Hannie Richards

by Hilary Bailey

  She mopped her brow as she drove along. She had water in the back, plenty of it. But Arnold had told her, ‘Never drink, and when you do, drink half as much as you want.’ He had also reminded her that if anything went wrong she should stay by the Land Rover and not forget the radiator was full of water. People had been found dead of thirst beside cars, he told her, with their car radiators full. Not that he recommended radiator water; it was inclined to be full of poisonous additives. All this had suitably frightened her. The landscape completed the message—flat, pale-brown, cracked earth, a few scrubby trees, rocks and glaring sun. Beside the tracks, wheelmarked where other vehicles had gone during rain, months, or perhaps years before, there was sometimes a heap of cattle bones, a skull, a pair of long, curved horns.

  She checked the compass on the dashboard, and every two hours, when she stopped, she checked it against a navigating device, a Cruiserfix, she carried in her jacket pocket. She drove on steadily over the bumpy, cracked earth. She should arrive at the village an hour before nightfall and, with luck, would be able to turn straight round and begin the journey back that day. The harsh hills came closer as the sun grew lower in the sky. She had seen some villages as she drove, tall thin herdsmen driving gaunt cattle with wide horns, a woman, followed by two big girls and a little one, walking along the horizon with pots of what she thought must be water on their heads. She hoped she had navigated correctly. She hoped that Sebastiano’s information about the village was right. She hoped the right child would be there when she arrived. She hoped, if there was a village and there was a child, that the villagers would let her have him.

  ‘They are animists,’ Sebastiano had told her.

  They’re savages,’ Arnold had told her. ‘You know—pots full of chickens’ blood, rags tied over bushes, all that sort of thing. They think there are spirits in everything—rocks, trees and all that. They reckon people can get possessed by an evil spirit. Then along comes the witch doctor and the town band to drive it out.’

  ‘Are they dangerous?’ Hannie asked in alarm.

  ‘Funnily enough,’ Arnold told her, ‘they’re not. As religions go, they’re fairly peaceful. You’ll see more trouble in the Falls Road or a Celtic Rangers match in five minutes than what you’ll see around these ju-ju merchants in a month of Sundays. The thing is not to get put off by anything. It can look at bit disgusting if you’re not used to it.’

  She had met Arnold in Lagos at a bar to which she had drifted as if by accident, but really from instinct. There was always a pub, a bar, a hotel, even a hut where the counter was a couple of planks raised up on two crates. It was often near water—sea, river or canal—and it always contained the same kind of transients, the seamen, the soldiers, the young drifters, the real travellers, those who could not stop travelling, the petty criminals, the veterans of wars, civil and national, the mercenaries and, usually, the girls. Hannie knew these places, sometimes smart spots, sometimes dumps, by the clientele. Those tanned bone-tired faces, those stale, empty eyes, were the same anywhere you went, from Boston to Hong Kong. She walked into Sam’s in Lagos, looked round and sat down. As she did so she wondered vaguely how long it would take her to become marked like this with the stamp of her trade. Perhaps the signs were etched there already, but she could not see them herself.

  A boy in a white coat hurried over from behind a long, polished bar. She asked him if there was anyone around who knew Chad. Two minutes later Arnold was sitting opposite her. He was between forty and fifty, short and strong-looking. He had no little fingers, only the stumps of where they had been, on his gnarled, brown hands. Arnold had found her a Land Rover which was up to making the trip. He had driven with her to Kano to check that the vehicle was in good order and point her in the right direction. They slid out of Kano one day to reconnoitre.

  He said, ‘Here’s where you slip off to get over the border into Niger by night. After that you can get back onto a tar road until Zinder, if you want. Then go north-east using the old trade route, if the rains haven’t washed it out. Then you’ve got 300 miles of desert to the Chad border, avoiding people. You should be able to trickle over the border at night. If you make it, you’ve got another 300 to do till you’re there. You’ll be lucky to do twenty miles an hour. If you try to do more, you’re mad. You stop every hour to let the radiator cool and check the vehicle. Don’t drive more than six or seven hours a day if you can help it. You’ve got a first-aid kit, flares, steel planking, shovels—the lot. You still need God’s help, and if you meet anybody nasty even He can’t help you. Your worst enemies in that terrain will always be heat, thirst, mechanical breakdown.’

