The Boy in the River Read Online Free

offered, here in Kinshasa,’ he told me, ‘I’d have handed over to you by now and be back home.’
    I knew he wasn’t impressed with what he saw of me. I was obviously a complete greenhorn, and he took it as an insult that someone so utterly inexperienced should be sent to tackle problems ‘up country’, where life was thought to be a hundred times harder than in Kinshasa.
    ‘Don’t be afraid to say so if you can’t make it work up there.’ He looked hard at me through his heavy, dark-rimmed glasses.
    It was clear that he didn’t think I’d last two weeks. I felt myself bridle, but managed to thank him for his advice and quickly changed the subject.
    ‘While we’re here in the city,’ I said, ‘we’d like to pick up some stuff at the Kinshasa market. I’ve read you can make your own water filter with a couple of plastic buckets and—’
    He stared at me through his terrifying glasses. ‘You want to go to the Kinshasa market?’
    ‘Yes, apparently it’s a good place for—’
    ‘It’s not a good place for anything,’ he snapped. ‘You’d be mad to go there. None of us ever does.’
    ‘But we need some rice and some lamps and some other provisions,’ Sue said. ‘We heard you could get all that there.’
    ‘Yes, you can get all that,’ Andrew said abruptly and looked back at me. ‘You can also get your wife kidnapped.’
    ‘Kidnapped?’
    ‘And sold into white slavery. She’ll end up in some market in Dubai. You obviously don’t know what you’re suggesting.’
    ‘I want to go to the Kinshasa market,’ I said in a reasonably steady voice. ‘We both do.’
    He glared at me for a moment.
    ‘All right,’ he said, with a sigh of resignation. ‘On your own heads be it. At least I can send a Congolese driver to pick you up.’
    Short of white slavery, the market was every bit as alarming as Andrew had warned.
    ‘ M’sieur ! You like monkey?’ A toothless man grinned at us over his blood-spattered table, holding up some indescribable gobbet of meat, black with flies. ‘Try a bit of this one! Very tender! Or maybe you want crocodile?’
    People crowded around us, shoving and shouting, thrusting fruit, vegetables, handicrafts and pots at us.
    ‘I’m not sure this was such a good idea,’ Sue said anxiously as we shouldered our way through the mêlée. ‘Maybe we’ve seen enough.’
    ‘I want my plastic buckets,’ I said.
    Everything was for sale here: every shape and colour of vegetable and fruit; the butchered remains of goats and cows and forest animals I couldn’t identify; cheap tin household goods; sacks of grain; bundles of herbs; tools; bolts of brilliant cloth; bicycle components; fish and eels; carvings; sandals cut from truck tyres. Traders sold roasted maize, slices of cooked fish on skewers and globules of flour fried in palm nut oil called minkati – sweet, tasty and very, very unhealthy.
    The din was deafening and the smells exotic, pungent and often revolting.
    But I loved it.
    Sue – unflappable until that moment – did not. She had an urge to be gone, especially once we had bought a couple of hurricane lamps and some rice. Although I was just as intimidated as she was by the seething throng, I glimpsed for the first time the adventure I had come for.
    ‘Do you have plastic buckets?’ I shouted across at one stallholder.
    ‘Of course, M’sieur ! All sizes! All colours! Very fine.’
    ‘Good,’ I said, triumphantly. ‘I want two. Big red ones.’
    Kinshasa at the time was something of a halfway house between the West and the heart of Africa and not yet the hellhole it has since become. If it was pretty rough around the edges, it did have electricity most of the time and running water, which was sometimes clean. It boasted some impressive buildings, stores and shops that actually had stock to sell, as well as truly chaotic traffic. The famous boulevard built by the Belgians along the south bank of the Congo was grand, sweeping and shaded by fine trees, and