by Tony Park
The boy knew he could not stay in Botswana. He had his temporary travel document in the pocket of his new baggy cargo pants. His money was almost gone, so he would have to go home to Zambia. He would look for the friends of his uncle and tell them what had happened, and they would give him an AK 47 and he would go back to Zimbabwe to hunt the elephant and the rhino again, and to kill the men who had killed his uncle.
He considered robbing one of the many tourists in Kasane, but decided it was not worth the risk. If he was caught by the police he would be sent to a Botswanan jail and he would never see his mother again or have the chance to avenge his uncle and the others. He walked past the shopping centre to the place where the minibus taxis were parked, and boarded one bound for Kazungula, a few kilometres up the road on the Zambezi River.
He left the bus with the other passengers and walked onto the ferry that plies the border crossing between Botswana and Zambia. His fellow travellers were all Zambian. He wasn’t surprised as he couldn’t guess what a big chubby Botswanan would want in Zambia. The others, eight men and two women, were poorly clothed. They eyed him enviously. No doubt some of them assumed he was a criminal, being so well dressed at such a young age. There was room on the ferry for one semitrailer and three cars. One of the smaller vehicles was a Toyota pick-up being driven by an old white man. The truck had the name of a Catholic charity on the side. The boy winced and pulled the peak of his cap down over his eyes as he sauntered past the man, whom he recognised.
‘Daniel? Is that you under that fancy new hat? Glory be, but what have you been doing in Botswana?’
The boy pretended he hadn’t heard, but the old man caught up with him and took his arm. The boy shrugged off the blotchy pink hand. He never wanted to be touched by a man again.
‘Sorry, sorry, Daniel, but it’s me, Father Timothy. At least say hello when I talk to you, boy.’
‘Morning, Father, how are you,’ Daniel mumbled as the rear ramp of the ferry was raised with the clanking of a chain. The ferry’s diesel motor belched black smoke as its revs increased. They moved sluggishly out into the fast-flowing Zambezi.
‘Daniel, you don’t need to hide from me, you’re not in trouble – even though we’ve missed you at school these past weeks.’
‘Sorry, Father,’ he said in a small voice. He wasn’t really sorry at all, but he knew that priests always liked it when you apologised for your sins.
‘Well, I won’t ask again what you’ve been up to, or where you got the money to buy these nice new clothes, but I have to talk to you, my boy. Come, sit here with me.’
Daniel was reluctant to sit next to the priest. He thought again of the man in the car, but Father Timothy patted the metal bench that ran along the side of the ferry. Daniel felt trapped.
‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, Daniel,’ the priest began.
Daniel remembered the man visiting his mother, after they had buried his father, and her crying and praying the night after. His mother had told him that Father Timothy was a good man, and had pleaded with him to go back to school. He had ignored her. He didn’t like the way the old man was looking into his eyes now. He looked down at the patterns on the metal deck of the ferry.
‘It’s your mother, Daniel. We tried to find you last week, but no one knew where you had gone. I’m so sorry, my boy, but she’s gone to God.’
‘She is dead?’
‘I’m afraid so, son.’
His father. His uncle. The others in the bush. His mother. What had he done wrong to be left so alone in the world? The euphoria of walking through the supermarket, of strolling among the contented, well-fed people of Kasane, of planning his future life as a rich man, disappeared with those few words. He started to cry, and he didn’t even flinch when Father Timothy wrapped an arm around his shoulders.
Timothy Ryan had ministered to drug addicts in his native Dublin, the victims of child sexual abuse in London, to murderers and rapists in a jail in Glasgow, and to victims of the AIDS plague in Zambia.
In his experience, for every lost soul who genuinely repented their sins, cleaned up their act, came back to the fold and embraced the word of the Lord, there were a dozen other failures or fakers who said what they thought he wanted to hear in order to get another free feed or a crack at the poor box after hours. He had become pretty good, if he were immodest enough to say so, at picking a liar.
