‘I can’t. Well, I can but I’d hate to risk it. I’m not very skilful and one mistake would blow the lot.’
‘Dangerous, then. If anyone even dreams we’ve got those photographs, the chances are we’ll simply disappear.’
‘Oh, come on …’
‘You got any contacts in the government?’
‘Well, no…’
‘Anyone powerful? Influential?’
‘No.’
‘Then who’s to stop it? Those photographs prove that this country is on the verge of civil war. That it can’t govern itself properly. Have you any idea what getting them out into the Western news media is going to do to people in this country? How many people it’s going to inconvenience, maybe destroy? Powerful people. Ruthless people.’
‘Oh, come on …’ She wasn’t so sure now. What had been done in the village was all too real. What had been done to Harry. She would not have believed such things could ever happen in her ordered world. Until yesterday. Until last night. Robert was right. She had to widen her horizons here over what was or was not likely to happen.
‘So if the wrong people find out about this we will probably never be seen again.’
‘We’ll disappear,’ he repeated. ‘And most likely not too slowly or comfortably.’
‘You mean the police or the army would arrest us, torture us and kill us.’
‘Probably. Or the Lions. Lots of them around here. Fifth columnists from Congo Libre. Probably rape us too. You, certainly.’ His voice was flat, matter-of-fact. Utterly believable.
They entered a suburb. Corrugated iron twisted itself into huts. Clapboard held garish paint, flaking. Beaten-mud footpaths. The first fat date palms, stripped. Two children and a dog ran into the road screaming. Robert braked and a battered Mercedes overtook him on the wrong side, narrowly missing the dog. In the quiet after the Merc’s blaring horn, a transistor radio played loudly enough to drown out the Rover’s engine and Robert’s colourful language. He swerved to avoid a broken beer bottle in the road.
‘It’s make up your mind time,’ he said. ‘We’re in civilisation now.’
The railway station was right in the centre of town. Its white marble portico stood between a tall building whose frontage was decorated with Arabic writing in gold and a Mercedes-Benz car dealership which presented the latest models, all white, on velvet behind thick dark glass, as though they were pearls. They parked and Robert had to go through the ridiculous process of finding enough change for the parking meter.
As they got down onto the pavement, they were given a pointedly wide berth by half a dozen young Arabic men in Italian suits hurrying towards the skyscraper. ‘But there’s so much money here!’ whispered Ann, feeling suddenly badly out of place not because she was white but because she was so untidy.
‘There always is, for the right people. That’s part of the attraction.’ He looked around, hawk-eyed. ‘Take everything you can carry. Keep the gun hidden in your camera case. I’ll take the Remington and we’ll pretend we’ve been doing a spot of hunting if anyone asks.’
He jerked the gun out of the back as though it was a suitcase. She did the same with her camera bag. Robert put the rifle casually over his shoulder and strode up the white marble steps with all the thoughtless swagger of Ernest Hemingway coming back from Kilimanjaro. She followed just behind him, trying to emulate his ease without seeming to do so. She was very scared indeed.
If they turned any heads or raised any eyebrows, the fact was not obvious.
The great cool marble hall of the station was packed with people and the noise they were making echoed overpoweringly in the white vaulted caverns above. In front, beyond the throngs, waited the maw of the departure gate. To the left, at the head of a shuffling, raucous snake of women, lay the ticket offices. On the right had once stood a parade of neat white shops. One or two still retained some kind of hoarding or counter but most of them had been ripped open and now contained market stalls laden with local produce which few here could afford, which no one in the shanties beyond the suburbs would ever see. Mangoes, pawpaws, bananas and oranges. Green plantains, dates and coconuts. A wealth of jewel brightness. And beside the fruit stalls were the travelling oven men with their half-barrels made of steel and filled with glowing charcoal. Roasted plantain, fresh cooked bread, various types of meat, their mingled fragrance filled the air. Two young women, scarcely more than children, attended a fat-uddered goat, selling fresh milk. Behind the goat, incongruously, stood a crate of Coca-Cola. Ann’s mouth flooded with saliva, her stomach cramped fiercely enough to make her stagger.
Before she could pull herself together and look for Robert, she was surrounded. A mob of little boys varying in age from five to fifteen descended on her with ruthless single-mindedness. Their cries — offers, suggestions, imprecations, demands — were overpowering. They waved pieces of cloth at her, leatherwork, shoes, pots, jewellery, craftwork made of wood, skin and horn. In a range of broken languages and dialects, they begged, cajoled and offered — their fathers, their brothers, themselves.
And she had nothing at all to give them.
She looked around desperately as their demands became more insistent, threatening. She saw a sea of black faces all frowning with terrible single-minded desperation. Hands pulled at her clothing, demandingly, pleadingly, intimately. She felt the camera bag jerk once, twice. Then, like a fisherman feeling a fish on the line, she felt the hands begin to pull the bag away from her with irresistible purpose. She swung round and tore it free. In the distance she saw Robert, unconcerned, unaware, shouldering his way with lordly disdain towards the ticket office. Hating to be reduced to this, she made a break for his protection.
In fact it was the women waiting in the queues who saved her, for in order to get to Robert she had to go among them and when the mob of boys followed, with the determination of a pack of wolves chasing a wounded deer, it was the women they disturbed. The hubbub on the air intensified briefly. Shrill N’Kuru was augmented by the sound of slapping and screaming, and a good deal of laughter, and she was alone, struggling past the patient lines, half blinded with tears, tripping over bundles of possessions, clothing, chickens, babies.
‘The next train to Mawanga will depart within the hour,’ the clerk in the ticket office was explaining to Robert in perfect English. The slightness of his stature and the lignite gleam of his skin proclaimed him to be of Kyoga extraction. A perfect civil servant. ‘No, there is no first class. Nor any other class, sir. Those days, alas, are gone. You may purchase either a seat or simple passage. Purchase of a seat permits you to ride inside the carriage. We do not guarantee you will actually be able to sit down, however.’
Robert looked at him for an instant. ‘Have you ever worked for British Rail?’ he asked.
‘No sir!’ The clerk seemed much offended. ‘Now, what will you require? I should inform you that the queues are for passage only tickets.’
Robert looked back. There were perhaps a thousand women waiting — or so it seemed. ‘Two seats,’ he said at once.
‘Two seats.’ The clerk began to leaf through a box of tiny cardboard rectangles. ‘Will that be single or return?’
‘Single.’
The clerk stamped the tickets carefully and handed them over. Robert paid. The clerk counted the money twice and handed over the change. ‘Persons in possession of seat tickets may board at their convenience,’ he informed them. ‘The train is at platform number one.’ He smiled and rose, crossed to a table a metre or two behind him and poured himself a cup of tea. Ann began to understand why the queues were so long.