The Boy in the River (6 page)

I sat on the bench after David had gone and gazed with misgiving at the crate. The fridge was a solar-powered prototype donated by an energy company. It would serve as the central vaccine repository for the whole Bandundu region, an area the size of Wales.

A little after seven a couple of mornings later, feeling like the wagon master of some pioneering trek, I kissed Sue goodbye and gave the order to roll.

There were no roads out of Bolobo, just forest tracks, and only one of these – towards Nko and then Mushie in the south – was remotely passable, even for a four-wheel drive. Nobody had tried this route for over a year; it was a nightmare of soft mud, bogs as deep as the vehicle’s roof and fallen trees. It took us nine hours to cover the first fifteen miles, hacking a new path with machetes, winching or heaving the Land Rover out of holes, then shoving it forward again in a welter of exhaustion, mud and sweat. I didn’t think it was possible to roll a Land Rover, but we came perilously close. I had no idea if the precious vaccine fridge could survive such treatment. By the time we got to Nko I no longer cared.

There was little to see beyond the flicker of a couple of campfires and the silhouettes of a few scattered huts. Outside the circles of firelight it was intensely dark; the sort of darkness I had not experienced even in Bolobo. A small group of children and women in shawls gathered around us. I hardly had the strength to greet them.

‘I am Mr Bodio, the schoolteacher,’ a voice said in French out of the gloom. ‘You are welcome here.’

I suddenly knew everything would be all right. Mr Bodio was a gracious, almost saintly Congolese in his fifties, with white hair and thick spectacles. Gratefully I allowed him to lead me through the villagers to his mud-brick house.

A mattress had been laid out for me in a small room lit with a hurricane lamp. A kindly woman brought me a bar of soap, a towel and a bowl of steaming water and showed me to a small shelter of saplings and reeds. I stood there in the darkness with the night-birds calling, and washed off the filth and sweat of the journey.

When I was ready I joined the circle around the fire, all of us sitting in wooden-framed chairs of stretched antelope hide, chatting quietly in Lingala while the women prepared a meal. I tried hard to take part in the conversation and was surprised at how well I got by. At length we were summoned inside a dimly lit hut and seated around a wooden table.

I was familiar with most of the menu.
Chikwanga
, for example, was ground manioc root baked into a hard slab: it had very few nutrients and smelled like vomit, but it filled you up.
Fufu
was the same stuff, but prepared as a paste, and I always found it delicious. Tonight’s last dish, however, was something else again.

‘We have prepared something special for you all,’ Mr Bodio said, beaming behind his spectacles. ‘We hope you like it.’

A woman placed a pot on the table in front of me and whipped off its lid.

Inside was the hand of a large ape. It seemed to be beckoning me. The fingers were slightly curled so that I could see the blackened nails. It took about a nanosecond for the appropriate emotions to flit through my brain: horror, shock, revulsion. What was I to do? If I refused the dish I knew it would cause terrible offence. One of the women cut off a segment and offered it to me. I peeled back my lips in some semblance of a smile and nodded.

The dispensary was a mile or two down the track. Once a customs post between the Belgian and French Congos, it was the only brick building in the area, but it was overhung by four enormous palm trees, which I was fairly certain would play havoc with the solar panels.

‘They’ll have to come down,’ I announced, glad that at least one task looked like being straightforward.

My irascible foreman, Tata Noah, shook his head. ‘They’re valuable, boss. There’ll be big trouble if you cut them down without asking the local chief.’

I sighed. ‘And where does this chief live?’

‘Only about twenty kilometres away.’

I gritted my teeth, but sent a message to the chief in question. This was becoming as complicated as putting a skylight into a listed building in Cheltenham.

I busied myself with the cabling while we waited for the answer. A day or two later the chief turned up in person, a short, wizened old man with very deep tribal scars. He had a great air of dignity about him and leaned on a staff while a small entourage milled about him. I realized he must have walked the whole way. I knew what an honour this was, and I felt uncomfortably aware that I had been thinking less than reverential thoughts about him and his local traditions. Worse, I was in shorts when he arrived, which I instinctively knew to be bad form.

