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Chapter 3

Sophie went through to the kitchen to make some more coffee; hoping, I think, that it would give me time to come up with a more convincing story about her father’s death. Instead, I just sat and stared at the cover of the second notebook. It was identical to thousands of other notebooks except for the label: ‘Angola – Second Contract: Oct 84 –’. The lack of an end-date hinted at unfinished business. My thoughts kept turning to Sophie. She had a right to know about her father but her questions about his death had unsettled me. By inviting her back to my home I’d tacitly agreed to tell her what I knew, or most of it. But there was something about Lodge’s death that worried me profoundly; I had no idea what it was. It was like a splinter: I knew there was something there, but I couldn’t get at it. Did the notebook hold the answer? I didn’t know but I was reluctant to find out. In the end my procrastination earned me a reprieve. Sophie bustled back into the room with a tray of coffees and half a dozen biscuits that she must have ransacked the cupboards to find.

‘Ready to go again?’ she asked.

I nodded uncertainly. ‘You hadn’t quite finished your story.’ I wanted to start the session on safer ground. ‘What is it you do now? For a living, I mean. You’re still in Cambridge?’

‘Yes, I really love it there. After graduating, I stayed on and did a doctorate in social sciences. I really wanted to work in that field, but nothing came up that was quite right, or that paid enough, so I fell back on my first degree, languages, and I’ve been a freelance translator and interpreter for the last seven or eight years.’

‘That sounds interesting. Who makes up most of your clients? Students, immigrants?’

‘No not really, though I do some work for individuals, but I get most of my business from the high-tech companies in the science parks in and around Cambridge, helping them work with international clients and partner businesses; plus, I get involved in acquisitions of foreign companies. I enjoy it – I get to learn the business side of things too. What about you? You obviously still travel.’

‘Yeah, too much I reckon. I’m a project worker with Flourish; it’s a development charity. We focus mainly on Africa and, to a lesser extent, South America and Asia. My area’s mining: I work with artisanal miners.’

‘Artisanal?’ She laughed. ‘Sounds a bit up-market to me, very arts and crafts. You pay a premium for anything labelled “artisanal”. Look at bread.’

I snorted. ‘You’re not even close. Some prefer to call them small-scale miners; they’re subsistence miners really. They work independently, not for a mining company. They’re often illegal. It’s mining at its most basic: hammers, chisels, spades, pans, candles … you name it – bloody lethal.’ I told her about some of the mines I had visited in various African and South American countries. She blanched when I told her that I’d been down mine shafts forty or fifty metres deep without a rope: just bracing my back and feet against opposite sides of the shaft and walking down. She found it hard to believe that miners still use candles for light and that they worked with little or no ventilation.

‘What do they mine?’ she asked.

‘Anything, but often gold – precious stuff.’

‘Greed then. Why does a charity …’

‘It’s not greed,’ I interrupted. ‘It’s subsistence mining. Most of them barely make a living; even with gold. But it’s a sensible thing to mine if you think about it: it’s portable. A gram of gold is worth a significant amount; just over $ 30 at $ 1,000 an ounce. You’d need half a tonne of iron for the same return. I know which I’d rather carry around.’

‘Yes, but what’s wrong with farming? Surely that’s a better option for pure survival?’

‘Well, yes, if the land will grow anything. A lot of miners are, or were, farmers but droughts, floods and other shit like desertification has forced them onto plan B. If you can’t grow your food, you need money to buy it – and that’s where mining comes in. It’s a straight choice: mine or starve. What would you do?’

‘Start digging, I guess. It still doesn’t seem like a typical charity area though – too many environmental issues. It must be a struggle to get funding,’ she said. ‘How many at Flourish work in mining?’

She wasn’t surprised when I told her I was the only one and she couldn’t hide her delight when she learned that we employed more than twenty social scientists as well as numerous specialists in other fields.

‘Where is it you’ve just got back from?’ she asked.

‘Ghana; I was there for six weeks. Some field work – projects, and a bit of networking in Accra. I had some useful meetings with influential figures from government departments and other organisations.’

‘What was the field work?’

