"I'm sorry," Laura said. "I'm really sorry. I wasn't aiming at you. I slipped."
"How about you guys try not throwing mud around at all?" I asked, directing my anger at everyone. I was going to storm back to continue digging, burn my angry energy that way, but Chong had already taken up the shovel I discarded.
"Relax," Laura soothed. "We'll make lunch. You'll feel better when you eat."
"I'm sick of this fucking truck," I said. It was a common sentiment. Truck life was draining and often difficult. But I had never meant it more.
"Come on," Laura said. "Help me get the table out."
"I'm serious," I said. "I'm not just saying it. I've had enough of this shit."
I was serious, and she realized it. She looked at me, concerned, obviously trying to work out what to say, how to improve my mood and change my mind back.
I wasn't in the mood to be placated. I approached Hallam, Nicole and Steve, who had just finished repairing the perforated tire. "This is bullshit," I complained. "We're just digging ourselves deeper. We'll have to fucking winch our way out."
"It's not looking good," Hallam admitted. "I'm going to give it one more try and then we'll break out the winch."
"This poor old sheila wasn't meant for hard living," Steve said fondly, patting the side of the truck.
"We should have traded this piece of shit in for a few Land Rovers three months ago," I muttered.
Nicole opened her mouth to say something, closed it, and then looked at Laura. "Shall we get lunch going?" she suggested brightly.
Laura nodded, and they began the routine: unlocking the cages that held fresh water beneath the sides of the truck, extricating canned foods and bread and vegetables from the stores beneath the floorboards, easing the table out from its slot between the cab and body of the truck, and constructing lunch for nineteen, in this case tuna salad and leftover rice from last night. After a little while I started to help. My anger had faded. But my resolve to leave the truck remained strong.
Rescue came a little later, in the form of the monkey sanctuary's Land Rover followed by a gaggle of Nigerians on "machines", or motorcycle taxis. We decided to leave the truck where it was, guarded by Hallam and Steve and Nicole, and negotiated rides up the road with our saviours. Half of us got rides on the Land Rover. I got stuck on the back of a "machine." My driver was all of seventeen years old, and first he crossed the river on a bridge made of a single four-by-four, then revved the engine and attacked the steep, rutted, uneven, stony road at terrifying speed. For parts of the journey I had my eyes closed, but in the end we made it alive. And the monkey sanctuary, run by an American woman who had come to Nigeria on a ten-day visa fourteen years ago and had not yet left, was a fantastic place, verdant paradise beneath a deep canopy of rainforest, shockingly and wonderfully green after the crumbling gray concrete and smog of the rest of the country.
The next morning, after breakfast, I sat in the tent watching Laura pack her toothbrush away, and said: "I meant what I said yesterday."
"Which thing was that?" she asked without turning around.
"I want to leave the truck."
She stopped and turned around. "Paul. I know you were upset. But let it go."
"It wasn't yesterday's digging," I said. "I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of our lives revolving around food. I'm sick of being the circus everywhere we go. I'm sick of sleeping in tents, I'm sick of cooking for nineteen people every five days, I'm sick of having zero privacy, and I'm sick of having to keep going whenever we go someplace I want to stay and having to stay every time we go somewhere I want to leave. And yeah, I'm sick of digging that fucking truck out of the mud, too."
"I thought you wanted to cross the Congo. The truck's the only way."
"I don't think we'll make it. But even if we could…I'd love to cross the Congo, but not on this truck."
After a pause she said "Are you talking about leaving alone?"
"What?" I asked, shocked. "No! Definitely not. Together. I want us both to leave. We can fly to Zimbabwe and visit my aunt and uncle. Or to Kenya if you'd rather go there."
"I'm not going."
I hadn't expected so flat a rejection.
After a moment I asked "As simple as that?"
She looked at me defiantly. "These are our people. You know that. And I'm not leaving them. If you want to go, you can go on your own. But I'm staying. And if you want to stay with me, you're staying too."
"That's…that's…this is…" I spluttered.
"What?"
I didn't know what I was trying to say, so I just looked at her.
"Is it the lifestyle you hate?" she asked. "Or the people? I know you're not a people person. But I thought you liked everyone."
"I do," I said. "I know. I mean, you're right, I agree, these are our people. I just can't handle truck life any more."
"You're going to have to."
I finally worked out what I wanted to say. "I thought our being together was more important than staying with the people around us."
"They're just as important," she said, very seriously, looking me straight in the eyes. "I'm not saying you're unimportant. You're not. That should be obvious. You're the world to me, Paul. You know that. But these are our people. They matter just as much. To both of us. I just wish you could see that. But until you can I'm not going to let you make this mistake."
I wish I had listened to her, really listened to her, to what she was trying to say. But I was angry, and I was upset, and I was eager to wallow in self-pity, and what I heard instead was: they're more important to me than you are; and I know you won't leave me; and I'm going to use that to get my way and make you stay.
"Fuck this," I said. "I'm going for a walk."
I stalked out of the tent before she could stop me.
I was so upset, replaying our conversation over and over again in my mind, layering the worst connotations imaginable on everything Laura had said, that I walked for a good half-hour before looking up and realizing that I was completely lost. For awhile I had walked through a little community of farming huts that adjoined the sanctuary, neatly kept wooden huts alongside a stream and surrounded by fields of vegetables, fields where the locals had wisely retained a few big trees in order to protect themselves from the crippling midday sun. From there I had taken a wide dirt path into the forest. But the path had shrunk and forked and subdivided, and I wasn't sure where I stood could even be called part of a trail at all. I was, however, sure that I could not retrace my tracks.
"Shit," I muttered. I looked around. At least I could see. This was not like the dense mangrove jungles of the south; this was rainforest, where the trees rose a hundred feet into the sky before their branches jutted out, their canopy swallowing so much light that the underbrush was relatively thin. I could see a fair distance in most directions. But it all looked the same. Waist-high bushes, young trees, fallen branches, enormous vines coiled like snakes around mossy fallen tree trunks, all carpeted by golden petals of some flower that must grow high in the canopy.
"Shit," I said again. Lost in African rainforest. A glorious and wonderful place to be lost, but still embarrassingly stupid and potentially dangerous. The vines reminded me uncomfortably of the pythons that lived in the jungle. And there were leopards. I heard something rustle in the distance and twitched nervously before getting hold of myself. Carnivores were extremely rare and not likely to attack something as big as me. The only real danger was not being found. If I stayed where I was they would come and find me. Somehow. The people at the sanctuary would send out locals who would work their local magic and track me down.
I shook my head. Maybe Laura was right for an entirely different reason. Maybe I shouldn't leave the truck because on my own I was too stupid to live.