The Gloaming (4 page)

And then the windshield burst open like a crazy flower.

 

Evening, around five, and I decide to go for a walk. To follow the nowhere-nothing road north. I intend to go a few miles and turn around. I walk past the clinic, which is shut—no sign of Dorothea. There are then the two half-finished buildings, which precede the edge of town. Immediately after: the bush. It is a matter of feet to step between the two worlds—this awkward human outpost and the stuttering, fidgeting bush.

The road bisects the green, drawn with all the certainty of a three-year-old's crayon, wobbling, but indelible. I can't understand why it's a road at all as I never see cars, and there isn't the trace of a tire track on the earth, even where, hard packed, some imprint might remain from the rainy season. There are, however, many bicycle and livestock tracks and footprints, some bare.

I walk for about ten minutes before I see the children. They are still some distance ahead—perhaps five hundred yards. I see they are playing with a puppy on a string. I wonder where they live, for there are no huts nearby, none that can be seen, only paths that diverge abruptly into the bush. I think how much is hidden.

As I come closer, I realize the children aren't playing with the puppy, they are torturing it. One drags the puppy along the dust, the rope so tight around its neck it cannot breathe or squeal, while the other two hit it with sticks. They are so involved with their game, laughing hysterically as they hit and hit the puppy, that they don't notice me until I shout, ‘Stop it!'

Immediately, they look up. Their faces express a strange and shifting mixture of emotion: fear, excitement, and something else I can't quite register. They abandon the puppy, which has urinated and shat all over itself, and rush toward me, dancing around me.

‘
Mzungu! Mzungu
!' they scream.

‘Pen, pen, pen!'

‘
Mzungu
! Pen!
Mzungu
! Give me, give me!'

They circle around me, laughing, their bare feet stirring little clouds of dust. ‘
Mzungu
! Give! Give! Give!'

I feel sharp little fingers pulling at the pockets of my skirt. ‘Give me!'

I grab the girl's hand and push it away, ‘No!'

They move quickly, their dexterous little hands poking and pulling. And dancing, they laugh, so I can see their little pink tongues and sharp, white teeth. ‘Pen, pen, pen!' I smell them, their unwashed clothes, the rags that pass for clothes, their filth and sourness.

‘Stop,' I say again, but they do not pause or care.

One of the boys slaps the back of my thigh and screams with laughter. The other reaches over and pats the front of my skirt, my groin. I try to back away, but they move with me, patting and slapping now, pinching, dancing, laughing, chanting:

‘
Mzungu, mzungu, mzungu
, give me!'

‘
Mwacha
!'

An angry shout, a male voice.

In an instant they scatter, and are gone. Absorbed back into the bush.

It is PC Kessy. ‘They are animals,' he says.

‘They're just children,' I turn, holding the tremor in my voice. ‘They don't know what they're doing.'

Kessy raises his eyebrows, ‘They touch you like that and you think they don't know what they are doing?'

‘They don't really know what it means.'

‘And when they do know, do you think they'll stop and become civil?'

‘Yes.'

Kessy laughs. ‘You should not stay here.'

‘Because of these animals?' I say it with a kind of challenge in my voice.

‘Because you don't understand.'

‘They are just children.' I repeat this as if to convince myself. Yet, I wonder: what would they have done to me if Kessy had not come?

He is silent a moment. ‘Please, madam, walk back to the town with me.'

‘No, I want to walk on. Not far. To the top of the rise.'

‘But the view is the same from here as it is from there.'

I start to walk anyway. He shakes his head and falls in beside me.

‘I don't need a police escort.'

‘I am just walking this way. To the top of the hill.'

So we walk, saying nothing. And from the top of the rise I see the land rummage on. In the distance are more hills.

‘That is Kenya,' Kessy says. ‘Less than twenty miles.'

‘And the road goes there?'

‘Not officially.'

‘Not officially?'

‘The border is closed. People must only use designated border crossings.'

‘But they cross anyway.'

‘Of course. Smugglers, Masai, local people. Who is going to stop them? Me? With my club? My flashlight?' He laughs at himself. ‘My laws?'

