But the bush societies, with their emphasis on the separation of body and soul, the presence of spirits and ancestors, shared a sufficient range of ideas with the Western religions they practised here for the children to look up to the cross or bow down to Mecca with a clear conscience, thought Anastasia darkly. But she would hate to test how deep their allegiance to the foreign ideas really was.
Anastasia had no sense of being watched at all. Nor any feeling of impending danger. Instead, all she felt, as increasingly often in these long, sultry evenings, was a vague, disturbing stirring of desire for her beautiful companion. Celine was tall and slim where Anastasia was slight and wiry. Her skin was café au lait, except in those areas where she had been beaten, burned and tortured in her previous incarnation as a freedom fighter. Her body moved with something close to liquidity, as though her belly, breasts, buttocks and thighs somehow contained viscous oil — palm oil perhaps — which caused them to judder, ripple and sway when Celine moved. Every action she made was performed with an unconscious, almost balletic elegance, except that she limped occasionally, and found unexpected pains in her shoulders where she had been introduced to the strappado. But even her imperfections made her more desirable in Anastasia’s eyes. The way Celine’s sweat-streaked blouse clung to her now, almost transparent in places, especially as her slim arms rose and fell pulling the bell-rope above her head. Her curls glittered with water droplets as though diamonds had been scattered amid ebony shavings. What breeze there was seemed to mould her skirt to her thighs.
Anastasia sighed. Shook herself a little. Her lazy sapphic lust wasn’t strong enough to get in the way of their friendship yet; for one thing, Celine gave no indication of noticing or returning it — but it was of increasing concern to the Russian woman. An itch she couldn’t scratch, in the old cliché. Made all the more itchy by the fact that the two of them shared accommodation, sleeping quarters, showers, everything. On occasion even clothes and underclothes.
Anastasia and Celine were by no means the only women in the organization. But they were the only women of the same age. They shared a calling — but not the burning fervour of the others. And, even among the disparate leadership of the church school, orphanage and rescue centre, they didn’t really fit in. Celine, after all, was an ex-freedom fighter, the Mother Teresa of Granville Harbour according to the media, though Anastasia thought Joan of Arc would have been more accurate. A survivor of President Banda’s torture cells and daughter of the current president — for all that her father and she had managed to disown each other almost immediately after he assumed power. Largely because he had failed to hold the promised elections.
Anastasia herself, lean and boyish — scrawny, she thought herself — with her skin dimpled in all sorts of places by piercings for bars, studs and rings she no longer wore, decorated in a wide range of areas with a disturbing array of tattoos, would hardly have fitted in anywhere — other than a Goth festival or a heavy metal rock concert. A fact which underlay the separation from her own billionaire biznizman father and family, and she made no secret of it. For she had indeed been a groupie to a heavy metal band, a drug addict and a crack whore before she managed to pull her life back together through a combination of good luck and sheer grit. And, as with Celine and her survival, through the blessed intervention of Richard and Robin Mariner.
Father Antoine, who doubled as head teacher and had been camp doctor until Celine arrived, came into the chapel then, followed by Sister Faith, who doubled as deputy head and nurse, laden with service sheets. In the absence of indigenous animal life nearby — hunted to extinction by starving villagers with access to guns rather than crops — he was a giraffe and she a hippopotamus. Brother Jacob, a water buffalo, who doubled as technology teacher and camp maintenance man, was unlikely to be joining them as he had more earthly responsibilities — to wit the generator, which had not liked the wet weather at all. He and the three eldest boys, whom he was training, would be labouring to ensure that there was light to combat the gathering darkness.
Sister Hope and Sister Charity were on dinner duty tonight, hovering like superannuated vultures over their task. There were nearly three hundred to feed, after all. And they too had half a dozen helpers from amongst the older girls. Working in parallel with them, the brawny elephant Ibrahim and his boys would be preparing halal food for the elegant leonine Imam Mohammed, the songbird Muezzin Samir and their flock. Neither of these enterprises relied on Brother Jacob’s power, physical or electrical — all the cooking was done over traditional fires, though what was cooked was by no means always so traditional for it depended on what the enterprise’s sponsors in America, Europe and Russia could send — and what of that made it through Granville Harbour and up on Nellie, the bizarrely named riverboat that laboured upstream from Malebo, the nearest outpost of civilization, and kept the place supplied. Tying up at the little pier down-slope from the chapel — a rickety little construct which had only just survived the floods — or sitting out mid steam if she was too heavily laden to risk the shallows, loading goods into the little rowing boat they kept tied to the pier to act as a lighter. Celine and Anastasia taught, doctored, nursed, and provided public faces for the enterprise. They were as adept at raising cash as they were at healing and teaching the children.
Immediately after Father Antoine and Sister Faith, the first of the children arrived. There was an instant, lively bustle. These youngsters were not the desperate, downtrodden, diseased charity cases of the big charity adverts. The jungle sanctuary gave them hope, health and training. And, above all, a way out, for twice a year at least — four times in the last eighteen months. Anastasia and Celine had taken twenty or thirty of the eldest downriver with them aboard Nellie all the way down to Granville Harbour — a journey of three days going and four returning, never to be undertaken lightly — and passed them on to the seminaries, colleges and university there.
Those voyages haunted Anastasia, not merely because they took her away from the solitude she enjoyed and thrust her into the bustle she increasingly hated, but because of the simple depression that they brought to her spirit. For they took her through a journey into desolation as well as memory. Past roadways that had been eight- and sixteen-lane highways in the seventies but, with only the rarest exceptions, were overgrown now and impassable to everything except motorbikes. Under Captain Christophe’s gentle tutelage, she learned to con Nellie past ruined villages and towns. Past mouldering jetties, port facilities and the rotting corpses of boats — even ships — that had once plied these waters to supply a burgeoning economy. An economy gone the way of the dinosaurs. Past the greatest folly of alclass="underline" Citematadi, a piece of urban development to rival Paris, its parks and boulevards all deserted and overgrown. Its buildings vacant and rotting.