Devil’s Harvest (15 page)

‘Vultures,’ Rasta explained, making a clucking sound with his tongue as if he disapproved.

The road from the airport was lined with half-constructed grey buildings, concrete pillars and iron rods sticking out like sea creatures fanning the passing currents. The roads to the side were all untarred, the surface a greasy mix of mud and diesel. They turned into one, the soft earth sucking at the wheels. The potholes were more like ponds, with gentle entry slopes and deep troughs, the front of the four-by-four rising up the other side, dripping with silty water. The sides of the road were carpeted in crushed plastic water bottles.

The military was everywhere, eclipsed only by the UN footprint – blue helmets looking out from meshed armoured vehicles, and oversized four-by-fours lumbering around the muddy pools.

‘Where there’s shit, there’s the UN,’ Rasta announced as another UN vehicle overtook them, spraying mud over the bonnet. ‘There’s a lot of money in shit,’ he added neutrally.

The city – in name a city, its sprawling size rather than its infrastructure making it more than a town – was an ambivalent mix of restlessness and stasis. It buzzed with activity, yet showed little for it. Foreign-aid workers roared around in air-conditioned Land Rovers, while everyone else squashed into buses and trucks, or clutched onto 100cc Chinese motorbikes, fumes spewing out the back. Gabriel watched in astonishment as a bike drew up alongside them, twisting around the dangers in the road, with two passengers holding on, one of whom was carrying a struggling chicken in each hand. No one wore a helmet. The woman on the back saw his horror and waved a chicken at him in greeting, the fowl thrashing in mute resistance. Then, as the road opened up in front, they were gone in a plume of grey-blue smoke and feathers.

‘That is
boda boda
,’ Rasta informed him. ‘Very cheap, but you must choose an old man as your driver. The young ones are too dangerous.’

Gabriel had never been near his bicycle without his riding helmet securely strapped. He could hardly imagine himself swinging his leg over a motorcycle to be driven unprotected about the bustling roads of Juba.

They passed a group of seated men, perhaps thirty in all, banging at broken metal sheets, some with hammers, some with rocks, moulding and fixing in a cacophony of clatters. Further up the road, another makeshift workshop had been established under a half-collapsed roof, a small generator shaking and spitting oil in the corner. One man was arc-welding, his only protection a pair of sunglasses. Gabriel looked away as the white sparks erupted from the end of the weld stick. The noise of hooting, the swerving of off-road vehicles and motorbikes, the smoking diesel engines, all combined to create a sense of lively chaos, a frenetic activity in the patent absence of an economy.

Gabriel had googled the position of the lodge; the map showed it at the corner of a large expanse described as the central cemetery. But his vision of an ordered burial ground was displaced by the reality: an expanse of overgrown bushes and tall grasses, the ground thick with garbage. On the corner, a group of women decanted water from a massive carrier mounted on a truck into yellow twenty-five-litre canisters: people on motorbikes were queued up with empty containers strapped on the back waiting to be filled.

The White Nile Lodge was more a compound than a lodge, and regrettably also endured a mixed odour of garbage, manure and poorly managed human excrement. It appeared to have a sewerage system of sorts, but was lined on all sides by informal shanties and broken-down brick structures. A wooden bridge spanned the divide between the parking area and the camp reception, a slow stream oozing rather than trickling underneath. The heat intertwined with the stench to become a single entity, with a pressure of its own, resting like a putrid cloth over Gabriel’s shoulders. The air felt claustrophobic and he longed for rain, but the clouds glowered, stubbornly refusing to deliver on their promise.

The compound was laid out among green trees and banana groves, each room a free-standing prefabricated square with an extra thatched covering overhead. The furnishing was sparse, by anyone’s standards, but there was a working air conditioner. Gabriel hadn’t realised that the ablutions were communal. Bloody hell, he thought. He hadn’t expected luxury, but the last time he had shared washroom facilities was on sports tour in high school. He took some time to inspect the toilets and showers. It all seemed passably clean, although in the shower he found the largest bullfrog he had ever seen, bobbing its head at him as if suffering a bout of hiccups after devouring the last occupant. The creature made him think of Hargreaves and he found himself longing for the cool, familiar comfort of his colleague’s armchair.

