by William Boyd
He walked for two hours, he calculated, then stopped and rested. It was hot and clammy and he had been bitten by many insects but at least the path was shaded by the tall trees it meandered through. Bond looked up at the high canopy of trees above him, the branches like twisted beams in some giant deformed attic. He set off again. The path remained surprisingly well trodden and occasionally he came across evidence of human passage – a bottle top, a shred of indigo material, a foil wrapper from a chocolate bar. At one stage he found a butt from a hand-rolled cigarette with some shreds of tobacco left – and he cursed the loss of his lighter. There was enough tobacco to provide a good couple of lungfuls of smoke. Bond was about to throw it away when he saw that it wasn’t tobacco in the cigarette at all. He sniffed – marijuana or some other kind of potent weed. Was this a hunters’ path, he wondered, some traditional route from village to village, from tribal land to tribal land, or, more likely, was it used by Kobus and his men to mount raids and incursions behind Zanzari lines?
He moved on, noting that there were fruits and berries of every hue and size on the plants and bushes that bordered the pathway, but he didn’t dare try one and, for such lush and green vegetation, there was no visible water source. He found a smooth round pebble and popped it in his mouth and sucked on it, coaxing some saliva flow to ease his increasingly parched throat.
He rested up again at midday, the sunbeams that penetrated the canopy now shining down directly on the path, and waited until the afternoon shade encroached. He thought he was heading vaguely south, though the path did take many illogical jinks and turns. He came across a gym shoe (left foot) with a flapping sole and a label-less tin with an inch of rainwater in it. He was about to swig it down when he saw that it was hotching with pale yellow larvae.
By dusk he was feeling tired and footsore and uncomfortably thirsty. He found a large ash-grey tree with great buttressing roots and settled down snugly between two of them. Darkness arrived with its usual tropic speed and, to distract himself from his cracked throat and his hollow stomach, he forced his mind to concentrate on matters far from the Zanza River Delta. He debated with himself over the respective merits of the Jensen FF and the Interceptor II, trying to calculate if he had enough ready cash to make the deposit required for an eventual purchase. Then he wondered if Doig and his team had finished redecorating his Chelsea flat. He had instructed Donalda to supervise the work in his absence and issue cheques as required. It would be a bonus to go home to an effectively transformed flat after this job was over, he thought, and he was particularly looking forward to his new shower – then he laughed at himself. He was lost in a tropical rainforest wandering along a path somewhere between two warring armies. The reality sank in and with it came the questions about Blessing and her fate. Blessing whose lithe slim naked body he could see in his mind’s eye, their night of intimacy so violently interrupted nearly forty-eight hours ago. He felt bitter and remorseful – but what more could he have done? He had his own survival to focus on now.
He turned up the collar of his safari jacket and thrust his hands in his pockets. He was not the repining kind – he felt absolutely sure tomorrow would prove better than today.
Some fluting bird-call woke him at dawn and he set off again without more ado, his throat swollen and sore, his tongue dry as a leather belt. After about half an hour he noticed the forest was starting to thin. There were clearings of blond grass, the giant trees diminished – lower, scrubbier varieties beginning to dominate. He also lost his shade and felt the sun start to burn. He took off his safari jacket and buttoned it over his head like an Arab kufiyya. Sweat began to drip from his nose and chin.
And then the path simply disappeared. The ground beneath his feet was cracked and arid with tufts of wiry grass – as if the path were a forest creature and this scrubby orchard-bush was not the sort of environment it liked.
Then he saw the pawpaw tree.
It was about ten feet tall and had a solitary ripe fruit on it. He grabbed its rough trunk and gave it a vigorous shake, then butted it with his shoulders, making it whip to and fro and, as the pawpaw was shaken free and fell, he caught it safely in both hands.
