When it began to get dark and they prepared to leave, Basil Ross announced that he was not going – he would spend the night there and wait for his friend. ‘He would do the same for me,’ he said firmly, and could not be persuaded to leave and return in the morning with the search party. In the end Father De Montfort decided to stay with him. Next morning the others, along with a large and curious group from Bartica, arrived at first light to find Ross and the priest wet and hungry, and miserable because there was still no sign of the missing boy.
For two days searches were made of the forest around the creek and far beyond; then a party of policemen arrived from town with dogs and they spent two days combing the area, but there was no sign of Raatgever. The speculation was that he had wandered far into the forest, got lost and been eaten by a jaguar or had fallen into a bottomless pit. Some said that if he knew how to survive he could wander around the Mazaruni-Potaro jungle for months.
All this was decades ago, and there has never been a satisfactory explanation of the mystery. There were those who harboured the suspicion that Ross had somehow done away with Raatgever – those who remembered their intense rivalry of a few years before; but no one could provide a plausible account of how he might have accomplished this without leaving some trace of this presumed crime.
But what of Ross himself? What did he think? On that harrowing night spent at the foot of Baracara falls, Ross had told the Father that he felt responsible for Raatgever’s disappearance. It crossed the priest’s mind that Ross might be about to confess to having done some harm to Raatgever, and he blessed himself quietly and asked the boy if he felt he needed to go to confession. Ross replied that he didn’t know; he claimed that he had been quarrelling with Raatgever as they walked single file up the bed of the stream. He’d been jealous and angry that his friend and Alison Cossou seemed to be in love with each other and then he’d been annoyed with himself for having these feelings. At the top of the falls that morning Ross had been irritated anew over the fact that he and Raatgever couldn’t seem to get away from each other, that it had occurred to Raatgever to climb the waterfall at the same time that he’d begun ascending the rocks. Then Raatgever had followed him up the stream. After they had walked some distance he had told Raatgever that he was fed up with him and he claimed that his friend had replied tauntingly, saying: ‘You’ll never be rid of me, I’m your doppelgänger. Wherever you go, I will follow, like Ruth in the bible.’ This had made him more angry and he refused to look back at Raatgever, although the latter eventually began to plead with him.
‘I’m only joking, Ross. Look at me, I’m your best friend, I always was and always will be.’
‘I wish you’d disappear for good,’ Ross had told him.
‘You would suffer most if I did,’ was the reply from behind him. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you yet that we are nothing without each other? It’s your wonderful Catholic religion, Ross, that makes it impossible for you to accept the truth: we are two halves of a single soul. Please Ross, forgive me whatever it is that I’ve done to wrong you: forgive me and accept me – accept yourself.’
‘I wish to God you’d disappear, just disappear! Vanish!’ Ross had heard himself insist in a terrible, hissing voice.
Then, he told Father De Montfort, there was a long silence before he thought he heard Raatgever say, very quietly: ‘All right.’
After that he didn’t hear any sounds from behind him, and after this silence seemed to have lasted several minutes, he looked back. There was no sign of Raatgever and he’d turned and walked further up the stream, convinced that Raatgever was hiding somewhere to make fun of him. Some time later he’d turned back, looking carefully along both banks of the creek, but refusing to call his friend’s name, thinking that Raatgever meant to teach him a lesson by remaining hidden. He’d then returned to the top of the falls. He told Father De Montfort that he still expected Ratty to show up triumphantly, perhaps early next morning, and that his friend was doing this to punish him – adding after a pause that he (Ross) deserved to be punished for what he had said.
But hours later that night, after it had rained and they had begun to hear the noises of bats and animals in the surrounding forest, Ross said to the priest, as though continuing a current conversation: ‘Unless he really disappeared, Father – unless I made him disappear...’
‘And how could you have done that, child? How does one make a human being disappear?’
‘I don’t know, Father.’ And Ross began to weep.
Father De Montfort tried to comfort Ross and, at the boy’s insistence, gave him absolution for the sin of being angry with his friend and wishing for his disappearance. Father De Montfort tried to convince him that, if he was telling the truth, it was illogical to feel guilty, since it was not possible to make a human being disappear simply by wishing it. The priest also advised him not to repeat the story, since it would feed the superstitions of the ungodly and, in any case, was unlikely to lead to the recovery of his friend.
* * *
In August that year it was announced that Basil Raatgever had achieved the top marks in the A-level examinations and would have been awarded the scholarship to do university studies. Ross was named proxime, having achieved the second best results in the country and in the absence of Raatgever was offered the scholarship. He accepted it, reflecting sorrowfully that he and his achievements still seemed tied to his vanished friend. Ross studied law in England, returning to Guyana after four years. He worked for a while in the Public Prosecutor’s office then, in the mid-1960s, he was appointed a legal officer in the Attorney General’s office, and has remained there to the present.
By all accounts, Basil Ross became a taciturn, solitary individual; he played no games, never competed with anyone and neither married nor pursued the opposite sex. He seemed to live for his job, gaining a reputation as an excellent drafter of complex legislation and legal opinion, though by virtue of his position his name was never formally associated with the work he authored. One can guess that this struck Ross as peculiarly appropriate: Raatgever had disappeared because of him, and he might have felt comforted by the thought that there was no identification of self or personality in the work he did; that he, Basil Ross, had disappeared almost as completely as Basil Raatgever. He refused appointments to other, more prominent positions in government service and while his superiors relied more and more on his knowledge and experience, there were others happy to claim the prominence he eschewed.
Ross, in turn, relied on his secretary, Miss Morgan – an efficient, old-fashioned civil service spinster – to keep the office running smoothly and to shield him from public exposure. The country had long forgotten the mystery of Raatgever’s disappearance, although on one or two occasions, not long after his return from England, Ross had permitted himself to be interviewed about the incident. He had hoped vaguely that the interviewer might have some new angle to explore; he knew that he had nothing useful to add to all that had been said before. He had been disappointed on each occasion, and decided he would not subject himself to any more journalistic probing.
People who knew him said that Basil Ross had changed physically after the incident: that he had become thin and ascetic-looking and, as the years passed, his physique began to resemble that of his vanished friend. He lived a life of careful routine – home to office, office to home. He visited his close relatives occasionally, but said very little and seemed to find casual conversation difficult. He remained devout in the practice of his religion and he was careful, through those oppressive years, to keep himself strictly above politics.
That might have been the end of the story, but then, in the mid-1990s, Basil Ross had a revelation. A number of eco-tourism companies had opened resorts in the Essequibo-Mazaruni area and one of these had rediscovered the Baracara falls, cleared the path and constructed a bridge over the little creek. A bathe in the ‘therapeutic waters’ of the falls was advertised in their brochure as one of the attractions of their tour package. This brochure had caught Basil Ross’s attention. This was in 1996.