Mountains of the Moon (16 page)

Does she look like a twit? Sitting on the roof terrace yesterday has turned her face and shaved head the color of teak and whitened her teeth, and eyes, and drawn straight and bold the four white scars, side by side on her cheek. Close to the bone. Like someone who has traveled far.

“On a camel?” says the woman in the mirror.

She thinks I care what people think; besides, what part would you rather play: Backpacker or Lawrence of Arabia? I don’t really want her to know exactly how excited I am.

“Are you ready?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mr. Iqbal is awake. Vital. I hadn’t expected an Indian man here; India to Nairobi, via Oxford.

“When you come next time,” he says, “maybe we are playing chess?”

“You’ll have to teach me how to play, Mr. Iqbal, and how to win.”

“I will begin straight away to whittle the pieces.”

I pay for my tab and give him back the room key.

“You’re not taking your bag?” he asks.

Oh! Yes!—That big heavy purple bastard that I’m supposed to carry and never leave out of my sight. He’s laughing at me. He has to give me the room key back.

“Why are you running?” he says. “Late is not an African word.”

I fetch the bag and he comes downstairs to see me off.

“Thank you, Mr. Iqbal,” I say. “I’ve had such a nice time.”

“What is your name?” he says. “What is the ‘L’ on the score sheet standing for?”

“
Lucky?
” I grims at him.

“In life, but alas not Scrabble,” he says. “And what about love?”

“Don’t ask.” I laugh and turn away, stepping out into River Road. I ran this ramshackle gauntlet yesterday.

“Muzungu!”

It’s me, I thought.

“Muzungu!”

I’m rich.

“Muzungu!”

Limited-edition rich.

“Muzungu!”

I’d got something to give.

“Muzungu!”

And something to lose. It was a whole new place. I moved fast and kept my head down; saw dusty dark legs and white calloused feet; passed
through the burning smells: corn roasting on the cob; hot seat PVC, fan belts searing, metal smelting, a light high: aviation fuel in my hair.

“Muzungu!”

Beware the scam.

“Muzungu!”

The instant crowd technique.

“Muzungu. Tzzzz.”

A small boy was running to keep up with me.

“Muzungu muzungu muzungu.”

I had to stop and bend down; waited for someone to cosh me over the head.

“Muzungu,” he said. “Give me pen.”

He had tiny green shorts, a little willy hanging out.

“Pen?” It sounded odd, unfamiliar, surely a small thing. “Pen?”

He pointed at the smudged route written with biro on my hand.

“Pen,” he said.

“Pen!” I floundered in montage confusion: goat; old Singer sewing machine, red fabric streaming through it; in the gaps between the traffic a silver arc of blade was hacking into something. Over the road. Over the boards. Over the steaming holes in the road. Cars. Buses. Pineapples. Dark men in dark doorways. A wall of exhaust. Tzzzzzz. The taste of banana skin. The devil I didn’t know.

“Pen,” the pot belly said.

I gave him a shilling from out of my pocket. As I walked away I looked back; saw him running down the street holding the coin up like an Olympic torch.

But today it’s Sunday and very early and much more relaxed. The rain a moment ago was so short it left dark spots in the red-red dirt; they’re disappearing before my eyes.

My shadow leads the way. I don’t know why I keep looking over my shoulder; it’s only the sun and the backpack looming up behind me. Street sellers are setting up for the day.

“Muzungu!”

Good-humored.

The road turns from crude red dirt to lilac asphalt and widens out. I suppose they’d call them
boulevards
. Tree-lined. Shady arcades, a glitter in the smooth walkways.

“Jambo, madam, welcome to Kenya!”

I know where we’re supposed to meet: in the wide boulevard with the mauve tarmac and the china-blue flowering trees. Only four other people had booked—it is the short-rains and off-peak season. Plenty of room in the minibus. The company are gathered. Isaac sees me coming, isn’t sure if it is me. I wave and cross the road.

“So fine. So fine!” He marvels at my pajamas and the dash of orange sash.

“Jambo,” I say to Isaac who will guide us. “Jambo,” to Benjamin who will drive us. “Jambo,” to Lawi who will cook for us, imagine that. I’ve got a sudden thirty-year hunger—I gesture to him as much and he’s going to see what he can do. I hadn’t expected an elderly lady in the group. She’s tiny, in a linen suit with her white hair pinned in an elegant knot. I pan from her face to a paunch with a belt around it. A curly giant bends down, offers me a huge hand.

“Vernon Pennsylvania USA,” he says. “This here is my mother Margaret.”

Her hand is tiny, arthritic, I’m afraid to crush it, for some reason I find I’ve bent and kissed it. She curtsies, I don’t know why. The other two people are a couple, his and hers khaki.

