58

They found him the following afternoon quite by accident. One of the younger boys had kicked the football far off into the trees. Isabel sent some of the older ones to look for it and made Rafael, the silent one, go with them. A short while later, Rafael came running back, breathless and frightened.

‘What’s the matter?’ Isabel asked, not because she expected an answer but because she made it her habit to speak to him like any of the other children.

‘El hombre … el hombre está muerto.’ The man. The man is dead.

Isabel and María Luisa exchanged a look of alarm.

‘Rafael? Which man?’

‘El amigo de señor Finn.’ The friend of Mr Finn.

He led them to a spot some distance down the slope beyond the far edge of the clearing. The prone figure was almost hidden in a clump of ferns. Unconscious but not dead, he was bleeding, badly dehydrated and running a high fever. Five boys, including Rafael, helped carry him back to the mission house, where Isabel made up a bed in the corner of the large and spacious room. Together with María Luisa, she sponged him with damp cloths, dressed and disinfected his wound and rigged up a saline drip which they retrieved from their emergency medical supplies.

Their efforts seemed in vain. The fever grew worse. During the early evening Black fitted, before collapsing into an even deeper torpor, from which they were certain he wouldn’t recover. By the early hours his pulse was barely detectable. The two missionaries prayed over him and commended his soul to God.

Black dreamed that he was swimming across a dark and bottomless lake with no shoreline in sight. Somehow, he knew there was a monster of unspeakable size and horror lurking far beneath its surface. He was caught between an instinct to lie still and float in the hope of becoming invisible and an equal urge to swim as fast as he could away from danger.

Night was falling.

Live or die.

He swam for his life.

He saw the outline of what he took to be a spit of shingle and made for it, only to find himself among a clutter of debris that frustrated his progress. At first he took the obstructions for pieces of wood and a sign that they must have drifted out from a human settlement on nearby land, but then he realized that they were the bloated, drowned bodies of men. And the harder he swam, the more he encountered, until there were so many bobbing corpses pressing in on him from every side that he could make no progress in any direction.

And then he felt a stirring beneath his bare feet and the sense of something vast and cold coiling upwards towards him from the bottomless depths.

He opened his mouth to scream and it flooded with freezing water.

Black woke with a violent shudder. The startled eyes of a boy stared back at him.

‘¡Está vivo! ¡Está vivo!’ He’s alive! He’s alive!

The boy ran away, calling out the same words over and over.

Black blinked, still partially trapped in his nightmare, unsure if he was awake, asleep, alive or dead. His mind searched for anchors in this unknown place. He was beneath a roof thatched with palm leaves, in a room with walls made from rough-hewn planks. At the far end was a table covered with a blue cloth, a wooden crucifix sitting in its centre. Bright sunlight flooded through an open window behind it. He became aware of voices – children’s voices – and of the smell of cooking.

Children … The mission.

A wave of relief swept through his body. And as he realized where he was, fractured images of his agonizing slog through the jungle returned to him.

A woman wiping her hands on her apron hurried through the door and came to his bedside. It was Isabel. She crossed herself and picked up a water bottle with a drinking spout like an outsized child’s beaker.

‘Mr Black. You’re awake.’ She seemed astounded, as if she had witnessed a miracle. ‘How are you feeling? Does your shoulder hurt?’

‘A little.’

‘You need to drink.’

She bent over him and lifted the spout to his lips. He drank deeply. Mouthful after hungry mouthful. When he could drink no more, he saw that the boy had reappeared and was standing at Isabel’s side holding a long wooden object. It was a bat. A cricket bat carved from a single piece of wood, with a flat front and curved back. He held it up for Black to see, as if searching for his approval.

‘Your friend made it for him,’ Isabel said. ‘Actually, they made it together.’

‘Señor Finn,’ Rafael said.

Black smiled.

The boy smiled uncertainly back at him.

‘It was Rafael who found you. You were very lucky. You would have died otherwise. Maybe when you’re feeling better, you can play with him.’

‘Yes. Tell him I’d like that.’

‘Cuando se siente mejor, Rafael.’ When he’s better, Rafael. She turned to Black. ‘You must be hungry.’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’ll get you some breakfast.’

She bustled out as quickly as she had entered.

Black eased his legs over the edge of the bed and tried to sit up. A tearing pain in his shoulder forced him back on to the pillow. Rafael put down the bat and extended his hands in an offer to help. His expression was so eager that Black couldn’t refuse him.

‘Gracias.’

The boy hooked his hands under Black’s good shoulder and helped him up.

Black planted his feet on the floor and caught his breath.

‘Bueno,’ the boy said, screwing up his nose and taking a step backwards.

‘Oh … I see. I stink.’ Black sniffed an armpit. ‘My God, I do.’ He waved a hand in front of his face, mimicking Rafael’s pained expression.

The boy laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. And Black laughed with him. They laughed until tears streamed down their cheeks.

Six days of convalescence, followed by eight more trekking across the Brazilian border to the Mucajaí River, where he traded his pistol for a canoe, gave Black all the time he needed to think through the events that had begun with Kathleen Finn’s phone call. He paddled for four more days and made his way, ragged and unshaven, into the small provincial city of Boa Vista with few doubts left in his mind. It brought a peace of sorts. Mostly it allowed him to make peace with himself, to move beyond anger and accept that he must have been acting for reasons of his own. Reasons he hadn’t dared form into words.

Such are the forces that drive us. Unconscious. Unknowable. Overwhelming.

He roamed like a tramp along the broad, straight boulevards until eventually he chanced on a street market where he found a trader willing to exchange his GPS unit for a mobile phone and a few reals, the local currency. He made for a cheap café and filled his empty belly with steak, beans and cold beer. Sated, he sat back in his chair, smoked a cigarette and listened to the old men gossip as they played cards.

It was a fine afternoon to be alive.