Читать книгу The Walk - Peter Barry - Страница 7
ОглавлениеAdrian Burles believed himself to be a good man. He also insisted that the events he organized in the summer of 1987 were done with the best of intentions and were of benefit to millions of people. But that didn’t stop his many critics from condemning his actions as being nothing short of unforgivable – murderous, some even whispered.
He was struck with the idea in the middle of the night after his visit to the health clinic at Korem in the Northern Highlands. It was his first visit to Ethiopia, and the nurse, Anne Chaffey, had said something to him earlier that day that meant little to him at the time – in fact had barely registered in his consciousness. This was most likely because he’d been too upset, as well as embarrassed, by his own sudden, very public and totally uncharacteristic display of emotion.
They’d been standing outside the clinic, and she’d been speaking to him – about what he had little idea, or certainly couldn’t remember later. Perhaps, almost certainly, she’d been firing statistics at him, statistics so outrageous, incessant and ubiquitous that it resulted in a seeming inability on his part to absorb them all. In the few days he’d spent in Ethiopia, such statistics had become almost meaningless, and he’d been asking himself why everyone was so obsessed with them (the latest to find a permanent lodging in his head was that, at the height of the famine two years earlier, 16,000 people had been dying of starvation every week), when their case or whatever it was they were proposing would have been won more speedily by simply telling their audience to look at what was under their noses. Forget the statistics, those cold-blooded facts and numbers, just look at what’s around you! The mathematics are weak in comparison to the spectacle. And it was exactly that – what was directly in front of him – that had distracted him from what the nurse was saying.
At his feet were hundreds of refugees. They were the overflow from the health clinic itself, but also from the camp a couple of miles to the north. They were sitting motionless around Adrian and Anne, packed so closely together that he wasn’t quite sure how the two of them had managed to reach the point where they were then standing. He felt hemmed in on every side, and even though he was outdoors, could scarcely breathe. Knowing there was no place for him to escape to, nowhere that would make him feel any better, made his situation almost unbearable. The only escape would be to get on a plane and leave the country. He was imprisoned in a monochromatic sepia nightmare, with everyone – men and women, young and old, infants – coated in desert dust, the rags on their backs and the pathetic bundles in their arms all covered in a fine film, as if they’d been left untouched for hundreds of years in an Elizabethan attic. They paid absolutely no attention to the two white people in their midst, even to their benefactor, the nurse now addressing Adrian. No one in the crowd spoke. Instead of words there was an incessant hum, a low, hopeless moaning mixed in with a high-pitched, pain-filled keening. Lethargy was too weak a word to describe the inaction of these people; what they exuded was a forceful indifference. They waited at Adrian’s feet with the patience of death.
And it was then that it happened.
As in a nightmare, he suddenly and quite unexpectedly became aware that he was standing directly over a motionless and obviously uninterested mother. She was sitting on the barren earth with a baby at her withered breast, a young child leaning against her on one side, and a dead infant, lying like a discarded rag, on the other. At the very moment Adrian became aware of this horrifying spectacle, one of Anne Chaffey’s assistants suddenly appeared at their side, bent quickly over the infant, and then picked the tiny body up to carry it into the clinic. It was obviously dead. The resemblance to an early-morning refuse collection in a suburban street back home was both startling and unsettling. A dense cloud of flies was covering each of the spectral figures in the scene, and had the effect of momentarily making the infant’s corpse look as if it were moving. Adrian wanted to shout out, to tell the assistant to check the baby’s pulse – just in case – or for Anne Chaffey to intervene, even though he had no idea to what purpose. But he did nothing. He told himself they must surely know what they were doing, that it was not his place… And then, as he watched the assistant disappear inside the clinic with her pitiful burden, he started to weep.
