Mountains of the Moon (45 page)

I nods and tears drip, wipes snot on my red knot.

“Shush,” I say. “Shush.”

“Help me, help me,” she says, gets terrible scared, “I don’t want to go on the spaceship.”

“I’m going to help you,” I says. “I’m going to help you now.”

She smiles and tears start pouring down her face and dribbles of words in strings hang off her chin.

“Shush,” I says.

She lays still while I climb on the bed. Starts to cry.

“Help me, help me.”

“Shush,” I says. I lean close over her ear, hum softly the tune of “One Fine Day.” She lifts her head nice and I pull the pillow from under it.

“On the sea…” She cries and nods her head, smiling.

“On the far horizon…” I says and puts the pillow over her face and leans on it heavy with all of my body. She bucks but I keep on singing softly “One Fine Day” til Pinkerton calls Butterfly and then she is perfect still and the performance is final, finished.

“Mr. Book,” I say, “I tucked the pillow under her head and spread out her hair. I left the ward as easily as I arrived. I waited til dawn then got in a horsebox and went off to Burleigh Horse Trials.”

He shakes his head.

“There is no evidence,” he says. “She was deranged; she choked on her own phlegm.”

Can’t stop the tune in my head. I hum it. I hum it louder.

“About the death of Jonjo O’Brien. Kim. Kim! His car went over a precipice called Devil’s Leap in Newmarket, a bomb crater, I gather. He wasn’t a very savory fellow, he was blind drunk leaving the pub; the road was known to be dangerous; locals were campaigning for barriers. He was blind drunk, he drove off the edge.”

“He didn’t have any brakes,” I say.

“Accidental death. There is no evidence to support what you say, Kim. What about this last chap? In Sheffield you say?”

“What about him?”

“His name?”

“I didn’t know his name.”

“So how did it come about?”

“I was reading my horoscope, in the paper, on the grass in the park with Patricia. My neighbor Patricia, she was a lovely lady. This bloke comes along. ‘Look at you,’ he says to Patricia, ‘sitting there with your tits out and your legs open.’”

Mr. Book waits for the rest of the story. But that is the story. He paces three times around the cell with his hands behind his back. I swig some more of the Lucozade.

“What happened to him, Kim?”

“Gasoline,” I say.

Mr. Book squeezes his temples with his hand. Pulls on one of his long eyebrow hairs.

“Later today, in court,” he says, “we’ll just deal with Quentin Sumner.”

“Is he dead?” I arsts.

“No. He’s in a coma, on a life-support system.”

A passing policewoman lets Mr. Book out of the cell and lights my cigarette for me.

“I’ll see you later, Kim,” he says through the bars. “They’ll probably
take you to Holloway straight after. Do you want me to notify your friends and family?”

“I don’t want to know,” Robertson says. “I really don’t want to know. How was it though, in prison?”

I think about it, no one has ever asked me before.

“It was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.”

There was something not right about me being there. I can smell fruit? When I open one eye her hand is there, offering a knife blade with a slice of fruit on it.

“Pawpaw,” she says.

I haul everything up to sit propped sideways against a post. Get lost in my own fingers and lips and pawpaw juice.

“Fucking hell it’s heaven, Lynn,” I say. “Where did you get it from?”

“Arusha.” Another slice arrives, goodness on a knife edge. She is my friend but she doesn’t know me. It’s a start, I suppose.

“Do you want a banana?” she says.

“I’d kill for one,” I say.

“Would you? Would you kill me for it?”

“Only if I was really hungry. Have you come down direct from Arusha?”

“I was offered a lift with a Franciscan monk. Comfortable Land Rover.”

There’s no such thing.

“There was a tent on the roof rack and he let me have it. Dar es Salaam was miles of a dog-leg in the wrong direction.”

“Fair enough,” I say.

“We had the most amazing journey down through the middle of Tanzania. The people were just so friendly.”

I nods. Heaven and hell is same place, Africa has learned me that.

“Have we got any water, Lynn?”

She shakes her head. I look across to No Man’s Land, kerosene night life moving about. Lace up my boots, wincing as scabs on my knuckles crack. I stand up in installments like evolution, with muscle knots and stomach cramps and a couple of cracked ribs.

“Remember the Mountains of the Moon?” I say.

She laughs. I think about the two steps down from the porch and the movements required. Make a total mess of them.

“Do you think it’s safe?” she calls. “Should we go together?”

“Stay with the bags, Lynn, I think it will be OK.”

Nobody in No Man’s Land is going to want to tangle with me. Even this illness is sick of me now. I feel much better. Much better actually. Wired to within an inch of my life. Half blind with tiredness. The stars are in my face, dropping into my open mouth.

Judy Garland nights. Bassey. Sinatra–tosser.

Malawi side. Malawi. I’m in Africa. I’m still free. I’m still half alive, scuffing over the lorry park. An African nightbird calls out
careful
.

