Vanessa wakes up with a shock of terror. 5 AM on the dreaded morning. It’s here: the day she must go to Bwindi. Switch on the light, switch off her phone alarm. She lies for a second, stomach clenching. Should she call it off? Is she going to die?
But she can’t call it off. She would look silly. She has told so many people she’s going to Bwindi. She shoots out of bed, and starts checking the essentials, which involves unpacking most of her rucksack. Money, camera, notebook, good. Malaria pills, sunhat, pen. Glasses, contact lenses, sunglasses. Phone! It’s been on all night for the alarm, so she must recharge it! She plugs it in. She’s just standing up again when the lights go out. Shit! But it’s fine, she tells herself, the electricity always comes straight back on, at the Sheraton. A beat, then another. Dark. Silence. Nothing happens. She starts sweating. Why hasn’t the generator come on? Why else do people stay at the Sheraton? And why does it have to happen this morning?
In the dark, on her own, she feels totally helpless. How can she assemble her possessions? Without her possessions, she cannot go. If she could find her torch, that would be something. She starts feeling with her fingertips, but things slip away, twist out of her reach, are not where she thought, elude her, betray her, crash down into chaos. They’re suddenly useless, all her possessions.
Shaking in the dark, she’s an unshelled crustacean.
The boy-man is happy. The rains have come! He is soaked and filthy, but his lips are moist. He could have drunk it for ever, the sweet clear rain, sucking it from leaves, from twigs, from his hands, but he remembers you must not have too much. He learned many things, while he was in the army. Were they an army? They were all that was real. They had taken his life, and consumed it all. Now all that remains to him is water. He has no possessions but shirt, shorts, boots. Each item was stolen from someone else. But now he has water. He laughs. He drinks. For the first time, he dares to think he might live. Is it possible he is near the border? The water sinks through him, cool, thrilling.
Not until later does the hunger begin.
He stays low in the bushes. It’s mid-morning. He sees the woman clearly, through his mask of leaves. She is slender and tall. Perhaps Rwandan? Perhaps a Munyankore. He listens: he could be anywhere, still in DRC, already in Uganda, or even Rwanda, there is no way of knowing. She is talking to her child as she does her washing. The child is naked: playing in the mud. She has some blue soap: a rich woman. Three dresses (he counts), two pairs of men’s shorts. He needs those trousers, civilian trousers, but even more, he needs what she’s eating, he can’t see clearly, some kind of grain cakes, maybe baked millet. And she has sugarcane for the baby. How old is the baby? He’s forgotten such things. All he knows is, the child is too young for the army. He knows he should strike, take what he needs and move on, quick, before other people come to the river and all of them turn on him and kill him.
For what he has done he can never be forgiven. It is the one thing he knows without question.
But what is she doing? She slips down her robe. A breast appears, round and beautiful and terrible, not long starved sticks like the breasts he has been seeing. He is stirred and afraid. He must not see this. He does not know what it will make him do. But she casually picks up the plump, calm child and suckles him, talking to him softly and sweetly, while she squeezes out the washing, the drops of water falling like gold in the sunlight. He pinches himself, hard. Why is he paralysed? The sun moves an ingot of heat on to his head. He will have to make his move. The cover is pitiful.
What happens comes so quickly that he is left gasping. She puts down the child, and it runs straight up to him. Stares through the leaves, bright-eyed, unafraid. The child is smiling and pointing at him. He cannot understand what the child is saying. Everything is over. He clutches his gun. But the child is smiling. The child is smiling. Split-second decision: his grip loosens. He pushes the gun away behind him. He gets up, slowly, in the full dazzling sunlight, and the woman is startled, and hides her breast quickly as she calls the child to her. She stares at him.
He points to her food. His mouth is watering. He points to his lips, he rubs his belly. Her eyes run over him like water, his thin corded legs, his knobbed shoulder blades, his ribcage protruding like an empty basket, his whipcord muscles, his eyes, imploring, his eyes which are those of a boy and a man.
She says something he cannot understand, but he knows at once it is full of pity. She strokes her own boy as she offers him food, the starving creature who came from the forest. As he gnaws and gulps, she looks more closely. Where did he get those wounds, those scars, those ridges and valleys by his eyes, his nose?
‘He’s still very clingy,’ says Zakira to Justin, her voice sharp with anxiety.
Justin and Zakira are up too early: the markets are jittery, and Zakira has got to go to Brussels after all: that’s stressful enough without Abdy being ill. Zakira tries not to think, it’s bad timing. But it’s cold, so cold. Soon the clocks are going back. ‘You should have taken him to the doctor yesterday.’
‘It’s OK for you to say that now, Zakira –’
‘I said it yesterday. I did.’
‘In any case, he had a playdate.’
‘YOU had a playdate with your mate Davey. Take him today, for goodness sake.’
‘Fridays everyone goes to the doctor.’
She stares at him, furious, his sulky face, that look of premature defeat. Why did she marry him? He’s hopeless. ‘Take him to the doctor or I’ll never forgive you.’
‘Don’t threaten me!’ He is suddenly shouting, and Abdul Trevor starts to cry in earnest, instead of just grizzling in his mother’s arms.
‘Don’t shout. You’re a bully. You’ve made Abdy cry. You’re a dreadful father.’
‘You’re a hopeless mother. I do everything! You’re never fucking here!’
She shoves the child at him, like a stone or a weapon, eyes flashing with fury. ‘I hate you! That’s IT!’
She is grabbing her coat, her laptop, her blackberry, her chic little chocolate Chanel suitcase. She’s going. Justin is gripped by panic. Abdul Trevor is sobbing, ‘Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, Mummy don’t go,’ in a hiccupy, snotty stream of sorrow.
‘I didn’t mean it, sorry, Zakira,’ Justin pleads. It’s their worst-ever row. He has never called her a hopeless mother. But I do do everything. It’s true, he thinks.
She returns, briefly, to kiss the boy, who has wandered away to the television, but she stares at her husband, disliking him. The mortgage on the flat is huge: the jeep isn’t paid for: she’s the only one earning. She feels afraid of everything. ‘You fucking get a job,’ she says. ‘You do something, then I can be a mother. And in the meantime, fucking keep him warm. Can’t you even do that? Can’t you do anything?’
‘Is that what you think? I should kill myself.’
‘How dare you say that in front of Abdy! I’m not going to listen to this shit.’
The unthinkable happens: she slams the door. She’s gone, without them making up, without kissing him, without taking back the cruel words he heard her say. She doesn’t love him, or care about him. What’s the point of his life? No-one loves him.
It’s not as if Abdy appreciates him either, for now his son has started to cry. ‘Where’s Mummy?,’ he calls from the other room. ‘I want MUMMY!’
So do I, thinks Justin. But we can’t have her. I’m all you’ve got, so be nice to me. He is tempted to put out his tongue at Abdy. He does, and feels better. Then he feels guilty, goes through to find him, picks him up, sighing. Abdy’s almost too big to pick up: not a baby any more, a big heavy boy who will be starting school in less than two years; yet today he feels limp, and damp, and hot, suddenly like a much younger child. Is he shivering? Yes, he is. But he can’t be cold: he is wearing a jumper. ‘Mummy,’ he whimpers, in a heartbroken voice, then just as affectingly, ‘Daddy’.
Justin suddenly thinks about his own mother. He wishes she wasn’t so far away. She can be a terrible pain, of course, but she’s also a useful source of advice. After all, she had raised him without killing him, whereas he and Zakira are both amateurs. She’s not been in touch. She’s abandoned him. Because he’s a fuck-up. All women leave him.