Judith is here to feed the living not the dead, thought Ghita as the jeep clattered through a gateway and joined a strip of hard road. They drove past a camp followers' shantytown of bars, stalls and a facetious notice saying Piccadilly This Way. Tranquil brown hills rose ahead of them. Ghita said she'd love to walk up there. Judith said if she did she'd never come back.
"Animals?"
"People."
They approached the camp. On a patch of red dust beside the main gates, children were playing basketball with a white food bag nailed to a wooden post. Judith led Ghita to reception to collect her pass. Signing the book, Ghita leafed casually back, only to have it fall open at the page she was pretending not to look for:
Tessa Abbott, PO box, Nairobi, Tukul 28.
A. Bluhm, Medecins de l'Univers, Tukul 29.
And the same date.
"The press boys had a ball," Judith was saying enthusiastically. "Reuben charged them fifty U.S. a shot, cash. Eight hundred bucks total, that's eight hundred sets of drawing books and coloring crayons. Reuben reckons that'll produce two Dinka van Goghs, two Dinka Rembrandts and one Dinka Andy Warhol."
Reuben the legendary camp organizer, Ghita remembered. Congolese. Friend of Arnold's.
They were walking down a wide avenue of tulip trees, their fiery red trumpets brilliant against overhead cables and white-painted tukuls with thatched roofs. A lank Englishman like a prep-school master rode sedately past them on an old-fashioned policeman's pushbike. Seeing Judith he rang his bell and gave her a lovely wave.
"Showers and honey boxes across the road from you, first session tomorrow eight a.m. sharp, meet in the doorway to hut thirty-two," Judith announced, as she showed Ghita to her quarters. "Mosquito spray beside your bed, use the net if you're wise. Care to mosey down to the club around sunset for a beer before dinner?"
Ghita would.
"Well, look out for yourself. Some of the boys are pretty hungry when they come back from the field."
Ghita tried to sound casual. "Oh by the by, there's a woman called Sarah," she said. "She was some kind of a friend of Tessa's. I wondered whether she was around so that I could say hullo to her."
She unpacked her things and, armed with her sponge bag and towel, set out bravely across the avenue. Rain had fallen, damping the din from the airfield. The dangerous hills had turned black and olive. The air smelled of gasoline and spices. She showered, returned to her tukul and sat herself before her work notes at a rickety table where, sweating helplessly, she lost herself in the intricacies of Aid Self-Sufficiency.
* * *
Loki's clubhouse was a spreading tree with a long thatched roof under it, a drinks bar with a mural of jungle fauna and a video projector that threw fuzzy images of a long-dead soccer match onto a plastered wall while the sound system belted out African dance music. Shrieks of delighted recognition pierced the evening air as aid workers from distant places rediscovered each other in different languages, embraced, touched faces and walked arm in arm. This should be my spiritual home, she thought wistfully. These are my rainbow people. Their classlessness, their racelessness, their zeal, their youth are mine. Sign up for Loki and tune in to saintliness! Bum around in aeroplanes, enjoy a romantic self-image and the adrenalin of danger! Get your sex out of a tap and a nomadic life that keeps you clear of entanglements! No dreary office work and always a bit of grass to smoke along the way! Glory and boys when I come out of the field, money and more boys waiting for me on my R and R! Who needs more?
I do.
I need to understand why this mess was necessary in the first place. And why it's necessary now. I need to have the courage to say after Tessa at her most vituperative: "Loki sucks. It has no more right to exist than the Berlin Wall. It's a monument to the failure of diplomacy. What the hell's the point of running a Rolls-Royce ambulance service when our politicians do nothing to prevent the accidents?"
Night fell in a second. Yellow strip lights replaced the sun, the birds stopped chattering, then resumed their conversations at a more acceptable level. She was seated at a long table and Judith was sitting three down from her with her arm round an anthropologist from Stockholm, and Ghita was thinking that she hadn't felt like this since she was a new girl at convent school, except that at convent school you didn't drink beer or have half a dozen personable young men of all the world's nations at your table, and half a dozen pairs of male eyes assessing your sexual weight and availability. She was listening to tales of places she had never heard of, and exploits so hair-raising she was convinced she would never qualify to share them, and she was doing her best to appear knowledgeable and only distantly impressed. The spokesman of the moment was a surefire Yankee from New Jersey whose name was Hank the Hawk. According to Judith, he was a onetime boxer and loan shark who had embraced aid work as an alternative to a life of crime. He was holding forth about the warring factions of the Nile area: how the SPLE had temporarily kissed the asses of the SPLM; how the SSIM were beating the shit out of another set of letters, butchering their menfolk, stealing their women and cattle and generally making their contribution to the couple of million dead already notched up by Sudan's brainless civil wars. And Ghita was sipping her beer and doing her best to smile along with Hank the Hawk because his monologue seemed to be addressed exclusively at her as the newcomer and his next conquest. She was therefore grateful when a plump African woman of indeterminate age wearing shorts and sneakers and a London costermonger's peaked cap appeared out of the darkness, clapped her on the shoulder and yelled, "I'm Sudan Sarah, honey, so you got to be Ghita. Nobody told me you were so pretty. Come and have a cup of tea, dear." And without further ceremony marched her through a maze of offices to a tukul like a beach hut on stilts, with a single bed, a refrigerator and a bookcase filled with matching volumes of classical English literature from Chaucer to James Joyce.
And outside, a tiny veranda with two chairs for sitting under the stars and fighting off the bugs once the kettle boils.
* * *
"I hear they're going to arrest Arnold now," Sudan Sarah said comfortably when they had duly lamented Tessa's death. "Well, they should do that. If you've set your mind on hiding the truth, then the first thing you've got to do is give people a different truth to keep them quiet. Otherwise they'll start to wonder whether the real truth isn't out there hidden somewhere, and that will never do."
A schoolmistress, Ghita decided. Or a governess. Used to spreading out her thoughts and repeating them to inattentive children.
"And after the murder comes the cover-up," Sarah continued in the same benign cadences. "And we should never forget that a good cover-up is a lot harder to achieve than a bad murder. A crime, you can maybe always get away with a crime. But a cover-up is going to land you in jail every time." She was indicating the problem with her big hands. "You cover this bit up, then out pops another bit. So you cover that bit up. Then you turn round and that first bit's showing again. And you turn round again and there's a third bit, just sticking its toe out of the sand over there, sure as Cain ever killed Abel. So what should I be telling you, dear? I'm getting a feeling we're not talking about the things you wish to talk about."
Ghita began cunningly. Justin, she said, was trying to piece together a picture of Tessa's final days. He would like to be assured that her last visit to Loki had been happy and productive. In what way exactly had Tessa contributed to the gender awareness seminar, could Sarah say? Had Tessa delivered a paper perhaps, drawing on her legal knowledge or her experiences with women in Kenya? Was there a particular episode or happy moment that Sarah recalled and Justin would like to hear about?