MERCIA, A JOVIAL, English-speaking Camerounian, stood next to me beside a trestle table in the compound of the mission. She was as large around the middle as she was tall, in her late thirties, with a deep, rich voice as soft as treacle. It was mid-afternoon and the air was wet with humidity. The washing she had done for me that morning still hung damply on the line; I had given up any hope of it drying.
‘Ya can go here,’ she said in her pidgin tongue, her short, blunt finger stabbing the map of the Central African Republic at a place called Solo. ‘Fram here ya get d’boat. It take ya dan stream ta Ouesso, an fram dere it easy. Ya get nadda boat aaaall d’way ta Brazzaville, but after dat . . .’ she looked up to the heavens and shook her enormous breasts, ‘God help ya boy.’
‘He will,’ I said reassuringly. ‘He will.’
I liked Mercia. Wrapped in her bright, orange kampala, printed with segments of green and red water melons, she was a fantastic sight. She helped out at the mission doing the washing and cleaning and lived on the grounds with her two children in a hut behind a large mafumeira tree. Her husband, she said, worked in town; I had seen him only once.
Whichever way I looked at the map, the rivers of the Congo basin crossed my route like a diagram of arteries in a biology textbook. It seemed inevitable that at some point I would be forced to travel down one of them. Not that this bothered me; on the contrary, after my recent experience, the thought of putting my bike on a boat for a few hundred miles was rather appealing. It looked feasible, so long as there was a boat. It would entail driving east out of Yaoundé, back on the main route to Berberati in the Central African Republic and then south to Solo where, 200 miles north of Ouesso, the Sangha river widens considerably. It was at Ouesso that I could either join the route Tony had taken through the rainforests of the Congo or, as Mercia suggested, take the boat all the way to the capital. I knew which option I preferred.
I felt the heat radiate from her motherly body as she stood fidgeting slightly. Her five-year-old son, Nonye, walked towards us. Embarrassed by my attention, he hid his face against his mother’s leg.
‘I t’ink you go lak everyone else.’ She glared at me as fiercely as she was able before reaching down to pick up her son. He moulded to her bosom and hip as though they were one. ‘Thes way ain’t no good. Ya don know wat mite b’like in Angola – it’s a crezy pies ya no. But I s’pose it up to ya.’ She turned and walked away, tut-tutting to herself.
The mission’s seedy labrador, which had been watching us keenly, scratched a flea from behind its left ear. It stood up, shook itself and wandered off in the direction of the kitchen, leaving me to dwell on these matters alone. I looked at the map again. A journey down the Sangha and Congo rivers, wasn’t that Joseph Conrad country? Into the heart of darkness? The romantic chord was struck. Besides, I had no choice. It would take at least three weeks to obtain a visa for Gabon, by which time the rains would have started again. No, this was the only way left unless I was to abandon my dream and follow the others into Zaire. All Mercia’s worrying about Angola was surely a little dramatic; no one else had been so concerned. The infant peace accord seemed to be holding and if it really was as dangerous as she thought they wouldn’t let me in anyway.
I sat back in my chair and picked up a copy of the daily newspaper. For the first time in a long while I became aware of the date. A familiar feeling swelled inside, a bittersweet ache of magic and loss. I took a deep breath and turned my eyes to the sky. It was 20 December, Mel’s birthday.
8.15 p.m. December 20th
‘How do I look?’she asked, standing up and throwing me a beaming smile.
‘Gorgeous, sweetheart, bloody gorgeous.’ I walked over and nuzzled her cheek. ‘The taxi’s here. Come on. Let’s go.’
It was no lie. She did look great. Melanie was one of those people who make the best of what they have. She was only five foot three, but her body was perfectly proportioned. Imaginatively, her friends had once called her Melons but the teenage puppy fat had slowly fallen off to reveal a body of beauty. Her lively face was a joy to watch. Sweet, rather than beautiful, it was shaped like a heart with a full-lipped mouth, neat little chin and the clearest skin I’d ever seen. Her nose, according to her, was a mite too long, but far from detracting from her looks it seemed to me to enhance them. She had grown her dark hair and it now rested gently on her shoulders. As it was her birthday, we were going out to dinner. We left the apartment and climbed into the minicab.
