The Boy in the River (11 page)

I explained that a sacrifice required much more preparation than a
muti
murder. It had to conform to established rituals, from the selection of the victim through to the ceremony itself and the deposition of the remains. There had to be a group involved – at least a handful of people, and maybe quite a few. ‘It makes sense of everything we know,’ I insisted. ‘Like the shorts being placed on the torso after death, the choice of their colour and the fact that deposition was in the river. I still think the victim and the perpetrators came from the same ethnic group or same geographic area. And I’ve an idea that might be West Africa.’

‘
West
Africa?’

I could see Will hacking through the operational tangles that would spring up if West Africa emerged as a firm front-runner days before their visit to South Africa.

‘Any chance of being more specific?’he asked.

I had hoped to avoid this. I knew how easily it could be misrepresented if I went about naming ethnic and religious groups, especially when I had no hard evidence. ‘Adam was circumcised as an infant. Circumcision at that age is common among the Yoruban people, and not very common elsewhere. The Yoruban homeland is in central and western Nigeria. And there’s some evidence that human sacrifice is still practised by certain Yoruban cults. They’re probably not the only ones who do it, but there’s a strong historical association.’

‘So if I ask Ray Fysh to get the boffins to start searching for matches in West Africa, and especially Nigeria, are you confident they may find something?’

‘The sacrificial victim is often forced to drink some kind of potion before the ritual act itself. That can be very specific in its make-up, depending on which deity is involved. We ought to get the contents of Adam’s intestines carefully analysed with that in mind. Not his stomach. His intestine. If he was given any sort of concoction, as I’m suggesting, he probably would have been forced to drink it a day or two before the killing, so it would already have gone through his stomach and into the gut.’

‘I’ll see if we can push it up the list of priorities.’ Will blew out his cheeks and sat back in his chair. ‘Nick, while you’re on your feet, why don’t you get the cultural adviser another beer?’

15

Bolobo, Oxford and Bath, 1989–1999

Sue turned to her faith for the support I could not give her. She submitted to the tragedy as the will of God and found that in this way she could come to some level of acceptance.

My own response was anguished and confused. I felt betrayed by God for not keeping his side of the bargain I thought we’d made, and sometimes my mind seemed locked in one long howl of protest against his very existence. I tried to deny him on the grounds of human suffering – not just mine but the suffering I’d observed in the lives of the people of the Congo.

And yet here I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. For if I did not believe in something, if I did not allow the existence of some purposeful pattern in life, how could I make any sense of my daughter’s death?

So, despite everything, I clung to faith for the time being. I could no longer even attempt to conceptualize what sort of God it was in whom I believed, but I had to believe nevertheless. I could not allow myself – not even for a moment – to entertain the thought that I had returned to the Congo with my beautiful daughter for no reason. Even worse, gnawing away underneath was the constant doubt about what might have happened if I had made the sacrifice as Tata Mpia had urged me to. Surely that way madness lay.

The Baptist Mission reacted to our loss by arranging for us to be sent back to the UK on extended compassionate leave.

On our last night before leaving Bolobo, Sue and I sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table and looked at each other through the glow of the hurricane lamp. Our hands were on the tabletop but they did not touch.

‘I don’t think I want to go,’ I said.

‘We both need to go home, Richard. We both need to move on.’

‘This is home,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want to move on.’

‘What
do
you want?’

‘I want to stay here with Abigail. I want to be buried here beside her.’

I was entirely serious. I did want to be buried beside my daughter, and at that moment I didn’t care how soon it happened. Indeed, I would happily have helped matters along, though I had the sense not to say that to Sue.

‘That’s precisely why we have to go home,’she said.

The next day we lifted off in the Cessna with Dan once again at the controls. Normally so affable, he avoided looking at us directly, as if what he saw in our eyes was too painful to handle. I stared out over the canopy as the tiny plane banked. The endless forest stretched below with the silver river winding through it. Already the tiny green strip had been swallowed up. Bolobo itself had disappeared from view.

I cried a great deal. I had never been a particularly tearful type, but now I was overcome at unexpected moments. These bouts of emotion were like ripples spreading out from that dreadful afternoon in Bolobo. I had no control over them and made no effort to exert any. I didn’t care what anyone thought. I was aware that Sue, now close to giving birth again, wanted and needed my support, but I had very little to give her. In its absence she got on with life, and managed it a good deal more stoically than I did.

She found me one day, kneeling on the living-room carpet with a pile of newspapers and a pair of scissors in front of me. Gently, she asked me what I was doing.

I couldn’t meet her eyes. I was cutting out the pictures of children who had been hurt or abused in some way. ‘I just thought I’d light a candle for them, that’s all,’ I explained.

‘Abigail’s gone, you know, Richard,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s going to be best for both of us if you accept it.’

I didn’t answer and after a while she quietly left the room.

Perhaps Sue called the Church in an effort to help me, or perhaps they decided to act on their own initiative, for at about this time a young man I didn’t recognize appeared at our front door. It was a late summer afternoon and I had been lounging on the sofa, watching the Test match. Cricket was one of the few things that brought me relief at the time. I loved the order of it, the esoteric rules and rituals, its very Englishness. So I pulled the front door open rather grumpily when the bell rang, resenting the intrusion.

