Aidan Hartley
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I angled the side mirror so that I could keep a watch on his face, which was blistered with extreme sunburn. Not only did he look like Sellers, but he spoke like Clare Quilty in Lolita, except with a South African clip.
‘Cairo, Cairo, yah, I’m going to Cairo. Do you think I can hitch?’
‘That’s 2,000 miles away!’ I swung round to look at him. ‘Why didn’t you fly?’
‘No money, you see. No money. My wallet was stolen. No passport either. Got to get to Cairo.’
He said he had a hundred shillings on him. Less than a pound. He’d abandoned Nairobi hundreds of miles to the south, where he might have got a new passport, credit cards and a flight.
‘How do you propose to reach Cairo with a hundred bob?’
‘Ah, hitch, I guess. I hear there’s a boat too.’
‘There’s a war on. Khartoum and Juba are fighting and the border’s closed, so there’s no Nile traffic any more.’
‘Ah, that’s bad news. Sure. Hmmm.’
‘Why Cairo?’
‘Ah, I’ve got to pick up a car for a client. Yes. Then I’m going to drive it back down south.’
As we passed through a landscape of whirling dust devils and jagged distant hills, he told us a ridiculous story of how rich South Africans would employ him to deliver their personal cars to distant points in Africa where they wanted to go on safari — or they sent him to collect vehicles that had to be returned to Johannesburg.
‘Yah, usually it’s Nairobi. I love Nairobi — lovely girls — do you know a bar called Sippers?’
On the road I’ve encountered some strange people. In Croatia I met a British mercenary lost in a minefield. A lunatic in the jungle who believed he had an appointment with King George VI. In Aden there was a Kiwi yachtsman with Marlow’s haunted face who was sailing all the way to the North Island in a 15-foot dinghy. Halfway to India the monsoon had swung round and blown him back to Crater on the edge of scurvy. I gave him dinner and beers and left him with an outboard engine stuck in reverse.
‘Can I ask you if you know Cape Town?’ We said yes.
‘Yah great, do you know…’ And he began to list an inventory of drinking holes that he’d clearly spent the past few years patronising. His geography of Africa was drawn in bars.
Eddie yammered on, hardly drawing breath in his croaking voice making little sense, but he kept returning to the subject of his daughter who was now all grown-up and doing so well. His marriage had fallen apart, he had been sacked from his mining job, times were hard, but he loved his daughter. Oh, how he loved his daughter. He began to sob. Ken and I didn’t know what to say.
Finally, I asked, ‘Eddie, are you on the run? Have you done something?’
‘Ah, come on,you guys, come on, ha ha ha, come on…’
A shanty of mud huts, millions of plastic bags and rusty old blown-up tanks heralded our entrance to Kapoeta, the first settlement in South Sudan. Eddie, who had wanted to travel with us all the way to Juba, suddenly developed a tourist’s curiosity for this godforsaken place. ‘Here’s fine. Just drop me here. Great. Super. Love the English.’
We stopped at a tree. Nearby was a mud hut where a woman was selling tobacco, Omo detergent and about 15 tomatoes. Eddie piled out of the Land Rover and pulled his huge suitcase from the back. Ken gave him a few bank notes and we left him standing there in the scorching sun, in the middle of Africa.
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