High by Andrew Osmond
Chapter Thirty
Martin was sick. At first he had ignored the symptoms - headache, sore throat, a slightly high temperature - he was a man unused to being ill, and now was not the time or place to start. At home, in a warm bed, the central heating on full, the duvet pulled up over his head to block out any light, a hot water bottle resting by his feet, and a bracing toddy of whisky, hot water and sugar within easy reach of his invalid grasp, now that would have been a time and a place to be sick; lying on deck on the Kinshasa to Kisangani steamer, surrounded by all manner of human, animal and vegetable life, was very definitely not.
How Martin came to find himself on the slow moving river-ferry is swift to relate. It was soon after Martin had bid his farewells to the affable Geoff in Lusaka - leaving that man, happy as Larry, exploring the darkest recesses of the Leyland DAF workshop in downtown - that he had discovered that his idea of travelling overland to the Democratic Republic of Congo was not going to be as straight forward as he had imagined. In fact, it was not going to be possible at all. The man at the immigration office at the DRC embassy had been most insistent - “Ce n’est pas possible”. Due to the recent resurgence of fighting between the various warring factions within DRC, all land borders between that country and Zambia had been closed. The only means of entering the country would be to fly to Kinshasa, and even then, foreigners were being strongly advised to consider the necessity of their journey before embarking on any travel. It took Martin only seconds to decide that his travel was not only necessary but that it was indeed vital and, after that, and following the exchange of an extortionately large amount of money, it was only a matter of another ten days before Martin was proudly in possession of both an airline ticket and a visa permitting him entry to the DRC for a duration of no longer than one month. By happy chance, when he finally arrived in the sprawling capital city of DRC, the scheduled steam boat which plies its regular monthly route between Kinshasa in the south and the city of Kisangani in the north, travelling a total distance along the Zaire River of over one thousand miles, and which actually should have already departed along this route eight days earlier, was running late. Martin bought himself a ticket of passage - third class: he had decided that the previous luxury and expense of a flight from Lusaka to Kinshasa meant that he should try to return to some kind of a budget - and stepped aboard the ship of adventure for his voyage north.
••••••••••
Martin felt as though his whole body was trembling, and not solely as a result of the vibrations of the steamboat’s erratic engine, or even from a sympathetic compulsion to move along in rhythm to the sounds emanating from his neighbouring passenger’s powerful ghetto-blaster. His temperature was racing, and he felt nauseous and headachy. Furthermore, one or two livid pink spots had appeared on the skin of his torso. It was clear that some aspect of his personal health was seriously amiss. It was obvious, too, that several of Martin’s fellow travellers had noticed his worsening physical condition and were making themselves conspicuous by their absence from his immediate vicinity: whereas when he had first stepped aboard the ferry it had been difficult to find so much as a clear foot of plank of deck space on which to sit, amidst the chaos of life heading upstream, suddenly Martin was conscious that he was now lying, alone, in a virtual oasis of calm. The sick instinctively shunned by the healthy, in a self-protective reaction old as Man itself. Martin’s night time delirium could not have helped his cause in making friends either: he had awoken, hot and sweating, aware only of scared and unfriendly glances directed towards him. His mouth felt dry but he did not want to eat; he was hot all over but there was no shade from the equatorial sun. On either side of him the thick verdant mass of vegetation along the river bank hemmed in on him oppressively, surprisingly close, the dark trees stretching up so high that it felt as though they could almost form an archway across the watery divide and unite their two forces, and in so doing block out the sky entirely, bringing the promise of some shelter from the sun’s powerful rays. For the first time since his embarkation, being effectively detached from the hurly burly of normal deck life by his shipmates’ imposed regime of isolation, Martin was suddenly aware of the sights, sounds and smells of the natural world through which he was slowly passing: there were monkeys chattering in the high branches of the trees and a steady background hum of insect noise, vibrant like an amplified, electronic instrument, constant like a Geiger meter registering the count for background radiation. In his delirious condition, some things had suddenly become crystal clear: Martin suddenly knew - with certainty - the extent of this jungle and his place within it; was conscious of what a minute and insignificant speck on the landscape were, not just his transient self, but also the river boat on which he was travelling, and even the river itself; a thin blue line traversing a great unexplored wilderness of green. Far, far overhead, and the only disruption in an otherwise uniformly blue sky, a small aircraft caught Martin’s attention. He lay flat on his back, spread-eagling himself on the hard, wooden deck, in order to watch the flying machine, without having to stretch his neck. At such a distance, the aeroplane looked like one of the small insects that hovered above the surface of the river water; a dragonfly occasionally dipping to take a drink, or one of a host of circling gnats, separated from the main swarm, testing the limits of its independence. Seemingly as random in its movements too, as a buzzing, motiveless fly, the aircraft was circling around and around, apparently revelling in its freedom and space, mocking the slow passage of the steam boat through a land chocked and congested by plants and obstructions. Martin shaded his eyes with his forearm as the plane flew in front of the sun and was momentarily lost to sight in a brilliant, golden haze. As the tiny speck reappeared from out of the fiery aurora, Martin reached upwards towards it with his hand, grasping at the air as though the distance between him and the pilot had been magically contracted and he could just pluck the machine out of the sky as though he were reaching out to touch a leaf on an overhanging vine. Once again the aircraft briefly disappeared from sight, although the faint hum of its twin engines could still be heard overhead above the engine of the river vessel, and then it was back again, high in the sky, slipping between Martin’s outstretched fingers as easily as the water from his flask spilled through the gaps in the wooden deck boards. Martin felt the intense brightness of the sun forcing his eyes slowly shut, and this time he did not resist.