“Jeff and Alison, Wolverhampton; we’ve renewed our vows.”

“Ah,” I say.

They seem like nice people, all looking at me. Me, who comes from who knows where, in white pajamas and colored clothes, apparently by camel. The shadow of Vernon sits down on the minibus step, leaving me exposed.

“Louise.” I squint into the limelight.

I talk to Vernon and Margaret. This trip to Kenya is a gift for her seventy-fifth birthday, a dream come true from Vernon.

“We’re both pretty darn excited about,” he says.

We all help to load up the minibus, with our bags and the boxes of supplies, bottled water and sacks of charcoal and Lawi’s pots and pans.

Then we’re in. And we’re off. My heart becomes a lark. I wonder if special occasions feel like this. That’s what I’m having, a five-day special occasion. Before I get raped and murdered for all this money I’m carrying.

We are away now from the city, climbing, always climbing, overtaking laboring buses in the face of flying downhill traffic. Little black-and-brown patchwork goats are herded on the verges by herds of little raggedy boys. Not verges. No boundaries, just clearings that the tarmac passed by. The trees are out of this world in scale, dwarfing people, dabbling in light and shade on thriving plots. Shambolic leaves of banana trees, tall tasseled corn and glimpses of mud huts in between. Mud shacks set back,
Smirnoff
and
Coca-Cola
, kiosks I suppose. Food, I can see, will be found at the roadside. Two tomatoes. Something yellow with green spots, melon or pumpkin, I don’t know. Green bananas. Surplus fruit with minders, waiting to sell under sticks and woven shelters.

“Say, Louise? Would you like some gum?”

I would. I sway forward.

“Thanks, Vernon.”

Something for my nerves to chew on. In five days time I’m out there, on my own. I think I see me on the roof rack of a bus, in with the luggage, in with the sacks and the chickens, in with a chance of being thrown clear, in with a chance of having a cigarette. Umbrella up for shade. Uh-huh. The temperature is perfect and blowing with the roof propped open. I lift my face into the slipstream, offer it my neck.

I see me striding through shadow and light. I buy a bottle of fizzy pop from a kiosk and sit down in the shade to drink it. I see me asking the bright women about the stuff, spread on the mats. Coffee? Beans? They pour through my fingers hot from the sun. I see me arranging my pillow hands and laying my weary head on them. I see my fingers feeding a
suggestion of food into my mouth. I’ve got a Swahili phrase book. I don’t know about water. We’ve got bottled water in the minibus but I don’t know about water out there. Only that it is red, and people are shifting it, in plastic water containers, distances, on bikes, on heads, on donkeys with little traps. So many colors of water container. Children are what I see, war parties of them with spears, in shot-through dresses and straining shorts. Terrifying. My heart booms.

Wake up on higher, drier, dustier land. I look up my side at dramatic crags; imagine eagles and leopards in it. Didn’t expect palms or giant mouse-eared cactus. The other side is an ocean of sky. Clouds tower up like galleons on it. Armadas, unfurling and sailing off.

“Now we are stopping for lunch!” Lawi says.

Vernon turns around to check I heard. We park by a wayside shack with threadbare grass and three picnic benches. Stepping out I feel light, like a dream, suspended in space and pale blue air. I can’t see anything, just balls on a scarlet pompom tree. It has no leaves but it’s down on one knee, trying not to drop its pompom flowers over the edge of the precipice. I don’t know the name of anything.

“The Great Rift Valley,” Isaac says.

My eyes follow the arc of his arm. Stagger a bit. Suck in at the blue vapor. Everything shifts. Isaac is pointing at something hundreds of miles distant. It looks like a flat-topped purple cone protruding from the valley floor. I go and stand beside him.

“Logonot,” Isaac says. “She is finished now but everywhere in the Kenya there is volcano underneath, getting ready for coming up.”

“Terrible hellfire is burning under feets,” Benjamin says.

A man after my own heart; I’ve always enjoyed language liberties.

“That volcano,” Jeff says, “is bigger than our Ben Nevis, looks like nothing down there, does it?”

We sit down on picnic benches, positioned for a falling-off sensation. Brilliant. I love it when sandwiches are cut on the diagonal. It’s a wide-angle lunch, laid out on a white tablecloth. Lawi has changed into a chef’s hat, white apron and vest.

“Nut roast,” he says to me. “Bean salad. Quiche. Avocado. Banana. Papaya. Watermelon. Mango. Passion fruit.” A whole new language.

