Merger By Matrimony

And the weather wasn’t helping matters. The rains this time round were considerable, and she felt as though she was literally and figuratively drowning.

‘You’d better go home for the day,’ she said at a little after twelve, when the rain was threatening to turn into a storm. She could barely make herself heard above the crashing of the rain against the window panes. ‘And, Paolo, make sure that your brothers do some reading.’ She managed a weak smile, ushering her little troop to the door and making them don plastic hoods which were fairly useless in a downpour of this nature and anyway would probably be merrily discarded the minute the compound was out of sight.

It was surreal to think that less than three months ago she had been in England, wearing clothes that looked like clothes and shoes that were ornamental rather than useful. She glanced across the open courtyard and through the driving rain saw her father beckoning to her.

‘An emergency!’ he was yelling, although the noise swept away a good part of what he was saying, and Destiny sighed and nodded, hurrying along the corridors of the wooden building and emerging a few minutes later through the door to her father’s office.

‘Apologise for disrupting your class, darling.’ He ran his fingers through his sparse, greying hair and gave her a worried look. ‘I’ve been radioed from El Real that there’s an emergency.’

‘What kind of emergency?’

‘Lone tourist has bumped into some of our mosquitoes and contracted some kind of parasitic infection. Or, at least, that’s what Enrique seems to think, but he’s no doctor.’

‘What about the medical services there?’ Though ‘medical services’ was something of an overstatement to describe the sole hard-working doctor with whom they had fairly regular communication.

‘Pablo’s been called away for another emergency a few kilometres away and seems to have become stranded out there by the rains. Dessie, I know you probably don’t want to do this, but there’s no one else. If Henri had been here I would have asked him, but, really, with me gone I’d need our own qualified doctor here just in case. We’ve had to deal with two snake bites already in the past couple of days, and Lord knows what’s happening towards Cana. I’ve had reports of fevers.’ He looked as weary as she had ever seen him.

‘Right. I’ll get something packed.’ She carried on discussing their method of transport, none too reliable in the current deluge, but she could feel her heart sinking fast. Her father was right. She didn’t want to go. There was enough to do here and the trip, which would probably take hours and be a nightmare journey, filled her with sudden dismay.

All she wanted to do was huddle away in her room and let her mind travel back through time.

Within the hour they had told the various other members of the compound what was happening, and were climbing into their four-wheel drive.

The journey would be a combination of road and river and promised to be hellish. Despite the onslaught of rain the atmosphere was stifling and humid, and she knew that, given the muddy nature of the pathways linking all these small towns, they would spend at least a proportion of their time clearing morass from the roads in an attempt to get through. It was always the same during the rainy seasons, and this time it would be a thousand times worse because of the quantity of rainfall.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ Destiny told her father, as they progressed at a snail’s pace, with the wipers going at a rate. ‘Why do tourists feel that they can travel unaided into this part of the world? What gives them the right to expect help when they get themselves into a muddle?’

‘This sounds a little worse than a lost tourist who’s got into a muddle,’ her father said, craning forward to make sure that he kept to the barely visible marked path.

‘We’ll get there and he’ll have nothing more than a few mosquito bites and a bad cold from getting soaked.’

‘Not from what Enrique says.’

‘Enrique runs the grocery store and a rooming house!’ Destiny grumbled on insistently. ‘He’s not likely to be much of a gem when it comes to diagnosing illnesses! Did he say what the symptoms were?’

‘Raging fever, apparently. The man’s hallucinating.’

‘I feel like I’m about to hallucinate,’ she said, wiping her face with the rag she had brought with her. ‘This car is going to self-combust in a minute.’ The windows were rolled down, but only very slightly to allow for the rain and the heat inside the car was fierce. Even with the miniature fan affixed to the dashboard she could still feel beads of sweat rolling down her face and making her body feel like oil. She rolled her glass down a few more centimetres and was rewarded with a wash of water across her face. It was better, at any rate, than the humidity.