Hannie Richards

by Hilary Bailey

  Hannie went on putting the gear into the Land Rover, thinking furiously. All this air activity over one spot did not make sense. It could be airforce manoeuvres. It could be an extension of the war in Chad, straying over its boundaries. She could hardly believe that so much technology was being directed at her, her Land Rover and one little black boy.

  They were sitting on the vehicle when they heard the helicopters returning. Behind that noise was the high scream of the jet. Suddenly, from behind the hills, there was a bang, and a flash. One helicopter gone, thought Hannie. A little later one helicopter came flying over the rocks. Another deafening bang rang round and round the gorge as it exploded, rolled over and over in flames and fell. It lay, suspended by a wing of the machine on a rock, burning, some 200 metres away from the Land Rover. Inside it Hannie saw two faces, distorted in agony. She turned to the boy, sitting beside her, intending to cover his eyes so that he could not see, but he sat there solidly, looking sad and muttering something, an incantation perhaps. Inside the fuselage another figure moved in the flames. There was nothing she could do. As she put the car into reverse and started to back down the gully the machine exploded again. Some metal clattered off down the rocks, but it still hung there, burning.

  She set off for the Nigerian border in a sober mood still wondering what had been going on. There was nothing to be seen of the Mirage but a faint white trail in the sky. It had done its job and zoomed off to the south. Unexplained event, thought Hannie, who was fairly used to unexplained events. She drove on through the blistering heat, deciding to risk crossing the border in daylight so as to get the boy to the rendezvous point and off her hands.

  By nightfall they were driving, legitimately, on a tar road, through a few trees, to the Anglican Mission, near Kano. The journey and its dangers over, Hannie realized she did not quite fancy handing the child over to just anybody. She hoped the people who were to receive him would be all right. She had grown fond of him.

  A big truck, full of people and goats, sped past her on the narrow road. She drove by a crew of men doing construction work near the road under arc lamps. They gave her a cheer. She waved. A few miles on she entered a small town and, slowing down, looked for the Mission. It was there, on the left, a low, white building set slightly back from the road. In the gap between that building and the next she noticed a parked Mercedes. She stopped the Land Rover outside the building and said to Bob, ‘Here we are.’ He picked up his little red cloth bundle and got out.

  Taking his hand, she walked in through the open archway. In a big, cool reception area a plump white man in khaki trousers and a white shirt sat under a fan. He got out of his basket chair and came towards them. Conscious of her stained bush jacket and crumpled skirt, Hannie looked at him carefully and said, ‘I’m Mrs Richards. I think someone’s expecting me.’

  ‘They’re in there,’ the man replied glumly, waving at an archway behind him. All she could see in the darkness of the room behind was part of a long table, with benches. Then, through the archway came a tall, middle-aged woman in a grey dress. She walked up to them and looked at the boy. He said, composedly, ‘Hullo, lady.’

  Her rigid face moved. She smiled and said, ‘Hullo— do you know any more English?’ She spoke in the clear, authoritative tones of the upper-class headmistress of an expensive girls’ school. Hannie felt baffled and, having been for some time an unsatisfactory pupil at such an establishment, uncomfortable and threatened. This was possibly the last person in the world to whom she would have wished to entrust the amiable Bob. On the other hand, such women were not brutal or likely to neglect the physical welfare of a child in their care. Nevertheless, she gazed in some horror at Bob’s new protector. The boy, in the meanwhile, had picked up what she meant by her question and replied, ‘Bed. Camp. Hannie.’ He gave her his brilliant smile and added, ‘Soldiers.’

  The woman shot Hannie a glance which made her feel scruffier than she was and suggesting that she should be ashamed she had not passed the journey teaching Bob Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’. A second later, however, she rallied, and said, ‘My name is Angelica Simms. I expect you could both do with a bath and something to drink before we have dinner. The others are in there waiting, but we did not want to overwhelm the child. This way.’

  As she led the way to the bathroom, Hannie asked her, ‘Have I got the right boy?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Angelica Simms in a crisp voice. ‘I expect we’ll soon find out.’