We’d lived in several places since we’d met – she in one flat and I at another – but as we seemed to spend every night together we decided to move in with each other. Through a friend of a friend we found a flat just over the river in East Putney. It was large and convenient and not too expensive.
Living together was great and our relationship blossomed because of it. Mel was just so easy. She was seldom angry or sullen – in all the time we’d been together I couldn’t remember our having an argument – and she was never given to temper tantrums. But Mel certainly wasn’t dull – she could, and often did, hold her own with anyone I knew – she just seemed to understand things better than most. She had changed jobs and now worked, by day only, at a restaurant in Knightsbridge, while I was still pushing my band. When the group was first formed I had fully believed that we’d write a few songs, get a deal and be megastars by Christmas. After nearly two years of hard work I realised it would take a little longer but my belief in our ultimate fame never wavered – I knew I was destined to be a rock star.
Mel didn’t seem to mind this. She enjoyed the gigs and the music and, knowing how much it meant to me, she supported me all the way. We’d become much more than lovers. We were also best friends. I turned sideways to look at her. One by one the orange street lamps lit up her face as we passed beneath them . . . yes she was all I wanted.
Le Quai St Pierre is a quiet little seafood restaurant in Kensington. It was our favourite, although actually we’d only been there twice because of the expense. John and Tania were already there, sitting at a table next to the lobster tank. There was a bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket.
‘Happy birthday,’ said Tania cheerfully. She handed Mel a small parcel wrapped in red and blue paper. When the two of them had been at school together, Mel and Tania had often fantasised about having two best friends as their boyfriends and amazingly it had happened. John and Tania met at the band’s second gig and after an inauspicious start – John had spilled his pint over her – they had merged into a concrete relationship. Excitedly, Mel tore off the paper and opened the box it contained. Her face creased with delight when she pulled out its contents. The present was a beautiful Indian necklace made of an array of delicately carved silver mangoes. She took off her old chain and put the necklace round her neck.
‘I love it,’ she said, studying her reflection in the window. ‘One day I should like to go to India.’
It was impossible to get away very early in the morning as the moisture from the trees and vegetation left everything covered in a deep layer of dew. Waiting for the tent to dry out completely would mean the loss of half a day, so there had to be a compromise. I would leave about ten. This gave me time to go down to a messy workshop at the bottom of the hill and get my frame fixed.
Because of their poverty, and the lack of spare parts, Africans have a great talent for fixing things. They patch things up time after time to eke a few more precious years’ work from a trusty and often ancient friend. Trucks, cars and bikes, which in the West would have been discarded decades before, still trundle gamely down the streets of most African cities, emitting a mite too much carbon monoxide but, out here, who’s measuring?
In no time at all the mechanic had cut through the offending piece of frame and welded it on higher up so it could no longer hit the wheel nut. I then bolted the box back on, using washers as spacers to move it out an inch. This provided enough width for the suspension to move freely again. I gave my petrol cooker to Mercia and, for a couple of quid, bought a second-hand gas one from a German. On my way out of town I bought two spare cylinders of gas and posted a letter to Amel.
At Obala the road split in two, west to Nigeria and east to the Central African Republic. Five miles further on the tarmac fell away beneath my wheels and the red earth tracks began again. Up here, running along the northern edge of the rainforest, the roads were in good condition and a joy to ride: wide and smooth and for the most part free of corrugations. On either side green laurel-like bushes were reddened with the soil thrown up by passing vehicles.
Some way ahead a large cloud of dust blocked the road like a wall of London brick: a truck trailing a thick plume. It was either a matter of hanging back and travelling at its speed, about thirty miles per hour, or running the risk of overtaking it. Of course there was really no choice. Even with a bandana covering my mouth and nose, and the goggles and mask protecting my face, sitting in his wake was impossible. I could barely breathe and could see nothing. However, with my broken horn and the huge spray of earth being thrown into the air, he wouldn’t see or hear me and I would be blinded for a few seconds. I pulled out beside the rear wheels, which maliciously spat stones and gravel, knowing that if anything was coming the other way it would be curtains. I flashed my lights and pulled back on the throttle. Then I was past, out of the dirt and through to the open road again. It was a logging truck with a huge tree trunk cut in three lying on its back. I passed many more that day.
