Devil’s Harvest (19 page)

Richards didn’t appear to feel the need to answer this question, simply giving a little shrug of his broad shoulders before continuing: ‘There was a collateral casualty on the strike.’

‘There’re always collaterals in these strikes. Ask the Israelis or the Americans. Just the one?’

‘The target’s niece. A six-year-old. She ran out to the target as the Hellfire was released. I thought you should know.’

Bartholomew felt his rage surge. He was being treated as if he were some geriatric, too infirm to receive all the distressing news in one helping, instead dished out in putrid samples during the course of a parking-lot conversation. You fucking upstart, he thought sourly.

But, still, a child casualty was never good. Same age as his grandniece, he realised, imagining little Sarah playing on her swing, suddenly obliterated by searing heat and smoke.

Chapter 11

JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN

Morning brought only regret. Not just because Gabriel’s head pounded, his forehead slick with sweat, and not just because nausea threatened to break into open retching at any moment, but also because of the blurred sense of things said and done, things which he could not undo or unsay.

The bar area was deserted, the ashtrays still full of butts and ash. Spilt bottles of beer lay on the ground, and the smell of alcohol mixed with the pungent stink of the surrounding city added to Gabriel’s queasiness. To his surprise, Rasta was already behind the bar, bottles clinking as he packed the fridges with fresh beer. Ready for the next session, Gabriel thought, rubbing his throbbing temples.

‘You ran away,’ Rasta laughed, putting a bottle of cold water in front of him. ‘The ladies made you scared.’

Gabriel drained the cool water and tried to make light of the evening’s events. ‘You were supposed to protect me, Rasta!’

‘But you looked happy, my friend. A little happiness in this place … most do not run away from that.’

There was truth in that: for a while Gabriel had abandoned himself to a kind of euphoria. Why had he not let it continue, why did he hold himself back so?

Rasta saw Gabriel’s furtive look across the dining area. ‘Don’t worry,’ he chortled. ‘You’re safe. They are like river rats; they only come out when it’s dark.’

Gabriel found the cleanest table and sat down with his laptop to retrieve his emails. Jane’s message remained in his inbox, its presence a sign of his abject indecision as to how to respond. He ignored it by typing a short but jolly message to Brian Hargreaves, downplaying the heat and dire conditions and saying nothing about the seeming dead end of his trip. Within seconds, he received an auto-reply: Hargreaves would be ‘out of office’ for three days. He stared at the message, as if it might be hiding something more personal, feeling a cold loneliness overtake him.

Rasta brought him some tea: a cup, a metal pot of hot milk and two teabags. Gabriel was beginning to enjoy the little ritual of making his tea this way, squeezing the red-brown juice out of the teabag and watching the milk darken. He helped himself to two slices of colon-stupefying bread with peanut butter for breakfast. One of the young foreign-aid workers loped up to the bar, still half-asleep and clearly very hung-over, disappearing back towards the rooms with two cans of Coca-Cola.

Gabriel closed the laptop. He needed to clear his head before he could respond to Jane. He would undertake an early Sunday-morning walk, he decided, some brisk exercise to focus his thoughts on the matters at hand. He would start the day by exploring Juba’s main market – Konyo Konyo – on foot.

The muddy road outside the compound was already filled with passing
boda boda
taxis, people shouting to one another from the backs of revving motorbikes, clutching parcels and holding on with one hand. Some smiled at Gabriel, engaging with him directly. A huge tree in an empty lot strained under the weight of a number of scraggly, bare-headed marabou storks, watching him like grumpy geriatrics as he passed. He had to walk through a mound of rotting garbage to avoid a particularly large pool in the road; a
boda boda
sank above its axle as it negotiated its way through. The rubbish was soft underfoot and gave off a squelch with each step. He passed a group of men sorting charcoal into bags, packed like bulging pupae, the ground thick with black powder, the whites of their eyes bright against the soot.

