Something to Hide (20 page)

No, even better – I want us to be back in England. It's hard to believe it's February. We'd sprawl on the sofa while outside rain lashes against the windows and the gales plaster the leaves against telegraph poles.

God, I want to go home.

Now it's the morning and, weirdly enough, the lobby is filled with businessmen. Where have they come from? Have they really been sleeping here? Many of them are Chinese. They wear crisp white shirts and shiny suits. Outside, a fleet of executive buses wait, their engines idling.

Today Clarence, too, wears a crisp white shirt. He smells strongly of aftershave. I ask him how he's slept, which feels weirdly intimate. I start to tell him about my room-service meal, how there was a ten-page menu of international dishes. However, when a waiter finally answered the phone, nothing was available except an omelette. My story peters out. Clarence is a patriotic chap; maybe he doesn't like me criticising his country's hotels. Indeed, he might have found the whole place pretty impressive. Anyway, he doesn't seem interested. Clarence works on transmit mode. He's never asked me a personal question and I wonder if this is an ethnic thing, or just Clarence.

I'm getting fond of him, however. Our relationship has deepened since the cab transaction; I wonder if he feels the same. Bev complained about African unreliability but Bev's borderline racist. No, racist. Clarence seems pretty reliable to me. I need to trust him; he's my only guide in this voyage into the interior, about which I'm feeling increasingly nervous.

We drive through the gates. Now it's daylight I notice the landscape has changed. It's more thickly wooded and in the distance I can see hills, hazy in the heat of what's going to be another scorching day. Clarence says we're now in Kikanda territory; these are their hunting grounds. I imagine them bounding through the trees with their spears – an illustration, I realize, from my childhood book of ‘Just So' stories. None are to be seen, of course; nor, indeed, is any wildlife.

I ask Clarence about the effect on the Kikanda of a more settled way of living, and whether they still chew kar. Indeed, if there is any kar left growing in the wild.

He has no idea what I'm talking about. I rephrase it, speaking more slowly. He appears to be ignorant of the whole story. Is this another example of his lack of curiosity? Then, suddenly, I have a darker and more alarming thought.

Has Jeremy been lying about the whole thing? Maybe he was sacked from Zonac for some misdemeanor, and lied to Beverley about his reason for setting up the charity. At this point I can believe anything about him. He was fiddling the books or doing something illegal; that's why he left under a cloud.

This is too awful to contemplate, an abyss opening beneath the abyss. I feel a nauseous lurch of vertigo. Maybe Beverley knew the truth and that's why she didn't want any investigations, she just wanted to bail out, no questions asked. Maybe she made up the whole poaching story to horrify me into silence. After all, she never presented me with any proof that had confirmed her suspicions.

‘Madam, a giraffe.'

I swing round. There it is, a head rising above the trees. A graceful bending of the neck as she – it's surely a she – turns away and canters off on her beautiful awkward legs, as ungainly as an ironing board.

I burst out laughing. Everything is swept away, all my doubts and fears. I turn to Clarence, warm with gratitude, and touch his knee.

‘Thank you,' I say, as if he were responsible for this moment of grace. ‘And please, for goodness' sake, call me Petra.'

ONLY A FEW
miles to go. I need to keep alert but I have a thudding head. Last night I hit the minibar – miniature gin then miniature vodka. When I'd polished those off it was miniature whisky, a serious mistake which is now punishing me. The jumbo-sized Toblerone hasn't helped, either.

Clarence is playing a tape of Petula Clark's greatest hits. ‘Downtown' booms out inappropriately as we drive through the bush. No further animals have been spotted. Have the Arabs hunted them to extinction? Clarence, shouting above Petula, says they fly in from Saudi and shoot them from helicopters. This seems pretty unsporting. With the Kikanda, at least the animals have a chance.

The road has degenerated into a track, pitted and strewn with stones. We bump across a dried-up riverbed, Clarence's voodoo mascots bouncing. In the middle of nowhere a woman sits at a stall, selling fried fish. Why there? And why, in certain places, have rows of rocks been laid across the road, like a half-hearted checkpoint? Some even have flagpoles. They must have been there for years, because deep tyre-tracks veer around them. I've given up asking Clarence questions. He has no answers, and besides, I'm too tense to make conversation.

But he knows the way, because he's driven here with Jeremy. This is lucky because there are no signposts. He swings right at a crossroads, then left along another dusty track.

I can't wait to see Manak,
I tell Jeremy.
The place you created, the place you loved.
My voice is bright and artificial; Good God, I sound like a woman at a cocktail party!
You've told me so much about it, I want to see somewhere that's so familiar to you, it'll make us feel closer.
This must be the ultimate betrayal, to lie to somebody in one's head. And yet there's some truth in it too. Christ, I'm a mess.

‘Welcome to Manak,' says Clarence.

It's smaller than I expected. Clarence called it a township but it looks more like a village. White concrete buildings, roofed with corrugated iron, are scattered here and there under the trees. It looks dusty and dry and there's no sign of life. When Clarence switches off the engine all I hear is a cockerel crowing.

