody thing doing? – then the roof twangs like tin as it launches itself off.
Nothing on earth smells like lion’s urine.
Zakira is fretting on the Eurostar. There is ‘a short delay’, as the announcer puts it, a short delay deep under the sea, where she sits imprisoned with hundreds of others in a tube of steel thousands of feet below the sand. What trust they show, to travel Eurostar, that there’ll be no earthquakes, that the world won’t tremble! A short delay! To her it is a lifetime. She’s been calling Justin every twenty minutes or so for bulletins, but now there’s no reception. She sits on her hands, pulls at her hair, stares at her glamorous, senseless reflection on the infinite night outside the glass.
All that matters is Abdy and Justin. She hungers to hold the small body of her son. She wonders how she can ever have left him. But you have to leave them. You have no choice. You have to earn money to live in London.
The other voice says, Never leave him again. Never, never. Hold him for ever.
39
Vanessa thinks, this is absolute hell. Why am I putting myself through this? They have been trekking through the trees since breakfast, but this time there has been no magical resolution. They have glimpsed the gorillas, always fleeing onwards, grey anxious shadows in the dense dripping forest. Once the actual rain started, it took only thirty minutes before the trekkers were drenched to the skin, despite their layers of hi-tech rainwear, their boots and gaiters and gloves and balaclavas. This rain is different. This rain is the ocean. They float about, helpless, inconsequential, marshalled by their chief guide, who fears to lose them, and fears to give up the trek without a sighting. (He has his instructions. FIND THE GORILLAS. If not, the tourists can ask for a refund.)
So the only way to go is on and upwards, but the bazungu are cold and weary, and some of them are taking it out on their porters, who are miserable: today’s going wrong, there’ll be no tips and no ‘thank yous’, and what if some of the old ones die in the jungle? One day it will happen, they have always known this, and then, because no muzungu must die, because no muzungu expects to die (unlike Ugandans, with death all around them) there will be police, and inquiries, and unfair law-courts, and some of their people will die in prison.
The little group of tourists is ragged, depleted. One of the old women has twisted her ankle; one of the men has an agonising knee; a young woman has developed a migraine, and is walking along with a hand over her eye; two fat Americans have heat exhaustion and are each being swung along by two porters. They ate all their lunch a long time ago. Too long ago. Now they’re running out of water.
‘Can’t we go back?’ Vanessa asks at last, making a furious effort to catch up with the guide and panting so much he can hardly understand her. He looks at her: white hair, wild and wet, small triangular face, gleaming with effort, pinched grey lips, too many layers of clothing, little pale eyes with a fierce, blind look. He doesn’t want to argue with this muzungu. But why do these old women flock into the jungle?
‘The gorillas!’ he says, and points ahead.
One by one, they have all asked him if they can turn back, but he has his instructions, and they press onwards.
She remembers yesterday, so magically complete, and wishes, fervently, she’d left it at that.
They plough on upwards through the undergrowth. Ahead of them, a nervous group of gorillas scatters and flees, always higher, unable to settle, becoming increasingly irascible as their attempts to rest and eat are frustrated. At the end of the equally wretched human column, one of the fat American women is weeping, soundlessly, and the other one is cussing slowly and rhythmically every time her boot cuts into her bruised Achilles tendon. ‘I need the bathroom,’ the weeper says, but her voice is lost in the hiss of the rain, the squelch of the boots, the rustle of rain-clothes. ‘I need the bathroom!’ She is suddenly screaming.
‘You will frighten the gorillas,’ the guide admonishes.
‘Screw your gorillas! I need the john!’