‘I’ve been working with one of the big mining companies in Tarkwa, persuading them to work with and help artisanal miners in the area. I also took a fact-finding trip to a place near the Burkina Faso border, to see a real live gold rush. What an eye-opener that was.’

‘How so?’ She was interested.

‘It was so chaotic – a free-for-all – illegal, dangerous and criminally inefficient; an illustration of all that’s bad in artisanal mining. Take for example the mercury. Some of the miners evaporate it off using the same pots they use for cooking!’

‘You’ve got to be kidding. Surely they must know the dangers?’

‘They do, but they ignore them.’

‘Why?’

‘They live from day to day, literally. They focus on what might kill them today not on what might kill them twenty years down the line. If you can’t get through today, there is no twenty years.’

‘That’s really depressing.’ Her face reflected her words.

‘Yes, it is, it’s heart-breaking. Providing the dream of a better future is one of the biggest challenges. Going back to the mercury though; much of it ends up in the rivers, which is where their food chain starts! There’s just so much to do. There are other major problems too – AIDS and the sex trade not the least. I’m currently working on a funding proposal for a project to study the impact of AIDS in artisanal mining communities. But it’ll be hard to make it attractive to the donors. They’re falling over themselves to spend money on farming and microfinance projects, but mining …’

‘Funding,’ she sighed. ‘I had my fair share of frustrations with that too when I was in research. That’s one side of research I don’t miss.’ After a pause she asked, ‘Have you ever been back to Angola? Done any projects there?’

I’d been wondering how long it would take her to steer the conversation back there.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess it’s because our partners and donors – for Africa, anyway – focus on English-speaking countries. Ex-Portuguese colonies like Angola and Mozambique don’t appear on our map, nor do any of French-speaking Africa.’

‘Even though some of those, like Mozambique, are in the Commonwealth?’

‘There’s plenty to do in English-speaking places without complicating life with other languages and the baggage left behind by other colonial powers. Britain’s past actions are hard enough to clear up.’

‘That makes sense.’ She stared at me, lips curled back between her teeth, deep in thought. ‘Why did you change your career? You’re like some sort of poacher turned gamekeeper.’

I laughed. ‘Gamekeeper turned poacher, more like.’

Sophie looked baffled; her face demanded an explanation.

‘It’s simple really,’ I said. ‘Most people regard artisanal miners as the bad boys: working illegally and screwing up the environment.’

‘Mercury?’

‘Not to mention messing up riverbanks and destroying vegetation. Then there’s child labour.’

‘Bloody hell. If they’re that bad, why do you support them? How can you justify it?’

‘That’s a big question, Sophie. Remember it’s for subsistence; they only do it to survive. If they didn’t mine, they’d either have to find some other way to get food or move on. The system, and the mining laws and the bureaucratic infrastructure, is rigged against them in favour of the mining companies. These people live where they have for generations, and they survive by whatever means they can, and as no one owned the land officially. They believe they can do what they want with it. Problems arise when one of them finds something valuable like gold, silver or precious stones and trades it to get money for food. It draws attention. Mining companies get wind of it and they snap up the mining rights, instantly making it illegal for the artisanal miners to mine their traditional land, as they are then on a mining company claim! They often can’t even farm it, let alone mine it, after that.’

Sophie looked at me thoughtfully – she’d obviously never considered this before. While I had her captive, I continued on the subject close to my heart.

‘Many of the world’s biggest mines weren’t found by geologists, like your father, but by the local people who happened upon something while working in their fields or fetching water from the river.’

‘So why don’t the … artisanal miners you called them, just apply for the mining rights themselves; it would solve the problem surely?’

‘Ah yes, but they have had no formal education and wouldn’t know where to start with the bureaucracy! Many aren’t even aware of the existence of mining rights – until it’s too late – and the process for getting the rights requires you to go to a big city, typically the capital, which might be several days’ walk away. Most simply can’t afford the time or the legal costs. Mining rights are expensive. Artisanal miners stand no chance without some help.’

‘So, do they just stop, or carry on somehow?’

