by Peter Tonkin
‘Like the olive in James Bond’s martini,’ answered Celine faintly. ‘Shaken.’
They all lay back, considering their new situation. At rest for the first time since their terrible ordeal began. There was a short silence. Which extended itself. Then stretched out further still . . .
Anastasia jumped awake. The sun was shining into her face, but much of the midday fierceness had gone out of it. She stared blearily ahead, looking downriver from the relative protection of her overgrown little mud cliff. Apart from the river, there was little to see. The far bank, all but lost in a low haze, was a wall of unvarying green that stretched unbroken, she knew, all the way down to the little settlement of Malebo, God knew how many miles distant still. The near bank curved to her left, vanishing along the back of a little bay whose extent was concealed by the edge of the mud cliff they were sitting under, not reappearing again until a good deal further downstream. The jungle stretched along this bank until it heaved over a low, mountainous ridge and swooped down into the broad basin that contained the ruined metropolis of Citematadi. Or that was the way she remembered things from her trips downriver and back aboard the superannuated little steamer Nellie.
The thought of Nellie turned her mind back to Malebo, where the supply boat was usually docked. Where the nearest aid of any kind might be found. The best hope of communicating with the outside world and trying to get some proper help. Maybe she should trust the boy soldier after all and pray he had enough skill – and the rowboat had enough petrol – to get that far down and across the river.
But then the needs of her body took over from the workings of her mind with a sudden vividness that was almost breathtaking. Without further thought, she scrambled out of the boat and started looking around for some kind of privacy. Half a dozen steps straight ahead took her across the bankside end of the hook and round the cliff which had been blocking her view. There was a little bay there, reaching back as she had suspected. It seemed to have been formed when an overhang of the red mud precipice had been undermined by the floods and collapsed. There was a jumbled slope, made into rough steps by the sections of vegetation that had come down with it. Anastasia was scrambling up it in an instant and a moment later she was up on top of the bank, perhaps five metres above the surface of the river itself.
The collapse had pulled down a complete wall of shrub and stubby jungle trees and their downfall revealed behind them a grassy space several hundred metres broad. And beyond that, was a road. It looked to be a wide road; a six-lane highway with a central reservation where there still, miraculously, stood a sign which announced in several local languages and English ‘Citematadi 30kms’, with an arrow pointing downriver. Anastasia was so surprised to see it that she overlooked the most obvious thing of all at first. The road was not overgrown and impassable. Someone was keeping it clear enough to drive along. Someone was using it.
But then her bodily needs reasserted themselves forcefully – and the answer to almost all of them appeared beyond the roadway. A banana plantation. It was wild to be sure. No doubt the trees had been decimated – all but wiped out by the starving peoples who had come through here in the last thirty years – destroying the local animal populations in their search for bushmeat, and even the creatures that had once inhabited the river itself. But the bananas had come back now that the starving hordes were a thing of the past.
Anastasia ran across the road, pulling her T-shirt out of her jeans. She contained herself for just long enough to find some privacy and tear down a handful of banana leaves before she dropped her pants and squatted. It was only when she was finished and pulling her clothes back into position that she paused to laugh at herself. Privacy from whom? The whole fucking delta was empty, apart from the army Esan belonged to and the village of Malebo – both more than a day’s hard travelling distant. In opposite directions. On the far side of the river. But then her laughter stilled and she frowned as she thought again about the road. Face folded in a thoughtful scowl, she pulled the Victorinox from her pocket and cut down a hand of the ripest-looking bananas she could reach. She banged it against the ground to make sure there were no nasty surprises lurking in it, and she put it on her shoulder. As she recrossed the road, she paused, leaning against the surprisingly solid sign, looking both ways and glowering as her mind raced over a range of unknowable possibilities. Then she went on across the grass verge and scrambled back down to the river’s edge.