Embarrassed, I greeted him in Lingala, ‘
Mbote
.’

‘
Mbote
,’ he replied.

There was a pause. He must have been at least three times my age and esteemed for his sagacity and leadership, but I realized that he was uncertain of where he stood with me. I was the powerful white man and I had brought God knows what magical boxes of tricks with me. I was ashamed that he should feel this way when I knew myself to be so inadequate and insecure.

‘
Losako
,’ I said at length – Father, give me your wisdom.

There were gasps of astonishment from the entourage, and I thought for an awful moment I had committed some unspeakable gaffe. Then I saw the delight in the old man’s eyes.

‘
Nkoi
,’ he replied – the leopard. I should go through life with the courage, guile and grace of a leopard.

As an awkward, rather immature young man from the Home Counties, I can’t say I felt much like a leopard. But I was as pleased with the chief for this blessing as he was with me for asking for it.

My new friend offered all the help and cooperation I could wish for and the palm trees duly came down. Within a few days, after a good deal of improvisation and nervous scrambling around on the roof, the solar panels were installed. A few more days and the fridge’s amber ‘function’ light sprang on and then flicked over to green. It actually worked. I couldn’t believe it. It actually
worked
.

On the last evening, I sat with Mr Bodio and the others and chatted long into the night. The fire rustled at our feet, and above us, in the gaps in the forest canopy, the southern Milky Way lay splashed across the black sky. This was the Africa I had been looking for. And perhaps, after all, I was beginning to be the man I had come to find.

I was more at peace for those first few months in Bolobo than I’d ever been in my life.

My triumph with the vaccine fridge won me a lot of kudos. It also boosted my self-esteem, something that I saw now I had always lacked. I flourished in this new atmosphere. Nobody seemed to mind what I tackled next, perhaps because virtually nothing seemed to work.

Bolobo had no running water unless it could be hand-pumped from a rain-catcher or collected from streams. The Congo itself was considered too dirty even when vigorously boiled. There was no electricity, and thus no light for the operating room at the medical centre. Within a few weeks I had repaired the centre’s water pumps and installed a Lister diesel generator, which had languished in the stores for some months. When we could beg or borrow enough diesel fuel from passing riverboats we even had lights for a couple of hours in the evening.

Late one evening, when the generator was silent, I was studying my Lingala in the light of the oil lamp when I caught Sue gazing at me across the table. She was due to set off for Kinshasa the next day to complete the course she needed to start work as a midwife. We’d been apart once or twice for a few days, but this would be the first time she’d left me alone here, and somehow it felt different to both of us.

‘I was about to ask if you’d be all right while I’m away,’ she said. ‘But then I realized how silly that was. You’ve done really well, you know? I’m not sure I expected it that first day in Kinshasa.’

‘Thanks,’ I laughed. ‘Me neither.’ I paused. ‘I love it here,’ I said. ‘I just love it.’

She smiled at me. I couldn’t quite fathom that smile. It struck me for the first time that by some alchemy it had been me who’d fallen under the spell of this wild and magical place, and Sue who merely lived here.

I thought about this a lot after she had gone, as I sat alone in the long evenings, listening to the scurrying of small creatures in the dark spaces of the house. The rhythms of African life had filled my spirit with peace.

This state of euphoria lasted for many months. Sue came back and started work; my own duties expanded, and I spent much of my time buying medicines and supplies for the centre, having them delivered by light aircraft or riverboat, and getting them distributed around the province.

Sometimes I took them myself, by dugout canoe or on foot, occasionally on David Masters’ bucking bronco of a motorbike, bouncing down the tangled tracks like a trail rider. Filled with a growing passion for the river, the forest and the people who lived here, I used any excuse to travel. I became fluent in Lingala, so fluent that I dreamed in it.

In the middle of 1987, when we had been in Bolobo over a year, Sue told me that she was pregnant. It seemed to both of us that our world was soon to be made complete.