Ethiopia made him feel like this: to feel suffocated and oppressed, to have scarcely the strength to move. He was as ashamed of these feelings as he was startled by the tears that now escaped from beneath his shut eyelids. The nurse stopped talking, and he wondered if it was his tears that had so suddenly and successfully dammed the unending flow of statistics. He opened his eyes to see her quickly turn away and look into the distance, over the heads of the waiting crowd. He supposed it was either to give him time to recover, or because she didn’t know what to say. Finally, she glanced in his direction. It was a shrewd, appraising look, both unselfconscious and uncritical.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t usually…’ He was mortified, and had to make an effort to stifle the urge to tell her that he never cried. He wasn’t one for public displays of emotion, especially in circumstances like these. Here he would have regarded them as a futile, self-serving gesture.
She looked sympathetic, but said nothing. She did, briefly, put a hand on his arm, however, and give it a small squeeze before turning away to scan the people encamped in front of her clinic. ‘I just have to deal with something inside, Mr Burles’, she said a moment later. ‘A crisis – another one.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘I shan’t be too long,’ and, stepping carefully between the refugees, she disappeared through the door – the same door that the assistant carrying the dead baby had walked through a few minutes earlier. Adrian suspected she was being diplomatic, and wanted to give him a moment or two by himself to gather his thoughts.
He felt not just out of place but out of uniform, like a twitchy middle-aged business executive unused to wearing the informal clothes he now found himself in: neatly pressed shorts that went down to the knees, and a baggy T-shirt whose sole purpose – although he would have denied it – was an attempt to hide his bulky frame. Streaks of sunblock were visible on his forearms, legs and the back of his neck, but his face, especially his forehead, beneath the thick crew cut of his salt-and-pepper hair, was already burning red. He was aware, painfully aware, of being a Westerner – pampered, clean, prosperous, heavily perspiring – but most of all, white. Screamingly, obviously white. And screamingly, obviously well fed. Not just cuddly (as he would have described himself), but overweight. He wouldn’t have stuck out more if he’d been stark naked.
Around him were strangers – aliens, skeletons covered in skin. Skin that was translucent and taut, lying over bones like the varnished tissue paper on a child’s model airplane. Heads more like skulls, eyes sunken, hands and feet merely skin and bones. He fought to block the obscenely uncomfortable thought that kept presenting itself to him, the startling similarity to the black-and-white photographs he’d seen of Jewish inmates at Belsen and Auschwitz after liberation. The only difference was that the people around him now were an inky, midnight, coal-like black. Screamingly, obviously black. And screamingly, obviously underfed.
He tried to avoid everyone’s eye. What was the point in trying to engage with anyone? he asked himself. To bridge such gulfs, of colour and nutrition, was an impossibility, and, anyway, he didn’t speak their language. Even a smile in such circumstances would be meaningless. It would most likely be interpreted as an insult, or as a sign of indifference. Fortunately, no one seemed in the slightest bit interested in him; even the children barely glanced in his direction. Everyone was paralysed by torpor. So he stood there – in the dust, out of place, like a cuckoo in a nest of sparrows – and wallowed in a feeling he’d never before experienced: inadequacy.
He was eventually rescued by Anne Chaffey emerging from the clinic. ‘People who visit us are always so moved.’ She was obviously referring to the tears he’d shed a few minutes earlier. These had already dried on his face, leaving his skin feeling uncomfortably taut.
‘Is it possible not to be?’
‘Sometimes, Mr Burles. People’s responses can be surprising. But I always say to visitors, if only those at home could see what you’re seeing. If they could see what’s right in front of us now, and what I see every day, I know they would also be moved. Then they’d be only too happy to help us. Witnessing makes people generous.’
At the time, those words meant little to him, and he’d simply shrugged as if to say, what can you do? ‘We do our best to explain to people… You know… So that they can experience… It’s my job, of course, to…’ His sentences, like rivulets of water on the fringes of a desert, petered out in the heat. He found it almost too great an effort to speak. When he opened his mouth, the hot air made him gasp. He wanted to retreat into the clinic, but knew it was almost as hot in there, possibly hotter.
Later that afternoon, he said goodbye to the old nurse, thanked her for showing him around the health clinic, and flew back to Addis Ababa with the Australian Tim Haden, owner of the private charter business, Abyssinia Air. He felt dissatisfied leaving Korem. Apart from having reached a clearer understanding of the scale of the problem facing charities like Africa Assist, he felt he’d achieved little. It was as if he’d seen a play, been a member of a theatre audience, no more than a spectator – removed, despite having been moved.
