handled it a little better, if I hadn't kept picking at it like a scab, it all would have been different. She wouldn't have been murdered. People tell you not to blame yourself, but what do you do when it actually was your fault? When you know for a fact that, if you had acted a little bit better, if you had been a little less petty and self-righteous, then a terrible thing would never have happened?
The monkey sanctuary was a wonderful place. A good thing, too, because the one-hour journey we were promised turned into an all-day marathon. Typical for Africa, and especially Nigeria, which at the time would have made anyone's shortlist of the ten worst countries in the world. Ruled by a brutal kleptocracy, unanimously voted the most corrupt place on earth, hot, dusty, polluted, ugly, overcrowded, a place where nothing worked, where nobody wanted to help anyone else, where even the food was bad. At that time, in Nigeria, one of the world's largest oil producers, you could only buy gasoline on the black market, because the country's entire domestic gasoline output was stolen on its way out of the refineries. It was potentially a rich country but it had been systematically looted for decades and was now rotten to the core.
The only point in its defense was that most of the roads were marvellous by African standards — other than the checkpoints every few miles where ragged men with guns requested a 'dash' before allowing vehicles to pass — but the road to Mount Afi was an exception, a muddy track that forded several thigh-deep rivers on its way up. This was a good thing; it was only because the road was nearly impassable that the Mount Afi rainforest had not yet been destroyed; but it made for a long and difficult day.
The truck punctured a tire and bogged down on the muddy approach to the second river. At first we weren't too concerned. During our three months of travel the truck we had lost a half-dozen tires and gotten stuck at least fifty times, and we had become experts at getting it on its way again. Dig the tires free, fix the one that was punctured, unhook the sand mats — imagine a pair of flat cheese graters about ten feet long, twice as wide as a truck tire, with holes two inches in diameter — thrust them under the tires to give them traction, and stand back as Steve or Hallam coaxed the truck forward along the sand mats to stability. By now our group formed a well-oiled excavating machine and we could usually get ourselves out of a quagmire within half an hour. But not this time.
It was fun at first. We had at least gotten stuck at a picturesque site. The river, maybe twenty feet wide and four deep, burbled through thick jungle rich with butterflies, flowers, and brightly coloured birds, where if you stopped and listened you could hear animals rustle through the distant bush. A little trail ran into the jungle and Claude found a pineapple bush just two minutes' walk away. It was rainy season but the sky was blue flecked with harmless little clouds. The best day we'd had in weeks.
While Lawrence and Morgan and I dug, Michelle slipped and acrobatically fell face-first into the mud while bringing us water, and everyone burst into laughter at her horrified mud-masked expression when she realized Nicole had videotaped the moment. When Rick and Michael and Robbie took over, Chong and Mischtel started an impromptu mud-wrestling match that grew to include a half-dozen of us. Emma and Carmel and Kristin went swimming in the river after their stint of digging. We were relaxed, joking, glad to be out of the thick cloud of smog that chokes every Nigerian city.
But the deeper we dug, the softer and stickier the mud got. We lowered the tire pressure and tried sand- matting out, but the wheels spun uselessly, serving only to drive the sand mats deeper. It took another ten minutes of digging to extricate them. Morgan and Lawrence and I took over from Chong and Steve and Hallam. Tempers began to fray. A mudfight had developed among the non-diggers, and when Michelle ran from Claude to hide behind Morgan, she got in his way and he snarled 'Will you just fuck off and die?'
'We're trying to fucking work here,' Lawrence added, 'in case you hadn't fucking noticed.'
Michelle fled. I wanted to say something too. My mood was growing increasingly foul. The people who weren't digging didn't realize how badly the truck was bogged down. My guess was that we would have to winch the truck across the river, which would take all day and leave us groaning with exhaustion, and then on the way back we would somehow have to cross this swamp again.
Michelle and Claude apologized. We paid them no notice and kept digging. I began to wonder if we were doing any good at all or just helping the truck sink into the mud. The mudfight continued, and Laura threw a big handful that hit me right in the face. A little got into my eye, which began to tear up painfully, and I would only worsen it by rubbing with my mud-soaked hands, so I dropped the shovel and staggered towards the river to wash my eye out. Laura rushed towards me, wearing an expression of abject guilt, apologizing.
'You want to look where you're fucking throwing?' I said angrily. The first harsh words I had ever sent her way. She reached for my eye but I shrugged her aside and ducked into the river. The water was thick with dirt and it took me some time before I could blink my eye clear of grit.
'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.'
