The Boy in the River (30 page)

Londres was clearly very frightened, and I could see why. I was filled with an intense pity for this lonely, scared boy, marooned in what looked to him like a madhouse. It seemed very like that to me too.

‘Can you take me back to London?’ he asked suddenly. His tough-kid attitude had deserted him. ‘Please, Richard. Take me home with you. I’d do anything to get out of here.’

‘Londres, your family would never let me do that.’

‘Please. I’ll be stuck in this place for the rest of my life. I’ll never get out.’

I couldn’t answer him, and I sat staring stupidly at the boy for several seconds. It was Andy, the lanky soundman, who saved the moment. He took of his headphones and punched Londres lightly on the shoulder.

‘Bollocks to this,’ he said. ‘Time to cool off.’ And with that he stepped to the edge of the pool and threw himself in, fully clothed. In a couple of moments Londres and the rest of us were all in the water, in various states of undress, splashing around like kids. Someone found a ball and a half-hour game of improvised water polo followed, which continued as soccer once we had dragged ourselves out of the pool. I could see why Londres was so passionate about football: he was extraordinarily good, and ran rings around even Andy, who was no slouch when it came to ball skills.

Perhaps for the first time in months Londres became a teenage boy again, laughing and shouting, squelching around after the ball in his sodden clothes. It felt to me as if this was all I could give him, this hour or two of normal, boisterous life. I suppose it was something.

After that we treated him to lunch. He sat wrapped in a towel while his clothes dried in the sun. I told him to order anything he wanted – he had two main courses and a vast confection of a dessert – and at about three in the afternoon I called a cab and prepared to take him back.

He was laughing until the last moment, high-fiving the crew and cracking jokes, but once inside the cab his mood grew instantly tense again and his expression hangdog. We drove away from the club in silence, and he barely acknowledged the waves and shouted farewells of Andy and the others.

As we approached his aunt’s house, his distress became even more evident and I felt desolate. I took him to the door, hugged him quickly and walked away,leaving him a forlorn and tearful figure, with his aunt and toothless crone of a grandmother fanking him like jailers. An ordinary London child, delivered into a ghoulish nightmare from which he could not escape.

Later that afternoon I contacted the British Embassy in Kinshasa.

‘We’re sympathetic, of course, Dr Hoskins,’ an official told me. ‘But if I understand you correctly, the boy isn’t even a British citizen.’

‘No, but he’s been a resident of London for most of his life.’

‘Hmm. Not good enough, I’m afraid. He’s Congolese. He’s a minor. He’s here with the consent and approval of his parents. From what you’re telling me, his mother actually brought him out here.’

‘He doesn’t want to be here. Doesn’t he have any rights?’

‘Of course he does, Dr Hoskins, but none that we can enforce.’

‘So what do you suggest I do?’

‘You could contact the Kinshasa social services department.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I’m sorry. Truly.’

I was greeted by a bad-tempered man in a white shirt who claimed he was the director. Speaking to me across a dusty desk entirely devoid of any signs of ongoing work he made it clear that he was profoundly uninterested in Londres’ case. I didn’t like him, but he had a point. The streets outside his barred windows were full of destitute kids – tens of thousands of them – stealing, starving, selling their bodies. Every one of them had a tragic story, many of them more tragic than Londres’. What was special about Londres, the director seemed to imply, except that I chose to think of him as British?

‘I will make inquiries,’ he said, and stared stonily at me to show that the interview was over.

I suspected that he had forgotten me and Londres by the time I had left the building.

Back at Sacha’s room in the Memling hotel I called DC Jason Morgan in London.

‘We have no jurisdiction, Richard,’ he told me bluntly. ‘We’re the London Metropolitan Police, and you’re in bloody Kinshasa.’

‘You’d have jurisdiction if he was in England, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes. But he’s not.’

‘He’s a boy from London. In everything except citizenship he’s as British as you or me. He deserves our help.’

‘They all do. Get real, Richard. What do you want us to do? Send in a squad car?’ When I said nothing his voice softened. ‘Half the world deserves our help, mate. Almost no one gets it. It’s not right,but it’s the way it is. You know that.’