‘Well, it’s a dangerous game. The mining companies often deploy armed forces to clear illegals off their property so there’s a very high risk they’ll get shot or injured in some other way. They can’t even sell what they produce very easily. They’re forced to use middlemen who rip them off. They’re lucky if they get five dollars for a gram of gold. The middlemen will get upwards of twenty dollars for doing bugger all. The upshot is that artisanal miners have to produce a lot more gold to make a living than if they were legal. It means they have to cut corners and use whatever labour is available to them, and that means women and children.’

Sophie looked at me long and hard. ‘I can understand all that but … You used to work for a mining company. You must have bought into what they stood for, including getting rid of artisanal miners. Something must have happened. You’ve changed sides and nobody changes sides without a good reason. What was yours?’

‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ I lied. ‘I just sort of drifted into it.’

‘For something you “just sort of drifted into” you’re very passionate about it. Something must have stirred you up …?’ She was very intuitive; it was unnerving and rather too close to the bone.

She must have noticed that I kept glancing at my notebook because she asked if she could take a look. After some hesitation, I passed it to her. There was no way she’d be able to make any sense of my notes. Triggers are useless if there’s nothing to set them off.

As she thumbed through, her expression turned from excitement to frustration. ‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t say anything.’

‘I’ve got loads like that – it works for me.’ I held out my hand; she gave an exasperated sigh and passed it back to me.

‘Let’s go back to you and my father,’ she said. ‘How well did you know him?’

‘We were friends, good friends. I’d known him for about eight or nine months, I think, by the time he died.’ I told her that I had arrived in Mumbulo in early 1984, having been transferred from South Africa by the company. James Lodge had already been there for three or four years by the time I turned up. Sophie was both surprised and disturbed when she learnt that Lodge and I had barely known one another in my first contract. At work, in the Mumbulo Mine offices, Lodge’s Geology department had no direct dealings with my department, Metallurgy; plus, I was the shy, new boy, not yet fully integrated into the established social groupings.

‘We shared a beer from time to time of course, but he was more comfortable with his usual cronies,’ I explained.

‘But you said you were good friends.’

‘Don’t look so worried. We became very good friends later on. I believe I knew him as well as anyone in Mumbulo did.’

Her face relaxed.

‘It took me a long while to get used to Angola. I didn’t adjust very well to begin with, and I found everything a struggle. Angola was completely different from here or South Africa: it was communist. There was a civil war going on and the poverty was in your face and far worse than anything I had ever seen in South Africa.’

‘It never occurred to me that my father had worked in a civil war zone. What motivates people to work in these places?’

‘I don’t know about your father but, for me, there were three things: getting out of South Africa, I hated the politics, the apartheid; adventure, I was a young man and I wanted to see and do things that most young lads of my age would have no experience of; and then there was the money … It paid well. I guess a lot of that was danger money … but we never saw or heard any serious gunfire.’

‘Serious? You mean there’s … I don’t know … casual gunfire?’ She chuckled.

‘Yes, sort of … The MPLA, that’s the government army, had a barracks in town. They would often fire their AK–47s down the middle of the road after dark and we’d enjoy the tracer show while we supped our beers on the veranda. The civil war passed us by, as did the war with South Africa.’

‘You couldn’t have known that you’d be safe though, could you?’ she asked.

‘No, but we were young. We used to joke about mortality; it was like some abstract theoretical concept back then. Anyway, after I left, the civil war did reach the mining area and UNITA, the rebels, did capture some of the mining towns. I heard they took Mumbulo – that’s where your father and I worked.’

Her slow head shake left me in little doubt that she thought we were mad. ‘You said the civil war passed you by, but there must have been some effects of it?’

‘Loads.’ I told her that almost all supplies had had to be flown in; very little had come in by road. Angola’s roads had been heavily land mined and any convoys that there were had to have a military escort. They were always getting ambushed or would run over land mines. Every item was ranked in priority and only absolute necessities ever made it in. Even diesel had been flown in. Mining equipment, food and booze had been top of the list so spares for cars, for example, had rarely made it. I told her how we had driven around in death traps, that my Land Rover had had no brakes, rubbish lights, and the tyres had been worn down to the canvas. ‘It was all part of the fun of it,’ I said.