I sit still for a moment, trying to connect this place to the place of my imagination. They're always dislocated, aren't they, when you actually arrive? You have to join them up, and it takes a while for the imaginary place to fade away and be replaced by reality. But now there's another dimension, that other story which fills me with horror. I have to connect that up too, and it's doing my poor hungover head in.

And yet I feel smug to be here, to have made the journey that Bev was too wimpy to do herself. It's me who's being the wife, who's going to find out the truth. I've taken on that responsibility and today it's Bev who's the outsider. This gives me a glow of satisfaction as I get out and stretch my stiff legs.

The air smells of kerosene and dung. I walk into the village, leaving Clarence leaning against the tro-tro, smoking a cigarette. It's then that I see three men, sitting in the shade of a building. They must be Kikanda because their skin's almost black and they have scars on their cheeks. I expected tribal costume but in fact only one of them wears a loincloth. The others wear dirty shorts. The youngest of them wears a Burger King baseball hat and nurses a machete.

Surprisingly, they're all overweight. On the internet, photos of them showed wiry little hunters, strung with necklaces. These men, however, remind me of those photos of Aborigines sunk into apathy on their reservations. When I smile at them they gaze through me, into the distance. How can I greet them anyway? I don't know Ngoti. They might not either, as they have their own clicking language.

Are these the men who loved Jeremy and rubbed themselves with ash when he died? Or are they poachers, in cahoots with him and conceivably responsible for his death? They hardly look capable of getting to their feet, let alone killing an elephant. Though I don't like the look of that machete.

‘Hi, can I help you?'

A young white woman strides towards me. She has nose studs and ear-piercings and her arms are covered in tattoos. In fact, she looks more tribal than the Kikanda.

I tell her I'm a friend of Jeremy's and want to visit this community he founded.

‘Jeremy?' she asks.

‘Jeremy Payne.'

She seems not to have heard of him. ‘But hey, I only arrived a couple of weeks ago.'

Her name is Sindy and she's Australian. She wears an olive-green T-shirt with M
ANAK
printed on it. Apparently manak trees grow all over Ngotoland and neighbouring Ghana; they have a long tap-root which Jeremy hoped would be symbolic of his project. I think about those upside-down trees that had so charmed him.

I ask about the Dutch couple, Hans and Kaatja, who visited us in Oreya, but she doesn't seem to have heard of them either. A bell rings and schoolgirls stream out of a nearby building. Their heads are shaved; they look like androids. They disappear through another door and all is quiet again.

Sindy says she'll fetch Hassan, the manager, and suggests I wait in the library. She says it's well-stocked with books, both for adults and children. ‘They had a big fundraiser in the States,' she says. ‘They're very proud of their education programme. Reading, computer skills and so on.'

I follow Sindy into another concrete hut. Inside it's sunny and clean. There are rows of tables and chairs and the walls are indeed crammed with books. It's empty except for a large African woman, asleep behind the desk. She wears a grubby bodice made of broderie anglaise; her vast breasts bulge through the gaps where, as my mother would say, every button is doing its duty.

There's no sign of any computers, but then I remember Bev saying they'd all been stolen. Sindy leaves. To the sound of snoring, I gaze at the book titles.
The Joys of Yiddish
…
A Short History of the Chrysler Corporation
…
Birds of Pennsylvania, Volume Two
. I pull out a few books and open them. Opposite the title pages are stickers saying Philadelphia Central Library.

Just then a man comes in. He's tall and black and startlingly handsome. He gives me a wide smile and, to my surprise, kisses me on both cheeks.

‘Hi, I'm Hassan Abdullah,' he says. ‘Any friend of Jeremy's is a friend of mine.' His voice drops sorrowfully. ‘What a guy. What a tragedy.'

Then he's smiling again. His teeth are dazzling white and he speaks with an American twang, like a DJ. His Manak T-shirt is stretched tight over his muscles; it hurts my eyes to look at his blazing beauty.

‘This is Mavis, our librarian,' he says. ‘Mavis!'

The woman wakes with a grunt.

‘Mavis keeps us all in order,' he says. ‘Don't you, dear?'

Oh God, he's gay. Of course he is.

‘How is Mrs Payne?' he tenderly asks me. ‘My heart goes out to her. She visited us a couple of times. She took a special interest in our clinic. There's a real risk of modern-day infection when nomadic people make contact with the outside world.'

‘It's been terrible for her. She's going back to England in a few days.' I add, casually: ‘She sent me to say goodbye.' It seems as good a reason as any for being here.

Mavis heaves herself up. She starts to slowly take books out of the shelves and put them back again. Hassan watches her with an indulgent smile.

I clear my throat. ‘I wonder if I could have a look around? I'd like to tell the people back home about the wonderful work you're doing.'

We go outside. I ask about the Dutch couple and Hassan tells me they're on leave. I'm sorry about this; I liked them and suspected they could be frank with me. There's a certain opacity about Hassan.

He shows me the shop, in whose shadowy interior I see boxes of Daz and slumped sacks of rice. The shopkeeper is talking on his mobile. This surprises me; I was told there was no signal in the village.

