Darkness

by David Fletcher

  ‘You’re talking about religion again?’

  ‘Yes. It’s almost always religion nowadays – with maybe a bit of tribal stuff thrown in, or even the odd gangster annexing a bit of Ukraine. But what I’m saying is that I would still put my money not on our blowing ourselves up, but instead on our succumbing to our age-old nemesis…’

  ‘You mean…’

  ‘Pathogens. All those millions of bacteria and viruses that we think we’ve overcome, when all we’ve done is win a few skirmishes with them. And already they’re regrouping. And our response is to do everything we can to help them when they come back to finish us off…’

  ‘Over-using antibiotics, dosing food animals with the stuff, providing pathogens with transport around the world?’

  ‘You’ve got it. And bear in mind that this population spike that we’ve been talking about is in large part due to our effective elimination of what used to be our major predators – all those bacteria, viruses and parasites that used to occupy themselves by keeping our numbers in check. And whilst we like to believe that the job has now been done – and we can keep these predators at bay – we are making a big mistake. Because we are ignoring what is the hallmark of these pathogens, and that is their resilience. Unlike us, they have been around for millions of years, and over those years they have learnt how to endure. That’s why they’re now in regrouping mode, organising themselves with mutations or overproduction so that when they return we won’t stand a chance. Their resilience will come to the fore, and our lack of resilience – and our hubris – will finally be exposed. Just before we’re wiped out in our millions.’

  ‘You were never on Jackanory, were you, Dan? In fact, you wouldn’t have been on anything before the watershed…’

  Dan grinned. He didn’t think he could let Mike grin on his own – and so expansively.

  ‘Oh, and incidentally,’ continued the grinning Mike, ‘you’ve not mentioned climate change or artificial intelligence or even the elimination of the reproductive urge as a result of watching too much reality TV…’

  ‘But not the sort of reality TV that I’d like to see,’ offered Dan, ‘the sort that would remind everyone of the reality of this world.’

  ‘I think we’re on a loop, Dan. We seem to have come back to where we started…’

  ‘Sorry. You must think I’m a…’

  ‘Deeply disconsolate misanthrope?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  ‘Perish the thought,’ pronounced Mike. ‘You just let things get on your nerves. Like we all do. For some it’s a rude shop assistant. For others it’s the whole of stinking humanity. Nothing to get too concerned about there…’

  Dan wasn’t quite sure how to react to Mike’s whimsy, but he thought he should acknowledge it – and bring this evening’s divulgence session to an end – by once again questioning Mike’s credentials.

  ‘Does being mistaken for a psychiatrist ever get on your nerves, Mike? Or is that just part and parcel of designing desalination plants?’

  Mike laughed.

  ‘I’ll answer that when we’re on the other side of that spike. Or maybe when we’ve seen our first gorilla. Whichever comes first.’

  Dan nodded his acceptance of this offer, and then he suggested that it was now time to get Tefo to take them to their cabins. It had been a long day – and too long a revelation.

  twelve

  Peter stared at his computer screen. It told him what he already knew: that today would be difficult. There were now five evaluations to deal with, along with three reports, and then there was the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting, to say nothing of a whole pile of work on the new protocols – and all before his afternoon appointments. He felt tired and he once again wished he still smoked. Early mornings and too much to do were what nicotine was all about. And what did he have now? A plastic cup full of so-called coffee and a Kit Kat, a chocolate bar he’d recently decided was far too sweet for his taste. He would make a note, he thought, to tell Gail to get him something else; maybe some chocolate digestives. Or he would, just as soon as he’d decided which of his tasks he should tackle first.

  It was as he was about to do this that the door opened and Toby walked in. He looked his normal dishevelled self and he wore his normal disarming expression. Whatever shortcomings Toby had – and Peter was aware he had many – it was impossible not to be charmed and then put at ease by his shambling great self. And so it was this morning. Peter, far from resenting the interruption to his day before his day had even started, beamed at his colleague and welcomed him in.