‘Some fun!’ she chastised. ‘Was that the cause of my father’s accident? An un-roadworthy vehicle?’

‘No, definitely not. He had a brand-new car; one of the few. It was a made-in-Mexico VW Beetle that came in on one of the convoys. The state of the cars had reached a crisis point – people couldn’t do their jobs – they couldn’t get about. So half-a-dozen VWs got bumped up the convoy list.’

‘So, how come he got a new car, and you didn’t?’

I ran my fingers through the greying vestiges of my hair, and chuckled. ‘Because I was new back then. Your father was older and established. He was also someone the company would bend over backwards to please. He found them a lot of diamonds, made them a lot of money.’

‘I’m pleased to hear that.’ Her face lit up. ‘But, back to your friendship; what changed between you on your second contract? A party or something?’

‘No. We had some memorable parties … but it was a work situation that threw us together. It was right at the start of the contract.’ I pointed at the notebook as though its title would validate everything I was about to say. I told her about the helicopter flight with Geoff Morgan and Thys Gerber, and how we’d landed at Cambunda so Geoff could take Thys to see the river diversion. ‘The river diversion was your father’s baby.’

‘I understand babies, but river diversion?’

I explained that most of the diamonds mined in Angola were from alluvial deposits: riverbeds or former riverbeds. To mine the bottom of a river it’s necessary first to dig a new course for it, then to redirect the flow before pumping out the original course. ‘The pumping was just about finished with this one when Morgan went to see it with Thys – but it looked very unpromising. Morgan was furious – he got a bee in his bonnet that there was nothing in it. When he’d calmed down a bit, he ordered me to test the ore; put it through the plant, the next day.’

‘And my father …?’

‘Morgan ordered him to do the test with me; as a penance for screwing up. I liked Morgan generally, but he had a nasty habit of rubbing people’s noses in their mistakes.’

‘Surely Morgan wasn’t the only person to see the diversion. Did everyone think it was rubbish?’

I thought back to the previous night, to the last pages I’d read before going back to bed.

***

It was late afternoon when we landed at the helipad behind the mine offices in Mumbulo. I went to Geoff’s office where I signed the mail bag over to his secretary. Thys then gave me a lift to the company house where I lived; it was known as ‘the Madhouse’ because it had the best courtyard for parties and often hosted them. The sun was setting, and it would be dark within half an hour. I didn’t need my watch to know it was five-thirty p.m. give or take ten minutes.

The Portuguese had built Mumbulo on a grid. Two broad, mango tree-lined streets ran up the hill from the town’s heart: the edifício público – the administration building – and the five-a-side football arena. A series of smaller streets linked with them every hundred metres or so. The houses in the main streets were all similar, built in the Portuguese colonial style. They were bungalows, set back about twenty metres from the road and all had five or six steps leading up from a path to a low-walled veranda. Each house had a spacious walled courtyard at the rear and small service roads ran behind the courtyards. The town had expanded over the years and the later additions deviated from the rigidity of the original footprint. The size and quality of the buildings also changed, deteriorating to shanty town dwellings, or bairros, as the locals called them, on the northern and western outskirts.

The mango trees lining the street provided a lush canopy and a profusion of pawpaw trees sprouted from improbable places, even from mortar courses in walls, softening the appearance of the town and lending it an untidy charm. Black and white goats were everywhere; they roamed where they liked, casually taking their pick of the choicest grass and the best viewpoints. One goat was standing on the veranda wall of the Madhouse as we pulled up and another was sprawling on the roof of the house next door. It was all good and familiar, but, although I was looking forward to getting back to work and seeing my colleagues again, my mood was subdued by the prospect of another six months before seeing home once more. It was a bit like a prison sentence except that it paid well. There were no cars parked in front of the house, so I guessed Carlos was still out at work. I went in, took a beer from the fridge, picked up a chair and went to relax on the veranda while I waited for my housemate to return.

I shared the Madhouse with Carlos Pereira, a mining engineer who looked after the mines north of Mumbulo, in the Nocredo direction. We had become good friends and we often shared transport as vehicles were in short supply and we covered the same geographical area.

