In addition, the humidity made everything sticky and endangered the integrity of many of the medical supplies, a large number of which had already been contaminated with mould and mildew. And the mosquitoes – she had never previously grasped, coming from her bubble of first-world convenience and twenty-first century civilisation in Sacramento, how malaria could possibly be as massive an issue in Africa as aid organisations made it out to be, but now that she was here she understood it only too well. The little bastards were enormous, often suicidally daring in their ravenous hunger for blood, and were absolutely everywhere. The mosquito net drives she had funded in previous years, without really understanding why, now made complete sense to her.
Margaret did not fear the disease herself, for she was on a course of anti-malarial medication, but the myriad bites from the swathes of stinging insects itched and hurt no less for that. She scratched at one of the many raised bumps on her plump, heavily freckled forearms and cursed under her breath. While the creatures whined their sleep-destroying symphony by the thousands in these hot jungle nights, during the day they seemed to adopt an entirely different strategy and instead attacked like soundless, invisible assassins. She counted seventeen fresh bites on her left arm, yet she could not see a single mosquito in the tent.
She packed up her medical kit, as meticulously as she always did, and stepped out into the dusk. The sun was sinking behind the distant mountains, and the dark was draping itself over the jungle with an almost ravenous keenness. Blue-helmeted UN Peacekeeper soldiers patrolled the edges of the village, where the wild and threatening mass of trees and vines stood their own sentry at the man-hewn lines that divided civilisation from its nemesis: primeval oblivion and the murkiness of a prehistoric past.
Two UN Peacekeepers stood guard outside Margaret’s tent; indeed, the main reason the troops were in this village at all was to protect the expensive medical supplies she carried with her; these items would prove an invaluable prize to the M23 anti-government militia soldiers who were camped out in depths of the jungle, and who were, according to the most recent reports, preparing to launch more attacks on the government forces and villages in this area. The threat of the rebel militias was a simmering constant, a hovering dragonfly whose metallic sheen gleamed in the copper casings of bullets and the too-white smiles of villagers and soldiers alike.
Thankfully, the lecherous Frenchman was not one of the two troops guarding her supplies. Instead, the guards outside the door were a pair of Ghanaian UN soldiers who had been with Margaret since she had landed in the DRC three months ago. As she scanned the village through crinkled eyelids, each guard glanced at her and each gave her a polite nod, but neither of them said anything. That was how Margaret preferred interactions with these soldiers to be; she had no love for military personnel, and since her teenage years she had participated in a number of anti-war demonstrations, although the most recent had been over America’s invasion of Iraq well over a decade prior.
Fright-hushed women and children hurried along the path that connected the village to the muddy stream inside the jungle, balancing yellow buckets and large clear plastic jugs on their heads, these grubby receptacles filled with water for the night. Older men sat outside their huts smoking hand-rolled cigarettes filled with cheap, strong tobacco, and a group of younger men returned from a nearby village, a few hours’ walk down the dirt track, carrying sacks of yams they had received in exchange for a few crops of bananas.
Margaret peered up the road, and through the dusty twilight saw Sergeant Bouchard chatting up a teenage villager. The wiry Frenchman was leaning against the mud wall of a hut in a typically cocky pose, grinning with his Lothario’s smile. The girl was tall and thin and looked no older than fifteen or sixteen, and she seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the Frenchman’s hand, which was resting on the curve of her hip. Firm, pert breasts, unconstrained by a brassiere, pressed through the flimsy fabric of her tee-shirt, and Margaret noticed one of Bouchard’s hands creeping up the girl’s torso toward them. The sight of this blatant depredation made her nauseous, and she desperately wanted to shout something … but she lacked the will to make even that small effort.
She looked away, feeling a profound sense of disgust at both herself and at the Frenchman, and then plopped her herself down in the camping chair outside her tent. For once it had not rained in the afternoon, and the sky above was clear and deep, the intense indigo punctured here and there by the bullet-hole lights of emerging stars as the dying day faded into night. All around the village the jungle was coming alive with the sounds of nocturnal creatures; birds, beasts and insects all contributed their idiosyncratic notes to the thrilling cacophony of life.
Margaret sighed as she leaned over and turned on her gas cooker to boil some water for a cup of coffee, after which she pulled out her phone and switched it on. There was no reception of any sort out here in the jungle, but she had not turned the device on to make a call or connect to the internet. No, she was doing what she usually did at this time of day: she brought up the photo album “Ting”. Ting Chung, a Taiwanese-born, Arizona-raised professor of Women’s Studies, was Margaret’s lover