I put the phone down and went to the bar, where the crew were drinking. They knew what I’d been trying to achieve, and they’d known I would fail. They lowered their voices when I appeared, the way people do around the bereaved.

‘Cheer up, Richard,’ Sacha said at last. ‘I’ve got us on a flight tomorrow. We can get back home and watch some cricket.’

Andy put a Primus on the bar in front of me. ‘We could always kidnap the little blighter.’

Of course he was joking. But as I stared into the frosted glass, I wondered if I might do just that – take a cab round to the house in the morning, bundle the boy in and escape with him. I knew the system well enough. I could bribe our way through the airport and onto the plane. I might just get away with it. And in London? Presumably I would be arrested for abduction. But Londres would be back home – and what headlines we would make with the case! Could it be worth it?

‘I want to get a sunset shot,’ Petra announced, putting down her glass and breaking the thread of my insane reverie. ‘Palm trees and rapids. Richard standing by the Congo River as the sun goes down. You know the sort of thing.’

We all followed her outside into the hot dusk and, helped by security guards from the hotel, we lugged the gear across the road to the riverfront promenade. I went along with it, allowing Sacha to tell me what sort of a piece to camera he wanted. I no longer cared much one way or the other, but there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do, and I stood on the broken pavement while Petra framed her shot.

Mosquitoes whined of the riverside vegetation and the soft boom of the falls filled the air. The sky above the vast river was a brilliant scarlet, as gaudy as a parrot’s wing, and the mist from the rapids foated blood red, blurring the lights of Brazzaville on the far bank.

The usual little crowd had gathered to watch, laughing Congolese kids and passers-by, keen for any kind of entertainment. Traffic slowed while passengers got a look at us.

I paid no attention until an elderly Datsun pulled up almost at the kerb in front of me. The driver wound down his window and looked me in the eye, his face a mask of contempt. He spoke a short sentence of Lingala, then wound up his window and sped away with a screech of tyres.

Andy glanced at the receding tail lights. ‘What was that all about?’

‘You want a translation?’ I asked him.

‘Sure.’

‘He said, “You fucking Westerners. You’ve stolen everything else, now you want our sunset too.”’

At noon the next day I sat in the ruined departure lounge of Kinshasa airport and stared out at the acreage of tarmac as it wobbled in the heat.

I had found a place for myself some distance from the others, and I was grateful that they – sensing I wanted to be alone – had respected my privacy. I was depressed. I seemed unable to get my mind in order. I was in part suffering a delayed reaction to the riot in which we had all so nearly died. But the image which kept coming to mind was not the screaming aggression of that day, but the picture of Londres standing forlornly between his aunt and his grandmother, a tearful and abandoned child.

I was desolate at the thought that I had opened a window onto his old life, without being able to offer him any way of escaping through it. We’d got our documentary, but what good would it do Londres? For that matter, what good would it do anyone in Africa? We had raised the
kindoki
issue and tried to show it for what it was. But would it make any real difference?

I gazed bleakly around the terminal. It was battered and bullet riddled, the seats broken and the glass cracked. I had been through here a few times now. During the riots of the early 1990s, when these bullet holes had been made, South African troops with machine guns had guarded the place against rebel assault while I saw of my wife and child from this spot. I remembered too the very first time I had come through this building, close to twenty years ago, a callow young man from the Home Counties. Then, I had been aghast at the confusion, the aggression, the shouting and chaos, but also seduced by the colour, heat and din. I had fallen in love with it all.

Had it all been worth it, my relationship with this place? What had it cost me and those around me? What had I really achieved? Had the sacrifice been worthwhile?

I thought of my two girls, buried 300 miles north of where I was sitting. And then I thought of Faith, sadly packing her bags to go and stay at her parents’ in Devon, not quite leaving me. Not quite. Just during the week, I should understand, because I wasn’t with her anyway. I was off trying to solve the problems of the world, problems which no one could solve, not alone. I missed her desperately. I missed her comfort, her love, her companionship, her warmth and affection.

