The Nigerians’ northbound convoy came across our car about a mile from the ambush scene, where Brereton had finally crashed it. They gathered us up and put us in the back of a truck, which they sent back to Lungi under a detached escort. The truck’s tailboard was broken, and without lifting my head from the floor I could see the scout car following behind us, the commander’s head protruding in its leather tank‐man’s helmet. I thought he was a cosmonaut.
Laura was talking to me. She was telling me how she’d flown into Lungi airport the night before and hitched a ride north with the Nigerian convoy. There were other people lying around me, bouncing about beneath the canvas awning. There were holes in the canvas and shafts of sunlight flashed about like disco lights. The floor of the truck was sticky.
I was numb at first, but not for long. At Makeni an Australian nun‐doctor gave me some morphine that she’d kept hidden from the rebels. That was good.
When I woke up again I was back in the truck. I had a mattress now. The morphine was wearing off and I tried not to moan. My right arm pulsed and burned as if someone had wired the nerves to a strobe machine. I couldn’t feel my right leg.
I heard Laura talking to somebody behind me. I started to cry again and Laura appeared and gave me more morphine. I wondered where she’d learned to do that. Maybe she’d already told me.
At Lungi airport they lined us up in the mouth of the hangar where Brereton and Tommo and I had spent such a happy week once, lounging and napping and waiting for our story to move. A small twin‐engine jet taxied up on the apron, and I watched as the other stretchers were carried over one by one and slid on board. Laura held my hand and told me not to worry. Then she was talking on a sat‐phone. She seemed very angry. A while later somebody put me in a helicopter.
Later Diamond Doug, who came to see me in the hospital, told me that De Wet had flown me across the estuary to Freetown free of charge, which was nice of him. I wish I could remember the trip. I’d always wanted to fly in a Hind.
Douglass also gave me a message from Laura. She said my own people had refused to pay for my evacuation. Management was worried that if they helped me now it might be seen as an admission of liability. Her company had ordered her to go to the Gulf, but she would have stayed to look after me if Douglass hadn’t turned up. I never saw her again.
‘You’re lucky you were hurt cheap, boy,’ said Douglass, perched like a sparrow on the end of my bed. ‘Nothing the surgeons here couldn’t deal with. Just a lot of it.’
The ward was hot and crowded and it didn’t smell of antiseptic. On the floor beneath my bed a cardboard box held some of the shrapnel that they’d taken from the right side of my body. There was more in my leg, they said, but it was too hard to get at. The box also contained one of Tommo’s cameras, the FM2, with a 50‐millimetre lens. There was even some film in it, according to the counter: sixteen exposed frames, twenty to go. The Nigerians must have thought that it was mine.
Douglass told me he’d come back to Sierra Leone to reopen his branch office. Freetown was safe for him again, now that Charles Taylor’s friends had been driven back into the bush. They still held most of the diamond fields, but not for much longer. Anyway, he said, he always did good trade, even when he was on the wrong side of the line, because he paid the best prices. In dollars, not guns, he added, and then he repeated it.
He acted like it was the biggest joke in the world to see me again. He didn’t mention the others. I found out later that he’d squared my bill with the doctors. He didn’t tell me that himself. He did say, though, that in a few days he and some friends would be bringing in an Ilyushin full of something or other and that when it was empty it could take me back to Abidjan. From there I could go where I liked.
He had brought me a couple of tubes of potato crisps from the Lebanese supermarket. The owner was a friend of his, and when Douglass mentioned that he was going to see me in hospital the owner gave him the crisps as a gift for me. He remembered how Brereton and I had bought a whole box of them to take with us when we headed up‐country. I gave them to the little boy in the bed next to mine, along with all my shrapnel. I’d seen him admiring it; the mine had blown his legs clean off, so he’d no shrapnel of his own.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to take Douglass up on his offer of a free flight to Abidjan. He went to Bo on business for a few days, and the morning after he left an American showed up in the ward and said he was from the Chronicle. He was young, about my own age, but very grave. He had short combed hair and he wore a beige linen tropical suit that looked as if he’d bought it just for this assignment. His face had that keen, stupid look that speaks of squash and postgraduate study.
He told me he was a writer – American hacks often call themselves that – and from the way he paused when he mentioned his name I guessed he reckoned he was a star back home. His name was Spencer Armitage, and the Chronicle had sent him out to pull together a big magazine feature about Fine’s last days. To get the full story he needed my memories. Also, he added smoothly, his paper would like to fly me out of Freetown. They felt really bad that their air‐ambulance company had left one of Fine’s wounded buddies on the tarmac at Lungi, just because I didn’t have insurance or anyone to guarantee the cash. At the time, Armitage said, his bosses hadn’t known about me.
I lay back on my lumpy grey pillow and thought about what Armitage had told me. Fine had finally done it: his story would run at great length off the cover of the Chronicle’s glossy weekend magazine. It would be under his own byline: Armitage said there was enough stuff in Fine’s diary, notebooks and computer to cobble together a few thousand words of first‐person reportage. In the coming days Armitage would travel up‐country with his own monkey, retracing Fine’s steps and talking to people who’d met him, and then he would weave Fine’s stuff into a story and write a side piece of his own. Tommo’s pics would carry the whole thing. They were really very good, Armitage confided; there was one of me, carrying that rebel away from that lynch‐mob in Lunsar, which had a sort of Michelangelo composition to it. They might even give a whole page to it, for Tommo’s sake.
‘You’re going to be a hero,’ said Armitage, as if he were offering me a payment.
The following morning Armitage came back and propped a mini‐disk recorder on my chest. Across in the next bed the legless kid stared at us with his mouth open. Armitage pulled a chair to the side of my bed, took out a spiral notebook and drew a line down through the middle of the page. He was wearing a different suit today.