We stand for a while in the low wind. I'm thinking about the children. The way their teeth chattered and snapped. They are a rendering of this place, of the hidden, dark huts and the weary violence that breeds there, and ends up, one day, in a report on the desk of a human rights lawyer marked
Atrocity
.

Walking back, we pass the place where they disappeared. I can make out their footprints in the dust, a fandango, and here and there the tiny paw prints of the puppy.

‘What are you doing?' Kessy asks.

‘Looking for the puppy.'

‘It has gone. It has followed the children. Look.' He crouches, shows me the tracks.

And I'm washing my face in the sink. It is later now, after dark, and the generator has quit, so I have only a cheap candle and this wavering, narrow light. I'm washing my hands, surprised at how dirty they always are. I look at myself in the cracked mirror above the sink, push back my hair. I've lost weight, it shows in the hollow of my cheekbones. The children—of course, they are just children. Their gender and their number are a coincidence. A girl and two boys. From huts in the bush. But there, again, is the odd loosening, the wavering, and I force myself to look in the mirror. Here I am. Here. My hands on the sink. The solidity of things. Touch my face with my fingertips. Feel my skull under the skin.

 

I wanted Tom.

But in the same instant I knew he wouldn't be there. Knew like looking at the whole world from space, a spinning blue marble: Tom was with Elise and their new baby.

I opened my eyes and saw the rectangular lights and white ceiling.

‘Mrs Lankester?'

A face loomed over me. A man, unknown. For some reason I focused on his nasal hair. ‘You are okay,' he said. His voice was heavy with Swiss German. ‘You are in a hospital in Bern. Everything is okay. Just a bad concussion and a few bruises. You are very lucky.'

Lucky?

I tried to speak, to form the word ‘why.'

He leaned in. I could smell his aftershave, the hint of peppermint on his breath.

My tongue was burred, heavy. I labored to form a ‘w.'

‘Water?'

I nodded, or seemed to, or perhaps just shut my eyes. Everything began with ‘w.' Why, what, who, water.

He said, ‘I'll have the nurse bring you some.' Then he shone a pinhole of light into my eyes. ‘Look at the light. Follow it.'

I did as he said.

‘Now, my finger. Follow. Yes. Good.'

‘What.' I said. ‘What.'

‘Water?' Briskly: ‘Yes, yes, I'll ask the nurse.'

I shut my eyes, focused, my mouth forming the words clumsily. ‘What. What.'

He looked at me. ‘Do you have any bad headache?'

‘Everything. Hurts.'

‘Can you then think, please, about your head.'

I tried to feel my head like a detached object, a vase with potential cracks or chips. There was no specific pain. I told him this.

‘Good, good. We shall keep you for observation for twenty-four hours and then you can be released. Unless the police—' he cut himself off, busy putting his little flashlight away.

‘The police?' I grabbed at his sleeve, nipping the fabric.

He pulled away with a shocked expression, as if I was a leper or beggar. Then immediately he covered what I'm sure was disgust with a professional look of query.

‘Yes?'

‘Why am I here?'

‘You do not remember?'

Really, I had no idea.

‘It's very common. In such an incident of trauma to have memory loss. Post-Traumatic Retrograde Amnesia. Some memory may eventually return. Or it may not.' He glanced over my chart. ‘CAT scan is normal. Blood? Yes, yes, all fine. But let us know if you feel any severe nausea or experience ringing of the ears or blurred vision.'

‘What trauma? What police?' It was difficult for me to speak, as if there was a great distance between my brain which held the words and my mouth which should speak them. I sensed the doctor's evasiveness, but then was not sure at all. Was I just not understanding? As I struggled to speak, my mind felt sluggish.

But he didn't answer. Instead: ‘Is there someone we can contact for you? A friend? A relative?'

‘No,' I said. Why wouldn't he tell me what had happened?

‘Are you sure?' he regarded me. ‘There must be someone.' Now he flipped to another page on my chart. ‘Your husband? Mr Thomas Lankester.'

‘We're not married.'

