I didn’t know where to start. Faced with the fatuously stupid, you have to backtrack into territory so facile and self-evident that for a while you can’t get your bearings.
“But it’ll take you two days to get these loaded and to Loki, and you don’t even know whether the airstrip will still be open when you get there.”
He started to turn away like his clipboard was telling him more than me. I followed.
“You don’t even know if you have planes, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s the quickest way before the rain comes – I’m not getting seven forty-tonners stuck on the road for the SPLA to pick off.”
“Jesus, Jimmy, you’ve got seven trucks and a dry road – just get them into Sudan.”
“Listen, Missy, I don’t know what kind of authority you think you have here. But I say it’s zip. Understood? You don’t work for me and I don’t think you know how this works.” He smiled, like he was patiently explaining to a child. “So it’s my way, not your highway.”
I felt that hot phosphorous rage, but I noted I was under control, which made me feel confident. I was in the grip of a terrifying calmness. I never wore a dog collar in the field, far less held a service. It was a hangover from the WorldMission days; the only sign was what we did, not what we said. But here on the baked earth of northern Uganda, I knew I was talking the Church’s book, rather than The Fed’s best interests.
“You don’t need to know who or what I am, or who I speak for,” I said. “Food in Sudan, anywhere in Sudan, is better than food warehoused at Loki for the hunger season.”
He returned to his clipboard. “It’s not going to happen.”
I tried reason. “Listen, I don’t want an argument. Surely all that matters here is that people get fed? So let’s take lorries into Sudan.”
“No.”
This was a power play. Nothing to do with facts.
But the burning inside wasn’t going to make me angry. Rather the opposite – it was feeding me. So I went for the challenge to his manhood.
“You’re bottling it, you friggin’ useless little cock.”
The pen froze over the clipboard. He didn’t look up straight away but took four paces towards me, so his face was very close. It was small and bristly.
“Listen, you dried-up little bitch, I don’t know or care where you come from, but you get right back there or I’m going to screw you good – you’ll walk bow-legged for a month.”
He held the stare, letting the silence and my lack of reaction establish his authority. I just chuckled ironically and held up a cocked little finger. He walked past me, catching my shoulder. I felt a coolness over my skin, tingling and insulating me from the heat. I looked down at my hands and stretched my fingers. They were like waking hands, not shaking, steady and purposeful.
It took the night and most of the morning to load the big lorries and it was early afternoon before the convoy shipped out. The drivers weren’t contracted for Lokichogio. Jimmy had five drivers, including himself, so in a further grotesque absurdity, he left two loaded trucks, with the promise that they would return for them, or find a further two drivers by radio along the route. I hissed to Adrian not to say that he was licensed and insured. We weren’t going to be part of this dilettante exercise. But in the event Jimmy didn’t ask. We were contaminated and even the prospect of shifting more of the supplies than he would otherwise be able to into a temporarily open airstrip wasn’t going to encourage a rapprochement with The Fed’s reps.
In an alpha-male roar, the five trucks swung out of the compound, heading east, a driver and one crew riding shotgun in each cab. If anything, it was hotter now. I looked south-east; no cloud bank. It could be a week before the rains came again. The whole encampment was strangely vacated, like a school after speech day. The only people left were the stevedores, the contracted loaders in their whitened scarves and sawn-off khakis. Somewhere there would be the cooks and ancillaries in their branded T-shirts and the compound managers and some armed security. I found Adrian in the shade of a baobab tree, swigging from a bottle of water and flicking the pages of a truck manual.
“Adrian,” I said. “Ade.”
He looked up.
“Adrian, we’ve got to do something.” I couldn’t think how to convey the awful dystopia that I saw around us. It was like I was the only one who could see it. “We’ve got a chance here to do something. It mightn’t ever come again. I don’t want to look back and think we didn’t take it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Adrian, we’ve got two fully loaded and fuelled trucks and an empty camp.” He turned his head, wanting more. “Adrian, please, we’ll never have a chance like this again.”
“Who for?” he said and his tone was blank.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Adrian, this isn’t about my ego, or yours. We’re here to do stuff, not just move stuff about. What did you say you’d joined up for?”
I was invoking the back garden in Kentish Town and I could see he knew it.
“Don’t you know there’s a frigging war on?”
We fell silent. He looked off west, towards the falling sun.
“So it’s Bonnie and Clyde,” he said.
I sighed and dropped my shoulders. “If you like. Come on, Adrian. This will never come again.”
There was a long pause. I had nothing else to say. Then the surprise.
“How do we get the keys?” he said, standing up.
So Adrian went in the office hut while I leaned on the door jamb trying to look nonchalant. A somnolent Ugandan staffer kept vehicle keys on a hook board. Adrian said he had to move the trucks down to the sealed area. They were contractors’ trucks, I heard
