The Power(89)

The women are surprised, then suspicious. Really? That one? It’s not a trick?

There is a little haggling. The blind woman tries to argue. Roxy argues back. In the end, it doesn’t take too much to persuade them to let him go. He was right about how they see Roxy. And he is not particularly prized. If this woman wants him, let her take him. The soldiers are coming anyway; the war is closer every day. These people are not mad enough to want to stay here now that the soldiers are close by. They’ll take up their encampment in two or three days and move towards the mountains.

They bind his arms tightly behind his back. They throw in the bag he was carrying for nothing, just to show her some respect.

‘Don’t be too friendly with me,’ she says as she pushes him to walk ahead of her. ‘Don’t want them to think I like you or that I got you cheap.’

His legs are cramped from his time in the cage. He has to take slow, shuffling steps along the forest path. It is an age until they are out of sight of the camp, and another aeon until they cannot hear the noise of it behind them.

With each step, he thinks, I am tied and I am in the hands of Roxanne Monke. He thinks, She’s a dangerous woman at the best of times. What if she’s just playing with me? Once these thoughts have flashed across the mind, they can never be put back. He is silent until, a few miles along the dirt-track, she says, ‘I think that’s far enough,’ and takes a small knife from her pocket and cuts his bonds.

He says, ‘What are you going to do with me?’

She says, ‘I suppose I’ll rescue you, get you home. I’m Roxy Monke, after all.’ Then she breaks into a laugh. ‘Anyway, you’re a celebrity. People’d pay good money for this, wouldn’t they? Walk through the forest with a celeb.’

And this makes him laugh. And his laughter makes her laugh. And then they are both standing in the forest, leaning against a tree, hooting and gasping for breath, and something is broken between them then, and something is a little easier.

‘Where are we heading?’ he says.

She shrugs. ‘I’ve been lying low for a bit. Something’s rotten with my people. Someone … betrayed me. I’m all right if they think I’m dead. Till I can work out how to get back what’s mine.’

‘You’ve been hiding,’ he says, ‘in a war zone? Isn’t that a “bloody stupid idea”?’

She looks at him sharply.

He’s chancing something here. He can already feel the prickles across his shoulder where she’d jolt him if he pissed her off. He might be a celebrity, but she’s a mugshot.

She kicks at the stone-leaf mix on the path and says, ‘Yeah, probably. I didn’t have much option, though.’

‘No nice compound in South America to jet off to? I thought you people had it all worked out.’

He does have to know how angry he can make her; this is clear right through to his bones. If she’s going to try to hurt him, he needs to know that first. He’s tensed for the blow already, but it does not come.

She sticks her hands in her pockets. ‘I’m all right here,’ she says. ‘People keep their mouths shut. I’d left stuff for myself just in case, you know?’

He thinks of the little plastic packet she held in front of the women in the camp. Yes, if you’re using an unstable regime to smuggle drugs, you probably do have any number of secret supply-dumps, just in case of trouble.

‘Here,’ she says. ‘You’re not going to write about this, are you?’

‘Depends whether I get out alive,’ he says.

And that makes her laugh, and then he’s laughing again. And after a minute she says, ‘It’s my brother Darrell. He’s got something of mine. And I’m going to have to be careful how I get it back off him. I’ll get you home, but until I work out what to do, we’re lying low, OK?’

‘And that means …’

‘We’re going to spend a few nights in a refugee camp.’

They come to a tented muddy field at the bottom of a gully. Roxy goes to claim a space for them; just a few days, she says. Make yourself useful. Meet people, get to know them, ask what they want.

At the bottom of his rucksack he finds an ID card from an Italian news-gathering service, a year out of date, but enough to encourage some people to talk. He uses it judiciously, wandering from tent to tent. He learns that there has been more fighting than he’d heard, and more recently. That, in the past three weeks, the helicopters don’t even land any more; they drop food and medicine and clothes and more tents for the slow and steady stream of stumbling people arriving through the woods. UNESCO is, understandably, unwilling to risk its people here.

Roxy is treated respectfully here. She is a person who knows how to get certain drugs and fuel; she helps people with the things they need. And because he’s with her, because he sleeps on a metal bed in her tent, the people here leave him alone. He feels a little safe for the first time in weeks. But of course, he is not safe. Unlike Roxy, he could not simply walk into the forest in this place. Even if no other forest cult caught him, he is illegal now.

He interviews a few English-speaking people in the camp who tell him the same thing over and over again. They are rounding up the men without papers. They go away for ‘work detail’ but they do not return. Some of the men here, and some of the women, tell the same story. There have been editorials in the newspapers and thoughtful to-camera pieces on the one working black-and-white TV in the hospital tent.