  ‘Toby,’ he chirped, ‘what a pleasant surprise. And tell me. Do you like Kit Kats?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ responded Toby. ‘I’m afraid I find them too sweet. Must be my age.’

  Peter sighed as he picked up the rejected confectionary.

  ‘Oh well, maybe I’ll eat it myself. If I can’t give it away…’

  Toby smiled.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘But first I thought you might want to know what we’ve heard…’

  ‘From Fido?’

  ‘Yeah. He phoned in last night. Pretty crap reception, but we got the gist…’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Which was that it’s all going well. No sign whatsoever that the assessment was wrong and no sign whatsoever of an abort. And he’ll confirm in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘No, nothing at all. It sounds as though this one’s a go.’

  ‘Good. Well, let me know if you hear anything else, and let Gerry and Andy know…’

  ‘On my way now.’

  ‘You know, this could be a beaut. If he can do it…’

  ‘He’ll do it. I met him as well, you know – and I can tell.’

  Peter thought he probably could. Maybe they should forget about the new protocols and just get Toby on the job. Short chat and it’d be done. And no bloody evaluations to do. And no re-evaluations to do when the panel got cold feet. It would be perfect, and it would mean that he wouldn’t now be sitting here remembering that, despite Toby’s news, his workload for the day hadn’t magically disappeared. It was time to accept that and time to bid his visitor a fond farewell.

  ‘Cheers, Toby. And if you change your mind about the Kit Kat, let me know.’

  ‘You’ll have eaten half of it before I’ve seen Gerry and the other half before I’ve seen Andy.’

  And with that prediction, Toby was on his way out of the office and Peter was once again thinking that Toby was something of an underused asset. One minute later he was snapping the Kit Kat in half, and three minutes later he was throwing the whole of its wrapper in the bin.

  At the same time, five thousand miles away, Fido was throwing his rucksack into the back of a Land Cruiser.

  thirteen

  For Dan, Lango had been sublime. It had even tempted him to… well, to consider changing his plans. But it hadn’t succeeded. In truth, it hadn’t even come close to succeeding. And now it was time to leave Lango. It was time for all eight in the party to make their way to the second camp in this remotest stretch of northern Congo – and first to embark on that deplorable track.

  It hadn’t got any better. Dan was again sharing a Land Cruiser with Mike, Bruce and Svetlana, with Kate at the wheel, and following them were the Spanish quartet in the other Land Cruiser, with Connor in control. Progress was slow and careful. Getting stuck on this transit wouldn’t involve just a gentle amble back to camp. It would require more of a real rescue mission. It would probably also involve, thought Dan, a nervous breakdown for the Eastern European in the party. And that was barely an exaggeration. She had appeared only after breakfast this morning, having selected a short (fake) leather skirt and a plasticised white blouse for her travelling ensemble, finished off very nicely with a pair of enormous gold earrings. Dan could only think that Bruce ha
d made the mistake of telling her that their passage today would take them through a “town”, and that she therefore wanted to look her absolute best for all the inhabitants of that conurbation, no matter how impractical her outfit might be. However, he quickly revised his thoughts. It was more likely, he believed, that her choice of wardrobe was some sort of blocking mechanism, something to shield her from all that unpalatable reality that surrounded her. And he also believed it might even work – for a while. It at least enabled her to make the rational decision to sit next to Kate and therefore to avoid an underwear-revealing climb into the back of the Land Cruiser and, at the same time, to avoid the intimate company of her increasingly detached partner – for which her increasingly detached partner seemed particularly pleased. Indeed, Dan had never before seen Bruce looking quite so content, if not positively happy.

  Of course, Svetlana’s home-grown sartorial therapy didn’t last very long. It took no more than five hundred yards of jarring and bumping in the Land Cruiser to demolish it entirely, and thereafter she was reduced to a silent, badly dressed mannequin, incapable even of responding to direct questions from a solicitous Kate. She was in another world – and not the authentic, spellbinding world of the Odzala-Kokoua National Park. The others in the Land Cruiser were, and they were all relishing it.