‘Learn anything useful?’ the pilot shouted over the roar of the Cessna as the plane climbed over the refugee camp. From above, it resembled a pustular growth on the face of the small town, a mishmash of canvas and cardboard on dead, flattened soil. It was barren, dull and grey, little different from the desert that lay at the foot of the escarpment to the east. A pall of smoke hung above the camp from the countless fires that littered the area, making the sky the same smudgy umber that wraps itself around the industrial towns of the English Midlands. Adrian felt he might be looking down into the ninth circle of Dante’s inferno: all that was missing was the screaming and the wailing. To the south of the camp he could just make out Anne Chaffey’s health clinic.
‘The problem seems intractable, almost too large to comprehend or deal with. I think that’s what I’ve learnt.’
‘Believe it or not, mate, it’s better than it was a couple of years back. Although there are still too many people dying of malnutrition – but then I guess you know that.’
‘Despite Band Aid and Live Aid?’
‘They need a few good harvests rather than money, that’s what many people don’t understand.’
They flew on in silence.
‘If you like, I’ll take you over the desert. It’s scarcely out of the way, and it’s worth seeing.’
A moment later the single-engined Cessna banked towards the east in a broad arc, and it was as if the plane, already airborne, abruptly took off over the edge of the escarpment. The land beneath them simply disappeared. Adrian felt the sudden updraught of air almost throw the small plane back over the clifftop, but then they were descending, the noise of the engine rising in pitch as the plane fell. They finally levelled out, to Adrian’s relief, a couple of hundred feet above the sand.
The emptiness of the environment filled him with foreboding. He felt out of his depth. Such surroundings couldn’t be contained. There were no familiar hedgerows here, no wire fences or dry stone walls to mark off boundaries alongside winding country lanes, nothing to separate one person’s property from another’s, nothing to say this is mine and that is yours – no civilization. This place, which ran wild and unpossessed into the distance, belonged to no one, and Adrian found himself oppressed by the weight of its emptiness. As he stared out, almost mesmerized by its strangeness, he recalled, from school, how Nature hates a vacuum, yet it had left one here. Below them there was nothing, and this nothingness spread as far as the eye could see, to the gentle, barely discernible curve at the very edge of the world. There it doubtless fell away into another void. Certainly there were daubs of coarse grass to be seen here and there, a meagreness of black volcanic rocks, even the rare shrub, but the overall effect was of an immense infinity of sand, like the edge of some huge canvas which the artist has yet to get around to working on. It was as if the subject of the painting were far away in the centre of the canvas, possibly in Europe, while here in a corner of Africa the artist had only found time to apply, in hurried, careless strokes, broad slashes of undercoat. It was the dried-out, burnt-up, barely formed edge of a continent.
Their matchbox plane was being thrown around by the hot air rising off the desert as if in the hands of an incompetent puppeteer. Adrian’s stomach rose and fell in a matching rhythm, but always slightly out of sync, always a split second later. He wondered if he was going to be sick.
‘See them over there?’
He peered through the small, distorted and scratched plastic window at his side, and at first was unable to see what had caught the pilot’s eye, but then he spotted an ectopic human shape, a speck in the enormity of the sun-blackened lava desert below, insect-like in its insignificance. And then his eyes focused on others, groups and individuals, strung out in a meandering, far-flung thread.
‘They’re heading for Weldiya,’ Tim shouted over the noise of the engine. ‘That’s the track they’re on.’ He was twisted round in his seat, and Adrian wished he wouldn’t ignore the controls for such long periods of time. ‘They say there are still 500 refugees arriving there every day.’
More statistics, Adrian thought, more meaningless numbers, but he said nothing. The pilot seemed determined to talk (so much for Australians being laconic, Adrian thought). ‘The country’s always going to have problems while there’s fighting.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’
‘But none of the factions in the civil war will allow peace unless it’s on their own terms.’
