Free Solo by William Boyd Page B

attract too much attention. We’ll just trundle off and no one will notice us.’
    Bond helped her load two jerrycans of petrol, two spare tyres and a fifty-litre plastic container of water into the boot. They said goodbye to Christmas, who was going to man the office phone in their absence, and without more ado they climbed into the 1100 and set off, Blessing at the wheel for the first leg of the journey.
    She handed Bond a map of Zanzarim with their meandering route south picked out. Bond saw that they would be moving haphazardly from village to provincial town to village again, always a good distance from the main transnational highway. When they set out and had quit the outskirts of Sinsikrou they immediately turned off into the countryside. Bond stared out of the window at the dusty bush, the unfaltering savannah scrub with its occasional trees. However, as they drove on, the vegetation grew steadily thicker until the view from the window was obscured by forest. The roads they travelled on were all tarmac but badly eroded with dangerous, deep potholes. They passed through hamlets and villages of mud huts roofed with grass thatch or rusty corrugated iron, each village with its little cluster of rickety roadside stalls selling bananas, peppers, cassava and various fruits. Seeing Bond’s white face at the window of the car as it flashed by provoked shouts and cries of excitement or derision from the villagers – or perhaps they were just pleas to stop and buy something. Bond couldn’t tell. He felt the real Africa engulf him, realising that Sinsikrou had nothing to do with the Zanzarim that they were now motoring through. On the roads the only other traffic they encountered was ancient lorries and buses, the occasional cyclist and mule-drawn cart.
    They made good progress and at lunchtime they stopped in a more sizeable town, Oguado, and found a roadside bar where they could enjoy a cold drink. Bond ordered a Green Star and Blessing a Fanta and they ate some kind of peppery, doughy cake known as dago-dago, so Blessing told him. It didn’t look much, Bond thought, like a beige doughnut with no hole, but it was surprisingly spicy and tasty.
    He took over the driving and they headed on through constant scrubby forest, then, at one stage, they passed through a vast plantation of cocoa trees that took them half an hour to traverse. It was hot and the sky hazed over to a milky white. They saw no military vehicles and encountered no roadblocks. Bond remarked on this: you’d hardly believe this was a country in the grip of a two-year civil war, he said, that just a couple of hundred miles to the south half a million people were starving to death.
    ‘It’s Africa,’ Blessing said with a shrug. She gestured at the village they were passing through. ‘These people may have a transistor radio or a bicycle but their lives haven’t really changed in a thousand years. They probably don’t even know their capital is called Sinsikrou.’
    Bond swerved on to the laterite verge to avoid a six-foot pothole. The road ahead was completely straight and the view so unendingly monotonous he wondered if he was in danger of falling asleep. He pulled on to the verge again and said he needed to relieve himself. As he stepped, carefully, a few yards into the forest he soon lost sight of the car. The air was filled with noises – frogs, bird, insects – and he suddenly felt a sense of immense solitariness overwhelm him, yet everywhere he looked there were signs of non-human life: columns of ants at his feet, a trio of magenta butterflies exploring a sunbeam, some angry screeching bird on a high branch, a lizard doing press-ups on a boulder. This specimen of
Homo sapiens
emptying its bladder was just another organism in the teeming primeval forest. He was glad to walk back to the road and the car – feeble symbols of his species’ purported domination of the planet – and to smoke one of Blessing’s potent Tuskers before she offered to