The Night of the Cobra - Chapter Two

Chapter 2

The helicopter lurched over the sea and wheeled into a stomach-churning turn. The din was deafening, despite the earmuffs handed around by the tough-looking Ukrainian crew.

The 10-minute trip seemed endless but finally they were on the ground and she was stumbling across the tarmac, past white U.N. helicopters squatting in the cloying, shirt-drenching heat.

Nina loved Freetown – a wrecked, ramshackle coastal city, crammed with smiling youths who should have been at school but instead were on the streets, wheeling and dealing and struggling to survive by selling plastic sandals or cigarettes. Sierra Leone’s capital embodied destitution. It had been ruined by a 10-year civil war of nightmarish brutality even by West Africa’s shocking standards.

Nina checked into the monolithic main hotel, inquired about the water and was assured it was running. In her room, a trickle of dirty, brown, sap-like fluid seeped out of the tap. She sighed. Then she called Tim’s mobile.

The line was crackly with the disjointed voice of an irate woman breaking in regularly with an increasingly frustrated “Allo, allo?” She could just about make out her husband’s voice.

“Hello darling, how are you? I just got into Freetown.

“Oh okay, I’m in Nouakchott,” he said, sounding tired even through the static. “I think I’ll be back in Abidjan in the next few days. It’s been pretty tiring but I think we’ve got the start of some kind of distribution network in place now.”

She started to tell him about the snake, but the static, the woman and the disconcerting two-second gap between what she said and when he heard it rendered the tale ridiculous.

Frustrated by another “What?” from Tim, she said sharply: “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you later.”

She regretted her sharp tone as soon as the words left her mouth but could only hope the static had swallowed the senseless rebuke.

“I miss you,” she sighed, overcome suddenly with tiredness.

“What? Oh yes, I miss you too. But we’ll see each other at the weekend alright?”

“Yes,” she smiled wanly. “I’ll be back on Saturday morning.”

After a few more minutes of interference-ridden, mistimed endearments, they hung up. Nina lit a cigarette. She didn’t know why but so often phone calls to Tim left her wanting more, feeling down.

A result of the unrealistic anticipation that a phone call would somehow make up for the solitude, that it could echo the level of longing, that simple words could convey the almost physical sensation of missing someone.

That plus the inevitable banality of conversations on crackling lines to crumbling countries. At least he was back in Mauritania’s capital now. She had not been able to reach him while he was travelling around the country’s vast desert, setting up food camps for people caught short by another year of drought.

He had called every day from his satellite phone, delivering brief spurts of information – where he was, what he was doing, where he was going next. Remembering Emmanuel’s comments, Nina wondered if spending so much time apart really strengthened their relationship or simply obscured cracks that would otherwise have demanded treatment.

Their busy lives certainly made postponing the children debate easier. They had touched on it once or twice but the time never seemed right for making a decision – other concerns always seemed more pressing, and perhaps she preferred that.

She was uncomfortable with the idea that she might not want any at all, an idea that came cloaked in guilt and failure but she also could not imagine making the sacrifices motherhood would demand.

She felt the familiar annoyance and frustration rise as she faced the reality that she could not have it all. Time to get to work. She stubbed out her cigarette and started rifling through her notebook.

Later, she headed out into the crowded streets to find Leroy Johnson, the volunteer who would introduce her to children who had fought during the civil war and who were now trying to rebuild lives derailed by horror.

She walked past the fish market where women shouted their wares in Krio, and climbed down impossibly narrow steps cluttered with buckets and bowls of spices, shellfish and mottled tomatoes. Children and pigs defecated together on piles of stinking rubbish at the sea’s stagnant edge as colourful fishing boats bobbed and swayed.

The heat and smells were overpowering and the smiles like lightning. It was a cliché but true. She had never seen such beautiful smiles. It was a miracle that the human spirit had survived intact in Sierra Leone, she thought. At traffic lights, children begged, smiling, their stumps held up matter-of-factly. The youngest must have been mutilated when they were babies, among thousands forced to lay their hands on blocks as the machetes descended.

Before she came to Africa, Nina had imagined it would take a single swap although her mind could then go no further into the horror. Since then, through interviewing survivors she had learned that the machetes were often blunt and that severing a limb was not just a dramatic single gesture but a determined unleashing of short blows until bone, muscle and sinew came apart.

Travelling through the streets of Freetown, one was conscious of the body’s fragility – inherited ideas about the integrity, the inviolability of the human form evaporated.

Her first visit here left her twisting and turning during sleepless nights – half horrors flashing through her mind, images distilled from the staccato, half-understood quotes of the survivors, the child killers, the traumatised parents, the still-smug militia commanders. Brutal snapshots flashed half-developed across her brain.

She clambered filthy, yellow-tiled steps to Leroy’s second floor office. A huge man in a woven white-and-blue shirt and matching cloth hat opened the cracked door.

“Hi, I’m looking for Leroy Johnson.”

“You’ve found him,” he said, grasping her hand and almost yanking her into a tiny cell-like office. A broken air conditioner clung silently to the mildewed wall. A rickety fan churned the soup-like air.

She sat in front of Leroy’s desk, where an antiquated computer squatted over piles of handwritten papers spilling from cheap coloured folders.

Nina still hated first meetings even after years in the business. She lacked whatever natural ease allowed colleagues to chat up new contacts and always felt her presentations were stilted, awkward and somehow insincere. Fundamentally, she still felt uncomfortable with the idea that people could let someone like her spy on their lives.

She knew there were many who sought to use her to further their own ends, but it still amazed her that so many ordinary people, with no idea who or what The Chronicle was, were willing to talk to her. Maybe everyone just needed a listener, an observer to somehow prove that their lives were really playing out on some bigger stage and were not just another flicker of absurdity in a careless universe.

