He was good, I’ll give him that.
Adrian swung the first and slightly less loaded of the big lorries down towards the fences, dust and exhaust billowing from its sides, while I ambled to the far side of the other truck. I was a schoolgirl dodging a lesson.
I heard the engine die in the distance and there was an extended pause, like the whole camp was waiting for something to happen. I thought he might have changed his mind, gone back to our hut or bumped into someone with one of those clipboards, a compound manager maybe. But he appeared, admirably casually, striding up the centre of the camp track, examining the other set of keys as if there was some mundane issue with the tag. Perhaps there was. Maybe Adrian really was wondering whether the registering systems for transport could be improved. I pulled myself up the steps on the crew side as I heard the central-locking clunk on Ade’s door and we sat into the high seats simultaneously.
For the first time, I thought Adrian and I were making common cause and it felt good.
The engine fired and, without a word, he swung the tractor unit around, air-brakes hissing, and followed the line of his first short trip. Then, at the top of the encampment, as if it was natural, as if a forty-tonne truck can saunter and whistle carelessly, he edged us left, instead of straight down to the sealed compound and joined the main thoroughfare through the scrub, north-west, towards Sudan.
“Seatbelts,” I said and we laughed, nervously, like we were taking the piss.
I’d say the first thirty kilometres of that ride were the happiest time I can remember. The sheer thrill of straddling this monster that obeyed our illicit will, the self-righteous kick of breaching the fuss-body bureaucracy of the aid machine, the electrifying charge of danger, rolling at a steady 60 kph on a dust track, achingly slowly from the captivity of the distribution station and teasingly slow towards an unknown destination and known dangers.
I opened the drop-down compartment on the dash and took out the map and compass, which all trucks carry as part of their administrative payload, ticked off on those clipboards as a pilot would check his plane.
Neither of us spoke much – it was so damn obvious what we were doing. We were constantly leaning forward and back to check the wing mirrors, our silent, mutual assents over the drum of the engine that pursuing motorbikes or jeeps could yet frustrate our joint venture. It was like that until we put about a hundred kilometres and several forks in the road between us and the rightful owners of our pirate ship.
As for that rightful ownership – how virtue added to the headiness of our banditry! And there was sweet irony. This machine, powered by diesel refined in the rich Western nations, was powering our nourishing cargo to those to whom it rightly belonged, by virtue of their crying need, if need can be a virtue.
We’re coming, I thought sentimentally, hold hard.
We drove north-west, following the valley of the White Nile, crossing the border north of Moyo, towards Kajo-Keji. In those days, you’d be unlucky to be stopped and searched. Relief lorries were obvious, there was nothing much to smuggle, and refugee traffic was all one-way, north to south. They probably thought we were stragglers from a convoy heading to Juba. Once in Sudan, we quickened our pace as Adrian grew accustomed to the varied bass ratios of the gearbox. I pulled the scarf and bush hat from my head and ran fingers through my matted hair.
Astonishingly, now I look back on it, given the tension of my heightened consciousness, I began to doze, head lolling like a home-brew drunk to the random jazz rhythms of the rutted road.
We’d decided to head up towards Rumbek, in the withering heart of Bahr el Ghazal, where the convoys now bound for Lokichogio would originally have headed, to identify local distribution stations where we could. At dusk, the base of my spine dulled from constantly counter-balancing the swaying cab, we pulled over in the scrub, ate some of the three-day emergency rations in tinned packets from under the seats, and as the safety of the night shrouded our great beast, we slept in our bags head-to-toe in the back of the cab.
We woke to a quiet that I don’t think I’d ever known before, a holy stillness that held within it secrets of the new day. Rolling from the cab, I stood facing east, my breath clouding in the remnants of the night air, watching a fading vermillion of dawn behind the hazy hills and across a rolling morning mist.
If I’ve ever felt blessed, just wholly at the centre of everything, an alpha and omega, it was then, as the dawn both required my attention and honoured me with its presence. I was certain in those moments that what we were doing was sacramental, as I stood there in the moment, in the lee of the sleeping lorry, witness in a barren landscape to the cornucopia that it carried, God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people.
After a short while of this communion, perhaps less than ten minutes, the driver’s door opened and I heard Adrian pee against the great wheel. He emerged stiffly around the vertical wall of the engine cowling, blinking blindly into the light and zipping himself up.
“Good morning,” he said, without looking at me.
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
It’s difficult, but I want to explain that this was a moment, more intense and real with someone than anything I’d had before.
And I want to be honest. It was deeply affecting
