Itchcraft (4 page)

‘Get off the heap, Itch,’ shouted his father. ‘And throw me the spade!’

Itch half ran, half slid back to the ground, then threw the shovel. Nicholas caught it in one hand. For a moment he watched Sammy, who was making progress up the slope on his hands and knees, then he copied him. Dropping onto all fours, Nicholas crawled up the spoil heap, metre by metre. Themba arrived, breathless and running with sweat, and threw another spade up the slope.

It landed near Sammy, who scrambled across to reach it. ‘She was just there!’ he cried. ‘Just there . . . and then the ground . . . opened up! Dad, help me!’

Themba was about to start climbing, but Nicholas held up his hand. ‘Quiet! Everyone shut up!’

Itch was beside himself with frustration. He kept stepping onto the spoil heap and then off again. He took off his detector and held it just above the stones at his feet; the clicks rattled from the speaker and he swore.

‘Itch, shut that thing up,’ yelled his father.

Itch switched it off and they all stood, crouched or lay motionless. Apart from the occasional clatter from an eddy of stones finding a way down the spoil heap, they heard nothing.

‘Dad!
Do
something!’ shouted Itch.

‘Chloe!’ yelled his father. Then they all joined in, their voices desperate. Nicholas, spreading his weight as much as he could, spidered his way up the hill of rocks. His arms and legs worked furiously as he tried to keep his purchase on the unstable surface.

‘More to the right!’ shouted Itch. ‘Near where that darker sand is.’

Nicholas glanced back at his son, and corrected his direction, heading right, towards the spot his daughter had been occupying just a minute ago. He knelt up. ‘Quiet again! Quiet!’ he called. He started scooping rocks away with his hands, pushing them down the slope.

Now Themba and Sammy had reached him, they heaved and swept the debris away from where they thought Chloe was.

‘No spades!’ said Nicholas. ‘She could be just below the surface!’

They were all scooping furiously now, the larger rocks flung with force by Nicholas and Themba.

Itch, pacing around the base, was desperate.

‘Shall I call for help? Do we need a digger or something? Dad, answer me! Do—’

Themba held up a hand. ‘Stop digging! Listen . . .’ He put his ear to the surface of the spoil heap, and Nicholas and Sammy followed suit.

After a moment’s silence they all heard it: clicks, and lots of them. A radiation detector doing its work.

‘Chloe! Hang on!’ called Nicholas. ‘We’re here!’

Sammy was nearest. He turned and heaved more stones away with both hands. Nicholas and Themba slid lower and, directed by the clicks, started their bare-hand digging again.

‘She’s here!’ shouted Sammy, and Itch couldn’t wait any longer. Radiation or no radiation, he couldn’t just stand there. He raced up the spoil heap, stones flying everywhere. Sammy was kneeling by the hole he had dug . . . and there was the top of Chloe’s head – brown hair sticking up through the soil.

Itch gasped and started pushing the debris away. The clicks were loud now. ‘Chloe, we’ve got you. Hang on!’ Looking at his father, he added, ‘Dad, she’s not moving!’

Nicholas nodded and bent to his task again.

With Itch and Sammy higher up and Nicholas and Themba lower down, every one of them trying to combine gentleness and urgency, Chloe slowly emerged. She was hunched over, her body arched as though protecting something. She wasn’t moving, but she was breathing.

It was Itch who brushed away the final debris from his sister’s face. ‘Chloe . . . Chloe . . . Chloe, can you hear me?’ He wiped the earth from her nose and mouth, and she started to shake.

Nicholas appeared at his side and, reaching long arms deep into the soil, lifted his daughter free. The radiation detector fell silent. ‘Itch, get off the spoil heap,’ he said quietly, and Itch nodded, running and sliding to the ground.

He watched as they stepped gingerly down the steep, shifting slope. Chloe was shaking hard now, sand and small stones falling from her clothes and hair with every step her father took.

‘You’re OK now,’ Nicholas said in her ear, then realized that it was still full of earth. She nodded anyway, and Itch sighed with relief.

Chloe tried to speak, but had to spit and then retch. ‘Thanks,’ she managed, then started to cry.

Sammy shot off in the direction of the truck.

‘He’s getting an old rug from the truck,’ said Themba. ‘She’s in shock. We need to wrap her up, but only once we’ve got all the debris off her. Nicholas, that’ll be thorium making the detectors go crazy. I am sorry – I had no idea there was so much radioactivity in that heap. I thought they’d all been checked – the nearby ones certainly have. But it will have been burning the skin. There’s a shower at my house, but that is half an hour away.’