I swore I wouldn’t come back to the Congo again.

I’d had enough.

40

Devon and Sheffield, August 2005–2007

Faith was waiting for me when I walked through the barrier at Tiverton Parkway station. We held on to one another for a long time, oblivious to the people we forced to edge and shuffle past us. Eventually she broke away and handed me the keys. She asked me if I wanted to drive. Her voice was unnaturally high and she kept her face away from me.

It was full, glorious, Devon summer, the trees still and heavy in the afternoon and the air as warm as a scented bath. We got into the car and I drove a couple of miles out of town before either of us spoke again.

‘I gather you had some trouble in Kinshasa,’ Faith said, studiously looking out of the window at the hedgerows and golden fields.

‘Yes. A bit.’

‘That’s what that mysterious call was about, was it? Saying you were all OK?’

I confessed that it was.

‘You know the most frightening thing in the world, Richard? It’s getting a phone call telling you not to worry.’

I told her I hadn’t been thinking clearly at the time. Apparently she knew what had happened, at least in outline: she had shouted at the girl from the production company until she’d told her. Now Faith wanted the full story from me, but I couldn’t face talking about it at that moment and I said so.

‘We have to talk about it sooner or later,’ she retorted, but something about my attitude was confusing her. She decided to change the subject. ‘Dad’s in hospital,’ she said. ‘Nothing too serious, at least I hope not. It’s to do with his diabetes. But the timing’s not great, with the hay all cut and just ready to be brought in, and this is the first spell of really good weather we’ve had. David Wood – the farmer up the road? – he’s going to bale it up for us, but he can’t do it all on his own. Mum’s running the farm at the moment, and we’re trying to hire someone for a day or two to help get the hay in.’

‘No need. I’ll give him a hand.’

She stared at me. ‘You?’

‘Yes, I realize I’m a bookworm of advancing years, but I might have a few days’ honest work left in me yet.’

‘But I thought you’d have to get straight back to London after the weekend. What about your casework? You won’t have time.’

I had deliberately chosen the back road home from Tiverton. We were deep in the Devon countryside now, narrow lanes bordered by high hedges of beech and hawthorn, white cow parsley dense on the verges. I wound down the window so the soft air flowed over my face. When I saw the lay-by ahead I pulled over.

‘What are you doing?’ Faith asked slightly nervously.

I felt in my pocket for the police mobile, the one the new cases came through on. I weighed it in my hand for a moment and tossed it into the hedge. Then I slammed my foot firmly to the floor, the soft gravel spinning behind me as we pulled away.

Faith twisted in her seat and looked out of the rear window, as if she might be able to pick out where the mobile had fallen. After a moment she turned back to face me.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ she said.

‘I put the London flat on the market.’

‘You did
what
?’

‘Just before I got the train down here. I went back to the flat and I looked around and I knew I couldn’t live there –
we
couldn’t live there – any more. I called the agents and put it on the market.’ I looked at her. ‘I know I should have discussed it with you first, but somehow I felt I didn’t need to.’

‘No,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘You didn’t.’

We began work at noon the next day, when the heat of the morning sun had dried the cut hay. For hours I followed the tractor as it bumbled and clanked across the dusty field. The tractor was supposed to be fitted with an appliance for loading the bales, but naturally it didn’t work, so it was left to me and Faith’s mother to load the trailer by hand.

All through that afternoon I heaved bale after bale off the ground and into the trailer, then unloaded them again in the barn and stacked them eight high. Mice and voles scrambled away to safety and crickets bounced from under my feet. Faith kept up a steady stream of lemon squash and tea throughout the day, laughing at me as I wrestled with the heavy bales.

Finally, David silenced the tractor’s engine and walked over to me, his boots crunching on the stubble. He was a lean, thoughtful man of about my own age, not much given to talking, which was just as well, because his West Country accent was so strong I could barely understand him. We stood in companionable silence. The sun was low above the western horizon, and the first bats began to flicker from the wood.