'I don't think we'll make it. But even if we could…I'd love to cross the Congo, but not on this truck.'
After a pause she said 'Are you talking about leaving alone?'
'What?' I asked, shocked. 'No! Definitely not. Together. I want us both to leave. We can fly to Zimbabwe and visit my aunt and uncle. Or to Kenya if you'd rather go there.'
'I'm not going.'
I hadn't expected so flat a rejection.
After a moment I asked 'As simple as that?'
She looked at me defiantly. 'These are our people. You know that. And I'm not leaving them. If you want to go, you can go on your own. But I'm staying. And if you want to stay with me, you're staying too.'
'That's…that's…this is…' I spluttered.
'What?'
I didn't know what I was trying to say, so I just looked at her.
'Is it the lifestyle you hate?' she asked. 'Or the people? I know you're not a people person. But I thought you liked everyone.'
'I do,' I said. 'I know. I mean, you're right, I agree, these are our people. I just can't handle truck life any more.'
'You're going to have to.'
I finally worked out what I wanted to say. 'I thought our being together was more important than staying with the people around us.'
'They're just as important,' she said, very seriously, looking me straight in the eyes. 'I'm not saying you're unimportant. You're not. That should be obvious. You're the world to me, Paul. You know that. But these are our people. They matter just as much. To both of us. I just wish you could see that. But until you can I'm not going to let you make this mistake.'
I wish I had listened to her, really listened to her, to what she was trying to say. But I was angry, and I was upset, and I was eager to wallow in self-pity, and what I heard instead was: they're more important to me than you are; and I know you won't leave me; and I'm going to use that to get my way and make you stay.
'Fuck this,' I said. 'I'm going for a walk.'
I stalked out of the tent before she could stop me.
I was so upset, replaying our conversation over and over again in my mind, layering the worst connotations imaginable on everything Laura had said, that I walked for a good half-hour before looking up and realizing that I was completely lost. For awhile I had walked through a little community of farming huts that adjoined the sanctuary, neatly kept wooden huts alongside a stream and surrounded by fields of vegetables, fields where the locals had wisely retained a few big trees in order to protect themselves from the crippling midday sun. From there I had taken a wide dirt path into the forest. But the path had shrunk and forked and subdivided, and I wasn't sure where I stood could even be called part of a trail at all. I was, however, sure that I could not retrace my tracks.
'Shit,' I muttered. I looked around. At least I could see. This was not like the dense mangrove jungles of the south; this was rainforest, where the trees rose a hundred feet into the sky before their branches jutted out, their canopy swallowing so much light that the underbrush was relatively thin. I could see a fair distance in most directions. But it all looked the same. Waist-high bushes, young trees, fallen branches, enormous vines coiled like snakes around mossy fallen tree trunks, all carpeted by golden petals of some flower that must grow high in the canopy.
'Shit,' I said again. Lost in African rainforest. A glorious and wonderful place to be lost, but still embarrassingly stupid and potentially dangerous. The vines reminded me uncomfortably of the pythons that lived in the jungle. And there were leopards. I heard something rustle in the distance and twitched nervously before getting hold of myself. Carnivores were extremely rare and not likely to attack something as big as me. The only real danger was not being found. If I stayed where I was they would come and find me. Somehow. The people at the sanctuary would send out locals who would work their local magic and track me down.
I shook my head. Maybe Laura was right for an entirely different reason. Maybe I shouldn't leave the truck because on my own I was too stupid to live.
I decided to look around to see if I could find a more obvious trail. I didn't want to be like Robbie in the desert, walking when he should have stayed put, but ten minutes of casting around for landmarks couldn't hurt. I had a vague idea that I had been going east and downhill. The sun was too high for me to judge directions, so I just went uphill.
After five minutes of walking I paused to silently appreciate the rainforest's majesty and perceived, just barely, at the edge of my hearing, the welcome sound of burbling water. After a couple of false starts I worked out where it was coming from and found the stream that was its source. Some animal had been drinking at the stream but fled before I could see what it was. I wished I had, but it didn't matter. The important thing was I was no longer lost. Triumphant, feeling very intrepid indeed, I followed the water upstream until I found the village near the sanctuary.
I wasn't really relieved, because I had never really been nervous. The rainforest was too beautiful for me to be frightened. I was glad that I had been lost. How many chances would I ever get to know what it is like to be alone in the African rainforest? If I had been with anyone else I would have talked to them, would not have had the chance to understand how pure, how peaceful it was. I wished Laura had come. We could have sat quietly together and appreciated it. That would have been better than being alone. But anyone else would have spoiled it.
Which, in a nutshell, was my problem with the truck.
When I got back, our group was just saddling up for an expedition to visit the chimpanzees. It was an interesting place, I suppose. Laura and I maintained a cold silence. during the expedition. For once I wasn't annoyed by the presence of the usual crowd. It made it easy to keep my distance from her.
When we got back to the tent we shared she looked at me expectantly. I knew what she was waiting for. An apology and an admission that she was right.
'I'm tired,' I lied, and closed my eyes.
We would have been fine. Things were tense and distant between us for the next week, but I think we were just a day or two from an emotional outpouring of apology and understanding and warmth. The fact it was our first fight made it a little more difficult to kiss and make up, that was all, because we didn't yet quite know how.
The backbreaking toil of the Ekok-Mamfe road just inside Cameroon, where we worked eight hours a day for three days to travel twenty-five miles, didn't help anyone's mood and certainly didn't make me want to stay with the truck a moment longer than necessary. It was the worst road in the world, featuring muddy potholes bigger than our truck and numerous detours that gave up on the road and went through raw jungle instead, but each day little Toyotas and Peugeots passed us with relative ease. When they got stuck, the eight or ten passengers jammed into each car had enough strength to simply get out and push their vehicle out of the mud. We had to dig and winch every time. It didn't help that both Steve and Morgan, our two strongest workers, had come down with malaria. Only Hallam and Nicole maintained anything like a good mood, and I suspected it was forced for the sake of the rest of us.
Laura and I maintained a cordial but cold detente throughout the Ekok-Mamfe ordeal. Then she twisted her ankle and couldn't climb Mount Cameroon. She gave me the blessing to go without her. I took it. The conversation was polite, but not warm.
The night I came back we shared a quick kiss and told each other our stories, but that was all. A slow thaw had already begun. I knew that she was just waiting for me to apologize to her and agree to stay with the truck as far as it went. I even knew by then that I would do just that. But, as stupid and petty and childish and sulky and self-centered as it was, I felt like I had been unfairly manipulated, and so I would hold out a little longer. Just a few more days.
The next day the truck went to Limbe, Cameroon, where we camped on the black volcanic sand of Mile Six Beach. Morgan, by now recovered from malaria, hitched down the road along with Lawrence, Claude and Michelle, to stay in hotels in town. But later, after dark, he came back. He came back and found Laura alone on the beach. Alone because I wasn't with her. Alone because I was still pettily angry enough to decline her offer to come swimming. Because of that, because of me, Morgan found Laura alone, and killed her.
