The Boy in the River (7 page)

Sue’s pregnancy hadn’t bothered her – in fact she had blossomed over the past few months. So when she slipped and fell whilst getting out of the dugout during an afternoon trip to an island on the River Congo, neither of us gave it much thought. She got up quickly and laughed it off.

If there had been any cause for concern, we would have headed straight back to Kinshasa, and probably on to England. But we had nearly three months to go before our baby was due; plenty of leeway if anything began to look out of the ordinary. We had it all planned. If the baby was a girl she was to be called Abigail, ‘her father’s joy’. We both loved the name, perhaps because the biblical Abigail was so winsome and feisty, if a little short on Old Testament morality when it came to seducing King David.

But a few hours later, when Sue was working in the kitchen, I heard her take a sharp breath and saw her place a hand flat on her belly.

‘Something’s happening,’ she said.

I got up and went to her. She had been cooking fudge, of all things. It was my twenty-fourth birthday the next day, and this was to be a special treat.

I led her to a chair. She sat down and seemed to recover at once.

‘I’ll get David,’ I said.

‘No need.’

‘I’ll get him.’

As I hurried between the trees all the arguments we had used for staying in the village since Sue became pregnant ran through my mind. Everything would be fine. She was healthy – and a midwife herself. We worked at a medical centre, didn’t we? David was back from a lengthy trip, so there was a doctor on hand. Even though he wasn’t a gynaecologist, this ought to mean we were in the best place for at least 300 miles. Yes, everything would be fine.

‘You’re going to have twins,’ David said, standing up after his examination. He kept his voice neutral. ‘And pretty soon, too.’

‘Twins?’

I looked down at Sue and saw something in her expression I hadn’t seen there before. Fear. I knew mine told the same story.

‘Twins?’ I said again. ‘Can that be right?’

‘Look, Richard,’ David said testily, ‘your wife’s in labour. And she’s going to have twins.’

‘But I’m only twenty-nine weeks,’ Sue said, as if she might be able to order this thing not to be.

David kept his face averted while he washed his hands in a bowl. ‘I’m afraid I can only feel one of them properly, but it’s breech.’

He didn’t need to say any more. Twins, and a breech birth, well over two months premature. In this place.

‘I’ll be back a little later,’ David said. ‘Call me if you need me.’

I had the impression he was leaving us alone to come to terms with this. Or perhaps because he didn’t want to see us failing to do so.

I looked out of the window at the rainforest, trying to quell my rising panic. The birds were calling and somewhere nearby people laughed, as if it were any other afternoon. The house still smelled comfortingly of fudge. I tried to concentrate. I knew there would be no electric light tonight: there was no fuel for the generator and it was already getting dark.

Sue got up and paced around the room, her face lined with anxiety and – increasingly – with pain. We didn’t speak. Twins. I had the most acute sense of approaching catastrophe, as if the door of an enormous iron vault was closing on us all.

It was a nightmare scene, hot and sulphurous, full of pain and blood.

I had never imagined that an event so masked in rosy myths could be as barbarous. David worked in the feeble glow of a small oil lamp. Beyond that disc of light the room and the house and the world were pitch black. The night was filled by Sue’s screams, the slick glint of blood, the shadowy figures of the Congolese women helpers blocking my view.

She was born dead, our first daughter. In the confusion, I never saw her face. I don’t even know exactly what happened to her. I was in shock, helpless and frantic, but unable to take my eyes off what was happening. Somehow, in the middle of all this, the child was spirited away from the room, a swaddled bundle no bigger than a paperback book. I didn’t see her go. She might never have been there. Everyone’s focus had already switched to the living.

David was bending over Sue, who shrieked again, and I watched with horror the tension bunching in his shoulders as a second child was dragged into the world, mewling, gasping for breath. But alive. Somehow. Alive.

Abigail was impossibly tiny – she weighed just two pounds – and it seemed certain that she would die too. All through that suffocating night I lay listening to her pathetic struggles to breathe.