  Hannie thought that she was not going to get much information out of Angelica. Now that the mission was over, she was increasingly curious about why anyone had paid her so much to snatch a twelve-year-old African child. She walked past Angelica, who had opened the bathroom door and turned on the taps to the bath.

  ‘I’ll go first and show him,’ Hannie said, sitting on a stool and pulling off her boots and then her socks. ‘I’m pretty stained,’ she said to the woman, who seemed shocked and glanced at the boy as Hannie took off the bush jacket and the crumpled skirt.

  ‘What is his name?’ she said, as Hannie got into the bath with a sigh of relief.

  ‘I’ve been calling him Bob,’ Hannie said, squeezing a sponge of water over her grimy head. She washed her hair with the soap, smiling encouragingly at Bob, who stood in the doorway staring. She ducked under the water and came up, saying, ‘It’s lovely. Nice—have a splash.’ She turned the taps on and off so that he could feel the water.

  ‘We had an incident, by the way,’ she told Angelica, ‘not far away from the Nigerian border.’

  ‘What incident?’ asked Angelica.

  Hannie got out of the bath and wrapped herself in the towel Angelica, eyes averted slightly, handed her. She pulled out the plug. The boy watched the water swirling away down the plug hole. Angelica’s eyes watched him.

  Hannie said, ‘We got chased by two helicopters. The personnel were Arabs, or something, armed with machine guns. Then someone came along in a fighter and shot down the helicopters. I don’t know why any of it happened.’

  Angelica went on watching the boy as he put the plug back in the hole and turned on the taps. She said, ‘Nasty for you.’

  Hannie said, ‘Could you get someone to fetch my bag? From the Land Rover?’

  Angelica called ‘Matthew!’ but her eyes stayed on the boy. He now turned off the taps and began to wave them out of the bathroom. ‘Out,’ he said.

  Hannie turned round and went out. In the passageway she said, ‘Could I borrow your comb?’

  A black boy brought her bag and a pile of fresh clothes for Bob. Angelica lent her the comb from her handbag in no friendly way. Hannie stood in the passage and put on fresh clothes from her bag, a European cotton dress in yellow, combed the tangles from her matted hair and said to Angelica, ‘Who are the other people we’re to meet?’

  ‘Mr Omovo is a Methodist minister,’ she told her. ‘Mr Martin is a Roman Catholic clergyman, Sister Anna is a nun and Mr Dugdale-Smith is an expert on African dialects from the child’s region.’ Her tone was cold. She added, ‘When will you be leaving?’

  Hannie knew the acceptable answer to give was, ‘Five minutes ago,’ but instead replied, ‘Tomorrow morning. I’d prefer not to do any more driving today. If there’s no room here I’ll find somewhere else to sleep.’

  Bob came out of the bathroom in the now stained red robe.

  ‘Put these on,’ said Hannie, holding up the shorts and shirt. He looked at them and said, suspiciously, ‘Boy clothes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Holding up her dress and pointing at Angelica’s skirt she said, ‘Girls’ clothes. These are boys’ clothes.’ He nodded, and took the clothes back into the bathroom.

  As they walked down the passageway Angelica said, ‘I believe there could be a bed for you here.’ They went past the plump man in the reception area, still in a basket chair under his fan, and went into the room beyond. The rest of the party were sitting at a long table to the right of the room. The two clergymen, one older and one younger, were both Nigerians, a
s was Sister Anna, the nun. Dugdale-Smith, who rose with no alacrity when they all came in, was white. The three Nigerians all looked at the boy, who advanced to the table. There was a complete silence which was broken by Dugdale-Smith, who said, ‘I’m Robert Dugdale-Smith. I suppose you’re Hannie Richards.’ He introduced the others.