Nicholas’s eyes narrowed. ‘We’ll talk more about this – but not now.’

‘Back to our place then,’ said Itch. ‘The shower’s rubbish, but it works.’

‘OK. Themba, get the truck,’ said Nicholas. ‘You need to get as much of the debris off as you can, Chloe. We’ll all look away. Wrap yourself in the blanket. Let’s get you cleaned up.’

Back at the house, they sat on the old sofa, waiting for Chloe to finish her shower.

‘She should go to hospital,’ said Itch. ‘Her skin looked red and she’d obviously breathed in some stuff. That could be dangerous.’

‘Agreed,’ said Themba. ‘But the nearest decent hospital is more than an hour away. Forget the ambulance – we’ll do it ourselves. Once she’s clean.’

Chloe emerged in an old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She managed a small smile. ‘All right – don’t stare,’ she said, and sat in one of the armchairs.

Her face and arms were blotchy; Nicholas studied the marks carefully. ‘You’ll be OK, I think. You can’t have been under for more than ninety seconds, though God knows it felt like an eternity. But if you breathed in radioactive material, we should get you checked out – and you need something for your skin.’

‘I know all that,’ she said. ‘I’ve learned a bit about radiation recently.’ She smiled at her brother. ‘But I kept my mouth shut. I tried to create an air pocket. Hopefully that was OK?’ She looked around for support.

‘You were amazing,’ said Itch, ‘really amazing. But it’s been a few weeks since we were all in a hospital, so we should probably visit one. Just to be sure.’

Chloe nodded.

‘Mum would say,
This family!
’ Itch laughed.

Their father looked awkward. ‘Best not mention this to your mother just yet, I think. You watch some TV and I’ll get our things together. Sammy, you might want to stay – I just want to have a few words with your dad.’ He switched on the old television and left the room with Themba.

Sammy sat rather awkwardly on the arm of the sofa and watched the images from a news channel of New Year celebrations around the world.

‘Well, this will be a different New Year’s Eve,’ said Itch. ‘Bet the hospital won’t have too many thorium-burn patients to deal with.’

‘We do like to be different—’ said Chloe, but broke off as the sound of Nicholas’s raised voice came through the open window. She and Itch glanced at Sammy, who was staring at his feet. They could all hear the dressing-down Nicholas was administering, and the use of some of his old oil-rig language added to the awkwardness. Sammy went and stood by the window, his face expressionless but his fists clenched.

Embarrassed now, Itch turned up the TV. He was just going over to talk to Sammy when Chloe said, ‘Itch, look at this.’ There was an urgency in her voice, and he turned to see what had caught her attention.

The small screen was showing night-time images: blue flashing lights illuminated a large saloon car, doors open, the paintwork and windows riddled with bullet holes. Police stood around it.

‘What’s this, Chloe? What is it?’

She pointed at the screen, and the scrolling words came round again:

BREAKING NEWS . . . LAGOS, NIGERIA. MISSING GREENCORPS BOSSES BELIEVED KIDNAPPED OR MURDERED IN ROADSIDE HIJACK.

Itch stood dumbfounded. He waited for the words to roll past again. ‘Turn it up.’ He’d shut out the sound of the TV to hear what his father was saying to Themba, but now this story had his full attention.

A reporter in a sharp suit and expensive haircut was explaining what he believed had happened:

‘
The men who run this vast oil company had only just landed in Lagos and, I am told, were on their way to a meeting. A meeting they never reached. According to the police, they got as far as this dock road when they were ambushed by what police are saying was a six-vehicle attack. Who attacked them? Well, the police say they are following several lines of enquiry, but obviously attention will turn to the Greencorps oil spill of three years ago, which cost the lives of seventeen oil workers. The only convicted Greencorps employee was Shivvi Tan Fook, who escaped from jail this July, only to die in a fire in an English school earlier this month. Police are asking for witnesses . . .
’

‘Go and get Dad,’ said Chloe.

‘How far from Nigeria to South Africa, Sammy?’ said Itch.

Sammy shrugged and said nothing.

‘Sammy?’ Itch repeated. ‘How far away is Nigeria?

This time Sammy answered, but his tone had changed, his voice flat. ‘Three thousand miles maybe.’

Itch and Chloe looked at each other.

‘That sounds way too close,’ said Itch.