Then, down a litter-strewn path to his left, he caught the glint of water, not a muddy pool but a wide expanse of moving water. He set off, stepping over the chassis of a disintegrated truck, the earth stained with oil, and then stuck to the meandering path as best he could among the tall grasses. His trousers were soaked by the time he reached the end where it opened out into a broad bank of rushes. In front of him the White Nile appeared, vast and swift, a massive bulk of brown water that eddied and pushed and sucked as it moved alongside the city. It was headed ultimately for the Sudd, the swampland that dominated the centre of the country, where the water would be filtered by thousands of square miles of vegetation, purified for its marriage with the Blue Nile and its grand entry into Egypt.

Upstream, a group of naked men – perhaps forty in all – were bathing in the shallows, soap suds foaming in clumps about their legs. Just downstream, a large blue tanker was sucking up water. While Gabriel watched, the tanker finished and reversed, its place immediately occupied by an identical truck. A black hose snaked down into the water like a proboscis and the machine started to suck the contaminated water into its bowels. ‘Juba Aqua’ was printed on the side – a name Gabriel recalled seeing on the bottles of water at the bar. Suitably sanitised, he hoped.

He walked for a short distance along the bank before cutting back up along a wider, more accessible road. Men had gathered under a tree to drink tea, one with a newspaper reading out the news to the constant commentary of his audience. Food sellers flanked one side of the road, cooking large flat breads – like coarse pancakes – in wide-rimmed pans. The smell of burning charcoal mixed with odours of reused oil and something richer, like braised meat. He stopped by one of the stands. An imposing woman with bright yellow-and-green headgear was spooning chunks of goat meat in gravy into the middle of the flat bread.

‘
Kisra
?’ she asked him, gesturing towards the food.

‘No, thank you,’ he said, stepping back and rubbing his stomach to show he was already full. The food looked appetising and his peanut butter sandwich had left him a long way short of satiated, but food from the side of the road made him nervous. The woman smiled and paid him no further heed.

Rasta had told him that he should aim for the minaret of the central mosque, walking up the grandly named Unity Boulevard – one of the few tarred streets – away from the river. He had made it sound as if the market was a single square, European-style, easily missed by the unobservant. But Konyo Konyo turned out to be a sprawling suburb that started quite close to the river and spread itself luxuriantly across nearly four square kilometres of Juba. The first sign was a huge walled compound in which trucks were parked in an impossible gridlocked puzzle, the ground beneath them thick with spilt diesel and oil. The activity in the compound was frenetic. People were shouting; sweaty, bare-chested men offloaded the trucks, huge sacks lifted and packed alongside the vehicles on the churned ground. On one truck, piled above the roof of the cab with bunches of green bananas, a well-dressed woman was standing beneath an umbrella held up against the sun. It took Gabriel a moment to realise that she was expertly perched on the stacked fruit itself, calmly directing operations from on high.

The market itself appeared to begin on the other side of the road, unannounced save for the sudden increase in movement into the uneven alleyways. Gabriel pushed down the closest walkway with some trepidation, the smell of urine and decaying garbage strong about him. The corrugated sides of the makeshift structures leant inwards, as if trying to narrow his path. And then, unexpectedly, he emerged, as if spat out, into a shaded labyrinth of internal corridors that crisscrossed in front of him as far as he could see. The alleyways were spanned by thin material that provided a ceiling against the day’s heat. Sound was dulled by the fabrics that hung from each little stall. The effect was a soft light and quietened interior space, despite the throngs of people passing through.

Tailors using foot pedals to operate their sewing machines sat hunched over their cloth, tracing pencilled lines. Their customers stood nearby sipping tea, watching their suit or dress take shape. A man sat on a modified bicycle, the wheels removed, a grinding wheel replacing the handlebars. The knife blades hissed on the grindstone as he pumped his legs up and down, tiny sparks showering out onto the earth beneath him. To his right, a series of pastel-coloured cloths, the size of small tablecloths, hung from cords high above his head, each printed in black ink with the design of hibiscus flowers and intricate creepers, some with two doves sitting chest to chest, others with hearts and religious motifs. A young man was working at a table, deftly swiping a black felt-tipped marker over the fabric to create the designs. Several men sat on chairs carefully pouring water from decorated enamel kettles over their bare toes, washing their feet and ankles before attending mosque. There was something medieval about the scene. Gabriel felt as if he had somehow slipped through the doors of an ancient city and found its inhabitants still at work.

