THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW

Yaoundé, the Hilton, waiting for the car. The trip was ridiculous, but it was the assistant producer who had organised everything: as seen from Hollywood, Douala, Yaoundé and Kribi must have seemed like a game of Scrabble spread out on a table. She had already made enough of a fuss to come early; she kept her geographical reflections to herself.

Kouhouesso wasn’t answering. Perhaps there was no network in the forest. The driver booked by the assistant producer was on his way from town. How did we manage before mobile phones? The four-wheel drive smelled of Landes pine fragrance; the air conditioner was on full. The town levelled out as the trees got taller, fewer and fewer houses and more and more trees, until there were only trees. You couldn’t really call it a landscape. There was nothing to see beyond the edge of the road, beyond that first row of trees, like a sort of huge hedge. The word ‘forest’ itself was inadequate. This forest and the Landes forest were as different one from the other as, say, the Atlantic and Lake Como. It was a whole other concept, completely different raw materials: as much green as you could wish for, but fleshy, bulging. And the path was rough. There was no more asphalt; there were holes, bumps, ditches in the middle of the road. To her mind, this was not a road but a trench, a gorge. With plank bridges.

Nevertheless, whatever, whatever, bit by bit she was getting closer to him. She was undertaking the final section along the arc that still separated them.

The driver’s name was Patricia; no, Patricien. He was half-Baka, right…The song on the radio, ‘We’ve come up with the question, we haven’t come up with the solution’, had a Congolese beat to it. She was hungry, so they stopped. The village (ten huts, an antenna and a handwritten sign) was called Washington. A street seller in the blazing sun offered them Nokias and cassava. Patricien showed her—pardon, Madame Solange—how to peel the stick of cassava to remove the sickly sweet, white paste, which was downright disgusting. That’s how typhoid epidemics started. So he told her. It was better to eat fried plantain banana. But, guess what, they didn’t have any there.

She rubbed her hands with antiseptic gel and would have liked to clean her teeth. A fierce stinging in her arm. It was a mout-mout sandfly. ‘It doesn’t actually sting you,’ said Patricien, hedging, ‘it eats into you.’ She sprayed herself with Special Tropical Insect Screen. Wouldn’t the Special Equator version have been better? Her mobile rang: Kouhouesso? No, her mother, calling from Clèves. Was everything going well? At the sound of the village church bells—it was midday there, too—her belly clenched. Was Jessie right after all? Perhaps it really was physically intolerable to be in two places at the same time; was the planet taking revenge, as it rotated, for being split in two like that?

Going to the toilet was actually a problem. They found a hole in a hut. She still had a stomach-ache, half from nerves, half from cassava. She swallowed two capsules of Imodium with a warm fizzy drink. According to Patricien, they still had about four hours of driving. The idea was to go as far as the river, leave the four-wheel drive with a guard at Big-Poco, cross in dugout canoes with the cargo: fifty kilos of rice, a sack of salt and a big sack of yams—two days of supplies for the local crew—as well as twenty packs of mineral water for what was known as the white crew. Then they’d take another four-wheel drive, known as a ‘bridge’, waiting on the other side, to do the transhipment, and keep driving to Little-Poco.

They set off in the Scandinavian climate of the four-wheel drive. All of a sudden she received a text, the letters appeared as they bumped along the track. Kouhouesso. A text that had travelled via satellites to reach her here, in Washington, in this desolate backwater, to land on top of the towering antenna, taller than the trees, to form magic words, words addressed to her:

‘So, African girl?’

That was so like him. Nothing and then that; it was so like him.

She sent him a super smiley, with extra brackets, and crosses for kisses.

On second thought, she also sent a summary of her schedule, her arrival time, in four hours, at Little-Poco, did that suit him, where should they meet, was everything going well?

Trees were flashing past, yes, they were immensely tall trees flashing past. She had to lower her head to see the tops; the slit of sky above the track was like an upside-down river. But what did places and times matter; the world here and now was once again inhabited by one man alone.

Kouhouesso was not at the village. They got her a room at the Straight and Narrow hostel; she made a fuss: she wanted Kouhouesso’s room. Where was the ‘white’ crew? They were all at Big-Poco. Yes, on the river. Jessie, Favour, Mr Kou and his assistant, and the director of photography, and the cameraman, and the soundman, and all the production technicians, the Nigerians, the Cameroonians, and even Olga: everyone. It was better to sleep at the hostel: there would be no more ‘bridge’ vehicles at that time of day. As for Mr Kou’s room, he had taken the key.

She lay down on a bench covered in raffia, and someone brought her a foam mat and some sheets that smelled musty. There was no wifi. There was no running water. She did what she could for her upset stomach, using a bucket, even though she wasn’t sure it was there for that purpose. She rang Kouhouesso—she had reception, but did he? She unfolded her portable mosquito net, but where to hang it from? The plaster roof was rotten; a nail would not have stayed in. She shut her eyes. She tried to breathe in the incredible humidity and she held back her tears, because if she cried, there and then, that would be the end of her; if she cried she would melt away entirely; if she opened her eyes she would empty out all the water inside her and the only thing left, like baby Kouhouesso, would be a little pile of powder, white powder.