Adrian nodded, reluctant to be drawn in.
‘Reason I’m telling you this, it’s generally reckoned most of the food you lot fly in goes straight into the pockets of the military, and it’s their relocation policy that’s largely to blame for the famine in the first place. The fact they steal most of the relief food just adds insult to injury.’
‘It’s impossible to prevent it. That’s how it is: armies always do well in famines.’
The pilot grunted, and the two men sank back into the close embrace of another sticky silence. They both, separately, contemplated the enormity of the task facing Ethiopia, a task personified in the figures barely visible in the desert landscape beneath them.
Adrian asked: ‘What’s the idea behind the resettlements?’ When Tim looked surprised, he added: ‘I’m a little new to this; never been in Ethiopia before.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Public relations. Africa Assist is a client of ours.’
The pilot nodded, staring at him, a little mystified, before saying: ‘The government moves people from areas where there’s little food to areas where it’s more plentiful. Claims their motives are humanitarian, but what they’re really doing is isolating the rebels by taking away their bases. They also want cheap labour for their agricultural enterprises in the south of the country.’
Without turning his head, Adrian said, ‘You can do that kind of thing when you’re a dictator.’ He’d never understood why dictators received such a bad press. If people were determined to prove they couldn’t run their own lives, then someone needed to do it for them; it was as simple as that. An individual was better at solving problems than any government. ‘At least it’s their own government they have to contend with.’
‘Meaning?’
‘At least it’s not a colonial power, the Italians, the British or the French that they’re dealing with now.’ This is exhausting, he thought. I’m too tired. And he decided there and then to be less forthcoming, and hope to discourage the pilot from further conversation.
‘The Ethiopians have never been colonized – or so they claim.’
‘What about the Italians?’
‘Like to pretend they were never here. Selective amnesia, I’d call it. But they’ve been colonized now – since 1985.’
Adrian frowned, not understanding.
‘By you lot – by the aid agencies. Since Live Aid, you’ve become the country’s new masters.’
Adrian wondered if he was being criticized, but rather than attempt to come to any conclusion, he said, with the slightest of smiles, ‘If you ask me, the only answer for Ethiopia – and every other country in Africa – is to be recolonized.’
The pilot blew through his lips, almost as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. He looked momentarily puzzled, perhaps unsure as to whether his companion meant what he was saying. ‘You being serious?’
‘It’s the only solution I know that would sort out this mess.’
‘Doubt it would go down well in Cape Town – to pick one city at random.’
‘Even the South Africans are incapable of getting their affairs in order. As for the rest of the continent, it’s a disaster. Take Somalia as a case in point. Or Sudan, Kenya, the Congo, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, Liberia, Zimbabwe – you name it. Africa has everything, except the people to rule it. At least when the British were here, the place was run efficiently.’
Tim stared out of the cockpit. Whether he was examining the distant horizon or the outrageousness of Adrian’s last statement, it was hard to tell. Perhaps he was reluctant to argue with a client. Then, as if deciding an oblique rejoinder might be the best approach, he said with a grin: ‘You Brits can never face up to the fact that the only successful colony you ever established was Australia. And that was by mistake.’
Adrian ignored the provocation. He stared at the large, solid man in the pilot’s seat, with his long, thick blond hair swept back from his forehead and his eyes deep set like the embrasures of a coastal fortification (probably used to scanning some outback scene, far inland from any sea), and was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how he himself must come across to this self-sufficient Antipodean. Tim was likely seeing the face of someone for whom life has been a little too easy, a face that was a little too plump and soft, a little too round and unlined. He’d think it was the face of someone who wouldn’t survive long in the wild.
The pilot was pointing down to where the flat plains of eastern Ethiopia are funnelled into a deep gorge by the mountains that surround Addis Ababa. The towering, three-and-a-half-thousand feet red cliffs resembled fortress walls protecting the city against the onslaught of the desert. Elegant spurs and solitary summits, bluish in the afternoon sun, paraded their majesty and fertility over the flat sterility of the Danakil Desert far below. ‘That’s the Great Rift Valley and the Awash River down there. Reckon that’s where humans first appeared in the world, the cradle of civilization. Twelve years or so ago – in 1974 I think it was – anthropologists discovered Lucy there, a fossilized skeleton that was about three or four million years old.’
