Mountains of the Moon (42 page)

“Seventy dollars,” the chief says.

I look at the bull-necked Fuck, see two of him; don’t know which one is real.

“No.” I sleep a while, smiling with my eyes wide open.

Sickness crawls up and down the back of my legs. My lungs labor. Thwump chops my head off; I catch it between my knees. A rolling bottle of drinking water curves toward my waiting foot. I nod my thanks to Robertson but can’t meet her eyes. I drink half of the water down. I look at the three Fucks. I look at the three chiefs. I look at the eighteen uniforms, don’t know which ones are real.

“Fifty dollars, come, come, madam, we are all very tired.”

“No.” I’m starting to hate him. “Lynn?” I say.

She ducks over and crouches down by my chair.

“
Anything
,” her eyes say.

“Can you nip over to No Man’s Land and get me a packet of cigarettes?”

The crowd catches the words.

“Can one of your uniforms go with her?” I ask the chief.

He nods.

“Which brand?” Robertson says.

An impulse makes me reach out and chuck her under the chin. She stands up and is about to go, cowed by guns and uniforms and limelight from a green moon on the black faces of the crowd.

“Lynn?” I say and she turns. “Better take this with you.” I pick up the ten-dollar note on the desk.

“Hey! Hey!” Riot breaks out in the shed. A thousand fingers at a glance are not pointing at me, but at the center space on the desk, where the exhibit should rightfully be. The bull-necked Fuck stands up suddenly, sends his chair crashing. He snatches the ten dollar note from out of my hand and storms out, knocking No Man’s people sideways. We all stare at the route he took out of the shed. Listen to his pickup starting, wheels spinning, reversing. Well, he
int
gone to get me some cigarettes. One of my shoulders shrugs at the chief.

“You are free to leave,” he says.

“Oh thank you!” Robertson says. Starts crying into her hands.

I get up, stand swaying, sirens in my middle ear tell me I am going to faint. Didn’t want to make Robertson cry.

“It’s OK,” I says.

She sobs.

“Come on, old chum,” I sway. “It’s OK. It’s only a cabaret.”

I look at all the purple backpacks lying on the floor. Robertson lifts the real one up for me and I get a shoulder through the harness. I’d like to collapse but my knees are locked. Robertson is stopping me from toppling, my arm is around her shoulders and her arm is around my waist.

“One foot in front of the other.” She taps my left foot forward with her boot.

“Padam, padam, padam,” I says. “Da-da-dum, da-da-dum.”

Da-da dum.

The border is closed; we’ve got seven hours to kill us. We go with the No Man’s crowd under the barrier and into No Man’s Land. They wing off, leaving us. We topple with our bags up onto the wooden porch, outside the closed Immigration Office. Robertson walks around me, sorting out the angles of my tangled limbs.

“Recovery position,” she says.

A shiver shakes through me, pneumatic. Mosquitoes whine around my head. At the other side of the lorry park, the No Man’s party is starting;
the pissheads and the prostitutes come out to play the night away. Techno music is dragging on a flat car battery. Robertson’s plastic bags are swarming. I hear and smell the insect repellent spray and her hands rubbing together. Her cold palm sweeps across my hairline, my brow, my cheekbone. Stings in carpet burns from the bus and thorn gashes, makes my eyes water. A sleeping bag is laid over me.

“Thanks, Lynn,” I say. “I just need to lie still for a minute.”

She is sitting on the step, close by. I open one eye to check. The starlight is painfully bright, casting shadows.

“Where did you learn to fight like that?” she says.

“In prison.”

She absorbs the news. I can feel her gaze on the side of my face.

“That kick, that thing you did flying through the air—did they teach you kung fu in prison?”

“No. Someone taught me the butterfly kick; I had years in the prison gym to practice it.”

“So violent,” she says. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Goodnight, sleep tight, see you in the morning?”

“It was beautiful, though, in the headlights. Beautiful. Violent. You’re
so
lucky,” she says. “Ten dollars!”

“I was still robbed.”

Night frogs, loud as they are and insistent, remind me of lambs calling. I roll over, recover on the other side. She is still sitting up, hugging herself against the night chill.

I wait for her to speak, to ask, what I was in prison for.

“STRANGE SPICE FROM THE SOUTH…HONEY THROUGH THE CONE…SIFTING…”

Baby Grady is on the kitchen floor. I squashes him to death with beloved ness and put him back down with his racing cars. I has to hold on to the sink. The drumming is so loud.

“Brrmmm, brrmmm,” Baby Grady says.

Sick taste, sandpaper-dry from scared and making sense of everything.

“…AND THIS IS MY BELOVED…”

“Mum,” I says.

She slams her hand down on the piana keys, makes me and the photographs jump.

“What do you think this is—some kind of joke? Do you think Borodin was having a joke when he wrote these birdsong melodies?”

“No,” I says, “only—”

“Do you think Rimsky-Korsakov was making a joke when he stole them from Borodin?”

“No,” I says, “only—”

“Well, that just goes to prove how much you don’t know. I’m not interested in your mundane little existence; I’m an adult and you’re ten.” She lights a ciggi, smoke all comes out one nostil.

Wonders if to say “eleven.”

“Do you think Rimsky-Korsakov was interrupted all day long by people calling him
Mum
?
Mum mum mum
,” she says.