Isaac and Benjamin have some business with an old man in the shack. They’ve fetched him some supplies and are busy carrying boxes in. Margaret is happy to sit on the bench beneath a rustic woven shade. Come up into the air. Breathe deeply. I know that it is the East Wind, the same wind that on the coast they call the Monsoon–King Solomon’s favorite horse. But up here it’s just the resistance of air as the earth throws itself forward into space. Out of Africa. I remember every word. Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in vital assurance and lightness of heart. That Danish lady, she wasn’t wrong. The others are standing on the edge, taking awed photographs of the view. I lift my camera to my eye, try this and that, but the Great Rift Valley makes a nonsense of zooms, wide angles and volcanoes.

“Say, Lou—are you about ready to move right along?” Vernon is at my elbow.

I’m fixed on color and clarity. Scarlet pompoms. Black butterflies. They came all at once and landed to sip on the tubes and drips of scarlet pompom juice. Slide film. Macro lens, the shutter is a sure and steady thing.

“That’s it now,” I say. “I’ve done a whole roll of film.”

Before Vernon can get a shot himself, the black butterflies lift together and in a series of rapid blinks disappear as quickly as they came. I walk with Vernon back to the minibus. Jeff and Alison reappear from a toilet shack yonder. I help Margaret up the minibus steps.

“Don’t they do hip replacement operations in America?”

“Waste of tight-anium,” she says.

“It was this trip or a new hip,” Vernon explains.

We set off again. Benjamin takes a careful track, hairpin bending down the steep valley side. Beyond that the hours start to scuff, we run through ruts until the ruts run out. Hit the gray grit of a thrown-out road,
spraying it wide in banks behind us. Benjamin knows this road, settles us into a swaying slalom around the craters and the meteorites that made them. The land is overexposed, shimmering with heat mirage. Blown and ripped with crooked thorns and green splints of short rain leaf. The road grit starts firing under my feet. Seeing red, see it, red, blurring through the bass lines, a drumming running stitch.

“Masai,” Isaac says.

“Say, Isaac, where do you think he’s coming from—where would he be going to?”

Nobody knows. I close my eyes, begin to spin. Out of the black, and into the red, and into the blue. Flashing. Shar. Shar. Shar. Shar. Sharp with burning sparks.

“Stay with us, Catherine!” they call, they shout, they arsts her nice. “Stay with us Catherine! Catherine, please!”

They keep on calling but she don’t come. One man is angry now cos he wants her more than anyone else.

“Fight, Catherine, you have to fight!”

Statement of: Mr. John Nesbitt,

42 Ellend Road, High Wycombe

November 22, 1976

Taken and transcribed by PC Pine 0867

I
am employed by Templar Construction as an FBD driver. It’s a large earth-moving machine. On Monday November 15, I was working on the foundation stones laid between Junctions 13 and 14 of the London Orbital (M25) Motorway. I finished work at five o’clock and parked the FBD back at base where we leave our cars. It was my first day with Templar and I chatted to the site foreman in his Portakabin for about an hour. When he locked up and we went off to our cars, I realized I had left my car keys in my work coat pocket. I had left the coat about a mile along the works, on the rock where I had eaten my lunch. The foreman offered to take me home and pick me up the next day since he lives my way. Sadly my wife had miscarried our first baby the day before and I was in no mind for going home. I said I’d walk back for the coat and keys. It was dark and the wind was biting. I picked my way back through the motorway works. Everything was frozen up and difficult to walk on, there were stars in the puddles. I got there eventually but my coat wasn’t where I left it. I didn’t know what to do except go back to base and walk up to civilization for a telephone box. There was a broken down JCB-752 parked off to one side. It’s a big digger with a wide beam bucket. I passed it on the way up and on the way back tried the cab door, to see if there was an old coat inside I could borrow. The cab was locked so I walked around
and tried the other side. It was open but there wasn’t a coat. I found a packet of cigarettes and sat and smoked a few, glad to be out of the wind. The sky changed from black to green and I saw the blizzard coming. I was too cold to stay any longer and the snow was settling thick and fast. The bucket of the JCB was facing down, rested flat on a heap of sand. When I climbed down to leave I saw a hole, like a badger or something had dug under it. I got the matches from the cab and tried to see if there were paw prints in the sand. It looked fresh-dug and I was curious what was underneath but the wind kept blowing the matches out. I put the last lighted match down in the hole and recognized then a small human foot. I called into the hole but there was no sign of life. Next thing I was tunnelling like a badger myself. When I tried to pull the child out, it was then that the spear went through my hand. The doctor says I won’t be able to work for six weeks. And though I am very happy that the little girl is alive, my wife says six weeks’ wages are hard to find. Also my back is playing up from running so far with the girl in my arms. I am not a big man.