In a small, smelly, noisy cabin, a man lay on a bunk, his head wrapped in bandages. He was motionless apart from his right hand, which was trying to roll a coin between his fingers. He worked it as far as his middle finger, then winced and dropped it. The coin rolled across the lino floor and disappeared under the toilet door; the man cursed loudly and reached for his whisky.

The room was sparsely furnished: a small bed, an overturned crate for a table and a laptop sitting on top of a small cabinet. The porthole above the bed showed only that it was night. In the unlikely event of the man receiving a visitor, the smell would have been described as a mixture of engine oil, medical astringent and garlic.

With an enormous effort, the man struggled off the bed, each small movement accompanied by a yelp of pain. He limped stiffly across to the bathroom, where he found some painkillers, then back to his glass of whisky to wash them down.

He sat on his bed, his feet still unsteady while the ship was rolling. Judging his moment, he lurched for the laptop, then was pitched back again as the vessel corrected itself. He lay sprawled uncomfortably on the thin blankets as he checked emails, blogs and websites, irritated by the ship’s erratic wi-fi connection.

Suddenly he sat upright. Repositioning the laptop, he clicked on a headline and read the story that appeared underneath. It offered him a video to watch, and he risked the internet connection. He watched as images from the aftermath of the Lagos attack played on his screen.

‘Well, well. What do we have here, Nathaniel?’ he said to himself. ‘What do we have here?’ Smiling for the first time in many hours, his lips cracked and bled. He replayed the fifty-second video time after time, now on full screen, examining it closely. ‘You were down by the docks – and both of you together! This was important, boys, wasn’t it? And now it has all gone wrong – so wrong . . .’

He fidgeted with the bandage over his ear and watched again as the report concluded with a photo of the two Greencorps chairmen. They were smiling at the camera in happier times, and as the camera zoomed in on their faces, Dr Nathaniel Flowerdew shaped his damaged hand into the shape of a gun.

‘
Bang
,’ he said, pointing it at Christophe Revere. He shifted his aim to Jan Van Den Hauwe. ‘
Bang
.’ He chuckled softly as he closed his laptop. ‘Good riddance.’

Three hundred miles from Flowerdew’s ship, in a cramped underground storeroom, handcuffed to the metal bars of an old fire grate, the Greencorps bosses listened as their captors squabbled. It was an argument that had raged for the best part of two hours.

‘If we don’t kill them, what was the point of all this?’ Aisha waved her knife at the two trussed and sweating men. ‘Who wants prisoners? It really is very easy. They killed Shivvi; we kill them. An eye for an eye . . .’

A woman in an oversized plaid shirt held up her hands. ‘Enough! This is going round in circles. We aren’t killers! And they didn’t kill Shivvi – that’s the point – but they
did
let her go to prison. It should have been Flowerdew, of course, but that would have been too embarrassing for them. Let’s keep them here for a few years, see how they like it.’

‘You’re a fool, Dada. You really think we can hold them here? Under Leila’s flat? They’ll be found. The police or Greencorps security teams won’t be far behind. We need to sort this out now.’

‘Tobi’s right,’ said Leila. ‘I told you we should have decided this earlier. We’ve been offered a ransom from Greencorps – a million US dollars, and twice that from a mafia gang. We vote now.’

Christophe Revere was trying to attract their attention but was hampered by his gag and handcuffs. He flapped his bare feet about like windscreen wipers and made what noise he could with his own socks in his mouth.

‘See what he wants,’ said Leila.

Dada came over and pulled the socks out. ‘What?’ she asked.

Revere coughed and spat out some loose cashmere threads. ‘We can get you Flowerdew,’ he said. ‘If it’s him you want, we should work togeth—’

The socks went back in his mouth. ‘Yeah, sure,’ spat Dada.

‘No, let’s hear what he says,’ said Leila. ‘Let him speak.’

Dada pulled a face and took out the spittle-soaked socks again.

‘We leave you a million dollars,’ said the Greencorps man, pitching again. ‘I can transfer it now if you wish. We accept we did wrong. You can spend it how you like – maybe set up a school or something – and we get you Flowerdew. We have security teams in many countries . . . we’ll find him in the end. Then we’ll call you.’

Aisha had heard enough. She snatched the socks from Dada and pushed them back in his mouth, then spun round to face her friends. ‘They’re oilmen, remember!
Oilmen!
And oilmen lie! Do you really think any of this will happen?’