  They were driving, in intense heat, back to Kano, where she would leave him. He said, ‘The best advice I can give you is not to go. I can put you in the way of some cargo to take back to the UK if you want. Make the journey worthwhile.’

  What would it have been, Hannie wondered, as she drove—a consignment of cannabis resin, leaking into her luggage, or a letter from a Nigerian politician or businessman too sensitive to be trusted to the ordinary mails? When she refused he said, ‘OK. But I hope you’re lucky.’

  ‘I am,’ she’d replied.

  ‘Then I hope you know when it begins to run out and stop trusting it,’ said Arnold.

  She stopped the Land Rover, picked up her water flask from the floor by her feet, drank and rubbed a little of the water over her face. She was wearing a khaki bush hat and shirt and a bright yellow skirt she had bought in the market at Kano. Her long red hair was tucked up in the bush hat. The important thing, she knew, was not to obstruct the sweat in any way. Let it trickle coolingly from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet. Then she heard, in the distance, the sound of drums and behind it the even fainter sound of the flute. She got out, checked oil and water, got in and checked the instrument panel. She drove on.

  The conical huts were thatched in groupings of three to six. There were about twenty of them. She pulled the Land Rover up about thirty metres away from the nearest hut, by a thorn bush. As she walked into the village she passed a forked tree trunk with a big pot lodged in the fork. Outside the first hut sat a woman nursing a baby. The noise of the instruments, drum, fiddle and African flutes, grew louder, coming from behind the village where big rocks lay tumbled at the foot of high, bare hills. The woman looked at her incuriously. Hannie stood there as the music got louder still. From behind the huts came a procession. In front, a woman with a length of red cloth wound round her half-staggered on the arm of an elderly man. Behind were thirty or forty men, women and big children and, among them, a man with a drum, which he played, another with a round, stringed instrument across which he drew a bow and some others playing pipes. The people, some naked, some of the men in shorts, some of the women in dresses, stopped when they saw Hannie. The music stopped too. They were all very tall and thin. Their faces bore no expression. Hannie, conscious of the sinking of the sun which would, in less than an hour, disappear, plunging the place in sudden darkness, started back.

  She said in English, ‘I have come for the child,’ and repeated the same thing in French. Before she had finished speaking, a woman of about thirty, with a baby at her breast, a much older woman and three men had come out of the crowd and were standing in front of her. They examined her. She bore their scrutiny as calmly as possible. They were not, she thought, hostile. She knew they had not understood a word she said. They might be expecting her to be someone she was not. They might expect her to do something. The sun seemed to be going down too fast. The crowd stared at her in silence. The next few seconds would determine what they were going to do—drive her out, strike her down, turn away and ignore her completely.

  None of those things happened. The two women and the three men began to talk. The younger woman nodded. The old woman started to make some remarks. Her voice, speaking the incomprehensible language, went on and on. At one point she raised her voice and called something out She went on speaking. The older man in the group interrupted her and
began to talk. The sun went on sinking. Then a skinny boy in a red robe which came to just below his knees pushed through the front ranks of the crowd. He put himself just in front of the family group and stood and looked up at Hannie. He was, she thought, about eleven or twelve but tall and spindly for his age. His skin, like that of the others, was so black that it had a bluish sheen, like a dark plum. His brown eyes were big and, she thought, intelligent. He looked long and peacefully at Hannie, who breathed out in relief. She had been sent to collect a child. Here was a child. It looked as if she had found the right place. Sebastiano, when she had asked about credentials, had simply said, ‘They will know when you come.’ Hannie had doubted if it would be that easy.