Adrian was more interested in the fact that a pilot – an Australian pilot, what’s more – should know so much about a country that wasn’t his own.
‘That’s where it all started,’ Tim said, almost to himself, shaking his head with wonder. ‘That’s where we all started.’
Ten minutes later they were talking to traffic control at the international airport, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Almost immediately they were given the all clear to land. They flew low over a World War Two Russian transport plane rusting at the end of the runway. After they touched down, they taxied to the terminal building.
At two in the morning, Adrian woke up in his Addis Ababa hotel room, and was unable to get back to sleep. Perhaps it was sleeping in a strange bed, or that he was upset by all that he’d seen at Korem, or that he was too wound up, but he lay for a long time with thoughts teeming through his brain: the refugee camp, work, Judith and Emma, the famine, Anne Chaffey… Round and round they went, in no particular order and with little sense of logic, a whirlpool he was unable to escape from. And then, in the middle of all this, quite out of the blue, without any conscious effort on his part, the nurse’s statement hit him. And at exactly the same time, so did the solution. He turned on the light, reached for the notepad and pen he always kept at his bedside for moments like this, and began scribbling, He was terrified to lose any of his inspiration. After that, he began to think, to take the idea that had come to him in a subconscious flash a few minutes earlier, and worked on it, applied logic to it, picked and nagged at it until it revealed so much more, details that opened up a whole world of possibilities.
He was so excited that he wanted to phone someone and share his discovery, but he knew Judith would be fast asleep. Anyway, she was likely to have been slumberously dismissive, as she was with any of her husband’s ideas that were to do with work. Nor could he wake Emma – like most 14-year-olds, she slept like a log. Everyone else in the UK, including his business partner, would also be asleep. Even for this revelation, he couldn’t presume to wake someone up in the small hours. Eventually, he turned out the light, and tried to get some sleep, but not before having decided to postpone his flight back to London, and to call Tim first thing and get him to fly back to Korem. He had to talk to Anne Chaffey immediately.
Soon after ten the next day, he was back in the Cessna, flying north. Anne Chaffey was taken aback to see him again so soon, but when they sat down in her tiny office at the back of the clinic, she soon became engrossed in what he had to say. Adrian kept calm, and explained – or sold – his idea as simply as possible. As well as attempting to foresee any worries she might have, he also emphasized the fact that it had been her words that had inspired him in the first place.
Her only real worry – apart from the logistics of the project – turned out to be with its ethical aspects. But, to Adrian’s surprise, she proceeded to argue against each of these as soon as she raised them. He simply had to sit there, nod his head vigorously and say every now and again, Yes, Anne… Absolutely… Quite right… I agree…
‘I imagine you’re looking for a young person, Mr Burles.’
‘You must call me Adrian.’
‘I feel more comfortable…’
‘I insist. We can’t be so formal when we’ll be living on top of each other for several weeks if this goes ahead.’
She nodded, so reluctantly she could almost have been shaking her head.
‘I think, ideally, someone in their late teens or early twenties.’
‘And male?’
‘I’ll leave that to you. What do you think?’
‘It’s very much a male-orientated society, and although it pains me to do anything that might perpetuate that inequality, I’m not sure it would be acceptable to ask a woman to undertake such a task.’
Adrian was pleased she was thinking things through as carefully as he himself had done. It gave him faith in her.
‘There’s no one suitable in the clinic at the moment. As for the camp, I’d prefer not to involve them if at all possible.’
‘Why’s that?’
She sat straight-backed before him, her lined, suntanned face, although austere, looking emphatically granny-like. There was a gently humorous warmth in the eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. They sparkled with life, and there was a softness in her hair, which was delicately curled and white.