He sat in a patch of shade and dug his thumbnail into the yielding skin, breaking off a portion of the fruit. He flicked away the soft, swart seeds and sank his teeth into the warm orange flesh. It was moist and sweet and Bond felt his throat respond and ease as he swallowed avidly. He closed his eyes and suddenly he was transported to the terrace of the Blue Hills Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, where it was his habit to eat two halves of a chilled pawpaw for breakfast, drizzled with freshly squeezed juice from a quartered lime. He would have happily killed for a cup of Blue Mountain coffee and a cigarette. His impromptu memories of those days and that life brought a thickening to his throat – then, cross with himself for this expression of emotion, he wolfed down the rest of the pawpaw with caveman hunger, eating the seeds as well and scraping the skin free of any lingering shred with his teeth.
It was extraordinary how good he felt having eaten something at last. The morning sun was still clearly in the east so he knew in what direction the south lay. He headed on with fresh purpose. Two hundred yards from the pawpaw tree he came across a rudimentary track for wheeled vehicles. He followed the track and it led him to a dirt road where there was an ancient bleached sign that read ‘Forêt de Lokani’, some forgotten legacy from the former French colonial days. But where there was a road sign, Bond realised, there must be some kind of traffic. His spirits lifted and he strode down the road with new enthusiasm.
He rounded a bend and saw the thatched conical roofs of a small village half a mile further on. He found a heavy stick to use as a makeshift weapon and advanced cautiously down the road towards the mud huts. There was no smoke rising from cooking fires; the cassava fields were withered and neglected. Bond walked into the village sticking close to the mud walls of the houses. There were about twenty dwellings clustered round a big shade tree. On some of the huts the thatch had been burnt away and one or two had demolished walls, as if hit with some kind of ordnance. As he stepped into the beaten-earth meeting area beneath the tree Bond saw three badly decomposed bodies – a woman and two men – a shifting miasma of flies humming above them. Bond skirted them, moving through the alleyways between the houses looking for water – some well or trough. There must be a stream or a river nearby, he reasoned, from where water could be easily carried – no African village was far from water.
Then in a doorway he saw a small boy sitting, leaning weakly against the door jamb. A small boy as skeletal as an ancient wizened man. Naked, his ribs stretching his slack dusty skin, running sores on his stick legs, his head huge, almost teetering on his thin neck. Flies explored his eyelids and the corners of his mouth. He stared at Bond listlessly, barely interested, it seemed, in this apparition of a white man standing in front of him.
Bond crouched down, disturbed and unsettled.
‘Hello,’ he said, with a token smile, before realising how stupid he sounded.
Something moved behind the boy and another skull-faced child appeared, staring at him, dully. Bond stood and went to peer into the mud hut but an awful smell made him recoil, rake his throat and spit. It seemed full of the corpses of children. Nothing was moving inside. Starved into this kind of fatal inertia, Bond supposed: crawl away to some shade and wait to die. This was the fate of the weak and forgotten in the shrinking heartland of Dahum.
Bond left the village feeling helpless and depressed. It had been like witnessing some surreal version of hell. What could he do for those two kids? They’d be dead before nightfall, like all the others lying in that infernal room. His powerlessness made him want to weep. Perhaps there was another village further down the road; perhaps help could be sent from—
Then, miraculously, he saw a figure up ahead – a very skinny young man in a tattered pair of shorts. The young man shouted at him and then threw a stone. It kicked up a puff of dust by Bond’s feet. The young man shoute
d at him and threw two more stones.
‘Hey!’ Bond shouted. ‘Come here! Help!’
But the figure turned and sprinted away, disappearing from view behind a copse of thorn trees. Bond gave chase but stopped as he rounded the copse. Here was the water source for the village – a small creek dammed to form a shallow pool. The skinny young man seemed to have vanished into thin air, like some kind of sprite or vision. Bond wondered if he had been hallucinating, but he didn’t care any more – he waded out into the centre of the pool and sat down, soaking himself, scooping up mouthfuls of warm cloudy water with his cupped hands. He could press on now, and perhaps see if there was any way of getting some help for those children. He lay back and submerged his head, closing his eyes, feeling weak with relief. When he surfaced a moment later he could hear the distant sound of a car changing gear. His long walk was nearly over.
Bond stood by the side of the dammed creek, his sodden clothes dripping, in a sudden stasis of indecision. No, he couldn’t just walk on. He made his way back to the village and found an empty calabash and a large tin that had once contained powdered milk. Returning to the creek he filled them both with water and carried them to the mud hut with the dead children. The little boy had disappeared – crawled back inside, Bond hoped, and he set the two containers down carefully at the threshold. Then he heard a cracked shout from behind him.