  The track from Lango camp had now been negotiated successfully, and both Land Cruisers were making their way westwards along the “Gabon highway”. This was no more than a marginally less rutted track that would take them to the western edge of the national park, but it also provided Dan and his fellow travellers with panoramic views of unspoilt and surprisingly open bush, and even the odd sighting of a bird or a primate to add a little spice to their drive. Eventually, however, the panoramic aspect of the transit diminished as the open countryside gave way to forest. And this, explained Kate, was the start of an enormous expanse of such forest that stretched all the way down from Cameroon to the north and from Gabon to the west, and that happily still covered huge areas of this part of central Africa. It was, registered Dan, what had once constituted that famous “dark heart of Africa”, and in many ways, he thought, it still did. Especially in the area they were just about to enter…

  The travellers’ destination today was Ngaga camp, and rather perversely Ngaga camp is not situated in the Odzala-Kokoua National Park. Instead it sits in the middle of the Lossi Gorilla Sanctuary, and this is an area just outside the park, created by researchers some time ago to monitor the population of Western lowland gorillas. It is consequently a magnet for anybody who wants to observe these gorillas in their natural habitat – like all those aboard the two Land Cruisers (other than Svetlana). But to reach it, one must first pass through a village called Mbomo at the very edge of the national park. This is the “town” that Svetlana may or may not have dressed up for, but it is in fact no more than a fairly large village, and it has what might be described as a very dark claim to fame. Because Mbomo, the only human settlement of any sort in this part of the Congo, was visited in 2001 by an outbreak of that most terrible of diseases, Ebola. It killed a number of the villagers – and lots of gorillas – and whilst there had not been a similar outbreak since, Mbomo would probably never be able to shake off its dark Ebola past. Even Dan knew about it, and he suspected the majority of his companions did as well.

  However, in the event, nobody mentioned it when both Land Cruisers stopped just before the exit from the park for some refreshments. The conversation between Dan, Mike and Bruce focused instead on the improbable youth of both Kate and Connor, and then on an almost perceptible increase in humidity. There was simply no denying it. Between getting off their vehicle and getting back onto it, the ambient humidity seemed to have surged – and even Svetlana was observed to be glowing. It must, thought Dan, presage a change in the weather, but this thought was soon overtaken by events. Kate had pulled away from their parking spot and, followed by the second Land Cruiser, had passed through the national park’s gate and was now entering Mbomo village. It was immediately enthralling.

  To start with there was a little graveyard by the side of the track. It was actually no more than a cleared patch of forest, but it was full of scores of concreted-over or tiled-over graves. This, according to Kate, was to ensure that neither forest creatures nor any bad spirits were able to disturb their occupants, and it certainly hadn’t been done for any sort of aesthetic purpose. Without exception, all these last resting places on the edge of the village looked depressingly grim. They were more like the grubby floors of abandoned hovels than what one might expect to see as proper memorials.

  Then there was a hunting party. A group of a dozen men and boys, complete with a pack of hunting dogs, were on their way out of the village. They were carrying between them great lengths of rolled-up hunting nets, and some were also carrying either small spears or sets of equally small bows and arrows. With these various tools, as explained by Kate, they would attempt to catch small forest animals such as duikers and maybe even monkeys, the modus operandi involving their nets being spread through the undergrowth and the target animals then being driven towards them with the use of the dogs. Those animals that were snared in the nets would then be quickly dispatched and subsequently butchered back in the village. It wasn’t what Dan had expected to see, but Kate went on to explain that this sort of hunting was allowed in this area between the national park and the gorilla sanctuary, and that as the villagers did need some sort of protein, this was not a bad way of securing it. Unfortunately, it was also still a good way of contracting Ebola. Those villagers who had died of this deadly disease eighteen years ago had almost certainly acquired it by eating animals that were already infected and would have been caught by the village hunters. And it could happen again.

