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  EPILOGUE

  I turned sixteen the week after I got home. Sami has an educational visa. She’s allowed to stay in Britain for two years, as long as she attends language school. She can already hold a decent conversation in English. I’ll be eighteen just after she finishes her course. We’ll go down the register office and get married under British law, then she’ll be able to get a passport and stay here forever.

  Everyone says I’m too young and it won’t last. If it was some girl I got off with at the school disco I’d take their point, but me and Sami have been through so much our love goes really deep. Some nights I lie awake listening to her breathe and thinking about her. Just watching her sends a shiver down me.

  Adam’s gone back to being a kid: playing Gameboy and eating too many sweets. When he talks about Africa in the daytime it’s all very abrupt and matter of fact, but he gets bad dreams at night. They’re mostly about the time his face got burned. He never goes to Mum. He always lifts the bottom of our duvet and crawls up the bed between me and Sami. Sometimes he doesn’t wake us up, you just open your eyes in the morning and he’s wedged between us.

  Mum is pretty lax. My uncles told me she was practically suicidal when she thought we were all dead. She was on pills and spent a couple of weeks in a clinic after a breakdown. When we got home, she was so happy she let us get away with murder. She didn’t care that I was sleeping with Sami. Adam got to sit up on his Playstation until midnight; then he’d say he was sick the next morning and Mum would let him off school. She’s got a bit stricter now, but we still get away with stuff we wouldn’t have dared do when Dad was alive.

  I don’t feel like the old me. I never had a single detention my first four years at secondary school, now I’m always in trouble. I answer back, I can’t be bothered with homework and I even got suspended for fighting. Some kid asked me how Jungle Girl was doing, meaning Sami. I punched his face until my fists were covered in his blood. It took two teachers to pull me off. I let my bad side out the bottle when I was in the jungle and now I’m home, I can’t go back to being a goody goody schoolboy. Sami’s exactly the same. She head butted some guy who cut the line in Kentucky Fried Chicken. It wasn’t even our line.

  I think about Africa all the time. There’s no news about the civil war. Not on television, in the papers, or even on the internet. Nobody cares about a seven year old war in a poor country. There’s no limit to how long these things last. In Angola, the civil war broke out on independence day in 1967 and it’s been going ever since. I’ll probably never know what happened to Captain, Beck and all the others. The law of averages says none of them will last more than a few years.

  A few days after I got back, I looked up Billy Mango on the internet. There’s about fifty fan sites out there and I couldn’t resist joining the Club Mango e-mail list. Six months after I got back, they finally sent out a message:

  Billy Mango sensationally re-emerged at a press conference in the capital yesterday to announce his return to state television. Billy is back in a new quiz format called Would You Like To Be A Millionaire? He is also in negotiations to write his autobiography, which will include sensational revelations about the last five years, which he has spent being held hostage by rebel brutes in the eastern jungle.

  Sami says she’ll slash Billy’s throat if she ever catches up with the traitorous creep. I laugh when she says it. She throws a CD box at my head. We end up on the floor beside our bed, snogging. She’s pulling off my school tie and I’m dragging her jeans down her legs. I can hear Adam running up the stairs and I just know he’s gonna burst in.

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