With the sun sinking behind the trees and the heat of the day dissolving into a calm, still evening I pulled off the road into a clearing. There was a mango tree in the centre of an area about the size of a tennis court behind which, some five yards back, stood a derelict hut with a broken roof. If I moved close to the hut, I realised, I would be practically invisible from the road, hidden by a cluster of coarse grass on one side and the tree on the other. It seemed as good a place as any to camp for the night.
I unpacked the bike, put up the tent with the tarpaulin in front of the entrance, placed my chair on that, hung my light on the guy rope and put the cooker in front of the chair. Inside, I unrolled my sleeping-bag over a small piece of sponge, the length of my back, and lay my sheet sleeping-bag on top. The tank bag was on one side and the clothes bag on the other, with my machete (bought in Nigeria, made in Sheffield) close at hand. After arranging all this, I washed the dust from my face and hands in a saucepan of water, and I sat quietly in the luxury of my folding chair to smoke a cigarette of peace and take in the last half-hour of the day.
This became my routine. After a few days I had it down to a fine art and it would be little more than ten minutes before I would be sitting enjoying what had now become the best part of the day, the only time really to relax.
My evening meal also became something of a ritual and almost all the way down the west side of Africa, if I was cooking for myself, I would perform the following:
Open a can of sardines in oil. (It was annoying when I hadn’t read the label properly and found myself with sardines in tomato paste.) Pour the oil into the medium-sized pan. Chop up an onion or two and a clove of garlic and fry in the oil. After a few minutes, add some water and tomato purée, tomatoes if you’re lucky enough to have any, and seasoning. Bring to the boil and simmer. Add the sardines and cook for a further two minutes.
Then cook the spaghetti (or rice) in the large pan. While draining the pasta, reheat the sardines, put them on the pasta and voilà! A delicious meal, full of protein, created with the minimum of fuss in fifteen minutes.
That day I had done well and covered over 200 miles. The bike was fine and I was in good spirits, so again I treated myself to a splash of whisky in my coffee. As it was too dark to read, I listened to a play on the radio and went to sleep with the huge orange moon low in the sky.
Suddenly I’m awake and for a second or two am totally unaware of where I am. It’s pitch-black and silent, save for the quickening beat of my heart. I lie still, listening intently. There it is again, a twig snaps and the ground is scuffed. Something is moving slowly round the tent. Is it human, or animal, and if the latter, what kind? It stops. Silence reigns. The clammy sweat covering my body suddenly cools and I shiver, all senses acutely aware. As quietly as I can, for I do not want to shock the predator into action, I reach over and fumble in the darkness for the machete. I find it and grip its wooden handle tightly. Why didn’t I stay in a bloody village? I would have been safe there, but here, oh shit!
I’m frightened by my position. The tent, at first a sanctuary, has now become a prison. I’m trapped inside my nylon cage at the mercy of whatever is lurking outside in the darkness. For a while the night is still and nothing moves, I can hear the tick-tock of my tiny alarm clock.
Again there’s movement, louder and closer. Suddenly it prods the tent on the far side away from my head. I sit, bolt upright, clutching my weapon, the knuckles of my hand white with tension, my heart pounding like that of a captured bird. Should I shout to scare it away or stay quiet? For by now I’m convinced it’s an animal. I can hear it breathing and sniffing as it tries to decipher the olfactory message. There could be leopards, jackals, various types of primates, even lions out there for all I know. What can it be? Again it prods, this time harder, pushing the fly-sheet in towards me. I shout and lash out at what I take to be its nose. It lets out a howl, a sound without mystery, and scampers away.
The terrifying creature that was going to tear me to pieces for a midnight snack was an inquisitive dog. It now stood, ten feet back, barking incessantly. Deeply relieved and breathing normally for the first time in what seemed like ages, I clambered out of the tent. By the wan light of the moon I could see it cowering back in the shadows. After a shout and a wave of my arms it disappeared into the night. I took a pull on the whisky bottle and lay down again but it took a while for sleep to return.