10

Bath, February 2002

As the First Great Western train sped through the winter countryside, carrying me back to Bath after my meeting with the police in Catford, I knew I needed to move on, to think about what sort of a murder this was, rather than what sort it wasn’t.

I propped open the office door, picked up the first of five stacks of
muti
dossiers and carried them outside to my waiting Land Rover.

‘Spring cleaning?’ Mahinda asked, smiling up at me from his computer. ‘One of your quaint Western rites, pagan in origin. Regeneration. Return of the sun. New life. It’s in the same category as Easter.’

I slumped in my chair, my new sense of purpose rapidly evaporating.

The absent books had left pale rectangles on the wood where a little dust had gathered. The surface looked blank and I didn’t know where to start.

Mahinda shut down the screen he was looking at and swivelled his chair to face me. ‘You know, Richard, it’s a credit to you that you take such an interest in the case of this poor boy.’

‘It is?’ The compliment surprised me.

‘Yes, it is.’ He gazed at me with his calm eyes. ‘Although I presume that you have a more than professional interest in this awful crime?’

I thought about denying it, but there was no point. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have.’

‘Then you must not allow it to take over your whole being. On the other hand,’ Mahinda stood up and pointed at my bare desk, ‘neither must you give up.’

He granted me one of his most beatific smiles and drifted out. With new determination I pulled out a notepad and opened the bundle of papers Will had given me.

Where did this boy come from? I decided to go back to basics. I focused on the possibility that Adam was either African or African-Caribbean. I’d already seen enough to realize that whoever did this was steeped in customs that were not exactly common in Britain, or any of the other Western countries with significant black populations. After some thought I decided that argument applied to potential Caribbean homelands too.

I pulled one of the photos out of the bundle. Adam’s circumcision was well healed, so it had been carried out a considerable time before his death; most probably, therefore, when he was a baby. African circumcision practices are more often than not extremely culture-specific. Some groups circumcise their male children soon after birth, whilst others view it as the entry to manhood. Many don’t circumcise at all.

I knew the Xhosa peoples of southern Africa, for example, traditionally practised circumcision at puberty. So did the Zulu, when they did it at all. Most of the East African tribes I knew about also performed circumcision at puberty. The Maasai of Kenya used the rite to initiate a boy into becoming a warrior, a
moran
. So Adam was unlikely to be Xhosa, Zulu or Maasai. Could I extend this cultural analysis across the whole African continent?

This approach wasn’t without its complications. I pulled open the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and found an article about a tribe in Uganda which was changing its cultural practices almost overnight. They’d learnt from a Western medical study that HIV spreads less readily among circumcised men, and so had begun circumcising their boy children soon after birth.

I logged onto the internet and emailed a selection of my academic contacts, asking for general information on circumcision practices among major African groups, and if the Ugandan development was becoming more widespread. I also emailed my friend Robert Papini, curator of the Durban
muti
museum, to check my Xhosa and Zulu intelligence.

I drove home and spent half an hour in the basement garage rummaging through my files and storage boxes. By the time I got back, staggering under a fresh armful of folders and books, Mahinda had materialized again. He raised his eyebrows, smiled benignly but said nothing as I dumped everything on my desk.

I worked doggedly through the heap of papers, books and articles. They dealt with cultural practices from all over the African world, and as a first step I tried to arrange them into geographical zones: East Africa, West Africa, South Africa.

By now the email replies were starting to come in. Robert Papini confirmed that Xhosa and Zulu peoples traditionally circumcised their boys only at puberty. He added that although there was some evidence of babies being circumcised in South Africa nowadays, it still wasn’t at all common. I tapped my pen on the desk. Not open and shut, then, but good enough for me. I wrote on my pad, as if to reassure myself: ‘Not
muti
. Not South Africa.’

I sat back in my chair and massaged the bridge of my nose. As a process of elimination, how far could I take this?

‘Lunch?’Mahinda suggested hopefully.

I shook my head.

11

Bolobo, February 1988

We never knew what brought on the birth so prematurely.