A stooped old man stood there at the entry to the meeting square, leaning on a staff. He was incredibly thin, his arms and legs like vanilla pods, wearing a tatter of rags. Bond approached slowly as the old man berated him with hoarse incomprehensible curses. He had a small head with a powdering of grey hair, a collapsed face with white corpse-stubble. He was like something from a myth – or a symbol of death, Bond thought – and his red eyes blazed at Bond with a weary venom.
Bond pointed at the hut with his two water containers placed in front of the door.
‘Children – pickin – inside. Help them.’
The old man shook his fist at Bond and continued with his spitting maledictions.
Bond pointed at the doorway again and as he did so saw two tiny claw-hands reach out and drag the powdered-milk tin inside. Now the old man grasped his stave and giddily, powerlessly tried to hit Bond with it. It thwacked painlessly against his leg.
‘Help those children!’ Bond admonished the old man for a final time and turned and strode out of the village, his head in a swoon of pressure, feeling as if he’d taken part in some atavistic dumb-show – a stranger’s encounter with death on the road – all the ingredients of some dreadful folktale or legend. He concentrated. He had heard a car, he would be saved – unless the malign spirits of this place were still tormenting him.
10
WELCOME TO DAHUM
Bond’s ears had not been deceiving him. There was indeed a road at the end of the dirt track leading from the village, the usual potholed frayed tarmac ribbon, along which the odd car raced at full speed as if fleeing from some natural disaster or catastrophe. Two flew past him without stopping. Then there was nothing for half an hour and Bond felt his clothes drying in the hot sun. Finally a third car came into view – a Volkswagen Beetle which slowed as Bond flagged it down and the door opened. Like the other cars that had passed, Bond noticed this one had a large red cross painted on the bonnet.
A sweaty grey-haired man was at the wheel. He watched in candid astonishment as Bond slid in beside him.
‘Where you go?’ he said.
‘Port Dunbar,’ Bond replied.
‘I go drop you at Madougo. I fear too much for the MiGs.’
‘Is that why you have red crosses on your car?’
‘Yes. Maybe they think we are ambulance.’ The man glanced skywards, as if expecting a MiG to appear at any moment. ‘If they see one car they come and shoot you. Bam-bam-bam. They don’ care.’
Bond told him about the village and the dying children.
‘They all die,’ the man said.
‘No. There are two alive. Maybe more, I couldn’t tell.’
‘All village are dead,’ the man insisted. ‘Everybody go to Port Dunbar.’
Bond kept on and extracted a promise from the man that he would report the presence of starving children in the village of Lokani, or whatever name it had. Perhaps something would be done.
Madougo turned out to be another semi-destroyed hamlet of mud huts on the roadside but this time there were signs of life. There was, amazingly, a stall set up on the laterite verge, tended by a toothless old mammy. Bond was dropped here and the VW turned off down a track and sped away. The mammy had a small bunch of unripe bananas, a shrivelled pawpaw and a bottle of Green Star beer. Some stubborn undying commercial instinct made her come to her stall in Madougo and pretend life was going on as normal. And maybe she was right, Bond thought, as, using sign language, he bartered his safari jacket for the bottle of beer. He sat on a wooden stool in the shade cast by her stall and drank it slowly. It was sour, warm and gassy, an ambrosial liquor of the gods.
A few people emerged from the shattered huts, stared at him and went away. The beer had gone to Bond’s head and he felt woozy and sleepy, exhausted from his two-day hike through the forest. The occasional car stopped and he was scrutinised but never spoken to. This dirty, unshaven white man lounging in the shade of a roadside stall in Madougo would be the subject of much speculation, Bond reasoned. The bush telegraph would do its business – all he had to do was wait; he would be sought out, he was absolutely sure.
It took longer than he thought but in the heat of mid-afternoon he heard the tooting of a car on the road, heading north. Bond shook himself out of his torpor and stood up to see a dusty black Mercedes-Benz station wagon drive through the village and pull on to the verge by the stall.