  The group was now silent. Then the boy disappeared. ‘Oy!’ said Hannie, staring at the crowd into which he had gone. Meanwhile, one of the men was trying to make her understand something. She thought she caught the words, ‘Frolinat—Tebescu—’ She shook her head. He spoke again in his own language, then paused and said, remembering the word, ‘Soldats’. Hannie nodded. Whatever he was trying to tell her was not good news. He pointed behind her at the hills. She nodded again. He must be telling her that Frolinat troops were in the hills. But where was the boy? Was he, in any case, the right boy?

  He was at her side holding a small bundle, wrapped in the same red cloth as his robe was made of. She looked at his alert face and back at the group facing her. The younger woman, with the baby, stepped forward and embraced the child. The others did the same. There was a chorus of voices—Hannie took the child’s hand and led him to the Land Rover. He squatted on the back seat, his bundle beside him. Then, seeing her sitting in front of the wheel, he sat down himself. Hannie turned to look at the now silent group of tall Africans, standing in front of their thatched huts, at the sun folding down over the hills on her right. She started the engine and drove away.

  Later she looked at the boy. He sat on the back seat, gazing gravely ahead. He had not shown any sign of distress at leaving them. The villagers, even his own family, had not wept or seemed very sad. Only the woman with the baby, who she decided must be the boy’s mother, had been grave. She felt puzzled.

  She drove for another half hour, getting out occasionally to check the track. Then, suddenly, it was dark. Even so she drove on, very slowly, following the track with the headlights. It grew cooler as she bumped through the bleak landscape. Each time she looked at the boy he looked back at her seriously, seeming calm and in no need of reassurance or consolation. He had no fear of her or of the future.

  Three-quarters of an hour after darkness had fallen, she decided to make camp. It was reckless to drive on alone over the rough road, and the headlights might attract attention if there were troops about. She pulled up just off the trail, by a big rock, cooked millet and some chicken from a tin over a portable gas burner, gave it and water to the boy, who ate and drank. Then she unrolled the sleeping bags and showed him how to get into his. She also found out his name by pointing at herself and saying her own.

  ‘Bambarake,’ was what she thought he said.

  ‘I’ll call you Bob,’ she told him. She had an idea it might be important to give the boy a short name she could call out in an emergency. He agreed to the name.

  Now she was tired. Three days of driving in boiling heat and enduring the contrasting cold at night had left her exhausted. She had travelled faster than she should have done, and her physical reserves were gone. She propped herself up against the rock in her sleeping bag, smoking. She looked at the boy from time to time. He was not asleep but lay, his big eyes gleaming, staring at the stars, which were huge in the clear sky overhead. Once he turned his head and smiled at her. Hannie began to calm down. She sat up all night, dozing now and then, keeping rough watch. Towards dawn she heard a camel roar. In the distance she heard the sound of engines and even, she thought, a shout. She sat farther upright, waiting, with the rock digging into her back. Nothing came near. The boy slept.

  A pink light appeared, as if painted, along the horizon. She stretched, welcoming the chance to get moving but not looking forward to the heat, the dust, the monotony. She made tea. They breakfasted off the remains of last night’s supper. As they packed up the Land Rover quickly, she discovered that the boy followed what she was doing intelligently and copied her. And then they were on their way again. As they went, Hannie looked around her and indicated to the child, Bob, that he should do the same. She was afraid troops of some kind were still in the region. The sooner they reached the border with Niger the happier she would be.

  When they stopped to rest, she tried to strike up a conversation with the boy, naming various objects around them and asking them what they were in his dialect. He had a quick and merry attitude to all this. He learned so much faster than she did that she began to wonder how far she had been impaired by the journey. At one point he began to point at an imaginary child beside him, of about the same size as himself and then, pointing at her, said, ‘You—boys—’ and nodded, holding up two fingers. He smiled at her, as she stared at him, and said, ‘You,’ again, then made the gesture of suckling two children at the same time. Was he really telling her that she was the mother of twins, or just that he was a twin himself? It was mystifying, but she nodded obligingly and agreed. In any case, as a travelling companion the skinny black boy was better than most. He was not fearful or depressed. He was helpful, uncomplaining and cheerful. If anything, he made her feel better, not worse. The animists of a poor village in Chad, she thought, had a lot to teach Europeans about child rearing.