The sun had just about gone. It was six o’clock; and a steady flow of vehicles washed along the street as workers returned home. Finally, a familiar Land Rover pulled up and Carlos bounded up to the veranda to greet me. Although he was Portuguese, his English was virtually faultless.

‘The wanderer returns,’ he said. ‘It’s good to have you back. Good leave?’ We shook hands and hugged warmly.

‘I wish I could say I was glad to be back, but you know how it is. Leave was great. It was good to see my parents, and friends. I did lots of travelling, lots of drinking, and I blew lots of money … How were things here?’ I asked tentatively.

‘Well, they were okay until today. I spent most of the day repairing the dams at the Txicaca diversion so the pumps could hold the level down. Then when we saw the bottom of Txicaca for the first time, it looked to be a total washout. Sand, sand and more sand; a bit gritty maybe – very few rocks, at least, not that I could see. Basically, it’s been months of wasted time and money. If we have to mine it, the volume targets will be buggered – you can’t mine what isn’t there. It’s a nightmare. Bloody river diversions.’

‘Yup. Geoff dumped me at the Cambunda plant today while he went to show Txicaca off to that new security guy. They’d picked me up at Nocredo with the chopper. He was seething when he got back; I was glad Thys was there. He copped the worst of it. Geoff wants me to test the stuff with Jim Lodge at Cambunda tomorrow. I don’t envy Jim when Geoff finds him. He’ll be looking for a scapegoat. I think he’s shitting himself about what he’ll report to London as he’s probably been making exaggerated claims to them.’

‘I’ll keep my head down, I think. Morgan’s unpredictable when pissed off, to put it mildly.’

I shook my can; it was nearly empty. ‘You want a beer?’

He nodded and I fetched a couple of cans from the fridge.

‘Steve’s been looking forward to your return,’ said Carlos, as he clicked open his icy can. ‘Dryden’s had him running around like a headless chicken, looking after your area as well as the south.’ Kevin Dryden was the Metallurgical Manager, my boss, and Steve Vernon’s. ‘Steve’s knackered. I don’t understand why Dryden doesn’t help you guys; he just sits on his arse in his office all day.’

‘I think he’d get lost. It’s probably better that he stays in and does the paperwork; he can’t do any harm there. It beats me though how he keeps busy without any field work to occupy him.’ I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Dryden again. He could ruin a good day just by being in it.

‘What about Jim Lodge?’ I said. ‘You’re a big mate of his. What’s he like to work with? And how’s he going to take this?’

‘He’s easy to work with, if a little secretive; but Txicaca? He won’t take that well; he’s used to getting things right. I’ve always thought he was infallible with diamonds but maybe he’s just been lucky, and his luck’s just run out.’

We supped our beers steadily and chatted idly for a while about my leave and what had happened on the mine while I’d been away. It was how we unwound most evenings before we showered and tidied ourselves ready for the mess and our evening meal.

***

‘So, Carlos agreed? He thought it was a dud too?’ said Sophie.

‘Very much so and he’d spent a lot more time than Morgan had at the diversion – he built it and pumped it out.’

‘I’m not sure I want to hear about this test. Maybe I’ll feel better after eating something; I’m starving. I was so excited this morning, I hardly ate anything. Have you got anything I can cook up for us? I didn’t see anything much.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t think. We could either go out, or phone for a takeaway. There’s a good Indian just up the road and they generally deliver within forty-five minutes.’

‘That sounds good.’

I got the menu from next to the phone, told her what I wanted and left her to sort it out while I went back to staring at the cover of the notebook again. I had to read on; I’d already told her everything I’d read. I didn’t want another session of winging it, where I was forced to rely on my memory, which I knew to be heavily self-censored. What I’d told her about her father’s death, I suspected wasn’t exactly true. It was the version of events I’d convinced myself about at the time, but until I’d looked at those pages with objective eyes – something I’d managed to put off for nearly thirty years – I’d never worked out what truly happened. And as for what Sophie should learn …

I sighed and opened the book where I’d folded over the corner of a page. At least there would be a bit more about the development of my friendship with Lodge … I owed it to Jim to do my best for Sophie; I wanted to bring him to life for her.