The Book of the Heathen (3 page)

We were distracted from our thoughts by calls from the card-players to return to them.

The men had finished their first pail of drink, and another sat at their centre. They dipped their cups into this – some scooped out the liquor with their hands – and with their increasing drunkenness, so their gambling became ever more theatrical and reckless.

We sat with them but declined their entreaties to rejoin the game. A few notes and coins lay on the ground beside the empty pail, but the substance of the gambling now lay more in the noisy expectation and soon-forgotten promises which littered the place, and which were added to with the turn of each torn and dirty card.

2

A further three days passed before I crossed the river to visit Frere. The water at the Station was too high and the boatmen who plied the crossing awaited their customers a mile upriver, negotiating the rapids and exposed bars while being carried downriver as fast as they were able to pole and row across the flow. Crossing in this way, one invariably arrived on the far shore soaked from head to foot, and steaming in the heat. One of the first lessons I was taught by Cornelius was to learn to judge the river and then to walk as far upstream as I deemed necessary. There would always be someone waiting, he told me, and invariably there was.

I left my room before dawn, wanting to be beyond our outer perimeter before the first light of the day fell in on us. I told no-one of my intended visit, knowing only that by then everyone expected it of me. Little further news of Frere had reached us during those three days. I followed a trail through the tall grass. The smoke of early scattered fires hung low around me, in places so perfectly level and unmoving that it might have been so many ponds.

*   *   *

I studied the river as I went, reassuring myself that I understood the vague calculations I was making. In truth, whether the water was high or low, fast or barely moving, I frequently walked to the same low promontory where the same old boatman was waiting.

I passed several others asleep in their vessels. Some had their wives and children alongside them, all sleeping in the river mud and against the banks, all appearing more animal than human in that half-light.

I arrived at the promontory and saw the man and boat beneath me. The man was awake and waiting, facing the river. Beside him squatted a child whom I recognized as the deformed and stunted boy who frequently inhabited the compound, and who was employed by some of us to undertake those menial tasks upon which we would not waste our own time. He excavated and then later emptied our cess pools; he scraped our specimen hides; he cleaned dirty rubber and tended its choking fires; he sang and danced for us; he gathered up our spent cartridges and sold them as charms.

The boatman and the boy were often together, but I was not aware of any family connection between them, and it was only as I saw them there that morning, outlined against the sheen of the river, that I realized I knew neither of their names.

At my approach, the man identified me and then stood aside from the path to his boat. The boy went immediately to the vessel and pushed it into the water. Seeing the orchestrated simplicity of their actions, it was not difficult to believe that they had been waiting for me.

I offered my greeting to the man. He was formal in his response, nodding but saying nothing. And then he raised the short stick he held and pointed to one side of me. The deformed boy, who was mostly devoid of language, made a blowing sound and rubbed his arms vigorously, as though warming his muscles for the task ahead. We all called him a boy, though I suspect his size and shape belied his true age and he was much older – perhaps eighteen or nineteen, say – than any of us imagined or wanted to imagine. I was distracted by this sudden noise, but then drawn back to the boatman by the jabbing motion he made with his stick.

I looked to where he pointed. Another man sat further along the bank, again distinguishable only in outline in the half-light, and by the glow of the cigarette he smoked. As I looked, he rose and came towards us. He called out to me by name. Bone. I felt myself tense at the voice. It was clear that he too had been waiting for me, and I cursed my predictability. The boatman, having served his warning, pushed his stick into the mud at his feet and picked up his long oar instead.

‘What kept you? Been here two hours,' Bone said. ‘Fletcher said you'd wait for a quiet day and make an early start. Five, he reckoned. Five. Been here since four. Just me, him and the idiot.' He clapped his hands. I imagined the boatman had watched him come and had then stood and watched him in silence until my own arrival.

‘Shall we go?' he said.

‘Is it any business of yours?' I said to him.

‘What?' He seemed genuinely surprised by my rebuke. But I knew even as I spoke that, of all people, he, Bone, would have some small official,
judicial
part to play in the proceedings, and that his involvement could not now be avoided. I conceded all this, and what it might mean for Frere, as he continued towards me, his expression changing from one of amusement to surprise and then to anger as he came.

‘What business is it of mine?' he said. ‘What business is it of mine?' It was clear to me that this prodding remark masked his own uncertain grasp of the situation.

‘My apologies,' I said. ‘Of course I need your advice on the matter.' It was my intention to have Frere transferred from the Belgian gaol to our own, and it occurred to me only then that Bone alone – however unwitting of it he might have been – possessed the paper authority to effect such a move.

‘I would have reported back to you later,' I said to him. He now stood directly in front of me. ‘I merely wanted to make this first visit to ascertain what condition Frere might be in.'

‘What difference will that make?'

‘I don't know. I simply wanted to find out before any
official
proceedings were started.' Merely and simply: soft gloves of words.

‘What proceedings? What are you talking about?'

‘I'd hoped you could tell me. I assumed you would be the man responsible.'

‘Me?' He reassessed the situation as quickly as he was able to, and it amused me to see his anger turn back to surprise, and then, as the thing became clearer to him, to something approaching pride.

‘You,' I said, driving home this sudden idea of responsibility.

It was by then much lighter, but still dark along the line of the river. A larger vessel passed us silently at the centre of the channel, distinguishable only by the lights it carried and by the dull clanking of its bell. The old boatman turned to watch its progress. I imagined him to be following it so that he might better assess our own course, but even as the vessel drew level with us, and the noise of its engine and the smell of its soot reached us, he turned away from it and back to where Bone and I stood.