••••••••••
When Martin reopened his eyes, the scene had changed. He was still lying flat on his back, but above him, instead of the wide blue expanse of the African sky, were instead, dark, wooden panels, not dissimilar to the deck boards on which he had previously lain. That was something different too: the surface beneath his prone body felt soft and slightly springy, certainly not the unresisting rigidness of hard wood. He still felt hot, but there was a surprisingly pleasant breeze emanating from somewhere close at hand, which relieved the oppressive chronicity of the constantly high temperature, and there was the sound of soft, female, singing too: a tune from an opera, if he was not mistaken. Don Giovanni, was it? Or Carmen? He didn’t know. The singing stopped suddenly, replaced by a concerned enquiry, “Ah, so you are awake finally. How are you feeling?” There was a slight Mediterranean lilt to the voice: Spanish perhaps? Or Italian. This theory of nationality was further supported by the appearance of the woman leaning over him: long, dark hair, brown eyes, and a complexion not entirely unaccustomed to exposure to a constant sun.
Martin smiled weakly, “Where am I?”
The slight rocking motion of the room left Martin in no doubt that he was still on board a boat, but his present surroundings were a world apart from the floating bedlam that he had known on the deck of the old steamer.
“You are in my cabin,” explained the young woman, earnestly. “You have been very sick. Do you know how long you have been asleep? Two days. Did you know that? Whatever possessed you to travel
“How...? What happened?” Martin asked, “Who...?”
“My name is Mona.” The woman smiled broadly, extending her hand by way of formal introduction. “Mona Candoni. I am pleased to meet you Martin Meek.”
••••••••••
“I discovered your name from your passport. I hope that you don’t mind,” Mona had said. She had gone on to explain how she had first discovered Martin, unconscious, dehydrated and badly burnt from the sun, and how she had enlisted the help of several other passengers to have him carried to her cabin. “It’s not exactly luxurious,” she said, apologetically, “but it is more comfortable than sleeping on the deck. Another few hours lying there and you would have been a dead man.” She had told him that she suspected that he had contracted a mild case of typhoid fever, and had explained how she had treated him. “You are lucky,” she said, “Typhoid is a killer. You will feel very weak for a long time yet, but it would appear that the worst is over. It was fortunate that I was carrying Chloramphenicol with me.”
A small meal of plantains and several glasses of water had restored Martin’s strength sufficiently, such that he was able to sit up. His limbs ached intolerably from dehydration, and the skin on his face, neck and shins felt red raw and tight, where they had been parched by the sun. His hands still trembled when he held them out, but now more as a result of general weakness, rather than from the grip of any fever, and the steady flow of air originating from the ceiling-mounted fan was succeeding in keeping him feeling comparatively cool. He realised the truth of Mona’s words: he was a lucky man.
“I haven’t even thanked you,” Martin said.
“That’s okay,” answered Mona, “It is my job, after all.”
“What?”
“A nurse.”
“Oh?”
“I work in the Ituri Forest, to the east of here.”
“In a forest? I wouldn't have thought there were many hospitals there?”
“No, that’s the point. I work with the pygmy tribes.”
“Teaching them?”
“It is more a case of the other way around.”
“Oh?”