I got up every few minutes and went to the crib, just to listen for the next rasp of breath, willing it to come. I didn’t know a human being could be so small and so defenceless, and I was unprepared for the strength of my need to protect her.

Sue, torn, bruised and utterly exhausted, lay beside me in the sweltering darkness. I desperately wanted to bring Abigail into our bed, but Sue forbade it; she was so fragile we might harm her. I went along with this: Sue was not only the midwife but the mother. I suspected that a more primal drama was being worked out here; that this first night was a trial Abigail must face alone.

And finally, somehow, the darkness began to thin and the song of the coucal birds floated from the forest into my half-conscious mind. It was my birthday.

Sue, I’m not sure how, had got to her feet and was standing by Abigail’s cot. I couldn’t hear a sound from the baby. I held my breath in the dawn.

‘Well,’ Sue said, with evident surprise, ‘we’ve got a real little fighter on our hands here.’

Sometime later that day Abigail’s twin was buried in a hastily dug grave in the cemetery on the hill.

Its rough wooden marker was visible from the window in our bedroom, beneath which Sue and I lay later that afternoon. We were utterly drained, sweating in the relentless heat, stricken with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again, whilst the world carried on around us regardless.

‘Twins,’ Sue said aloud. I hadn’t realized she was awake. ‘I knew I felt two of them kick. I knew it.’

‘A scan would have picked it up,’ I said. ‘Just a routine scan.’ I didn’t mean to sound bitter but I could hear it in my voice, and so could she. ‘I never even saw her. The first baby. It all happened so fast, and there was Abigail just born and . . . she was out of the room so quickly that I never saw her.’

‘I did,’ Sue said in a small voice.

I rolled over to look at her. ‘You did?’

‘When I got up, just after Abigail arrived. I found the little bundle in the kitchen. I don’t suppose they intended me to find her, but there she was, and I folded back the cloth. I saw her face.’ She groped for my hand. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, I don’t mind.’ I lay back and stared at the stained ceiling. ‘How could I mind? I’m glad you saw her. I just couldn’t think of anything but Abigail . . .’

I knew I would always regret not seeing my first daughter’s face. And now it was too late. I thought of the pathetic mound of turned earth just 100 yards from the window, baking in the Congo sun.

For Sue, our first daughter was a person who had lived, no matter how briefly, and died. For me she was insubstantial, a presence I could never give form to, nor quite lay to rest. We didn’t give her an English name until well over a year later, when we decided to call her Judith. We had only expected one child, so we had only chosen one name, and naturally her younger sister had inherited that.

The lack of a name didn’t seem a problem then. In this part of the Congo twins are relatively rare. The elder is always called Mbo and the younger Mpia, titles which confer some status and which imply an indissoluble bond between the siblings. There is no need for other names. So for months we referred to our lost daughter simply as Mbo, when we could bring ourselves to speak of her at all. Mbo Hoskins was the name on her grave marker.

It didn’t strike me until much later that everything had been granted to the living sister and nothing, not even an identity, to the one who had died.

Sue was in a bad way after the dreadful events of that night and, though she showed great strength and courage, I did at first have rather more to do with the care of Abigail than I might otherwise have done.

I relished this responsibility, the knowledge that I could do something useful for her. I fed her through a tube and walked around with her strapped to my chest in a sling. I bonded with her in a way that I suppose would have been impossible under any other circumstances. Her eyes would gaze up into mine from her pouch. I had never loved anyone – or anything – so much.

The villagers called me a Tata Mapassa – father of twins – and as such I was eyed with much respect, but it was tinged with wariness, as if people felt it might be as well to keep their distance when dealing with me.

I was hardly aware of this at first. Or if I was, I thought the change might have been in me alone. For one thing, once Abigail had survived the first few months and was developing well, I began to travel more. I found myself driven by a relentless desire to visit the remotest villages, far away from Bolobo.

It seems strange to me now that I should have experienced this urge to journey away from the child who meant so much to me, but at the time it did not seem so. Sometimes when I was on my own in the house a sense of dread visited me like a presence. Having lost one daughter, I knew I could not bear to be near if the other was taken.