‘In the Korem camp, and also in the seven camps around Mek’ele, there’s a bureaucracy that can be quite overwhelming. I’ve heard stories,’ she added, smiling suddenly, leaving the three words alone to tell those stories.
‘What kind of stories?’
‘Oh, that’s not so important,’ she said dismissively. ‘It’s their attitude that will be a problem, especially with a request as unusual as this one. The camps are full of young aid workers, and, heaven forbid there’s anything wrong with that – far from it, but they can be, well, how shall I put this…? Maybe I have spent too long working on my own, but I feel they can be a little earnest and idealistic at times – too hesitant and overly suspicious.’ She smiled. ‘“It can’t be done, it can’t be done,” they tell me over and over again – even about the most trivial request – and they demand the filling in of countless forms, and emphasize the necessity of consulting with Paris or Geneva or New York rather than making any kind of decision themselves. You could be waiting for months, possibly years, before you receive an answer. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they’ll be happy to cooperate, anyway.’
‘But we only need one person, for heaven’s sake, to borrow one person, that’s all we’re looking for.’ And even though this imagined youthful slayer of dreams was not before him now, he supposed Anne Chaffey was right. If such people, with their do-gooding, pious sentiments and their tunnel-vision minds could try even the patience of an old nurse, he was unlikely to get far with them.
‘“We can’t just let you walk out of here with someone who’s in our care,”’ the nurse parroted, ‘“it would be irresponsible, even immoral.” That would be their justification.’ She giggled. ‘But I’m being most uncharitable.’
‘How can they talk about morality and responsibility in this chaos, in this hell where people, despite all the food and medicine, are still dying? Are you saying Korem would also be like that?’
She hesitated. ‘I’ve been here a long time, Adrian, long before Korem and the other camps were set up to cope with the latest famine. My primary concern has always been the long-term health of the locals, whereas their primary concern is to feed people.’ She picked up a folder lying on top of the small table, and carried it across to the filing cabinet in the corner of the room. It was as if she were saying she couldn’t spare any more time simply sitting and chatting to Adrian. ‘There’s some crossover between us, and with so much food now being flown in from the West, the camp is able to keep us supplied too. This is necessary because many refugees from the Tigray and Wollo districts still come here, to the clinic. They’ve known about us for many years, and see no difference between us and a refugee camp; to them we’re both sources of relief.’
She closed the cabinet door and returned to sit at the table. ‘So, although we work closely with their aid workers, I wouldn’t be happy involving them in this.’
Adrian shrugged. ‘Well, you should know.’
‘There’s also a problem with refugees not wanting to leave the camps.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Why would you leave when you have food and shelter, when there are soldiers outside the camp who may kill you? The civil war is still being fought. It’s much safer to live in a camp.’
‘I’ve heard there are many who’d be more than happy to leave the camps. I understood they regard them as a last resort, almost as an admission of defeat. A nurse I met in London, someone who worked in Ethiopia in 1985, told me she never had it in her to send anyone to the camps. It didn’t matter if they were starving, her conscience wouldn’t allow it. “It’s a death sentence” was how she put it to me.’
Anne moved her head from side to side, as if weighing up the options. ‘I think that’s a little exaggerated, even for then. They do their best in an impossible situation. It’s the local officials who are to blame for making the camps difficult to run. There’s theft, corruption and, worst of all, incompetence.’
By early afternoon, everything had been agreed. Anne would find a suitable person, and Adrian would return to London and make as many arrangements as he could in the meantime. ‘But we must do it this year, and preferably this summer. August would be perfect, Anne. It still gives us time to organize everything. Do you think you can find someone in that time?’
‘I’ll try.’
Anne struck Adrian as being trustworthy and efficient and, best of all, someone who had invaluable experience with Ethiopians, yet he still worried. It was such an amazing PR stunt, it just had to succeed, no matter how crazy the rest of the world might think it. But he understood that if the nurse couldn’t organize things in Korem in his absence, then his dream was in serious danger. Everything hinged on her finding the right person.
‘And, of course, you’ll come to London as well?’
She looked doubtful, almost panicked. ‘It will be hard for me to get away.’