He drove the Nissan in silence and glanced across again at Daniel. The boy had been vague about where he had found the money to buy his clothes, and that, to Timothy, was as good as a confession that he had thieved. It didn’t surprise him that Daniel had turned to crime at a young age. His mother had been a good, hard-working woman who washed laundry for one of the lani lodges up the river, but his father had been a drunken bum more interested in blowing his wife’s income on booze and prostitutes. The uncle, Leonard, whom Daniel revered in death, was well known amongst the local community as a poacher of note.
Yes, Daniel was cagey about his new duds, but there was no way he was lying about the rest of what had happened to him in Zimbabwe. If the man hadn’t been already dead, Timothy would have king-hit Daniel’s uncle himself for taking the boy across the river on one of his poaching forays.
The easy thing, of course, would have been to do nothing, or to tell the police in Livingstone, which would be tantamount to the same thing. What would they care about the deaths of a few criminals in another country, save for the fact that their pay-offs might be a little light from now on? He could cross the border at Victoria Falls and tell the police in Zimbabwe, but he would likely get a similar response. Why would the cops over there waste their time investigating the shooting of men who had clearly, admittedly, been breaking the law in a country where the authorities had the right to shoot armed men on sight?
Timothy sighed as he turned off the new tar road linking Kazungula to Livingstone, onto the corrugated dirt track that led to the mission school and the orphanage. He hoped he had managed to talk Daniel out of arming himself or linking up with more criminals to cross back into Zimbabwe and avenge the deaths of the others. However, to save the boy from a continuing life of crime – and to see that justice was done – he couldn’t take the easy option. Timothy Ryan would have to ignore the rule of law and dance with the very devil himself to get Daniel back on the straight and narrow.
Sister Margaret’s beaming black face was at the window as soon as he pulled up, welcoming him and his truck-load of Botswanan fruit and vegetables. ‘Hello, Father,’ she said. ‘And who’s this with you? Young Daniel! Oh, praise be.’
After exchanging the minimal amount of pleasantries with the nun, Father Timothy said, ‘Sister, did you by any chance keep the card of that lady journalist who visited us last month?’
20
Michelle chewed the inside of her lip as she drove Fletcher’s Landcruiser on the road which had once been a flowing river of lava. She ignored the spectacular views of the mountains to her left and, for the time being, Wise, who was seated beside her.
She was concerned that Fletcher was not taking Patrice’s insubordination seriously enough. She had explained what had happened during the gorilla trek on her return to camp the night before. ‘Marie’s a hothead and Patrice is too arrogant for his own good. They must have just goaded each other on. It’ll probably be the last time they ever go out together,’ he had said, brushing off her concerns.
In a sense, he was right, and that was what bothered her. Both Patrice and Marie had acted more than a little crazy on the trek. She understood that Fletcher needed Patrice’s experience – no matter how difficult a character he was – and that she, at least, would probably come into contact with Marie on a regular basis. Particularly if the wayward troop of Ugandan mountain gorillas stayed on the Congo side of the border. She had willingly agreed to Marie’s plea that she keep close tabs on the primates, to help protect them from poachers and even Fletcher’s organised hunting trips. No one, including Fletcher, wanted the endangered creature
s caught in the crossfire. Fletcher had sent Patrice away from the camp on three days’ leave as soon as they had returned.
Michelle swerved to avoid a timber scooter piled with fruit and honked her horn to scatter a scrawny hen and her chicks off the road. The kilometre peg on the verge told her they were close to Goma.
‘Do you want to come to lunch with Shane and me after I pick him up from the hospital?’ she asked Wise.
The Zimbabwean shook his head. ‘No, I think I will go to a bar to . . . to perhaps meet some people.’