  Father Martin, the older of the two Nigerian men, said, ‘Let us all sit down. You must both be tired and hungry.’ Hannie looked at the younger clergyman. He was large and strong, she thought, and wondered why it mattered. As a Nigerian boy brought in platters of rice, chicken and lamb, she realized she was apprehensive about something. She picked at her food, wondering how this respectable middle-class British lady, a nun, two clergymen from different denominations and a language expert were all connected with the clever Italian in the café in Rome and why the centre of the whole thing was the Chadian boy who now sat at the table, talking to the clergymen politely in fractured English and eating his food neatly with his fingers. Six hundred miles across the desert to fetch him, the destruction of two helicopters and their crews which, because the whole affair was so odd, she was now prepared to consider as part of the scenario, a handover to a religious group at a mission—nothing made any sense at all. Perhaps, she told herself, she felt uneasy because her working life was normally conducted among people whose lives ranged from, at one end of the spectrum, seediness, to, at the other, downright evil. There was no one sitting here to whom you would not entrust your life savings in complete confidence—that, she thought, might be why she felt so rattled. At the bottom end of the table the black-suited clerics, the black-habited nun and Angelica spoke quietly. She and Dugdale-Smith had somehow got stuck up at the lay end of the refectory table.

  ‘You speak Bob’s language?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m not expert,’ he said, ‘from what I hear from that end. I know a related dialect, though. The only two people really up to this one are both in France. The others will be in Chad.’

  ‘Move down the table a bit,’ she said, ‘so that you can join in. I’ll sit here and eat quietly. I’m tired anyway.’

  So Dugdale-Smith joined the group at the other end of the table in the big, quiet room and Hannie sat and ate silently, in a daze almost, listening and not listening to what passed. She found herself checking the catches on the French windows in the wall opposite. They looked flimsy. She wondered why she cared.

  At the other end of the table Dugdale-Smith and the boy began a halting conversation. It soon became plain that Bob was learning faster than the professor. Hannie, tired, refused ice cream and went outside the building and leaned against the wall. It was cool and very dark. The stars were huge. Little knots of people stood in the street, gossiping and laughing. She sat down and rolled herself a cigarette.

  ‘Can I join you?’ asked Dugdale-Smith, appearing beside her. He squatted down and rolled himself a cigarette from her tin, using only one hand. ‘This is a funny business,’ he said. ‘What’s it all about? Who’s the boy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hannie. ‘I thought you must know. I was just hired by an anonymous Italian to go and collect him. They’re very exclusive in there. They’d like me to leave this minute—in fact, I got the impression they would have been pleased if I’d dumped the boy and gone away immediately. I thought you were one of them.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Dugdale-Smith. ‘I teach at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I was contacted a few weeks ago by a friend of a friend of mine at the club I belong to. This chap just said he wanted someone to teach a boy from Chad English as he was arriving in Nigeria shortly and his relations wanted to get him off to an educational start. The pay was good, and I love Africa, so I said I’d do it for a couple of weeks. I went to a man I know at the FO to check on the fellow who’d approached me just in case it was politics. Africa’s so full of politics even innocent academics like me have to be careful. But the man was what he said he was—the relative of a local bishop—there’s the ecclesiastical connection coming in again, you see. I came out and what do I find? Not the jolly Nigerian family I’d expected, hundreds of aunties and uncles and first, second and third wives and lashings of arguments about everything under the sun, just this slightly melancholy collection of clerics, the admirable Miss Simms, who frightens me only fractionally less than the headmistress of my first school, and—the amazing boy. The boy’s amazing, you see. He’s obviously straight out of the bush. He eats with his fingers. He knows nothing. He learns like wildfire. He experiences no culture shock. I’m not exaggerating—when he sat down at that table he’d not only never seen a watch but he can’t have had any notion of what time is in the western sense. When I left, he could tell the hours on this.’ Dugdale-Smith pulled a large pocket watch out of his shirt. ‘In English—he learnt words and numbers together. A child like that could learn fourteen languages in two years. I’ve an idea that’s not all he can do, either.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ asked Hannie.