As we walk round I can't shake off my sense of dislocation. This is partly due to the lack of people – specifically, the Kikanda. I see several members of staff in their olive T-shirts, sometimes surrounded by children. I see a couple of what must be Kikanda women, swathed in patterned cloth, carrying baskets on their heads. But where are the men?

I'm soaked in sweat. Near me a tree sheds, with a thud, a slab of bark. In the distance, the desert has dissolved into a shimmering mirage. Nothing is quite as it seems. Even last night's hotel seems as unlikely as a dream. Why was that there, and why is this here?
I can't connect this place to you,
I tell Jeremy.
That hot afternoon, the drumming through the trees … were you really describing this random collection of huts in the middle of nowhere?

The drumming is real, however. For now Hassan is leading me to the edge of the village. And there, in a circle, jumping up and down, is a group of men who are evidently Kikanda. They're dark and wiry, naked to the waist and heavily decorated with beads. Ochre mud is rubbed into their hair. As they shake their spears, dogs dart at their ankles, barking.

So here they are at last, the real thing. Just for a moment, I'm thrilled. This tribe dates from the Stone Age! I ask Hassan what the dance symbolizes.

‘Good hunting,' he replies. ‘They're rehearsing for the hibiscus.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘The Hibiscus Hotel. They perform for the guests on Saturday night.'

I still haven't asked about the poaching. I don't know how to broach the subject. Hassan, who seems to have time on his hands, takes me to see the farm.

This, too, is not what I expected. What
did
I expect? Not a small patch of what looks like maize. Tall dried plants anyway, with drooping husks that rustle in the wind. There's a few cows too, standing in a dusty compound hedged with thorn branches. They have huge horns and their hide is stretched over their bones like canvas over tents. A teenage boy sits guarding them. He has luxuriant black hair and listens to something on his iPhone, nodding to the beat.

Hassan's telling me about the crops they're planting and the craft workshops they've set up and the programme of vocational courses where they're teaching the younger generation how to adapt to the modern world.
He's starting to get on my nerves
, I tell Jeremy.
Did you really like him? He's such a smoothy-chops, so shiny and bland, I'm not sure I trust him.

‘Are there elephants round here?' I blurt out. ‘I've heard they get in and destroy the crops.'

‘Where did you hear that, dear?' Hassan raises his eyebrows, smiling.

‘Just – someone told me that the Kikanda used to live happily alongside them but now they're killing them.'

Is there a flicker? ‘The Kikanda respect all forms of life,' he says easily. ‘They only kill to eat.'

Anyway, there aren't many crops to trample on. But at least I've introduced the subject of elephants.

‘What about poaching, though? For the ivory?'

I watch him closely. He's perspiring but then it is suffocatingly hot. ‘Poaching?'

‘I know there's a lot of it round here,' I say. ‘And it must be very tempting. I mean, thousands of dollars for one tusk and so forth, which they probably didn't know until now. You know. When they made contact with the outside world.' I stumble to a stop. He's watching me politely. ‘I was just wondering if, well – if you knew of anyone here, in Manak, who might be involved.'

He bursts out laughing – a deep, trombone laugh. Over the thorn-hedge, the cow-boy removes his headphones.

‘My dear, er …'

‘Petra.'

‘Petra. What put that idea into your head? If I may say so, you have a very British sense of humour.' He's still shaking with merriment. ‘Like your Monty Python.
This parrot is dead
!' He shouts at the boy. ‘
This parrot has kicked the bucket
! We love this Mr John Cleese, don't we, Chika!'

I've drawn a blank. This place has defeated me. Hassan has gone back to his office. I'm alone in the middle of Africa, sodden with sweat, bitten by no doubt parasitic insects, my head throbbing. What was the point of it anyway? I want to go home.

There's no answers to my questions, and nobody to ask. The village seems to have closed its shutters. When I walk past the library it's padlocked. So is the shop. Where have they all gone?
Did they know I was coming, Jeremy, or were they all a figment of my imagination?
In the distance the horizon dissolves into liquid. It's all slipping through my fingers like mercury.

A plane drones overhead. It's flying low. Where's it landing, somewhere near? The landscape is empty, just trees and scrub stretching into the distance, and there's been no sign of human habitation except for that vast meaningless hotel. Where were those businessmen going, disappearing into this void?

And where are the Kikanda men? There's something odd about this settlement; it's so small and listless. From what Jeremy said I expected a thriving community – acres of fields being tilled, animals raised, workshops and craft centres. Despite Hassan's promotional gush, there's no sign of those. And though I've seen plenty of women I've seen few men – just that performing freak-show and a few sullen fatties. Is that because the majority of them are miles away, deep in the bush, pursuing another activity entirely? They are hunters, after all; it's in their blood. The money to be made must be beyond their dreams, and who cares if the elephant population is wiped out in a generation?

I've been trying so hard to believe in Jeremy's innocence – that this dispiriting place is simply the result of misplaced idealism. I've read about this so often – how people go to Africa filled with good intentions and find themselves defeated by apathy, superstition and corruption. By the sheer, suffocating heat. It's hard to function at all in this temperature; I feel like a sandbag and can hardly move one foot in front of the other.