‘What did he say?’ Abass comes to lean between the seats; he smells of lemons and soap.
‘He told me to think of a big block of stone a thousand miles long, a thousand miles high, and a thousand miles wide.’
‘That’s a huge block!’
‘A huge block,’ concurs Adrian. ‘OK, now imagine a tiny bird, like a sparrow.’
‘What’s a sparrow?’
‘Well, any tiny bird. Like that one!’ Adrian points at a movement between trees. ‘Now imagine that bird lands on the rock once every thousand years.’
‘Every thousand years?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then imagine it wipes its beak once on one side, and once on the other side. How long do you think it would take for the whole rock to be worn away?’
Abass jumps up and down between the seats. ‘A very, very long time.’
‘Yes. Not quite infinity but very close to.’
‘Yes,’ agrees Abass. ‘Only the bird would die first.’
Kai and Adrian laugh.
The road takes a series of tight turns down through one small village and then another. Here the houses are tall, wooden with narrow windows and shingled roofs, different from the concrete houses of the city and the clay-brick homes in the villages on the road out to Ileana’s place.
‘The first settlements,’ says Kai. ‘There’s a church, too. It’s worth seeing. But we’ll have to come back another time. We’ve a long drive.’
The road dips down along the valley floor and rises again. Here the macadam has disappeared altogether, giving way to rough laterite and in some places huge moguls round which Kai steers the car, a thirty-year-old yellow Mercedes he calls Old Faithful. A white Land Cruiser races past them, kicking up clouds of red dust, briefly wiping out all visibility. At such a moment Adrian might have halted, but Kai drives on unperturbed. The side of the hill rises steeply on one side of them and falls away equally steeply on the other. Here and there, the smooth scars of landslides. On the far side water pours from high up the hillside on to a slope of sheer, dark rock.
‘Look!’ screams Abass, an inch from Adrian’s ear. ‘Waterfall!’
‘Call that a waterfall?’ says Kai. ‘Wait until you see where we’re going.’
‘How long will it take us to get there?’
‘About three hours.’
‘Three hours!?’ He flings himself back against the seat.
‘Don’t worry. It’s worth it. It’ll get faster once we’re on the main road. Do you want to get some cassava bread and fish at Waterloo?’
‘Yes please.’
A bridge, the width of the car. The railings have fallen away, leaving the sides unguarded. Opposite an oncoming vehicle hovers at the entrance to the bridge, waiting for them to make the crossing. Adrian holds his breath as they do so. They have now skirted the city entirely. It lies to the south of them, between the tail of the car and the Atlantic Ocean. Due north is Guinea, three hundred kilometres as the crow flies. Beyond Guinea — Mali, Mauritania, then sand, the Sahara. They pass a settlement of single-storey houses, open scrub, a scattering of rusted equipment and arrive at the junction for the main road. Here the pace shifts gears suddenly. Vehicles sweep past, swerving, overtaking, sometimes stopping abruptly to allow a passenger to descend or pick up another. Kai is silent, giving his concentration to the road.
Around the bend of the hill the road narrows suddenly, encroached upon by a marketplace. Kai pulls over and lowers the window. ‘Ssssss!’ He raises a hand and clicks his fingers. A woman approaches and lowers a tray from her head. She counts out six fish, golden and blackened, a dozen rounds of flat bread, separates the fish and bread into portions and ladles a deep-red sauce over each. Kai passes a portion to Adrian, to Abass another. Adrian eats with his fingers. The fish is smoky and dry, the cassava bread plain and unsalted — reminding him of unleavened bread. By contrast the sauce is rich, greasy and savoury. Kai starts the car and drives away, eating from his lap with one hand and steering with the other. The sauce stains the tips of Adrian’s fingers saffron.
Up through the hills, trees closing in on either side of the road. The traffic is gone, the road is silent. The landscape flattens out. Rice fields, vegetable plots and tree plantations are gradually replaced by an unvarying wall of elephant grass. There is the occasional broken-down lorry but little else. The interval between settlements widens, children seemingly frozen in a single moment in time watch the passage of the vehicle. Once they pass what looks like a disused quarry. Abass lowers the window and sticks his head out, opens and closes his mouth to make popping sounds and occasionally shouts his name into the wind. Kai presses a cassette into the tape player, the speakers hiss, a drum beat and then another.
Well they tell me of a pie up in the sky,
Waiting for me when I die.
But between the day you’re born and when you die,
They never seem to even hear your cry.
Abass draws his head back inside the car, stands up between the seats, steadying himself between the headrests, and sings at the top of his voice, The harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all!
Kai taps the steering wheel. Adrian remembers Kai playing the same tape in the evenings in the apartment during his illness. Another song follows. Abass seems to know the words to each one. Kai leans across and flips open the glove compartment. ‘Choose something.’
Adrian rummages through the space: Biros, latex gloves, matchsticks, cassettes. Next to him Kai takes a corner, swerves suddenly and comes to a halt. Out of the rear window Adrian sees a minibus on its roof in the ditch. A knot of people are gathered in the road. In front of them, a row of cloth-covered shapes.
Kai has the door open. ‘Hold on here a moment.’ He doesn’t pause for an answer but steps out of the car, slamming the door behind him.
‘Wait for me!’ Abass scrabbles at the door handle. ‘I’m coming, too.’ But Kai is already twenty yards away.
‘You know, I think we should wait here,’ says Adrian. ‘Like we were asked to.’
Abass’s head snaps round, he is still tugging at the door. ‘Why?’
‘Well, I think they might need a doctor. They don’t need us, either of us. You stay with me.’
Abass peruses Adrian’s face for a moment, considering his response. Adrian smiles. Abass relaxes and lets go of the door. ‘OK, then,’ he says. Behind the boy’s head Adrian can see Kai pause and squat at each of the covered shapes. There follows a brief conversation with the people by the roadside, Kai walks back to the car and swings himself into his seat, turning down the volume of the music before they drive away.
‘What happened to the poda poda? Did it crash?’ asks Abass.
‘Yes,’ says Kai.
‘What happened to the people?’
‘Some of them are dead. The ones who were injured have been taken away. The accident was a little while ago. They’re waiting for someone to collect the bodies.’
‘I want to see the dead people!’ shouts Abass.
‘Well, they didn’t want to see you,’ replies Kai equably.
Abass squirms around on the back seat and stares at the wreck out of the back window as it recedes into the distance. They drive in silence for a while. After a few minutes Kai turns the music up. He has moved on. It is their day out. Abass, too, is soon humming along and pointing out of the window. Adrian tries to erase from his mind the image of the survivors standing waiting, the bulky lozenges beside them, like an orchestra of double-bass players.