His room was stifling, the heat radiating off the thin walls. A mosquito net hung in a damp knot above the middle of the bed. He noted that the linen consisted of only a sheet. No doubt one did not need anything more, he realised with some trepidation. Surely the heat would abate at night? In an effort to restore some sense of order, he unpacked his clothes, arranging them across the plywood board that served as a shelf, and changed into shorts. Then he sat on his bed, head in his hands, half-wondering if there was perhaps a better standard of room, or if there was somebody to complain to. Surely, he, on the brink of full professorship, wasn’t expected to endure this? When he could stand it no more, he fled the infernal room for the reception area.

The bar and dining room was an earthen-floored expanse covered by a wide thatched roof and open on the sides. Fans were suspended from the beams, spinning rapidly but with little notable effect. The smell was better here, due largely to a bowl of smoking frankincense that gave the air a misty quality, heightened by the smoke from hookah pipes at many of the tables. A meeting was in progress at one of the larger tables, delegates earnestly listening to the speaker, some making notes on pads of paper. The bar area itself was dominated by a rowdy group of white men in shorts and T-shirts, inebriated to the stage of masculine back-slapping and hugging. Gabriel chose a low couch and table at the other end of the open area. He was pleased to see Rasta, now also the establishment’s barman, approaching him with a smile and a tall glass filled with amber beer and a good white head.

‘Local beer,’ he said, placing the full glass in front of him. ‘White Bull Lager.’

Gabriel took a long draw, the cool liquid soothing his throat. Given that as a unified Islamic state Khartoum had banned all alcohol in Sudan, he was grateful both for its availability and its quality.

He muttered his thanks and the barman grinned before heading back to his post.

The meeting at the large table had wound to a close, and the delegates were standing, their heads lowered in a parting prayer. At this moment the group of men at the bar – probably not deliberately, but nevertheless unfortunately – elected to burst into song, a shouted chorus of which the only discernible words were ‘We don’t give a fuck about anyone else’. The group in prayer murmured their praise despite the intrusion. Mercifully, the tuneless song was cut short by the scoring of a try in a foreign rugby match being shown on the tiny television set above the bar. Fists were raised and high-fives shared liberally.

Gabriel noted two men sitting slightly apart on bar stools, both drinking and smoking. They ignored the noise around them and maintained their conversation. The one talking, with sandy-coloured hair and deeply tanned arms, was explaining something, moving his hand to indicate the banking of a plane or helicopter. The other man nodded seriously. At that moment, the tanned speaker looked up and stared straight at him. Gabriel looked away, gazing into his beer instead. Flies were pestering him and he noted with dismay that two were now doing breaststroke in his warming lager. A monitor lizard, the size of the Queen’s corgi, was watching him with interest from the ledge of the low wall, its bluish tongue tasting the air.

‘You should smoke; it keeps the fuckers off your face.’ The sandy-haired man had peeled away from the bar and sat down opposite Gabriel. ‘And only eat when it’s dark. Then they leave you alone. And you can’t see your food, which is good ’cos here it looks like it came out of a hadeda’s arsehole. But the mozzies rip you apart then, of course. That’s Africa for you – not for fucking sissies, hey?’

The man’s accent was rough and flat, like a New Zealander’s. He had a scar, a smooth keloid on the left side of his neck, an irregular shape like the outline of a country. Although it was small, it was still difficult to look at him without letting one’s eye slip off the edge of his jaw to the shiny patch. His biceps flexed as he spoke and he had some kind of coat of arms tattooed on his upper shoulder. He was halfway through an unfiltered cigarette.

‘Everyone’s fucking off like rats. Rainy season starting. Going to start pissing down soon. Mud everywhere. Shit running down the streets. So what’s with you? You got a good reason to be here or you just fucking stupid?’ Smoke billowed from his mouth as he spoke.

‘Most probably just stupid.’ Gabriel laughed lightly, but the man showed no sense of humour. ‘I’m doing research. I’m a biologist.’

‘Birdman, hey?’