‘So tell me,’ he said formally, ‘what did your friends mean to you?’
Once, when I had some money, I took Beatrice for a weekend at a bushveld safari camp. We drove east from Johannesburg for three hours, crossed the Long Tom Pass and then threaded north through the hills of Gazankulu. The road wound through plains and valleys strewn with one‐storey shacks. Livestock grazed between the houses, leaving broad patches of bare earth for the wind and sun to harrow. As we drove, we realized that the fields of scattered houses formed great conurbations, unmapped suburbs for towns that were hundreds of miles away. Goats were climbing the thorn trees to strip the hard green leaves.
Young people swarmed everywhere along the tarred road and its unpaved tributaries. Girls and boys in uniform hurried for appointments with school clocks, cutting brisk paths through drifting clouds of older siblings. The idlers shuffled along in their flip‐flop shoes and watched the traffic as it passed. Minibuses halted and knots of people nudged up against them like puppies looking for suck. Suitcases went into the taxis; bundles of goods came out.
‘What are they all doing here?’ murmured Beatrice, slumped in a corner of her seat.
‘They live here,’ I said. ‘It was a homeland for Shangaan people. Back in the old days the whites wouldn’t let them live anywhere else.’
‘Sure. But what do they actually do?’
She must have been teasing me again, but again I didn’t notice.
‘The children and older women live here, and everybody else goes to the Reef to get work. They send money home when they can and they come back for weddings and funerals and holidays.’
She stared across the waste of shacks, where rusting wire fences enclosed red gardens of carefully brushed red dirt. I looked across at her but her face was turned away. Then, as I shifted my eyes back to the road ahead, she suddenly leaned over and hugged my knee where it curved above the clutch pedal. I looked down at the fine brown hair that ran down to the nape of her neck. Then she straightened up and smiled at me.
The safari camp was suitably rustic, an unfenced cluster of wooden chalets in a stretch of low bush. Our chalet had a rhino motif, which Beatrice thought was rather funny. Although we’d arrived in the early afternoon, she insisted on lowering the mosquito net before she pushed me back on to the bed. We were still asleep at 4 p.m. when they called us for the game drive.
‘Can’t they just drive the game past our hut?’ Beatrice mumbled to the pillow, but I was insistent. I told her I was paying for the trip and I wanted to see all the animals I had coming to me.
An open Land Rover was waiting for us behind the huts; we were the last ones to arrive. Our fellow guests were a pair of Afrikaner newlyweds and two middle‐aged English women. As we climbed onto the truck the English women glared at us from joyless faces and muttered loudly to each other about some schedule or other.
The honeymooners were scared of them and in awe of us. They were barely twenty years old and you could tell that they didn’t have much education or money, that this really was the trip of their lifetime so far, and you wouldn’t bet that anything much better would come to them in the future. She was small and neat and rather pretty apart from her bleached, frizzy hair. He was a big fit lad with short hair and slow eyes, and when our guide turned up with a hunting rifle the boy asked to examine it before we set off. The rifle was unloaded, and the guide allowed him to work the bolt and sight it at a tree and pull the trigger, and then he took it gently back from him. The boy was displaying for his female in the manner of his kind, and as she watched she fought to keep the pride out of her face.
Our tracker was a thin Shangaan in a German army parka. He perched on a padded stool welded to the front of the Land Rover, which made Beatrice laugh. She called him the hood ornament.
I don’t remember what animals we saw. Impala, I suppose. At last light we stopped beside a dam where hippos grunted and blew, and the guide offered us drinks from a cooler box. The Afrikaners wandered off a short distance to murmur to each other while the English women stayed in their seats on the truck, accepting with bad grace the gin and tonics that the tracker passed up to them. They seemed to resent the delay.
The sun had set and somewhere in the grass close by an insect whirred like a faulty transformer. The dusk drew fanciful shadows from the bushes and thorn trees, and the first stirrings of the night ruffled the surface of the dam. Apart from a rim of gold along the distant, jagged edge of the Drakensberg the western sky was a silver infinity. A phrase came to mind – the peace that passeth understanding.
The moment was broken by a ghastly commotion somewhere across the dam. There was a series of booming, rasping barks, followed by a prolonged shriek of pain and fear. I felt Beatrice move in close beside me while the guide and the tracker jerked their heads towards the noise.
The guide spoke after a long moment. ‘It’s just baboons,’ he said. ‘They’re in that big tree to the right of the dam, see? You can see the branches moving.’
The tree was heavy with leaves, and as we peered through the gloom we could see the branches whipping back and forth. There was another storm of grunts and shrieks and the thrashing redoubled. The honeymooners drew in beside us and the two English women gave up their crabbed conversation.
‘It sounds like they’re being attacked by something,’ said Beatrice doubtfully.
The guide slowly shook his head. ‘Nah, it’s not that. It’s the big fellow… He’s having some problems with one of his girlfriends … I’m afraid baboons are old‐fashioned about women.’
The barks broke out again, mounting in an almost human crescendo of hatred and spite. The upper part of the tree convulsed as if in a hurricane and the female baboon screamed again, in mortal fear or pain, until its voice abruptly choked off into silence. There was a momentary pause and then many other voices started shrieking in the tree. Beatrice took a step away from me, towards the guide and the tracker, her eyes wide. She looked as if she might even be about to say something, but the guide shook his head and chuckled. ‘It’s just nature’s way,’ he said.
One of the English women spoke up, a supercilious smudge in the half‐light. ‘You’re not supposed to get involved with them,’ she said. ‘It’s not like they’re people.’
Beatrice didn’t answer. At the other end of the Land Rover the newlyweds were kissing.