Michelle smiled. She knew exactly what Wise had in mind. He was a soldier who had been out in the bush for too long. She just hoped he played safe, but she didn’t know him well enough to ask if he were carrying condoms. It wasn’t the sort of thing men and women discussed in Africa, and that, she mused, was one of the root causes of the continent’s biggest problem. She noticed how he looked out the window to hide his embarrassment. He was a good man, she thought, though he was not his normal chatty self – hadn’t been, in fact, since the gunfight with the poachers in which Shane had been injured. ‘Okay, here we are. Beautiful downtown Goma. I wonder if it looked any better before the earthquake.’
‘You can drop me anywhere, Michelle.’
‘There’s a bar over there – how about that one?’
The hint of a smile broke through his brooding. ‘As good as any.’ They arranged to meet at the same spot at five pm – in four hours’ time. ‘Be careful around here,’ Wise said as he closed the door.
It should have been her telling him that, she thought, as the young black man entered the shebeen. The Landcruiser practically rocked on its springs from the thumping beat of the music booming from the bar. She put the truck in gear and headed out of town towards Nngunga.
Part suburb, part squalid refugee camp, Nngunga was a temporary resettlement village which had been housing people displaced by the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo years earlier. It wasn’t meant still to be functioning, but the rebuilding of the homes of Goma’s poor would take money, will and materials. There seemed to be precious few of any of these.
Children clustered around a rusty water pump took turns at swinging on the handle to fill an assortment of odd-sized containers. They broke their work-play to wave at her and chase her truck down the black lava tracks between clusters of semi-permanent dwellings. The original tents provided by the UN and other NGOs after the eruption were still standing in some places, their canvas mildewed and faded. Over the years, enterprising villagers had scrounged bits of wood, corrugated iron, plastic sheeting and cracked asbestos tiles which they had nailed and tied to frames erected on and around the emergency shelters.
Michelle had heard enough about Goma’s original hospital – still in a state of disrepair since the eruption – to know she never wanted to see it. She’d heard of a single bloodstained wooden table used for birthing and operations in a room which looked more like a medieval torture chamber than a place of healing. At least in Nngunga the missionary doctors and nurses had a new tent and clean linen. She saw the Red Cross emblem next to a Catholic charity’s logo on the sign and pulled over. She shooed away the horde of children following her as politely as she could.
Shane was sitting outside the clinic tent on an upturned packing crate, next to a young white woman wearing tan slacks and a white shirt, perched on a fold-out camp stool. Shane was smoking, emphasising some point with a stab of his cigarette in the air. The woman had an elfin look with big brown eyes and short brown hair. Her olive skin was blemish-free. She laughed at whatever Shane had just said. She was very pretty.
‘Well, you look as though you’ll live,’ Michelle said as she navigated her way along a pathway flanked by discarded empty plastic water bottles.
Shane waved and the woman looked down at a nurse’s watch pinned to the front of her shirt. ‘Scusi, Shane. I have to get back inside. I hope your leg is fine, but if it is not, you can always come back and see me. Ciao.’ She smiled and excused herself from meeting Michelle with a wave, then walked back inside.
‘Who’s your friend?’
Shane stubbed his cigarette out on the ground then transferred the butt to his pocket. ‘Pretty, isn’t she? Italian.’
‘Did you get her phone number?’
Shane laughed and stood. ‘She’s taken. Do I detect a note of jealousy?’
Michelle laughed. Too loud, damn it. She felt her cheeks starting to colour. ‘Where’s her husband?’
Shane pointed skywards with a finger and Michelle was momentarily confused.
‘She’s a nun, Michelle.’
Now her laugh was genuine. ‘Hungry?’
‘You bet,’ he said as they walked side by side to the Landcruiser. ‘I figured the poor bastards I shared the tent with last night needed my slop more than I did.’
‘Where do you want to go? Fletcher tells me the Hotel Karibu, out on the lake, is nice.’
‘Haven’t you had enough of Fletcher’s Yank businessmen and Eurotrash?’
‘Where do you propose, then?’
‘Anna Maria – Sister Michael, once she takes her final vows – suggested a cafe in town. I’ve got the directions.’
Michelle started the Cruiser and turned back towards town. ‘Final vows? You mean she’s not a for-real nun yet? You still might have a chance.’