At the same time there was something much deeper at work. It seemed to me that if I now strove to do good for the people of this region, God would reward me. If I did what I thought was God’s will, surely He would protect my family?

I felt useful, bringing medicines and other supplies to the villages, bringing news, making contacts, learning every day. The villagers held white people in exaggerated esteem and would talk to me for hours about their problems, their fears and their dreams. Mostly, they just needed someone to talk to, but besides that they were influenced, I think, by the fact that I was employed by the Church. For some people I almost had the status of confessor, someone to whom they could unburden with safety. I relished the role and did my best to be worthy of it, but there is no doubt that the respect and deference of the villagers was a salve for my own pain.

I found relief in the sheer physical experience of travelling. Electricity was the stuff of fairy tales for this whole area and running water meant the nearest stream. At first I took the Land Rover, but that was only possible on the track to Nko and Mushie, and even that eventually disappeared in a giant quagmire. It wasn’t unusual for it to take seven or eight hours to cover a dozen miles or less, with endless stops to cut a new path through the forest.

I learned not to rely on machines. The long-suffering Land Rover, pushed beyond endurance, broke down several times. On one occasion I had struck out with Tata Mopanda for a remote cluster of villages known collectively as the Nkuboko. After passing Mushie, the track meandered through the forest for another 100 miles, little wider than people could pass in single file and yet the Land Rover was rammed through. After hours of grinding labour, the vehicle finally broke down with fuel pump failure. We spent about six hours trying to fix it and then walked a couple more to the nearest village. The monkeys screamed and gibbered in the canopy above us, ripping off fruit and letting it drop to the forest floor.

The village comprised eight shabby palm-thatch huts. Neither of us had eaten anything all day; we were filthy, exhausted and famished. There was no water to wash in and the villagers only had two eggs between them. I tried to turn them down but the villagers wouldn’t hear of it and graciously made us an omelette. I stretched out that night on rushes in one of the simplest huts I had yet stayed in, staring up through the gaps in the palm thatch at patches of sky between the treetops.

I was desperately lonely that night. My resolution faltered and I remember asking myself what I was doing there when I had a wife and child back in Bolobo. Was I really doing this for God, as a trade-off for my family’s protection? What kind of God would seek such self-denial from me, or impose such a price on Sue and Abigail? I couldn’t find an answer.

Nevertheless, for weeks and months a great restlessness drove me on.

I usually set off into the heart of the rainforest by bicycle, stopping every few miles to hammer the wheel back into shape after the latest buckling. When I came to the frequent streams and rivers that crossed my path I would either wade out with the bicycle above my head, or try and find a villager with a canoe who could ferry me across.

Small victories over big obstacles gave me some satisfaction, but my loneliness never left me. I had a pocket radio with me and in one extremely isolated stretch of rainforest, hundreds of miles from anything resembling a town, I picked up Brian Johnston commentating on the Lord’s Thest. Out in the middle of nowhere, the sound of his plummy, quizzical voice filled me with almost unbearable nostalgia.

I used a dugout canoe to travel on the river. By this time I’d become passably competent at handling it the Congolese way – standing up to paddle gondolier-like from the stern. On longer trips, though, I followed the example of the wealthier local traders and used an outboard motor. I found that if I headed upriver it was possible after a few miles to turn inland through the forest along the smaller tributaries.

Once, I made a month-long trip by canoe through a series of forest streams known as the Sangassi, almost on the Equator. Villages here were built on stilts, because the forest was flooded for most of the year. I stopped to wash my clothes in a brook, beating them against the stones under an extraordinarily hot sun, and as I did so some villagers gathered round me. They seemed amazed at everything I did.

‘What’s so fascinating?’ I asked in Lingala. ‘Never seen a man washing his own clothes before?’

They exchanged bashful glances.

‘It’s not that,’ one of them said at last. ‘We’ve never seen a white man before.’

I stood up, tilted back my straw hat and wiped my forearm across my sweating brow. It was my turn to be amazed. I didn’t think villages still existed where a white man had never been seen.