An hour later, all but the greenest bananas were gone, their bright yellow skins floating away downriver like strange lilies – though Anastasia noticed that Celine had hardly touched anything while Esan packed away enough for a small army – and the banana plantation had been well watered and fertilized one way or another. Both Celine and Esan had been harder for Anastasia to deal with, right from the start, in fact. The wounded woman had needed a great deal of help to get up the bank – and even to meet the calls of nature, forcing Anastasia, one way or another, into much more intimacy than she had ever dreamed of enjoying. Esan presented the opposite problem – how to allow him enough rope to permit privacy without giving him an irresistible chance to escape. But a tightly knotted loop round his throat seemed to answer the conundrum. It allowed him freedom to use his hands and feet while presenting him with something he could hardly have untied even had he been able to see it. Which, of course, he could not. The only problem, as it turned out, was that Anastasia couldn’t untie it either. So she ended up cutting it free with the trusty Victorinox. And, against her better judgement, she was impressed by the way the boy calmly let her saw away at the cable, the spine of her blade moving back and forward across his jugular. She might not yet trust him, but it seemed that he was ready to trust her.
As soon as Esan was free, Ado suggested that he had been tied up for long enough. It was time for less trussing and more trusting. Anastasia reluctantly acquiesced – though she kept both the knife and AK close at hand, still firmly in charge. ‘As I see it, we still have very limited choices,’ she said, her glance sweeping round the other three. ‘We relaunch the boat and hope we can get it to Malebo. Get help, make contact with the outside world, see if we can get the authorities to help us rescue our people from your people . . .’ This last to Esan. Who sat and watched her like an anthracite statue.
‘The downsides, of course, are the time it will take, and the difficulty it will present,’ Anastasia continued after a while. ‘We can only just all fit in the boat in the first place and it’s at least another day to the village. We can’t rely on coming safely ashore near food and shelter like this whenever we want to. Certainly not with me at the tiller. We can’t stock up the boat with two days’ supply of food and water. It would simply swamp us – even if we could come up with containers for the water and be content with a diet of bananas. We can’t rely on the river to run clean – particularly after we get past Citematadi. And talking of Citematadi, Celine and I at least know the big problem there. The road bridge across the river collapsed years ago. It’s effectively a man-made set of rapids now. They’ve had trouble getting Nellie safely past it every time I’ve been downriver; it was the only bit Captain Christophe wouldn’t let me steer the boat through. And this rowboat is nowhere near the vessel that Nellie is. I quite honestly think we’d be lucky to survive, even if the petrol lasted that far and we could rely on the motor to push us through.’
‘We drift,’ suggested Esan. ‘Drift downstream and only use the motor to keep us safe or to bring us ashore or to try and avoid these rapids you talk of.’
‘It will take too long!’ countered Anastasia, her voice tense with frustration. She did not add that Esan’s plan relied on them trusting him absolutely. No one else would be able to guide the boat in the way that he suggested. ‘Drifting might take us four days to reach Malebo,’ she said instead. ‘Your army will have moved; vanished. Our people will have vanished with them – those that haven’t been butchered. We would never be able to find them, let alone get them back again.’ She did not add that it
was also her burning ambition to see the men who ran the army brought to justice. Or simply executed at the earliest possible moment.
‘There is another problem with time,’ interjected Ado suddenly.
‘What?’ asked Anastasia.
Ado simply pointed with her chin in the Matadi fashion. Celine was slumped over and shaking. Her blouse was transparent with perspiration. ‘Madame Celine may not have much of it,’ she observed.
Anastasia felt Celine’s forehead. She was running a very high temperature indeed, and it seemed to have sprung up since the pair of them had climbed up to the banana grove and back. Her heart sank. ‘We’d better not move her too far anyway,’ she decided. Then she looked around. ‘But we can’t stay down here either. If it rains or if the river rises at all, we’ll all be washed away. We have to get her back up into that banana grove. Find some way to keep her warm. Light a fire, maybe.’
Then the afternoon turned for Anastasia into a living enactment of a puzzle she lad loved as a child. One of Kordemsky’s famous Moscow Puzzles – where a farmer has to row a piglet, a goat and a wolf across the river in a boat only big enough to take two animals. The goat and the piglet are friends. The goat and the wolf fight if they are left alone. The wolf eats the piglet if they are left alone. This time the conundrum concerned a fit – if exhausted – woman with a knife and a gun, a sick woman who needed to be moved, a girl whose loyalties were beginning to shift and a boy soldier who just might be planning to slaughter the lot of them – especially if he could get his hands on the gun or the knife.
Eventually, Ado and Esan helped Celine back up the bank while Anastasia followed with the AK. Then Ado made her teacher as comfortable as possible on a bed of banana leaves while Anastasia watched Esan pull the boat further ashore and secure it to a solid-looking tree – with the AK cradled across her breast. Then, as darkness gathered, the increasingly active and decisive youngsters moved confidently through the grove and the jungle surrounding it. They made Celine’s bed, though Anastasia sacrificed her T-shirt as a pillow while Esan offered his combat jacket as a rudimentary blanket. The torsos thus revealed could hardly have been more different on one level – more similar on another. His was smoothly muscled, deep-chested, marked with the scars that told of his initiation into Poro jungle society. Hers was scrawny but strong, modestly breasted – her bra verged on being an unnecessary vanity. And, like his, her skin was covered in the marks that proclaimed her membership of certain societies. A leopard was tattooed across her belly, seeming to leap out of her jeans, its ear-tips brushing the lower curves of the loose black bra, level with its fore-claws. Its snarl filled the hollow of her solar plexus. And, when she turned, a silverback gorilla stood guard on her back, clutching an AK-47. Each of them looked askance at the other, then came to terms with such primitive ritualism with a shrug.
Esan and Ado erected a low shelter over the sleeping woman by putting up a simple frame of branches and covering it with banana leaves. Then Esan built a fire like an accomplished member of the Russian Federation of Scouts and Navigators, and showed Anastasia how to light it – a process aided by a cupful of petrol from the fuel can in the boat and a shot from the AK, its muzzle buried in the petrol-soaked kindling. Then the children rose and began to walk towards the darkening jungle. ‘Wait!’ said Anastasia, raising the AK. ‘Where are you going?’
Esan turned back, just at the edge of the darkness – hardly more than a series of golden planes and glitters in the reflection of the little fire’s flames. ‘I am Poro,’ he said simply. ‘I know the jungle. I will find her medicine.’
‘In the dark?’
‘It is only dark near the fire. I know what I’m looking for. I will be quick.’
‘Ado?’ called Anastasia, feeling the initiative, the power, slipping away from her. Ado turned, a ghostly figure in her pale blouse and skirt.
‘I am Sande. I know as much as he does. I will go with him. We will bring medicines for Madame Celine.’
And, without a further word, or any sound at all, they were gone.
Anastasia sat cradling the AK and watching her friend as she slept her restless, feverish sleep. Long ago, in the days immediately after her adventures with Simian Artillery, there had been an Anastasia who was depressive, negative, always expecting the worst from a life she could not control, which was always headed from bad to worse and regularly kicking her in the teeth. That had been the life she had tried to hide from in numberless bottles – mostly of Stoli and Russian Standard – then cheap Polish potato vodka and worse – then, finally, behind lines of coke and crack.
But that was the old Anastasia. This one, the new Anastasia – post-Robin Mariner, post-detox, post-psychiatric help and support – knew that if life threw problems at her then she could overcome them. It was just that if the problems got bigger they required more energy, more self-reliance, more faith in herself. Certainly not more alcohol or more cocaine or more group sex or gang-bangs. Even so, when she looked down at Celine tossing from side to side in the firelight, she felt she would have given almost anything for a decent belt of original Red Label Stolichnaya.
Quite when the grumbling of the truck’s engine first insinuated itself into Anastasia’s reverie she didn’t know. But when she suddenly sprang alert, it was already quite loud. She jumped to her feet and looked around. The noise could have been coming from anywhere – like the roar of a hunting leopard. But she felt it was coming from upriver, moving down, along the road they had been following on the water. She looked back up the highway into the darkness, therefore, and was rewarded with a distant glimpse of headlights. Wracked with indecision, she hesitated as her mind raced. The only land transport she had even dreamed about during the last twenty-four hours and more belonged to the Army of Christ the Infant. But they were on the far side of the river and there were no bridges standing and no ferries running. Moses Nlong and his men simply could not have got their trucks over to this side of the river. But who else was out there? Who was there who might be trusted?
Who?
Abruptly, Ado and Esan reappeared. Silently they doused the fire, bringing a velvety, impenetrable darkness beneath the canopy of banana leaves. Even so, they pulled the bivouac down to render the sleeping Celine doubly invisible. Then they led the blind Anastasia back into the thickest grove nearby, able to see much more than she could, for their eyes had not been blinded by the fire. ‘All this will be useless if they have their windows open,’ whispered Esan as they crouched in the darkness at the farthest point away from the road, which nevertheless allowed them to see what was coming along it. ‘Because they will smell the fire.’
‘Then let’s hope they are people we can ask for help,’ said Anastasia.
She felt Esan stir uneasily beside her and realized that anyone wanting to help her would probably want to arrest him. But then Anastasia’s attention switched. Headlight beams, seeming to shatter and scatter in the night, seeming to light up both sides of the roadway at once. Then she understood. There were two sets of headlights. Two trucks. And as the first came into view at last, the headlights of the one behind it illuminated it quite clearly. Its cab was white-painted with a wire grille over the windscreen. The back was canvas-covered. But just discernible on the front beneath its headlights were the bold black letters ‘U N’, and on the canvas side under the lights of the second truck there was stencilled the familiar white on blue logo with the words ‘United Nations Peacekeepers’.
Anastasia was in motion at once, running forward, shouting wildly, before she realized that she was still holding the AK. She pulled the trigger. The gun bellowed and the trucks accelerated. ‘No!’ she screamed, pounding forward wildly into the headlights of the second truck. She held up the rifle to show she was not going to fire again. The trucks stopped. She put down the AK on the warm tarmac of the road surface and backed away a little, her hands in the air. It must look so suspicious, she thought. A half-naked woman alone in the jungle with an AK. It could so easily be some kind of trap
. Would they risk talking to her – let alone coming out and helping her?
After a few moments more, the door of the second truck opened and a man in combat fatigues and a blue helmet got down. He was wearing blue-coloured body armour with ‘UN Peacekeeper’ stencilled on it in white. He was carrying a gun which was pointed at her. ‘Who are you?’ he asked in Afrikaans accented English.
Anastasia’s story came tumbling out. The truth, but not the whole truth. Not the part about Esan. As she spoke, she heard the door of the first truck open behind her. A burning between her shoulder blades told her that she was also being covered with at least one gun from there as well.
‘And there are two more women out there?’ asked the UN soldier at last. ‘Just two women?’
‘A student and another teacher. She is wounded. We need your help . . .’
The UN soldier was sceptical, guarded. But at last he stepped forward far enough to pick up the AK. He stepped back and passed it up to someone in the second truck’s cab. ‘Cover me,’ he said, still speaking English. He turned to Anastasia. The headlight at last allowed her to recognize what he was carrying. It was an M16A4 that was becoming almost as ubiquitous as the AK. But it was a much more modern and powerful piece of kit. She didn’t want to imagine what it would do to her if he pulled the trigger he kept caressing. ‘Show me,’ he said.
She followed her nose into the darkness, but after a few steps he told her to stop. ‘Take this,’ he ordered gruffly and handed her a narrow-beam torch that gave enough light to guide them without making whoever was holding it too much of a target. He kept back, keeping her covered as carefully as she had kept Esan covered that afternoon.
But the telltale torch beam at last helped her see the pale figure of Ado who was kneeling beside the body of Celine. ‘Just the three of you?’ he confirmed again.
‘Just the three of us,’ confirmed Anastasia desperately. ‘We need help. We need to tell someone what has happened.’