The door opened and Kobus stepped out. He was wearing jeans and a blue checked shirt. He took off his sunglasses.
‘Mr Bond,’ he said, with a brief dead smile. ‘Welcome to Dahum.’
As they drove south, Bond decided to remain cautiously taciturn, despite Kobus’s crude attempts at amiability, as if there were no history between them. After all, this was a man who had thrust a gun in his throat, struck him twice in the face, who had threatened him with death and had stolen all his possessions. Kobus’s endeavours at small talk were forced and unnatural, as if he were being paid to be agreeable while everything in his nature rebelled against it. Bond said nothing: he knew Kobus’s pleasant formalities and empty smiles counted for nothing.
So they drove on, for the most part in this mutual silence, Kobus interrupting from time to time to ask him to check the sky from Bond’s side of the car for sign of any MiGs.
Kobus was obviously aware of the chill between them and, half an hour later, made another semi-reluctant effort to try and break it down. He turned and conjured up another of his awkward smiles. When he smiled he showed both top and bottom rows of teeth – small teeth with gaps that resembled the radiator grille of a cheap car.
‘I forgot to say – the name’s Jakobus Breed. Call me Kobus, man – everyone does.’
‘I’m James Bond. As you know. Call me Mr Bond.’
Kobus took this as a signal that all was now well and began to chatter.
‘You walked out of the Lokani forest after two days, Bond. I’m damn impressed, I got to tell you. You’re good – for a journalist.’ He failed to keep the tone of scepticism out of his compliment. ‘Smoke?’
Now this did moderate the chill in their relations, somewhat. Bond gladly accepted one of Kobus’s proffered cigarettes. He lit it and inhaled.
‘Is this a Tusker?’
‘Nah. It’s a Boomslang – they make them in Dahum. A boomslang’s a snake. It bites but it doesn’t kill.’ He chuckled and wiped a dripping tear away from his bad eye. ‘You get a taste for them – you’ll never smoke a Tusker again.’
Bond drew on his Boomslang, feeling the powerful nicotine hit. He remembered Kobus slapping his face.
‘No hard feelings,’ Kobus said, as
if reading his thoughts. ‘I had a job to do: snatch the SAS guy, they told me. How was I to know any different?’
‘Try using your intelligence,’ Bond said.
‘Hell, do they love you in Port Dunbar,’ Kobus pressed on, ignoring him. ‘The government boys jumping up and down: Agence Presse Libre. We haven’t had a Frenchie in town for months. When I showed them your ID they crapped all over me. How could you lose him, you stupid douche-bag?’ Kobus gave an odd barking laugh, like a seal. ‘Then word comes down this lunchtime. An Englishman has just walked out of Lokani forest. I said – that’s Bond, that is. Jumped in the car and here we are.’ He glanced over again and a tear tracked disconcertingly down from his bad eye. ‘Glad you made it. That crazy fucking firefight on the road. Somebody set us up.’
‘What happened to the girl?’ Bond asked.
‘Never saw her, man. I swear. I thought she was with you.’
‘She panicked and ran. I heard her scream. Twice. I lost her.’
Kobus grimaced. ‘Let’s hope she died in the bush. If those Federal boys got her, then . . .’ He sniffed. ‘She’d be better off dead, believe me. I’ve seen what they do to women.’
Bond felt that weary heart-sink, that heaviness of loss.
‘I looked for her in the morning,’ he said. ‘But there were no bodies left behind.’
‘Pretty girl,’ Kobus leered. ‘How was she in the sack? A real goer, I’d bet.’
Bond registered this glimpse of the old Kobus, the brutal gun-for-hire, not this purported pseudo-comrade he was being offered, and stubbed his cigarette out in the dashboard ashtray. He didn’t want to be friends with Kobus Breed.
They drove on in silence, as if Breed sensed Bond’s new sombre mood. There was very little traffic on the road to Port Dunbar. At one stage Breed pulled over to the side in the shelter of a tree convinced he’d heard a MiG. They both sat and listened for a couple of minutes but there was no sound of jet engines, so they motored on.