T
he lamplight puddles in the wet-looking floor. My frozen face and fingers sense serious heat, apparently there’s a problem with the heating thermostat in the basement. The apartment is still vacant like a stage set with painted miles and a promising sky, a huddle of floor cushions and some candles on a low table. Everything that can shine, does. The rent is paid up to date. The windows are open, heat escaping from the apartment steams into the cold outside air; drifts and disappears through the bare arms of trees. The pub across the road is boarded up. No phone box below. It’s a filthy evening, darkness lightened by sleet. The woman in the mirror startles me, blows out of the glass in colored cloths and white pajamas. Damp, filthy, white pajamas. She is as brown as a year in Africa. The sun has bleached her teeth; nutter’s hair: hacked here and there and backcombed by a side wind, salt and sand and thorns sewn in it. Cold wet nose like a dog. There’s a letter for me from Scotland, Robertson I presume.

Danny Fish left me some supplies. There’s an electric cooker and a fridge, from the Sofa Project he said. I make coffee. No Techno downstairs, just sleet slapping on the open windows. The apartment is hot, seriously hot. I take off my walking boots and socks. My feet are the color of teak. The Skeleton Coast has polished my toenails brilliant white like nine opals. Out of habit I check between my toes for jungle jiggers. No brown fleas buried; no pus pockets of maggots. I left a chink out of my right shin on the good ship
Ilala
, in Malawi, five months ago but the scab still isn’t ready to drop. The photographs are all developed, I sort the twenty-seven packets of pictures in sequence.

Kenya: Masai Mara. Lakes: Naivasha, Nakuru, Baringo, Turkana.
Mombasa, the steamy turquoise coast. Uganda. Mountains of the Moon. Moss and waterfall nymph, the pictures of Robertson came out well; I’ll write and send them to her. Lake Victoria; Murchison Falls. Chimpanzees at Fort Portal. Rainforest mountain gorillas: I wanted to scream “Run, run, run for your lives!” I was standing there with a camera but it could have been a gun.

Zaire. Volcanoes and refugees. The body reassembled in the grave I dug, couldn’t find the head or the left leg. Couldn’t find it.

Tanzania.

A car door slams.

“Sit down,” I say.

Ah, Malawi. The good ship
Ilala
was sailing through a blue-black galaxy, full of stars. The storm didn’t give any warning, it didn’t come from any of the compass points, it came up out of the water and swallowed the
Ilala
whole. The cargo came loose and storming seemed to have a mission to kill us. Waves crashing onto the deck picked us up and threw us. We just missed a hundred certain deaths. Then the storm sunk and disappeared back below the surface. We were black and blue and bleeding. Neither of us could walk on land for a week,
Swash-buckled
, Robertson called us. Even then we couldn’t get to land and had to wade waist-deep through a mile of water hyacinth with our backpacks on our heads. Malawi. The lake and the sky, they loved each other. There was something all-consuming about the blue, the language of blue. The blue rocks and the blue lizards, the blue water and the blue fishes, the blue enameled Fabergé crabs with little gold-rimmed glasses and lilac claws. Baobab trees and swathes of wild flowers.

Zimbabwe: Victoria Falls. Yellow irises and rainbows.

Botswana: Bushmen in the Kalahari. Okavango Delta.

Namibia: Sossusvlei, the apricot moonscape. Oryx tracks. Etosha National Park: mirages and salt pans. This photograph is the one. Like someone emptied an ark in a puddle. A car door slams.

“Sit down.”

Fish River Canyon. Diamond fields and ghost towns. Skeleton Coast. South Africa. The batch of photos I want, the last film. Stellenbosch: châteaux this and that, wine tasting and duck ponds galore. It’s only three days since I was there.

Their home was beautiful, a white-painted farmhouse in the Cape style. The driveway was eight miles long, level and straight between acres of ripening grapes. Even when I was some way from it I could see a figure standing in the middle of the road ahead and knew it was Irene. She couldn’t have known I would arrive that day, but something had made her leave her garden and look down the lane with her hand shading her eyes. She walked a little way to meet me. I hadn’t expected to cry but her face, the posy of English spring flowers, had not wilted. Me, I could not forget her eyes. She called me Kim, of course, and as I bent to take her welcome hand and as I cried and knelt to kiss it, the perfume was there on the wrist, hers, mine. It would linger through all time. I didn’t recognize the bones of Quentin. His slap of wet-look hair didn’t quite cover the scars, where surgeons rebuilt the top of his head. One eye was blind but the other one knew me. Memory kept hearing the sound of suffering he made, while I held his brain in with my hands until the ambulance arrived. One evening after dinner when Irene and I walked down to the dam I asked her what it was that had made her disbelieve the verdict. She said Quentin had been heartbroken when a girl called Gwen dumped him. He was struggling at the casino to keep his feelings contained. In the weeks before he was shot he had written in his diary seven different references about how kind
Kim
had been to him.

Memory kept hearing the sound of my lungs tearing. When Quentin was in the hands of the ambulance men, I ran. Heath and Gwen had disappeared. I ran. I ran. I left behind my coat, with my diamond in the lining. November the 5th: fireworks and bangers. Thirteen years ago.

“Sit down.”

I fan the South African photographs on the floor.