“I have learned far more about medicine from observing them, than anything that they may have learnt from me.”
“And how long have you been living here?”
“Almost two years now. Apart from a short time I spent in the Middle East I have been here ever since I escaped.”
Martin wondered, at first, if he had perhaps misheard Mona. Escaped? It raised several awkward questions. From where? And for what were you originally imprisoned? It took him several minutes of thinking about a subtle way in which to broach the subject, during which time Mona was engaged - in a fashion she appeared habitually to be, consumed by an inner nervous energy - in unpacking and repacking the contents of her small rucksack, before he eventually blurted out, his curiosity getting the better of his tact, “Were you in prison?”
Mona looked at him, curiously, before answering, “In a way, yes, I was.”
Martin tried to think of the best case scenario: not all prisoners were murderers or lunatics. “Was it political?”
Mona smiled, “No, not political. Religious.”
“Really? You don’t strike me as the type.”
“Is there a type?”
Martin surveyed the young woman standing before him. She was petite and undeniably attractive: her clothes were slightly austere, but, given the surroundings remarkably well groomed and fashionable, and a hand which displayed a ring on almost every finger, a colourful bead necklace around her neck, and a bright splash of red across her lips revealed a nature not entirely blind to the material world. “Perhaps not,” he conceded, “But you still don’t look the type.”
“You might be surprised to know then,” Mona answered, “That for the first twenty three years of my life I was actually called Eliza, and during that time I did not once have any social interaction with anyone outside of my own immediate sect.”
“Were you a nun?”
"Exclusive Brethren.”
“I’ve never heard of them."
“No? Have you heard of the Plymouth Brethren?”
“Vaguely.” Martin thought that he recognised the term.
“You could describe the Exclusive Brethren as an extremist splinter group from them. Both groups follow the teachings of a clergyman dissenter, John Nelson Darby. They’ve been around for a long time, you know. Founded in 1825.”
“So you are no nouveau sect,” Martin said, jokingly.
“I am not one of them at all, anymore,” said Mona, severely.
“What happened? You said you escaped,” Martin prompted.
“You must understand”, Mona said, “the Exclusive Brethren forbid any contact with the ungodly.”
“Who are, exactly?”
“Well, you, for one,” answered Mona, “Actually, anyone outside of the Brethren.”
“That sounds very restrictive.”
“It is, but it is not until you are outside this world that your eyes are opened to it. No TV, no radio, no Internet, no newspapers; there is a strict regime of isolationism. Do you know what I now compare it to?”
Martin could almost guess the words that Mona was about to speak, but remained silent, allowing the young woman to make her own analogy, “North Korea. You know, before the... what is it called, Great Reawakening. Is that right”
“Yes,” Martin confirmed.
“I was just as blinkered as those poor people.”
“So how did you get away?”
“I was knocked over by a car.”
“Extreme.”
“It gave me time to think. I was confined to a hospital bed for three months after the accident. It was the first time that I had spent any time away from the Brethren.”
“Gave you a taste of the real world?” Martin asked, although he continued more flippantly, “Although no TV, no newspapers, or anything, it doesn’t sound too bad to me.”
Mona cast her glance around her present surroundings, “As you can see, I still don’t have access to any of those things even now. No,” she continued, “it wasn’t being exposed to the real world, as you put it, that was such a revelation, so much as being allowed time to discover exactly who I was, and more importantly, what I believed.”
Time to think. Martin recalled a conversation he had had with his old employer, when Garnet had advocated the necessity for exactly the same thing. Passive reactors ripe for automative take-over, had been Garnet’s assessment of humanity. Martin was still not entirely convinced that the machines were quite at the stage in their evolutionary progression where they posed a significant threat to the domination of mankind, but he could perceive how, in the vacuum left behind between the decline of one great mental colonisation - spirituality - and the rise of the next - technology - opportunist, organised religions could seep in, with the promise of relieving the individual of the burden of original thought.
Martin was intrigued to know what had been the conclusion of Mona’s period of enforced self-examination. “And so what do you believe now?”
“Nothing.”
“A Nihilist?”
“Not that. A Humanist, if you have to have a label, but not that either. We live, we die, we smile, we cry, we eat, we breathe, we...” Mona paused, her train of thought momentarily diverted. “There is only one bed. We must sleep together, yes?”
“Yes. Yes of course, no problem,” Martin agreed, embarrassed, desperate to know what happens after ‘we eat, we breathe’.
We, we, we.