  This was a sobering thought and it might also explain, assumed Dan, the rather subdued atmosphere that seemed to pervade the whole village. Because the visitors to Mbomo were now in the village proper, and it was by no means a vibrant or boisterous sort of place. Nor, he decided, was there much wealth here. The village petrol station – serving the needs of those few people in Mbomo who had graduated to owning a moped – was a falling-down hut with, set out before it, a collection of Pernod bottles, now pressed into service as petrol containers. Quite where the owner of the establishment would have gathered so many Pernod bottles would have to remain a mystery, but the fact that his enterprise was so ramshackle was no mystery at all, as it did no more than reflect the nature of the entire village. For Mbomo was a collection of simple mud and thatch huts, some in better repair than others, but all of them displaying a comprehensive lack of wealth – and, in Dan’s eyes, maybe a certain lack of optimism. Or did he mean confidence?

  That was the real essence of the muted atmosphere of this village: the apparent apprehension of its inhabitants. It was unmissable – expressions of suspicion and mistrust on every face and not the tiniest hint of joy or even of interest in what was obviously not a common sight: two vehicles full of strange-looking strangers. Dan could easily see his own melancholy in the inhabitants of Mbomo, but unlike his own situation, he could only guess at its source. It could be, he now thought, just the grinding poverty of the place – or maybe its isolation. It was, after all, near nowhere, and even with one of those battered mopeds, the rest of the world was essentially beyond reach. There again, he suspected it might be what he’d first assumed: that it had its roots in that past encounter with Ebola – and the real possibility that there might be a further encounter at any time. As long as the inhabitants of Mbomo continued to eat locally caught bush meat, there was no guarantee that the scourge of that terrible disease wouldn’t visit them again, and that was an awful prospect to have to live with, no matter how statistically unlikely. Or there again, it could be that the inhabitants of Mbomo were simply incurably wary of outsiders, and that the appearance of even a few harmless strangers was the cause of their sombre and unwelcoming reaction.

  Fortunately, there were
more than enough tiny kids to relieve the gloom. They were all far too young to appreciate their isolated situation, far too young to have known the Ebola outbreak, and they had not yet learned to be suspicious of strangers. Accordingly, they were eager to grin at the passing strangers and even to manage an embarrassed wave. Dan found himself waving back – and then he found himself wondering what was going on. Because, completely unannounced, Kate was in the process of bringing her vehicle to a halt, just as it was about to pass a rickety, open-sided building which clearly served as Mbomo’s central market. Immediately, its vendors and its customers turned their attention to the Land Cruiser and then to the second Land Cruiser as it drew to a halt as well, and none of them looked very happy.

  ‘Sorry, folks,’ Kate announced. ‘But Ngaga’s out of a few essentials, and Connor and I need to do a bit of shopping. It shouldn’t take too long, but do feel free to look ’round. I mean, nobody will bite you.’

  That last sentence was delivered after the most transient of pauses, but that pause, no matter how transient, was telling. It told Dan that she had recognised some concern on the faces of at least a couple of her passengers. And that concern was that they were being invited to mingle with the local villagers, all of whom still looked as though they welcomed this interruption to their day about as much as they would welcome another dose of Ebola.

  Svetlana actually began to shake her head. But then Dan noticed that the Spaniards were already climbing off their vehicle, and as Kate went to join Connor they began to head for the close-by market. Soon after this, it was just he and Svetlana who were still on board their vehicle. Both Bruce and Mike were on their way to market as well – with Bruce striding out in front. Maybe, thought Dan, he saw this as a rare opportunity to isolate himself from his traumatised partner. But whatever the reason, it did make Dan wonder why he was being quite so timid himself. Kate was right. The villagers of Mbomo were highly unlikely to bite him, and the worse aspect of visiting this nearby market would be finding out what was on sale there – especially on its meat counters. So Dan quickly left Svetlana to her personal trauma and joined his other fellow travellers for a slice of Mbomo retail reality. It might even be interesting.