‘He is listed as your next of kin.'

‘The divorce,' I said. ‘The paperwork…'

‘Ah, yes. Here it is,' he stabbed the relevant paperwork. ‘I see that the police called him, but he declined to come.'

I felt a humming of humiliation in my chest. Keep going, I thought.

‘And there is no one else?' He sounded incredulous.

No one. Because we always left or they always left. The projects, the tribunals, the stints—it was impossible to form attachments, friendships. We joked, Tom and I, of our ‘associates.'

When I didn't answer, the doctor turned to leave. I spoke now with determination to be clear: ‘I want to know what happened, why I am here.'

‘The police are coming in a minute. Wait for them. It is better for them to explain.' And he left.

I lay back and considered the curiously intense image of Mrs Gassner putting on her shoes. I was helping her with the laces. I hadn't paid my phone bill.

‘They cut you off no mercy,' she was saying.

MAHNUNG
!

There was a knock on the door. A policewoman leaned in. ‘I am Sergeant Caspary,' she said. ‘May I come in?'

She entered gently. She was small and rounded, not fat, but neatly stacked in a series of orbs. She pulled a chair to the side of the bed and cleared her throat and took out a notepad. ‘The doctor tells us you don't remember what has happened.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said automatically.

‘It must be very confusing for you.' Was she being kind? I couldn't tell. She took a small breath, ‘I must inform you this is something terrible.'

I was trying to think—what? Perhaps if I squeezed my eyes shut I could find the memory. I could feel the outline of it in the dark. I considered the word ‘terrible'—a bomb? Had there been a terrorist attack? I felt in my body a sudden lurching as if I'd been thrown.

‘You were involved in a very tragic incident,' Sergeant Caspary said. She waited, watching me as if gauging my reaction. Like the doctor she'd carefully chosen the word. Like the doctor she was evading.

‘
Incident?
'

She shifted in her seat. ‘With your car.'

I waited. She waited, watching me.

Then she said, ‘Three children have been killed.'

Obviously, there'd been a mistake. Someone else instead of me. Charts switched, paperwork mixed up. Even the Swiss can make mistakes. But Sergeant Caspary said right away: ‘I appreciate it's difficult for you that you don't remember. It must seem very unreal.'

Only then did I feel a prick of panic: not about the children, but that I couldn't remember. The children were not real; no more real than if I'd read about their deaths in the paper. Their deaths had nothing to do with me. But the missing time—the part of me that I could not retrieve—it was like waking up with a stranger in my bed or finding a tattoo on my arm. It was like waking up and finding Tom gone from my bed, and that moment of confusion when I wondered where he was.

I should speak, I was expected to express my horror. But I could only turn inward, frantically searching for an image, even a glimpse—the corner of a memory that I could drag into the light.

‘Mrs Lankester, are you all right?'

Slowly, Sergeant Caspary came back into focus. I knew what I was supposed to ask. ‘Was it my fault?'

She shifted in the seat, still watching me. ‘There is an investigation, of course. So at this time we cannot conclude fault definitively. Your car hit a bus stand, just outside Arnau village. Three children were waiting. Two died almost instantly, the third was taken to hospital. She died a few hours later.'

I turned away. I kept thinking it must be an elaborate mistake. But if I stepped back, wherever I stepped, the ground was unstable, there was no truth. Tom hadn't bought the land.

‘We'll need a full statement from you,' she said. I heard her push the chair back and stand. ‘We'll need you to be available for the duration of the investigation.'

I began to cry.

For myself. Pity for myself that I had lost hours, had lost my mind, was hurt and vulnerable and confused. I wanted my husband to fold his arms around me and tell me it would be okay, that Mrs Gassner was mistaken about the land. But he would not.

Sergeant Caspary put her hand on my shoulder. She was touched by my grief. ‘Your driver's licence is suspended during the investigation.'

 

A man is trying to lead a large white goat. There is a rope around the goat's neck, and the goat pulls back against this, matching the man's determination. But not quite his strength. Inch by inch, the man succeeds in pulling the goat forward.