He walked for ages, carefully stepping over the muddy pools. The noise and smells and movement and colours were nearly overwhelming, and yet, because of the strange reticence of the Sudanese, it was manageable. He must have been an extraordinary sight: pale, sweating, oddly dressed, and yet not a person looked at him. He walked through a market of thousands without a single person calling to him, no one touching him. He was like a ghost among the living, untouched by the eyes of those around him. It was, he realised after a while, both a blessing and a diabolical curse, the scar of the suicidal, ignored and unobserved. No wonder his loneliness felt unbearable. But he learnt that the moment he made eye contact, softly said good morning to a passing inhabitant, put out a hand in greeting, their faces lit up and their smiles widened. ‘Good morning, how are you? It is good that you are here. Make yourself welcome.’

He walked through passages flanked by cloth and tall displays of sandals, people selling dubious United Nations T-shirts and garish American jeans with studded patterns in beads. Many stores sported an array of cheap Chinese plastic goods, from hairbrushes to buckets and fly swatters. He wandered through a particularly muddy alleyway between two tea rooms and came out into the fresh food section, undulating with the uneven ground into the distance. There was even more activity here, the sellers calling and negotiating loudly, laughter interspersed with the bleating of goats tied up by their back legs. The smell of roasting meat drifted enticingly across the stalls. Rows of rough tables showed off bananas, pineapples, mangoes and mounds of black dates, their skins smooth like the backs of cockroaches. Small pyramids of bright-red tomatoes vied for space with brinjals, red onions and red-and-orange bullet-sized chillies, carefully brushed into separate piles. People chewed the ends of sugar cane, spitting out the fibres when they’d sucked them dry. Many women wore Muslim scarves around their heads, and some were in full-length traditional dresses. One pocket of the food market seemed dedicated to Arabic cuisine, with open sacks of spices on display, incense and frankincense filling the air with aromatic smokiness. Gabriel stopped at one stall selling strange pink orbs of resin, seemingly friable, but surprisingly solid on closer inspection. The seller gestured to him, showing him that it was to be smoked. ‘Medicine,’ a passer-by informed him in friendly fashion.

A number of sellers offered pineapples, the size of elongated footballs, far larger than anything Gabriel had ever imagined. Wheelbarrows were pushed around the marketplace, wheels squeaking, with succulent chunks already cut and peeled, sliced like cartoon slices of watermelon, wrapped in plastic to keep the flies at bay. Juice dribbled out the rusted bottoms of the barrows, leaving sticky trails as they negotiated their way through the bags of rice, cow peas, speckled beans and lentils. Another wheelbarrow offered him cleaned chunks of sugar cane, inviting him to tear sweet strips down with his teeth.

Gabriel bought a small bag of roasted peanuts and tramped back towards the compound, crunching the nuts with relish. Bicycles weaved in front of him, weighed down front, back and on the sides by square water tanks. Yellow-billed kites, far more intimidating in size and behaviour than the elegant birds of prey of the Hotwells cliffs, dived unconcerned around him, their triangular tail feathers directing their swoop, sending skinks and rock lizards scattering. He walked along a muddy road headed towards the cemetery, its surface a mass of crushed water bottles that obscured the surface beneath, the taxis and
boda bodas
crunching them with the sound of brittle bones.

* * *

A combination of an early night and abstinence did nothing to aid his sleep and Gabriel endured another humid and restless evening, waking well before sunrise. The Sudanese started all physical labour long before the heat of daylight, and the pounding of generators, the chorused tinkling of stone on metal, the lowing of cattle being escorted to slaughter, all began at four o’clock in the morning. He woke with a start, dragged from a dream of broken teeth, a bloody tongue and bits of tooth enamel rolling around in his mouth like corn kernels. His jaw felt stiff from grinding.

He languished in the dining area, drinking insipid coffee and lining his stomach with stodgy bread, while he waited for Rasta to take him back to the UNDP compound. He knew better than to ask about their time of departure, but nevertheless reminded his driver of the ten o’ clock meeting. His emails showed no reply from Hargreaves, but he managed to send a neutral response to Jane, maintaining a cold dignity, before setting off in the Land Cruiser.