The skin across the back of Gabriel’s neck prickled and he felt a surge of protective adrenaline kick in. All his senses were alert now. ‘Funny, I heard the same expression recently. From a man named Bill in Nairobi.’

‘Bill? Never heard of him. My name’s Jannie.’ No handshake was offered. Instead the man dropped the remainder of his cigarette and placed his boot heel over the glowing ember, grinding it into the earth. The next one was already alight.

‘Yanni, with a “y”?’ Gabriel asked.

‘Do I look Greek to you? No man, South African: Jannie, with a “j”. I’m a contractor. Security.’ There was a pause, apparently meaningful to the South African but lost on Gabriel. ‘So what kind of birds you into?’

Gabriel hesitated, unsure how to answer. Again, he got the sense that there was some innuendo he was missing, perhaps a gauntlet, a challenge. But without knowing what was being discussed, he dare not say anything. The moment seemed to last for ever, until finally his inquisitor relented: ‘No, don’t worry. I’ll know soon enough.’

The South African picked up his half-empty soft pack of cigarettes in one massive paw and stood, towering above Gabriel. ‘Be seeing you,
boet
.’ He cocked his thumb and finger in a mock gun and made a little ‘pow’ sound as his thumb dropped. The blond hairs along his forearm stood out against his tanned skin.

The monitor lizard eyed Gabriel with suspicion. Juba was awash with local military, UN military, private militia, security consultants, and other apparent opportunists, but no one like him, he realised. They thought he was a bloody ornithologist. And the only birds he could see were the vultures overhead. Perhaps this was all a grand mistake, he thought, trying to dig the upturned flies out of his beer with his finger. Perhaps now was the time to turn around and go back to whatever he could still call home.

* * *

Gabriel’s first night in Juba was disturbed and uncomfortable. He felt a pressing need to communicate with Jane, perhaps more as someone from his ordinary life rather than a person still dear to him. Uncharacteristically, he unburdened himself in an email to her, after battling to get the laptop to connect to the erratic internet server. But the moment it was sent, he regretted the emotional tone of the message. He nevertheless checked his inbox every few minutes, hoping for some reply, some connection with his known existence. None was forthcoming and his loneliness deepened with each passing minute that he remained unanswered. He returned to his toolshed-for-a-bedroom, only to find it still fiercely hot and everything, from the floor to the sheets on the bed, moist to the touch. Then, foolishly, he opened the door to try to cool it down, and had to chase out an invading host of amphibians. The first toad he had spotted – a relatively small specimen given the maneater in the shower – was easy to corner, but the moment he picked it up, it emptied its entire digestive system over his hand and wrist. He herded the rest of them out with the back of his shoe and then turned his attention to the variety of insects and arachnids that had also grabbed the opportunity to seek shelter from the dark outside.

But the early evening’s interruptions were nothing compared to what followed. The noise of the frogs in the dank fields surrounding the compound was close to deafening. There seemed to be a number of competing disco parties happening immediately outside his shed. And there was a bird, or some kind of aerial being, moving through the trees above his room, making a noise that was both soft and somehow threatening, a bit like the small but rapacious dinosaurs he recalled from Spielberg’s
Jurassic Park
. He had a vision of it, scaly and sharp-teethed, ripping through the thin skin of his room and feasting upon him uninterrupted. He eventually dozed off, lying on his back and trying not to move so as to avoid the clinging moisture of the sheets, only to be awakened within the hour by a barrage of machine-gun-fire, hundreds of rounds blasting off in the near distance. It was short lived but it left him shaken and he hunkered down in the centre of his bed, waiting for dawn to come.

Sunrise so close to the equator was less the gentle transition from dark to dawn and more the abrupt switching on of a spotlight. One moment it was dark, and the next Gabriel found himself squinting into the hot core of the sun. The lack of sleep and the persistent challenges delivered by nature and humanity left him headachy and miserable. He longed for his morning espresso and the crisp coolth of an autumn Bristol dawn. Instead, breakfast consisted of thick-cut white bread and peanut butter, washed down with instant chicory. It did nothing to improve his mood. The White Nile Lodge’s attempt to pander to European taste needed work.

Before leaving the lodge, he had some joy with the unreliable wireless connection and received a short reply from Jane: