26.

Four of the rangers escorted us back to camp, carrying Xander on the stretcher. They weren’t big guys. One was smaller than me in fact, with skinny little legs, but we struggled to keep up with them, and while I arrived on the brink of collapse, those guys barely broke a sweat. They managed to carry Xander dead level the entire way too. We made it back to camp just as night fell. I don’t know whether Xander was exhausted by the pain, zonked by the pills or out of it because of those twigs he kept chewing, but he’d actually drifted off by the time we made it back. Amelia went with Marcel to give an account of what had happened to the head ranger. She had the French. I sat with Xander while he slept. On his return, Marcel made it clear we’d be setting off for Goma in the morning.

I slept badly and was awake before dawn. At first light I saw Caleb emerge from his tent in a rush and stagger away into the brush. Not quite out of sight, he bent double and threw up. The sound of him retching woke Xander.

‘Did he eat something dodgy?’ he muttered.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Perhaps it’s exhaustion.’

‘My money’s on something else.’

‘What?’

‘Guilt, I think.’

Another bout of heave-groaning reached us.

‘Possibly,’ said Xander.

‘I think it is,’ I said. ‘I reckon that’s the sound of things sinking in.’

Xander didn’t respond, just pushed himself up on his elbows, winced and looked forlornly at his immobilised leg.

‘We’ll get that sorted in no time,’ I said.

‘Course,’ he replied. ‘Marcel said there’s a good little hospital in Goma.’ He was trying to sound offhand, but I knew he was worried. Who wouldn’t be? The state of the city – its poor roads and unfinished buildings – didn’t exactly inspire confidence that it would harbour cutting-edge medical care. We returned there in the back of the same pickup that had brought us out to the national park, driven by the same guy with the bloodshot eyes. But without Innocent or poor Patience. A sombre Marcel accompanied us instead. He sat up front with the driver while Amelia, Caleb and I tried to steady poor Xander and protect him from the worst of the bumps. We’d transferred him to a proper stretcher in camp. Though it was padded and had aluminium poles, it still had to sit on the pickup’s unforgiving metal tray. We jacked it up on our backpacks to try and soften the juddering of the road. When I noticed that Caleb had wedged his legs under the stretcher too, using them to help absorb some of the jarring potholes, I did the same, but it didn’t really help beyond giving us a share of Xander’s discomfort. We’d not been going long when the pickup hit a particularly unforgiving rut which bounced all four of us into the air. Xander yelped at the blow.

Caleb banged hard on the cab window and shouted, ‘Drive more carefully, will you?’

‘Why wouldn’t he drive as carefully as he can?’ asked Amelia.

‘I don’t know,’ muttered Caleb.

Amelia’s question was genuine, and maybe Caleb really couldn’t guess why the guy might not have been doing his best to drive steadily, but I thought I knew better. Catching sight of those red eyes in the mirror as we ploughed on, I saw them narrow with hostility. Marcel would have explained what had happened to Innocent. Was it any wonder that this driver might be at best indifferent to us feeling a bit of pain on the way back to Goma?

Amelia and I took Xander to the hospital with Marcel. I could tell Caleb wanted to come, too, but when Xander sighed that he didn’t need an entourage my cousin’s ‘It’s your call’ was gentle. He’d mind our stuff, he said. Before we set off I overheard him tell Marcel to mention his father’s name if he thought it would help. Though I bristled at the self-importance of this, I think he was genuine.

Xander and I had been wrong about the hospital. The building was small but it looked recently whitewashed and the little garden in front of it was full of bright ferns and carefully tended roses. The reassuring smell of disinfectant blotted out their perfume as Marcel and I stretchered Xander through the little lobby into a busy waiting room. The nurse who examined him wore the whitest uniform imaginable, and had one of those little watches pinned to her top pocket. She told us there’d be a bit of a wait.

‘That’s fine,’ sighed Xander.

‘How long a wait?’ asked Amelia.

‘Maybe an hour and a half, two …’ said the nurse apologetically.

‘That’s inside NHS targets,’ Amelia replied.

The nurse had a warm smile but I could tell that she didn’t know what Amelia was on about.

Unusually, so could Amelia. ‘When I cracked my head on the side of the pool doing backstroke and needed twelve stitches, I had to wait in A & E at St Thomas in London for three hours and forty-nine minutes,’ she explained. This raised a smile in Xander, though the nurse remained none the wiser. A doctor would see Xander as promptly as possible, she confirmed as she left.

In fact an orderly whisked him off for an X-ray pretty quickly, which was just as well because it meant he wasn’t there when Amelia started thinking out loud about the trauma this hospital must have seen in recent years. Marcel appeared not to want to talk about it, but that rarely stops Amelia, and all it meant was that she delivered her monologue to me.

‘Right here, the Eastern DRC, is the epicentre of the worst conflict on earth since the Second World War, in terms of casualties. Around six million people have been killed in these parts since 1996, and many more displaced.’ Her eyes had that faraway look that I know so well; ever since we were little kids she’s worn that expression while reeling off the facts about whatever she was interested in at that point in time, whether it be dog breeds or table-tennis bats. I did what I’ve always done, which is smile and let the detail wash over me, as she talked about a Rwandan genocide which prompted mass immigration, disputes with neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda in the wake of it, endemic corruption and the proliferation (her words, not mine, though I got what they meant more or less) of armed militia fighting for power and natural resources in the absence of government control. ‘It’s not just soldiers and militants who’ve been killed and hurt. Everyday civilians, women, the elderly and so many kids. It barely makes the news back home for some reason, but recent history here has been a tragic mess. The doctors in this hospital must have seen some horrific injuries. Not to belittle what’s happened to Xander, but I imagine they’ll make short work of a broken leg, if that’s what it is.’

I would have felt awkward listening to this in front of Marcel. This ‘tragic mess’ was his country, but although we’d only been waiting ten minutes he’d already gone off, saying he was going to tell the nurse what Caleb had said about his father’s name. All three of us told him that wasn’t necessary, but he waved us away. It seemed almost as if he was worried that failure to do as Caleb had asked might cost him something.