Bryce comes in the front door and makes a wind and all the sheet music takes off flapping like seagulls in the room. They drop and slide from out the sky when Bryce closes the front door. He nores us, goes down the hall.

“Daddy?” Grady in the back room laughs, belly tickle.

Hands is shaking when I pick up the pages and put them all the proper way around. The bashing is so loud. Baby Grady is laughing in the back room.

“No, Daddy!” He laughs harder, starts squealing cos he loves it.

I look at Mum. Wonders if to call her Vivienne. Or Joan.

“Mum,” I says. “Ellie Smithers has gone and I seen what the Sandwich Man done.”

That’s how come I starts crying.

“Boring! That’s all now, thank you! PETALS ON A POOL…DRIFTING…”

“Oulu! Oulu!” Baby Grady is on the side in the kitchen.

Bryce is leaning, reading the
AutoTrader
.

“Take him,” he says.

I put Grady on my hip and go out, down the alley. We wait on the triangle grass for a gap in police cars. Then run cross the road, disappear in the bushes. Shivers darkly under the beech trees in cold left from yesterday’s winter.

“Monkey,” Baby Grady says. “Oo-oo-oo.”

“Shush.” I tie him tight in my red cloth and climb up the tree. The Sandwich Man’s blocks int so safe. Then run the planks through the treetops, long the end to Africa Tree Camp.

“Superman?” Baby Grady says.

“Shush,” I says.

Listens. On Lowry Lane, heavy plants still crossing. Tinker’s horses galloping scared. Down in the Humps, police radios crackling.

“Shush.” I rock us backward, forward, filling up with cold.

Baby Grady presses his fingertip on my eye, tries to stop where the tears come out. He catches one of mine and wipes it down his chubby cheek. Tree Camp is creaking way with cold wind getting up and panics in the gold leaves. I want to go to sleep; sleep is heavy, on me like a coat. Underneath, through the gaps in the floor, I sees a transit van park, then four policemen in white suits, carrying stuff cross the Humps. They put up a tent over Sheba’s grave.

“Gone way,” Baby Grady says.

I look through my binocliars at vultures in the sky. Herds and herds of policemen herding in Lowry Lane, spreading out down in the Rift Valley. I has to go and tell them. Tell truth. Say he took Ellie into the Masai-Mara but then he come straight back without her. Makes me cry cos it’s my fault. Cos I never went down and kept her safe.

“Superman?”

“No,” I whispers. “We has to go and tell the policemen.”

“Roger?”

“Shush.” I hugs him tight. “Back down.”

When I turn around I kick my scrapbook, it skids and tips half off the
edge, I grab it but loose pages of my story Mountins of the Moon go swooping down through the trees and over the Humps and Leafy Lane. I pick Baby Grady up and run back through the trees with him on my hip but a wood pigeon clatters and makes him scream and kick his legs, how bad shock it is.

“Shush.”

Past my feets down in the road sees the lady from 97 holding one of my pages and looking up, through the branches, through the trees, in my eyes, eyes to eyes.

“Have you got that baby up there?”

“It’s all right,” I calls. “We is just coming down.”

“You’ve got that baby up there–oh my God!” she shouts and starts to run.

“It’s all right,” I yells.

But she runs, she runs up our path and bashes on our front door. And Bryce comes out and looks cross and Mum as well comes running and Mr. Baldwin seeing what it is. Trouble, coming, running. Everything is drumming.

“You are dead!” Bryce yells up at me.

“Stay still, just stay still!” the lady from 97 is shouting.

I sees my mum in the road. We is the gods, strings of terrible words catch up in the trees. Baby Grady is strangling, hanging on the knot in my cloth.
Ladder.
People is shouting.
Ladder.
Bryce is running back with Mr. Baldwin to get one. The Cortina parks and two more police cars. Uncle Ike swings long on his crutches, Auntie Fi runs long sides him. The Smithers family come back with all the searchers in a pack. Words turn into a slipping wind and blue police lights and Baby Grady is slipping and my hands is sweating, my feets is sweating, bark under my toes don’t know me.

“Stay still, stay still!”

The branch is snapping, the wind is cutting me; the dark is pushing me. I sees the fright of eyes caught up in headlights. Mr. Baldwin’s ladder comes up longer and longer and the top of it leans on my branch. Bryce comes bigger and bigger up it.

“No, Daddy! No, Daddy! No, Daddy!” Baby Grady turns way, clings scared on my hair and knot.

“Come on, son.” Bryce holds out his arms.

Baby Grady won’t look.

“Give him to me,” Bryce says.

But I can’t.

The other four tapes are signed and sealed; this last one is just a formality.

“This is Interview Room 2, Trinity Road Police Station, Bristol. It’s November the 8th 1986. The time is 2:57 a.m. I’m Detective Inspector Wilson.”

“And I’m Detective Inspector Webb.”

“I am also present, Thomas Book, duty solicitor on call, here at the request of Kim Hunter.”

“Will you please state your full names?”

“Kim Hunter. Beverley Woods. Jackie Birch. Dawn Redwood. Catherine Clark.”

“You have at one time or another used all of those names?”

“Yes.”

“Remind us. How old are you, Kim?”

“I was twenty-one in September.”