‘But, Anne, you have to. We couldn’t do this without you.’ It was a huge admission for Adrian to make. He was a man who considered anything was possible so long as he himself was involved; other people did not usually feature.
‘Well, I do have a sister in Yorkshire whom I haven‘t seen for over 20 years, so it would be nice to visit her.’
‘There you go then. It’s settled.’ But he sensed her hesitation.
He returned to London to sell his idea to James Balcombe. He didn’t foresee any problems in that area; the executive director of Africa Assist was an ineffectual, even weak man, who was more interested in the social introductions that arose from working for a well-known charity than in any good it might achieve for strangers barely existing on some far-off continent. He did have a heart, but in the main his feelings were a little abstract and easily ambushed when not directly involving himself.
At the end of his first day back at work, however, before discussing the matter with anyone else, Adrian spoke to his partner at Talcott & Burles.
He explained to Jack Talcott how greatly affected he had been by his visit to Ethiopia, never before having understood either the scale or the horror of the famine. ‘Neither Live Aid nor Band Aid really brought home to me the sheer size of this humanitarian disaster. And that’s important, Jack, that word, humanitarian. Remember, we’re talking human beings here; that old cliché, about people not being statistics. It’s too easily forgotten by all of us, myself included.’
Jack Talcott respected his partner too much either to interrupt him or to argue with him – at least not before he’d had the opportunity to put his case. He nodded, said nothing, and topped up both glasses of wine.
‘I was genuinely moved by what I saw – and you of all people know what a cynic I am.’
‘I certainly do.’
Adrian told his partner about Anne Chaffey, and what she’d told him, and the impact of her words. ‘At first I didn’t take in what she said, but it obviously sank in somewhere.’ He changed the subject suddenly. ‘Remember how we were talking about the Tobu World Square theme park a few months ago?’
‘That place in Japan where they’re going to have more than 40 World Heritage sites, and over 100 perfect replicas of world-famous architectural works and ancient monuments?’
‘That’s right. All on a scale of 1/25. The Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Taj Mahal, Big Ben and the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids and the Parthenon, St Peter’s Basilica and the White House – they’ll all be there, in the park, when it opens in the 1990s.’
‘And the sites are going to be populated by around 140,000 miniature people, each just three inches high.’
‘Correct.’
The Lilliputian figurines especially appealed to Adrian because of the way they’d bring an instantly understandable scale to the project. ‘The theme park means that, instead of travelling around the world to see these marvels, the Japanese will be able to drive a few miles out of Tokyo and photograph themselves against each of them, all on the same day. It’ll be easier, quicker and less expensive than visiting the originals. Which is quite something – if,’ he added with a smile, ‘you’re into that kind of thing.’
He stopped pacing the room and, standing directly in front of his partner, said: ‘Imagine if we could do the same as the Tobu World Square Park for Africa Assist?’
Jack looked blank. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘What if we brought a starving person to London? If we placed the reality of Africa right on our own front doorstep? Instead of Londoners going to Africa, which only a few people ever even consider, why not bring Africa to London? Just as the Japanese will be doing with all of the world’s great tourism icons. That would really make people sit up and take notice.’
Jack became enthusiastic. And Adrian thought, this is a great idea if only because everyone believes it’s a great idea. Even though he’d only explained it to Anne and Jack so far, both of them had immediately seen its potential. He then made a request of his partner that he didn’t expect to be a problem, but it had to be asked. ‘I want to take a month off. I want to become a full time consultant with Africa Assist. I want to run this operation from within their organization. Can you do without me for that amount of time?’
His partner laughed. ‘You’ll hardly be missed. We probably won’t even notice your absence.’
‘Thanks, Jack.’
‘But has James Balcombe agreed to you doing this?’ Jack knew how easily his partner was carried away by sudden enthusiasms.
‘Not as yet. I wanted to speak to you first. That’s my next task.’