‘Richard Hoskins? I’m Pete Swaffham, from the Church.’ He held out his hand and I took it reluctantly. He had an open, friendly face. ‘I’m here to see if I can be of any use to you.’

‘Of use to me?’ There was a ripple of applause from the TV and I glanced over my shoulder towards the living room, impatient to get back to the match.

‘I’m here if you’d like to talk through any . . . issues. Obviously you’ve had a very bad time in Africa and it usually helps to talk.’

‘I don’t even know you.’

‘It can be especially helpful to talk to a stranger, Richard. Neither of us can bring any baggage to the discussion, can we?’

I looked at him and the irritation must have been apparent in my face. I didn’t need counselling, I thought, and he was interrupting my cricket. But he stood his ground and in the end I was not quite far enough gone to shut the door in his face.

‘Listen,’ I said at last. ‘I’ve spent three and a half years in the middle of bloody nowhere and this is the first chance I’ve had to watch a Test match. So if you want to do your Samaritans bit you’ll have to sit through the cricket first, OK?’

He smiled broadly. ‘Sounds fair enough.’

And to his credit he came in and sat beside me in the sitting room for a good hour. We swapped occasional comments about the state of the pitch and the English batting. I don’t now recall if we ever got round to talking through my ‘issues’, but his visit was the first useful input I’d had during this strange time.

We were a family again, whatever else had changed. For the first time I began to feel a stirring of interest in the future. We returned to our limbo in Sidcup to take stock of what this meant for us. These were a strange few weeks for both Sue and me. We were aware of the fact that the gulf between us had widened. We didn’t fight, or even disagree, but each of us had reacted so differently, first to Judith’s death, then to Abigail’s, that we could not hide from one another the distance between us in outlook and belief.

Life, however, seemed determined to go on. Here was a precious new child who needed both of us. And if life was not going to give up on us, we felt that we could not give up on life.

The seasons changed again, and across the dull suburban gardens crept the first signs of spring. One February afternoon, Sue and I were sitting in the main room of the Sidcup house. Sue was feeding David and I was alternately reading the newspaper and watching the raindrops slide down the windows.

‘We can’t just sit here doing nothing indefinitely,’ Sue said abruptly, shifting the baby’s weight in her lap.

‘No,’ I agreed, folding the paper. I did this carefully but it seemed to make a large sound in the quiet room. ‘No, we can’t.’

‘It reminded me, having David,’ she said. ‘The help we got, the care. It reminded me how many people don’t get any help at all. It makes me feel selfish. And here am I, a qualified midwife with all this experience, doing nothing. I don’t think that’s what God put me here to do.’

I didn’t know what to say.

Sue and I went back to the Congo in March 1990 and spent another eighteen months working there, trying to rebuild our lives and to find our common purpose once more. Then, in September of 1991, events overtook us in explosive style. We were in Kinshasa when the capital was sacked by rebel soldiers. Sue – now heavily pregnant again – and David were abruptly evacuated to Britain via South Africa, whilst I stayed on, attempting to hold the fort. But after a few weeks I too had to flee, under gunfire, across the river.

Sue met me at Heathrow with David on her hip and she and I embraced awkwardly. We didn’t speak for a while. Neither of us quite knew what this new life in Britain had in store for us. We had been through so much together that it was hard to imagine ourselves fitting into anything like a normal life. In many ways things should have been hopeful and positive for us. We had a young child and another baby due shortly, and we were, after all, still young. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel that way. Once again we were faced with rebuilding our lives, and I think we were both beginning to ask how often two people could be expected to do that. It was as if we feared the English suburbs might prove more of a challenge to us than the Congolese rainforest.

Still, we entered into our future as positively as we could. It seemed to me that this was the ideal opportunity to return to the point at which I had left off all those years before and try to get a degree. Rather to my surprise, I was accepted by Oxford to study theology. It wasn’t that I was hoping to rebuild my own battered faith – I didn’t believe that I could ever lose my faith, because to do so would have made a nonsense of Abigail’s death – but my relationship with Christianity had certainly come under enormous pressure. Partly because of that, the nature of belief itself – not merely Christian belief – had become intensely interesting to me, so theology as an academic discipline seemed the obvious choice.

It would be some months before I was due to start at Oxford, and meanwhile Sue and I rented a place in South Norwood, near Croydon. It wasn’t much of a home but we thought we could return to some normality there after the lunacy of the Congo, and perhaps find a way of moving forward together. Those winter months brought us their share of joy. In November 1991 Sue gave birth to our beautiful daughter Elspeth. Mercifully, this time everything went well and we were overjoyed to be parents of a daughter again.

Early in 1992 I was invited back to the ravaged Congo, this time for a month to see if I could help get vital supplies up-river from Kinshasa to Bolobo. I travelled on my own, spending a gruelling time in a country that was on its knees. Whilst there the United Nations asked me if I would go to work for them on the Congo–Rwanda border. I agonized over the decision, but my place at Oxford beckoned and I knew that it would be my last chance to go to university. I turned down the UN job and came home.

Despite this, I was unable to kick the door firmly shut.

I discovered that Compline with Benediction was held in the chapel of Magdalen College at ten every Sunday evening, and I never missed it when I was in Oxford. There would seldom be more than a handful of us, and in the dim light of the candles and gently rising incense I would listen to the words in awe: ‘
Brethren, be sober, be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Whomso resist, steadfast in the faith.
’