In Kisoro, not far south of Bwindi, the lorries of soaked troops are arriving. The peaceful border town is awash with rain, adrenalin, hungry men. Once down from the lorries, they swarm in a chaotic, angry way, like half-drowned bees. But ten miles away, beween Kisoro and Bwindi, a peaceful meeting of eighty people is going on. They are small people, only four feet tall, and the British used to call them pygmies, but now they use a Bantu name, the Twa or Batwa. In these borderlands between feuding countries, many people have lost their parents, many people have lost their children, some of them in wars, some of them in crimes, as when the raiding parties of Interahamwe came over the frontier, not so very long ago. But these small, brave people have lost their forest, the forest that was father and mother to the Batwa for hundreds and thousands of generations; they have been driven off the mother’s body, the beautiful home that gave them food and medicine, shelter and stories, and now they have nothing, and are despised, and work as slaves for the tall people. (Though in fact, the Batwa are clever and resourceful, and know things that everyone else has forgotten, and one day, perhaps, when the world is different, this secret knowledge will become golden, of trees, and plants, and herbs, and medicine, this knowledge, too, of what to do without. For now, though, they have to survive in the present.)
The Batwa are having their third Annual General Meeting, observed by two American lawyers. At the first AGM, someone had asked the Batwa what they wanted most. ‘Office,’ one said and they all chimed in: ‘Yes, office, office, then they cannot ignore us.’ Now the Batwa have got their office, but it isn’t large enough for this meeting, which they hold in a church with a corrugated iron roof. It has been going very well: they have all spoken in turn, without much overlapping. It’s not bad to be inside when there’s such heavy rain. But when the rain suddenly gets heavier, the noise on the roof is deafening, infernal, and the Batwa all look round at each other, and a ripple of laughter runs around the room, and then with one accord, they get up, they leave their places at the conference table, they free their papers to blow in the wind, and the Batwa dance; the Batwa dance. They become their history, and nothing is lost; they become eternal, they become the forest.
If you had nothing. But if you had no-one. If you were something you could not bear. If you were forced outside yourself, to become the worst that is in anyone. If you were no longer, to yourself, even human. If you could never forgive yourself. If you could never be forgiven. You would feel something like the boy-man.
When the scarred body wakes, late, cramped and bitten, where it slept in the bushes at the back of the hotel, his hatred for himself is like a cleft in his brain. He has failed, he failed. He failed again. It was there for the taking, and he had the right, he was justified, no-one could stop him, but something in him was weak as milk, was the feeble thing he had been, before ...
She was there in the light, the ugly little woman, the shrivelled whiteness, counting its money, the thing he needed and must have. Only glass protected her. Only glass stopped him. The moment when his hand veered away, the hand that should be turned against
everyone, that was wrapped in rags ready to break through the pane.
The transparent skin between doing and not doing.
A glistening film, and now he is crying, sobbing like a child with rage and frustration, and the water on his cheeks stills and stops him. He is still very near. The chance hasn’t gone. What he needs most is shoes that fit him (he needs to remove those torturing boots which have left his heels raw and bloody). These tourists have endless pairs of shoes and trousers, shirts and jackets, money and spectacles, books and drinks and tickets and cameras. They draw all the good things in the world to them like magnets. In his life, everything has fallen away.
Now he circles, carefully, watching the camp. He is ravenous, but he has learned to wait. He watches the servants take things away to wash them, so many clothes from every tent. He shins up a tree, every muscle complaining, and stretches along a branch like a panther. Below him, two girls not much more than children are doing the laundry outside in the drizzle, squeezing and twisting till their arms must ache to get out the mud-stains from the forest. But their laughter as they work affronts him. They have something he lost so long ago. He sees an old man, who should be respected, carrying pairs of polished boots back to each tent in turn, humbly, and lifting one leather pair to his face so he can see his own reflection. He writhes with anger. So many boots.
And all these people, both guests and servants, are lucky, because they take their lives for granted, because they are part of the world of men. He slipped through the net, was dragged through one day, on that hellish morning in the blinding desert when the driver of the baking bus he was on saw children spread across the road ahead, and the passengers were shouting at him to drive on, but the driver could not make himself drive over children, and soon he found out what kind of children they were as they clambered on the bus, screaming like monkeys, and one held a choking stick up under his jaw while another jagged a dirty blade up into his entrails.