Adrian wasn’t at all surprised when James Balcombe struggled to get his head around the idea; the thinking was too outside the box. He watched him puzzle over the implications of what he’d been told, like a child listening to a teacher explaining the principles of algebra for the first time. When he spoke, eventually, it was with his usual ponderous, almost carping tone of voice. James didn’t do enthusiasm; he preferred looking for problems.
‘I’m being totally honest when I say this: it worries me sick.’ (Adrian knew of his client’s inclination to speak in hyperbole.) ‘I’m not sure you understand the implications of what we could be letting ourselves in for here.’ (Adrian also knew of his client’s inclination to miss the whole point of an argument.) ‘This could all go horribly wrong, Adrian. We can’t afford to damage our reputation, you know. Africa Assist is highly regarded amongst the people who count. There’s never been even a whiff of scandal attached to our name.’
Adrian did his best to reassure. ‘Everything will be all right. Trust me, James. This is going to be the biggest thing you’ve ever done. It could be bigger than Live Aid.’
‘That’s absurd. I’d remind you Geldof raised millions of pounds.’
‘I still think we could be bigger.’ As he said it, Adrian wondered if he wasn’t being wildly optimistic. But he knew that only if he appeared to be without a scintilla of doubt would he receive the necessary backing from James. ‘On top of which, I want to run the show. One advantage of this is that you can keep the whole thing at arm’s length. If it’s a failure, I’ll be the one who cops all the flak; if it’s a success – as I’m sure it will be – I’m more than happy for you to step forward and receive the plaudits.’
‘That’s all very well…’ There was a ‘but’ in there somewhere, but Balcombe never managed to reach it. Instead he stood up and moved from behind his desk to sit down, with a weak groan, on the sofa next to Adrian. It was an unconscious attempt to show Adrian that although James considered himself to be on a different, as in higher, level from him, he had the generosity of spirit to play the egalitarian card, to bring himself down to Adrian’s level. His PR consultant could see this quite clearly; James couldn’t. ‘It’s a crazy idea,’ he said, ‘quite mad, and I don’t believe we should do it.’
‘Crazy or not, the idea is everything. And that’s why you employed Talcott & Burles, remember? You wanted us to make you famous. That was your brief, James, and that’s what this idea will achieve.’
Balcombe perked up a little at this remark, but only momentarily. Like many weak people, he could be stubborn. ‘I could forbid it, you know.’ It was a feeble rejoinder.
‘Of course you could, but you won’t, will you? That would be stupid, and you know it. You missed out on Live Aid and Band Aid, with most of the money going to the big charities like Oxfam, Save the Children and World Vision. You don’t want that to happen again, and this will make sure it doesn’t. Believe me, you’ll have the other charities, even the juggernauts, knocking on your door, begging for a slice of the action. They’ll go crazy with jealousy.’
James smiled at this possibility, but persisted with a final, weak, ‘I still have grave doubts about such a project’. But he had already begun to sound as if he was exhausted by their disagreement.
At that point, Adrian knew he’d won. He didn’t relent though. ‘I’ll say it again, James, this is why you employed us, to raise your profile. It’s our area of expertise, it’s the only reason we took on your business in the first place – on a pro bono basis, I have to remind you.’ The executive director looked pained by this reminder. It perhaps made him conscious of having a somewhat lowly status in the corporate world. ‘You need this kind of publicity; it’s the only way Africa Assist can survive.’
‘I’d remind you that we’ve been doing all right for a few years now.’
‘All right isn’t good enough. The world is changing. You have to stay ahead of the game, otherwise you’re finished.’
Finally, James Balcombe gave the project his very half-hearted support, but only on condition that his trusted assistant, Dave Parker, worked closely with Adrian on its planning and implementation. Adrian had little time for Dave, considering him an ineffectual and sycophantic nobody, too busy agreeing with everything his boss said to ever be capable of doing anything worthwhile by himself. But he didn’t see any problem working alongside him; he’d be harmless.
Three weeks later he received a call from Anne. She’d found someone. She described him to Adrian over the phone, her voice fading in and out as if she were speaking to him outdoors in the middle of a snowstorm. The static was dreadful.
Two days later, he flew out of London.