‘Nah, she’s too short for me.’
Michelle slammed on the brakes to avoid running into another Japanese four-wheel drive with the name of a well-known international charity emblazoned on the side. She leaned on the horn. Had Shane just been referring to her height? She was much taller than the nun.
‘So, where is this place?’
‘Next block, if the sister’s as good with her directions as she is with a sponge bath.’
‘Ewww. You’re disgusting.’ Michelle pulled over. ‘We can walk from here.’
The backdrop of emerald hills and the resting volcano was very different from flat, dry Zimbabwe, but the sidewalk could have been in any African town. Michelle politely waved away the children pestering her for a ballpoint pen, smiled at the women in brightly printed traditional dress who sat patiently behind small pyramids of fresh fruit and vegetables, avoided a mangy dog and screwed her nose up at whiffy trees which obviously doubled as public conveniences after hours. Music blared from speakers and ghetto-blasters outside virtually every shop, bar and cafe. If it were this loud outside, it must be deafening indoors, she thought. There was rap and Hindi pop, African township music – Kwela, they called it in Zimbabwe – even some ancient Motown; but underneath it all was the beat, the thumping bass pulse of Africa. Her mind conjured a half-remembered line from an old safari movie – ‘the drums, the drums, those damned drums’. The noise was life and in the millennia since man had first made music it had inspired him to dance, to love, to sing, to pray, to kill.
‘There must be a government department somewhere in every African country with warehouses full of confiscated illegal treble knobs,’ Shane said.
She smiled. ‘So, where are we going?’
Shane pointed to a sign propped against a building with cracked walls and a shattered front window. ‘There. Tora Tina. That’s the place.’
Outside the small cafe were metal tables and chairs and they were seated by an African waitress, whom Michelle addressed in French. ‘What’s on the menu?’ Shane asked.
Michelle rattled off the short list and they settled for a plate each of beef and chicken brochettes. ‘They’re on skewers – like shish kebabs or satay,’ she explained. ‘What about a drink?’
‘What do you recommend?’ Shane asked the waitress.
‘Me, I like Guinness,’ she said in passable English.
‘Long way from Ireland, but why not,’ Shane said.
‘With Coca-Cola?’ the waitress asked, taking down the order on a notepad with a pencil barely an inch long.
‘Coca-Cola on the side?’ he asked.
‘No, monsieur, we drink the Guinness mixed with the Coca-Cola.�
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Michelle raised her eyebrows, but Shane just shrugged and said, ‘Just when you think you’ve seen it all in Africa . . .’
The food was good and killed the conversation as they stared out over the colourful, noisy parade of Congo life from their vantage point above the street. The skewers of meat were served with French fries – frites, the waitress called them – and mayonnaise. ‘A little piece of Belgian colonialism lives on,’ Michelle said. After he had finished eating, Shane excused himself to find the bathroom.
‘Your husband, he is very handsome,’ the waitress whispered to Michelle as she cleared the plates. ‘Do you have many babies?’
Michelle laughed. ‘No. I don’t think he’s the marrying kind.’ Michelle wondered if she were. The girl looked confused until Michelle explained they were just friends.
‘Where do you think you’ll end up, Shane?’ she asked when he returned.
‘Six feet under like the rest of us, I suppose. Seriously? Here in Africa. Perhaps not in the DRC, but somewhere with red dirt, blue skies and as few people as possible. What about you? Presumably you’ll go back to Canada one day.’
She had no idea. ‘It gets in your blood, this continent, doesn’t it.’
‘I was born here, remember. Australia was a nice place to kill some time, but I think I always knew I’d come back one day. How long can you keep living out of a tent, following animals around and recording what they eat and shit?’
She laughed. ‘Probably as long as you can live hunting human beings.’
‘If that’s the best you’ve got, then you’ll be on your way back to Canada in a year, maybe eighteen months.’
‘Is that as long as you’re going to stay with Fletcher?’