  That night she slept peacefully and next day made good speed. The following day was equally good. They crossed the Niger unobserved, and it was only late on the third day, when they were barely seventy miles from the border with Nigeria, that the boy suddenly stopped singing—they were passing time teaching each other songs although, again, he proved much more able at it than Hannie. He said, ‘Look.’ She turned slightly and saw him pointing upwards. She saw nothing but two birds circling overhead. Then the birds were gone. She shook her head. Five seconds later she heard the sounds of an engine. A little after that she realized it was a helicopter. Ahead of them, about half a mile away across the scrubby plain lay a range of low hills, about five hundred metres in height. Instinctively she accelerated, bumping and jolting down the track. She looked up sharply. Behind her, the boy, unalarmed, pointed back and to the right. Now there were two helicopters, still tiny, but heading in their direction. She came off the track, into the dusty, cracked earth and drove slowly for the hills. She would try to hide the vehicle until the ’copters had gone. She suspected they were border patrol. Neither she nor the boy had respectable credentials, and here, miles from anywhere, in the hands of uncertain border guards, anything could happen to them. Ahead she saw a narrow, rocky gully running into the hills. She drove in, over the rocky surface, hoping the helicopters had been too far away to identify them.

  As she jolted on in the lurching Land Rover, between steeply banked rock, she looked for some overhang which might conceal them. She found it and pulled over as the two helicopters whirred over and disappeared. She waited. Less than a minute later they were back. She could see the men inside peering down. They were not dressed in the khaki camouflage uniforms she had expected. They were not in uniform at all. They were wearing, as far as she could see, civilian black shirts and black trousers. And she realized they had spotted her, or guessed from searches farther on where she must be. They now buzzed incessantly overhead, circling round and round. She had driven past these hills on the way in and remembered they were only about a mile in length. After that the plain went on and on. So even if the gully was a way through and not a dead end she would, if she drove on, still be out of cover in a matter of minutes. Once she was in the open they could swoop down on her and land near by. And they could not stay here for ever. The helicopters could land elsewhere, and the men rush in and take them. There were four or five men in each, and all but the pilots had rifles slung over their
shoulders. She looked up again, able to pick out the features on each face. It was only then that she recognized the fact she must have noted before—the men were not Africans. The majority were dark-skinned and might have been from somewhere around the Mediterranean. One of the pilots was blond. If this was a border patrol, she thought, they should be Africans, from Chad or Niger.

  She sat and thought for a moment but, in the end, whoever they were, they had her boxed up and the only answer seemed to be surrender. If she resisted, they might use their rifles on her and on the boy. The only hope was to hang on, hoping that their fuel was low and that they would have to retreat. Then she could try a dash for the border and hope to get over before they returned. Once in Nigeria her position as a British citizen on her own, authentic passport would be secure. It was a slender chance, but anything was better than facing eight heavily armed men in a wilderness. She looked up at the helicopters, as if surprised that they were still there, then turned to the boy and indicated that they were going to eat. She made a small camp on a flat stone under the overhanging rocks and got out the portable gas rings and blankets to lay on the boiling rock. They had tea, tinned beef and rice and peaches.

  Hannie ate dry-mouthed, chewing resolutely, as the noise of the helicopters spinning overhead filled her ears and the buzzing and burring drove holes in her head. The boy sat back, leaning against the rocks, eating calmly. Hannie could not tell what he was thinking. Flies clustered round them. A string of large black ants headed for a section of peach, lying on the stone.

  Then both helicopters made a noisy, low-flying sweep across the gorge—and were gone. The sound of their clattering wings grew less. Hannie, thinking that perhaps they had been forced to go off and refuel, started packing up the camp slowly, listening all the time. A scream began. It was so startling that at first she could not work out what it was. The boy looked up as the noise grew louder. A small fighter plane, probably a Mirage, swooped over the gorge, flying dangerously low. It too disappeared.