‘What did Fletcher say?' I said to him.

‘Nothing. Said you'd go and see the murderer and get him brought back to us.'

‘Did he think I'd succeed?'

He nodded reluctantly.

‘Even though everyone else wants him to rot – to die, preferably – where he is?'

He nodded again.

‘And so they dismiss completely your own involvement in the proceedings. Did none of them ask
your
advice on the proper course of action now to be undertaken?'

He considered this provocation. With Bone, you were either his friend or his enemy; the middle-ground, to his mind, was forever filled with people facing one way or the other.

‘Presumably because they understand where the responsibility and, ultimately, censure will fall.' I made a point of appearing disinterested as I spoke, but at the same time I pointed my finger directly at him.

‘Me?' he said.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps the whole situation is already so far beyond any of us that we would all be well advised to stay away.'

He must by then have been aware that I was manipulating him into the position which best served my own interests, but, equally, he could not entirely dismiss from his mind the fact that he might have had some significant role of his own to play: Frere was still a Company employee, and Bone was still the arbiter of justice on behalf of the Company – a role in which some small but unassailable power might yet be wielded.

He turned away from me to consider all this without allowing me to read his face.

Without waiting for him, I went to the boat and climbed into it. The boatman followed me.

‘Are you coming?' I called to Bone.

He came immediately.

The boy pushed us away from the shallows, wading until the water reached his chest. Bone and I sat together at the centre of the boat. The boy climbed aboard and shook the water from his limbs. The boatman made the first of his slow, assured pushes with his pole. The water rose within inches of the craft's low sides, and already it seeped into the bottom around our feet. Tin cans lay scattered the length of the floor.

We moved further out and I felt the tug of the current to which we abandoned ourselves. The steamer which had passed us earlier was by then out of sight, its more certain passage marked now only by the fading rattle of its bell. I shielded my eyes to await the sun rising out of the growing brightness, but was foiled by the canopy of the trees, and by the river which turned us one way and then another on our passage across it.

*   *   *

The story of Frere having killed a child came to us first from a feather-trader who had heard the tale from one of his gatherers at the confluence of the Lomami and Pitiri rivers. There was a small Station there, little more than a guard hut, manned only during the trading season. Frere, apparently, had arrived at the Station and gone into the forest beyond. The country was mapped along its main watercourses, but the ranges beyond these remained uncharted. It was assumed that the hills rose and fell west and east until they reached Boendie Post in the west or Port Francqui on the Kasai to the south, and it was upon hearing these names that I recalled Frere long ago expressing an interest in the place, in the fact that it remained unknown and unappealing, and, more significantly still, that it was reputed to be the home of cannibals even fiercer than the Matari.

The feather-trader said his collector had been present when the girl had attempted to rob Frere of one of his journals, and Frere had grabbed her arm and then swung her so violently against a nearby tree that he had broken her neck, killing her instantly. Apparently, Frere was either suffering from a sickness or had just then been woken from a delirious sleep, perhaps by the child herself lifting the journal from his lap. The girl's father had witnessed the whole incident. In fact, it was said that it was he who had encouraged the girl to become a thief, the pair of them having come across the sleeping Englishman so far from where any Englishman had been before. And so the delicate crystals of the story grew.

Frere had held the lifeless girl by her wrist, and had offered the small corpse to the man confronting him. The girl's father, seeing that she was dead, had started shouting and had drawn several other men out of the trees around him. All of these others had been armed, all intent, according to this slender branch of the story, on avenging the dead girl. Frere had then laid the body down and had attempted to reason with the approaching men. One of the new arrivals seized the journal the girl had been attempting to steal; others picked through the remainder of Frere's belongings scattered around the tree against which he had been resting. Attempting to avoid being robbed a second time, Frere, still confused and alarmed, had then struck out at one of these men, whereupon the others had retaliated and had clubbed him until he could no longer stand. A further blow had knocked him unconscious, and when he came round he found himself being half-carried, half-dragged in the direction of the Lomami, where he was eventually brought to the guard hut and the recently arrived feather-trader.

The rest of the story remains as speculative as the country beyond. Nothing of how he came to be in the hands of Hammad, who brought him back to us, nothing of his journey from there to here; nothing of what deals were struck with the dead girl's father or of the ransom paid for such a valuable hostage. Only unconnected details. Frere was unable to stand for three days, unable to flex his fingers for a week after that.

By the time of his return, he had either been stripped of all his belongings, including his boots and most of his clothes, or everything had been returned to him, including his precious journals, and everything he owned was now in safe-keeping alongside him in the Belgian gaol. Yet another story said everything had been lost – including the lives of three porters – when a boat had misjudged the Boloko rapids and had overturned there; or when yet another porter had abandoned Hammad in the night, taking Frere's possessions with him in lieu of unpaid wages.

All the places mentioned existed, though few had visited them – and certainly no-one from the Station – and although some of the men involved were known to us, the chief participants – the dead girl's father and the other witnesses – remained stubbornly beyond our reach and questioning.

*   *   *

I searched ahead of us for any sign that we had been observed. There would always be someone watching a vessel cross the river, but hopefully on this occasion no-one who would guess our business in coming. Lights shone in some of the larger buildings. A line of men ferried timber from a boat moored downriver. The sun was by then well risen behind us and already pouring its light into the darkness.

I was pleased that our arrival had not attracted anyone to the water's edge, but then, as the boatman poled in through the channels of braided sand and mud, and as the boy crouched ready to leap overboard and pull us to the shore, Bone raised his rifle and without warning fired three times into the air. I asked him what he was doing.