I settled on to a bench. On my left sat one of these spiritual young men, his eyes closed, clutching a folded prayer mat to his chest. On my other side, a glamorous girl with two sets of eyebrows — one pair painted strangely above her own — who sat joggling a small bag of cashews in her hands. I considered all the months that separated my first ferry trip from this one. The Illuminated Academy for Girls — which, for convenience’s sake, and to save everyone the shame of saying it, we abbreviated, behind Aimee’s back, to IAG — had survived its first year. Thrived, if you counted success in column inches. For the rest of us it had been a periodic ordeal, intense whenever the visits rolled round or some crisis brought the embattled headmaster into our meeting rooms in London or New York, via fraught video-conference. Oddly distant at all other times. I often had cause to recall Granger, in Heathrow, the night of our first return, hugging me round my shoulders as we queued for Customs: “None of this looks real to me now! Something’s changed. Can’t be the same after seeing what I’ve seen!” But in a few days he was exactly the same, we all were: we left taps running, abandoned plastic bottles after a few sips, bought a single pair of jeans for the same sum as a trainee teacher’s yearly wage. If London was unreal, if New York was unreal, they were powerful stage shows: as soon as we were back inside them they not only seemed real but the only possible reality, and decisions made about the village from these locations always appeared to have a certain plausibility while we were making them, and only later, when one or other of us arrived back here, and crossed this river, did the potential absurdity of whatever it was become clear. Four months ago, for example, it had seemed important, in New York, to teach the theory of evolution to these children — and their teachers — many of whom had never so much as heard of the name Darwin. It seemed far less of a priority in the village itself, when we reached it in the middle of the rainy season to find a third of the kids off with malaria, half a classroom ceiling fallen in, the toilet contract unfulfilled and the solar-panel-powered electricity circuits rusted and corrupted. But our biggest problem, as Fern had predicted, was not our pedagogical illusions, exactly, but the wavering nature of Aimee’s attention. Her new thing was technology. She had begun to spend a lot of social time with the brilliant young people of Silicon Valley, and liked to consider herself one of their tribe, “basically a nerd.” She’d become very responsive to their vision of a world transformed — saved — by technology. In the first flush of this new interest she did not abandon IAG or poverty reduction as much as patch the fresh preoccupation on to the old ones, with sometimes alarming results (“We’re going to give each one of these damn girls a laptop: that’s going to be their exercise book, that’s their library, their teacher, their everything!”). Which Fern then had to massage back into some semblance of reality. He stayed “on the ground” not for mere weeks but for whole seasons, partly out of affection for the village and his own commitment to his role there but also, I knew, to avoid working any more closely with Aimee than his preferred distance of four thousand miles. He saw what no one else saw. He noted the growing resentment of the boys, who had been left to fester in the old school, which — though Aimee sporadically rained a little money on it — was now little more than a ghost town, in which children sat around waiting for teachers unpaid so long they’d stopped coming to work. The government seemed to have withdrawn from the village generally: many other previously well-running, or reasonably well-running, services now languished cruelly. The clinic had not reopened, a huge pot-hole in the road just outside the village had been left to crater and spread. An Italian environmental scientist’s reports of dangerous levels of pesticides in the groundwater well were ignored no matter how many times Fern tried to alert the relevant ministries. Perhaps this kind of thing would have happened anyway. But it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the village was being punished for its connection with Aimee, or deliberately neglected in the expectation that Aimee’s money would flow into the gap.
One problem you could not find written down in any of the reports but Fern and I were both acutely aware of it, although we experienced it from opposite ends. Neither of us bothered discussing it with Aimee any more. (“But what if I love him?” was her only response, when we combined forces, by way of conference call, in an attempted intervention.) Instead we worked around her, swapping information like two PIs on the same case. I probably was the one who noticed it first, in London. I kept walking in on sweet nothings being passed back and forth, at her desktop, on her phone, always closed up or shut down the moment I entered whichever room. Then she stopped being shy. When he passed the AIDS test she’d made him take she was so glad she told me about it. I got used to seeing Lamin’s disembodied head in a corner, smiling at me, streaming at us live from, I presumed, the only internet café in Barra. He was there at breakfast with the kids in the mornings, and waved good-bye to them when their tutors arrived. He’d appear for dinner, like another guest at the table. He began to be included in meetings, the ridiculous “creative” kind (“Lam, what do you think about this corset?”) but also in serious meetings with accountants, the business manager, the PRs. From Fern’s end the situation was less queasily romantic, more concrete: Lamin’s compound got a new front door, then a toilet, then interior dividing walls, then a new roof of tile. This did not go unnoticed. A flat-screen TV had caused the latest trouble. “The Al Kalo called a meeting about it on Tuesday,” Fern informed me, when I called him to tell him the jet was taking off. “Lamin was away in Dakar, visiting family. Mostly the young people came. Everybody was very upset. It came down to a long discussion about how and when Lamin joined the Illuminati…”