  ‘They’ve trained him up as a sorcerer back at his village. You can tell by the way he raises his head, like smelling something.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Hannie, who got bored when she had to listen to superstitious tales from fellow travellers. ‘I found him to be a very nice boy, that’s all. Cool as a cucumber, too. We got attacked en route. Two helicopters which might or might not have been after us got taken out completely by a Mirage. Can you think of any kind of fighting which might be going on around the Niger—Nigeria border?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ said Dugdale-Smith promptly. ‘Do you think there’s going to be any trouble?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Hannie. ‘But I’m sleeping in the boy’s room tonight.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Dugdale-Smith. ‘I’m going back inside to ask what’s going on—I didn’t come here to risk my skin.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll tell you the story,’ said Hannie. ‘And I’m certain they don’t expect anything. Only I do, and I’m not sure I’m not just tired and desert-struck.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Dugdale-Smith, ‘I’ll make use of my deep knowledge of, and sympathy for, Africa to go over there and see if I can get anything to drink. I didn’t realize I was in for clerical gents and total abstinence when I signed on for this trip. You’ll join me, I hope?’

  ‘I will,’ said Hannie. After Dugdale-Smith had strolled off into the darkness, she walked round the building and checked the windows. At the back there was a small garden, surrounded by a wire fence. The dining room had arched windows and french windows, and on either side there were other windows, for other rooms. It would take ten men inside to stop intruders from coming in, and two or three would have to guard the front door leading into the building. The only thing to do was to hope she was having paranoid fears—there was no way of protecting the Mission with the few people they had available. As a last try, she went indoors to talk to the others. The two clergymen, the nun and Angelica Simms were still sitting at the table. Bob, they told her, was in bed.

  Hannie sat down unasked and said, ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility of an attack on the Mission tonight. I think it could happen—I think those two helicopters may have been after us. I think it might be as well to put some guards on duty.’

  Father Martin said, ‘I cannot see why we should be attacked. It seems a most peculiar idea. Have you any reasons for thinking we are threatened?’

  Hannie sighed, ‘I’m afraid not. I just feel it might be wise to find some guards. I’m sure the police would take anything you said seriously.’

  Father Martin looked at her and said sympathetically, ‘The rigours of the journey have been great, Mrs Richards. I think you may be over-reacting.’

  Hannie stood up. She said dryly, ‘I’ve noticed that the moment when people start telling you you’re over-reacting is the moment, usually, to be most on your guard. But I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. Goodnight.’

  After she left the room
she heard them talking among themselves. She checked where her room was with the Nigerian boy and looked in on Bob, who was in the room next door, near the end of the corridor. He was fast asleep in an iron bed, under a white coverlet. Above the bed was a huge iron crucifix. She went out and rejoined Dugdale-Smith outside the Mission. As she sat down he handed her a paper cup and told her, ‘It says Johnnie Walker on the label, but I don’t believe it.’

  Taking a sip she said, ‘Neither do I.’

  He was tipping something from a screw of newspaper into a cigarette paper on the ground. He completed his expert roll-up, lit the cigarette and handed it to her. ‘You’ve been doing some effective foraging,’ she remarked. ‘Did you pick up any gossip? Anyone new and strange in town? Any unexpected vehicles?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘But a couple of the women said they felt something was going to happen. Sometimes they’re right.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hannie, ‘and just as often they’re not.’

  ‘What’s new indoors?’ Dugdale-Smith asked, nodding at the Mission. ‘Same old iron curtain,’ Hannie said. ‘I asked what they’d think of getting a few guards for the inside of the building or maybe a policeman or two. They told me not to over-react.’

  ‘Such a bad sign,’ Dugdale-Smith said.

  ‘I wish I knew that Bob would be all right,’ Hannie said.

  ‘He’ll always be all right,’ Dugdale-Smith told her. ‘He commands respect, affection, even loyalty, even at that age, even from men like me. We’re supposed to go up to a hotel at Jos tomorrow, all five of us. Do you think I’d spend a weekend up there with that cheery crew if it weren’t for the boy? I’d be on the next plane in a flash. I’ll stay for the boy—I even want to. I can’t understand it.’

  ‘Funny,’ she said.

  ‘Very funny,’ he told her. Hannie saw a man with a secret, a bad one, in Dugdale-Smith. She didn’t want to know what it was.