The Boy in the River Read Online Free Page B

such a move. Until that point, I’m not sure I’d understood quite how far they were prepared to go to find justice for this unknown boy.

 
    6
    Bolobo, April 1986
    ‘How are we going to get all our gear in?’ I eyed the Cessna’s under-slung luggage pod, considerably smaller than the average car boot.
    ‘Yeah, that could be a challenge,’ the pilot said. ‘But don’t worry, anything that doesn’t fit can come up by riverboat.’
    ‘How long’s that going to take?’
    ‘Oh, not more than a few weeks.’
    In the event, there was only room for a suitcase and a bag in the hold. Everything else – our rice, most of our clothes, many of our books – would meander after us along 300 miles of the River Congo. I had one small victory: I managed to hang on to my red plastic buckets.
    The tiny plane bumbled along the potholed tarmac and lifted uncertainly off the ground. Although Sue and I were crammed closely together in the back of the cabin, the din of the engine was so deafening that conversation was virtually impossible.
    Within minutes we were out over the vast Malebo Pool. The Pool marks the point at which the river disgorges from a narrow gap in the Bateki Plateau to the north, before being sucked into the rapids below Kinshasa, which we had seen and heard from the Baptist Mission.
    To be suspended above the vast landscape of green and silver was both magical and terrifying. As we climbed from pool to plateau, little villages emerged below us, scattered in patches of savannah carved into the endless forest. Sometime later we crossed the Kasai-Kwa River – a major tributary of the Congo that emerges from the copper belt deep in the south. Occasional orange-coloured roads snaked through the thick green vegetation then disappeared, never to emerge again.
    After an hour and a half the engine noise dropped and I could make out a village tucked up against a bend in the river as it coiled away towards Mbandaka and the Equator. Some miles inland was a small yellow-brown gash: the airstrip.
    Within seconds of landing children appeared from the tall grass. They all laughed and shouted their welcome, but beneath the warmth of their smiles their clothes were torn and stained and their bellies were distended with malnutrition. Lesions and discolorations covered their skin and most were barefoot.
    It was my first brush with desperate poverty. The adults among them bore deep horizontal lines across their cheeks, scars which I was to discover meant they belonged to the Bateki tribe. But there was no hostility, and if their eyes were cautious they were also curious and kind.
    Before we could be engulfed by the crowd a spluttering Land Rover pulled up, full of local dignitaries and staff from the medical centre. There was just one white man among them. He leapt out of the vehicle almost before it had stopped and came bounding towards us, a bustling character in his forties wearing a hectic shirt of local cotton and a pair of white shorts so incredibly decrepit they were indecent.
    ‘Welcome to Bolobo!’ He seized our hands. ‘I’m David Masters. I run the medical care around here.’
    ‘Right,’ I said, slightly dazzled by his manic energy. ‘So you’re effectively . . . my boss?’
    ‘What?’ he looked distracted. ‘Oh, yes, I suppose so. Technically. But I won’t be around here much.’
    I could see that he was already anxious to be gone. David, like the March Hare from Alice in Wonderland , was always in a rush.
    ‘You get settled in and we’ll see you at seven tomorrow. No, make it a bit before seven. That’s important. You’ll see why when you get there.’
    And with that he was gone. I’ve no idea how he got back to Bolobo, which was five miles from the airstrip, because there was only one Land Rover and he wasn’t in it. Perhaps he hopped.
    By now our Congolese welcoming committee had lined up and was making its stately way towards us.
    Papa Eboma led the group. A tall, grey-haired man in his seventies,