Her own upbringing in middle-class England had been shrouded in secrecy, in the need to keep as much as possible from the neighbours. Limp net curtains at the fingermark-free windows, head-high hedges to protect the sanctity of the garden and a strict code of omerta when outside the family home.

Not that they had anything particular to hide – the odd shouting match between her parents, the scandalous purchase of a colour television when it was still a luxury, the teenage squabbles with her brother Paul.

She had grown up to be discreet and although she envied others, including Tim, their openness and nonchalance in the face of The World, she could never copy it and be comfortable.

“I’d like you to meet Tom Winstone,” Leroy was saying. “He’s one of our success stories, if you can call them that.” He grimaced.

“He’s now 13 but was captured by the rebels when he was eight and forced to fight. They made him kill his uncle while his mother watched. We’ve been training him in carpentry for six months and he’s finally going back to his village. It’s going to be difficult for him but we hope he will be one of the saved.”

Leroy smiled, an engaging mix of self-deprecation and hope.

“When is he going home?”

“Wednesday. His mother still lives near Port Loko. You can come in my car.”

When Nina left Leroy’s office she felt the tingling exhilaration that always filled her as she felt a story coming together. She strode quickly through the streets as the sun set on the still humming city.

Later, she sat in the hotel bar doodling on her notepad and idly watching a handful of U.N. peacekeepers drinking. Nearby, two Lebanese men chatted, their mobile phones placed carefully on the table. Every five minutes or so, one or other phone rang and an urgent sounding murmured conversation took place.

Two Sierra Leonean teenagers perched on barstools, their hair laboriously straightened and dyed startling red and blue. Their skirts were short, skimming plump buttocks, their tops tightly stretched over full breasts, their heels high, their eyes empty as they scanned the bar’s few occupants.

She read through some earlier notes, hoping to get a solid grip on her story.

She had already met some child fighters who had not been able to exorcise the ghosts of childhoods lost to war, moody young men prone to lash out at the slightest insult, unable to make the cut to civilian life, unable to life without the power and glory that was theirs when they roamed the bush with rifles and machetes.

She supposed some of these young men would remain unredeemable, would wander off into the bush again, looking for another war to bring them to life in a world that never wanted them. Her mood darkened and she wondered again at the unrelenting hopefulness of the human spirit that allowed people to continue having babies in a land where childhood had been so warped.

Sometimes, the things she saw and heard were enough to make the idea of having children seem selfish and self-indulgent. Tim, of course, would love children.

A middle child from an Irish Catholic family of five, he hoped to recreate that sense of unity, of us-against-the-world that marked his childhood. He was still close to his parents who lived in County Cork on a farm of rolling fields and plump Fresian cows.

His siblings were also in Ireland, now with their own children. It took some of the pressure off Tim, but also made him stand out even more. He was different, the one who married an English woman and went to live abroad, and worse went to Africa, a land of disease, illness and dark wars which only rarely made it onto the nine o’clock news just before the Gaelic games results.

She and Tim really would have to address the question of children soon. She was 34 afterall and ….

“Excuse me, are you a journalist by any chance?”

She looked up, annoyed at the interruption, a frown ready to repel the idly curious or seedily opportunistic. A dark-haired man, his pallor startling in the tropical heat, smiled down at her. He had a camera around his neck and another slung over his shoulder. She softened slightly.

“Good guess. Can I help you?”

“Well, I’ve just arrived and I’m basically looking for a wee bit of information.”

He paused, eyebrows raised expectantly.

Generally, Nina hated when foreign journalists parachuted into Africa and sought her out to pinch invaluable local information before heading off self-importantly to cover stories she considered hers. But there was something engaging about the way the gangly stranger had asked, straight up with no pretence and with a disarming smile.

“You’d better join me then. Who do you work for?” she said, gesturing to the chair across from her.

He sat down gratefully, placing his heavy camera carefully on the table.

“Shaun Ridge.” He stretched his hand across the grimy, plastic table.

“I’m a freelance photographer based in Paris. I’m here to get some pix for an article on diamond mining for a South African magazine. I just got in this afternoon and spotted you in here. I thought you might have a few words of friendly advice.”

The smile again. She couldn’t help smiling back, although she still felt a hint of annoyance at his presumption, and also at the fact that she was so obviously a journalist. Still company was a pleasant surprise.

“Nina Walters. I work for The Chronicle. It’s a magazine, based in New York,” she said, “but I flew in yesterday from Abidjan.”

“Ah, A real Africa hand. My lucky day,” he said. “Well, I know you are probably thinking how presumptuous of me to just waltz in here and demand information, but would it help if I bought you a beer?”

She accepted, blushing slightly at his accurate strike. By the time the waiter had returned and laboriously opened two large, almost-cool bottles, Shaun had told her a lot about himself, speaking quickly as if to justify his request for help.

He was a regular visitor to Africa and had worked in Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Liberia and a string of other basket-case countries. He had lived in Nairobi and Johannesburg but had moved to Paris three years ago. He had been on a professional break for about a year and so had not covered Ivory Coast’s war.

“How is it over there now?” he asked.

“Like a limbo-land,” she replied. “The war is technically over but no one has given up their guns yet. I guess the best one can say is that it is a temporary cessation of hostilities, but I wouldn’t bet on it staying calm for too long.”

Nina feared she sounded like an African Cassandra and quickly changed the subject.

“So what kind of information do you need?” she asked. This stranger with the slightly too-long brown hair and the green-brown eyes had won her over.

He said he was looking for a fixer. She gave him a few numbers to try, reliable guys she had used in the past.

It seemed only natural they should agree to have dinner together. She went up to her room for some anti-mosquito spray, thinking it would be nice to eat out with company – a rare luxury on a feature trip like this when the world’s press was busy seeking headlines elsewhere.