John Simpson - Change of Course

‘I suppose not, but it’s simple really. We just started talking to one another from then on, that was all, and we found we got on well and had a lot in common. I also granted him a favour; I took him into the sort house so he could help to pick the diamonds from the test; he’d never been in there before and he was interested to see how things were done. As a quid pro quo, he gave me a geological tour, including the Txicaca river diversion. We spent a lot of time with one another in the next few weeks. They turned out to be his last.’

Chapter 5

For once I was looking forward to going to the sort house. Normally I loathed, even dreaded, the place but I was carried along on the crest of Lodge’s wave of enthusiasm. At the gate, I dealt with the bureaucracy for getting him a visitor’s pass; then we went inside. The clang and thud of the door closing behind us was like a switch; Lodge’s mood changed visibly. The sort house was a place that sounded good in conversation but in fact it was a dingy hellhole. It seemed to suck the ebullience out of Jim, like an austere poultice. There was no natural light, the place swarmed with flies and armed guards, and the atmosphere was oppressive: stagnant, hot and humid.

We passed through the second tier of security checks and I led Lodge to the changing room where we stripped naked under the CCTV cameras and donned the loose-fitting, pocket-less shirts and shorts that were the uniform for everyone with a hands-on role in the sort house.

‘How can you work in here?’ Lodge asked.

‘I don’t. I only come in when I have to: for the end-of-month production panic, the diamond exports and the routine checks that I do as rarely as I can get away with. The rest of the time, I’m out in the open like you.’

‘You don’t have quite the same freedom though. You’re still on the plants; they’re fixed locations. I have some tied responsibilities: mining blocks and river diversions, but most of the time I’m out in the bush; sometimes I just head off on a compass bearing. Tell you what; how about me giving you a tour around? Is Saturday okay with you? It’ll be my pay back for this little treat.’

‘Some treat,’ I said, ‘but yeah, you’re on.’

I took him through the dismal labyrinth of corridors to the picking room.

‘What’s that din, David?’ An irregular, staccato chattering like a misfiring machine gun echoed through the building.

‘That’s the x-ray sorters.’

‘Blimey, they’re a lot noisier than I expected.’

I told him that it was usually quieter; the rowdiness was because we were processing the Txicaca material. I explained that the sorters fired x-rays at the gravel, causing any diamonds to fluoresce. Sensors then detected the emitted light and fired compressed air at the source to blast everything around it into a concentrate bin – clever and remarkably effective. The amount of noise was proportional to the number of diamonds; the compressed air was firing almost constantly.

In the picking room I introduced Lodge to Diogo, the Chief Sorter, an Angolan who looked constantly amused. I explained to him that Lodge and I would be helping the pickers for an hour or so with the concentrate from the test. I liked Diogo. We had shared many a joke and kept one another going on long sessions through the night at the end of a month, getting every last stone into the production. I knew he would keep a close eye on Lodge and would speak out if he thought he was not up to the job. A bad picker meant more work for him as it was his job to check what the other pickers had finished with. On a good day, he would find nothing. I doubted Lodge would let the side down though.

The noise of the x-ray sorters stopped. Diogo nodded for three of the security guards to leave the room with him. They took two Angolan pickers with them and they returned a few minutes later lugging a concentrate bin, like a small milk churn. Diogo and one of the guards then unlocked the picking cabinet and lifted the bin inside before locking it again. The picking cabinet was a large glovebox; a long stainless-steel table isolated from the outside by a steel frame with Perspex windows. It had four pairs of holes along each side, a shoulder-width apart; each hole was fitted with an arm-length glove – a barrier between man and diamond.

Lodge and I sat side-by-side on steel stools and put our arms into the gloves. Diogo sat opposite me and opened the concentrate bin. He shovelled out a small quantity of gravel into an aluminium tray and slid it across to me, and then he did the same for Lodge and the five Angolan pickers who occupied the other stools.

I took a pair of tweezers and began to sort systematically through the stones in my tray, picking out any diamonds and dropping them into a stainless-steel beaker. I did a running commentary for Lodge’s benefit and he was soon up to speed. He had started out worrying whether he would be able to distinguish a diamond from the rubbish but quickly learned that he could. Even the brownest, industrial-grade diamond has a quality that sets it apart from quartz and other shiny stones.

It took us less than an hour to pick all the stones from the test and the results were astounding. Lodge had recovered his excitement; he’d found four ‘specials’, diamonds weighing more than ten carats, and one of those was a beautiful, white octahedron with no obvious inclusions: it was just over 26 carats.

‘We think we’re lucky if we get two specials in a whole day,’ I confided, ‘but you picked four on your own, in an hour, and the rest of us found another thirteen. I’ll be surprised if it’s not a record for Mumbulo. It’s certainly the best I’ve ever heard of.’

Even Morgan came to the sort house to watch me sizing, counting and weighing the stones. Before we left, I sealed them in a steel box, which Diogo and I, under the close supervision of three security guards, took down to the safe in the strong room. The picking room was oppressive, but the strong room only lacked shackles and blood stains to distinguish it from a dungeon; I was always glad to get out. Our production for the month up until then had been below target and we were going to struggle even to get close to it with only a few days left. This tiny volume of river material had yielded enough diamonds to take us well beyond our target and there were some big, beautiful stones in there too.

***

‘How were the production targets set?’ asked Sophie when I had finished recounting the sort house episode.

‘They’re related to selling prices inferred from historical data. As I remember, every mining area has an average price per carat based on the size, colour and clarity of the average stone from there. A ten-carat stone’s worth much more than ten times that of a similar-quality one-carat stone.’

‘So, something like Txicaca would really skew the targets if over-exploited?’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? We got a beautiful ninety-carat stone once – that was from Txicaca – and it was worth a significant proportion of the value of the rest of the production; about 25,000 carats.’

‘So, did the target change for the next month?’

I told her I couldn’t remember, but I didn’t think so. ‘I certainly don’t remember a production target ever going down.’

‘Typical.’ We both laughed.

We were quiet for a while, sipping our wine, quite relaxed in each other’s company now. I reflected over my initial shock at seeing Sophie, with her uncanny likeness to Jim. I would have expected that spending some time with her and gaining familiarity with her character would provide her with a separate identity from Jim, and it had, but not completely. She not only had his looks, but she seemed also to have his intelligence, with her perceptive questioning and single-mindedness in getting the information she wanted. The fact that she was very obviously a woman was all that was stopping me from calling her Jim sometimes.