by Ian Watson
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Why didn’t you –?’
‘Me? I passed out … It was the bhang.’ He spoke falteringly, and groaned faintly – as though to convince her that he was genuinely groggy.
‘You mean you went to bed?’
He gestured. ‘I’m still dressed. Look, aren’t I?’
‘So you went to bed dressed.’
‘If I’d driven after you … well, I didn’t know which way he’d gone. So I waited. And I passed out. You are all right, love?’
‘Do I look all right? So you made no effort to tell the German, hmm!’
‘I didn’t know … I mean …’
‘You don’t mean anything. Not to me.’
‘I thought you’d both be back in a few minutes. I didn’t want to make a fuss too soon. I was drugged,’
She laughed bitterly. ‘Then so was I. Did that send me to sleep?’
‘What happened?’ Harry stared at Helen’s soiled legs and arms. ‘He didn’t –? If he did, I’ll –!’
‘Desai’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘A leopard killed him.’
‘Oh God.’
Helen sat on her bed. Harry moved to put an arm around her, but she thrust him away. ‘Get off! Don’t touch me.’
‘Are you sure Desai didn’t –?’
‘He didn’t do anything, you fool! Nothing important. He just died.’
‘You’re upset about his death. The shock. That’s natural.’
‘Natural?’ she snarled. ‘What’s natural?’
‘Darling, you’re safe. We’ve got to …’ Got to what? Harry wasn’t quite sure. ‘We’ve got to pull ourselves together. Have you told anyone? Does anyone else know yet?’
‘And if they don’t, shall we pack our bags and drive away right now in the middle of the night? Drive, drive! Then no one will be any the wiser?’
At least, thought Harry, Helen was still speaking. It wasn’t his fault that he’d succumbed.
‘No, but we could say that Desai delivered us both back safely, then drove off on his own. That way, we aren’t involved.’
Said Helen, ‘I think that I left my socks in his car.’
‘You did what? Why did you take your socks off?’
‘I must have been hot, mustn’t I?’
‘You aren’t serious!’ Harry’s tone was accusatory now.
‘Well, it must have been the bhang, then. If you want us not to get involved, you’ll have to go and fetch my socks, won’t you?’ Yes, she thought, the police would find her socks. Or maybe not. Maybe no one would wonder about a pair of socks.
‘You mean, drive out there now, to his car? You’d have to show me where. Someone might notice us starting our car and going for a night drive.’
‘So you’ll have to walk – the same way I walked back. At least you’ll have a flashlight with you.’
Harry swallowed. Was this a test of love? A way to redeem his failure, the fact that he’d slept?
‘I don’t know the way, damn it! I can’t just wander round in the bush all night … How far is it?’ It occurred to him then that Desai’s car might be close by.
‘I’ve no idea.’
It’s ridiculous. Impossible.’
‘Nothing’s impossible,’ said Helen. ‘If I know one thing. I know that!’ She crossed to the water bucket and quickly washed the ash smuts from her arms and legs. ‘I’m going to bed now. Make your own mind up.’ Turning her back on Harry, she undressed, slid into the camp bed and turned her face to the wall.
Harry fretted for several minutes. He turned the paraffin lamp down lower.
‘Are you asleep?’ he whispered.
No response. Helen lay unmoving and silent.
‘Shall I go?’
No answer.
Harry doused the lamp entirely. With flashlight in hand, he parted the flaps of the tent and stood out in the night, feeling sick. ‘Oh damn it, damn it,’ he swore softly. He could at least go as far as the toilet tent …
Urrrngg …
A low growl in the darkness! He flashed the light-beam around. The low-set eyes reflected the light momentarily. Beast eyes. He couldn’t see the shape behind the eyes.
He backed into the tent and zipped the flaps, then lay down on his own bed, listening. He imagined claws ripping through the canvas wall beside him, and gripped the torch light. Strike the leopard on its nose, he thought. The noses are sensitive.
Something moved outside. Something brushed the tent. Harry lay rigid, sweating coldly. He lay for an immeasurable time, wide-awake. Ultimately the torch battery began to weaken. Eventually he fell asleep.
‘It’s light!’ he cried, sitting upright in a rush. ‘It’s dawn!’
‘Uhh?’ Helen turned over.
He shook her shoulder. ‘It’s dawn, love.’
She opened her eyes, but didn’t focus. ‘What?’
‘I said it’s dawn.’
‘I’m tired. I’m going to stay in bed.’
‘But you can’t… we told Frau Boll we’d be going out in the Land Rover this morning. If we don’t …’
‘I’m not going. Stop bothering me.’
In despair, Harry went to unzip the flaps. How could he persuade – no, beg – Helen to act normally?
The African dawn assailed him: light, air, emptiness, vastness, a faint drift of smoke, calls of nameless birds. Barren hills, trees, clouds.
At his feet just outside the tent lay a pair of white socks side by side.
He stooped and seized them. She brought them back with her after all! was his first thought. The bitch, oh the bitch!
But this didn’t figure. When he had stepped outside with the flashlight the night before, no socks had lain there. Maybe Desai wasn’t dead at all. Maybe he had returned her socks. Maybe what Harry feared, had indeed happened!
Then why should Helen have lied about a leopard killing him? It didn’t make sense – none of it. Only the socks made a kind of sense. They at least were tangible. They were right here in his hand, like a gift from providence. He went inside, shook Helen brusquely, dangled the socks before her eyes.
‘I have them,’ he said. ‘Here they are.’
She sat bolt upright, then gathered the sheet to her breasts. ‘You fetched them? You did?’
‘I have them,’ he repeated cautiously. ‘These are your socks.’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘So we’re all right now.’
‘Are we? Is that what you think?’
‘Please get ready. We have to be at the Land Rover. Then back for breakfast afterwards. We must act normally.’
Helen considered. ‘All right. Go to the toilet or something while I get dressed. Take a walk.’
He did. He went nowhere near the Asian’s tent, which was still silent. The African Boy was about, though, doing his early morning jobs.
The German hunter, Herr Boll, looked like one of Rommel’s desert captains, somewhat aged: and maybe he had been, too. He spoke English with a perfect exactness daunting to native English speakers, making their own normal use of the language seem slovenly by comparison. But he carried no gun in the Land Rover, since he was only a hunter on rare occasions.
Apart from Helen and Harry, a Canadian diplomat and his wife and two Italian, men rode out to the reedy waterhole some miles away.
Warthogs were about, and giraffes; a few wildebeest, a solitary elephant, a small pride of lions.
On the return journey Helen spotted Desai’s white Peugeot standing solitary on the plain in the distance.
As did Boll. ‘I wonder what our Indian friend has found,’ he said. ‘We shall take a look.’ He turned the Land Rover off the track and headed across country.
‘Gott,’ muttered the hunter, a few minutes later. ‘Everyone will please stay here. Do not get out of the vehicle.’ He walked the last fifty yards.
‘There has been an accident,’ he said when he returned.
‘What is it?’ twittered the Canadian woman,
raising her camera.
‘An accident. Please do not take photographs.’
‘A man is lying there,’ said one of the Italians.
‘Yes, I know.’ Boll engaged gear and drove off, dust pluming in their wake.
‘An accident,’ Harry said to Helen softly. ‘An accident.’ He stressed the word. It said plainly that they had nothing, and could not possibly have had anything, to do with it. He glanced down at Helen’s feet. She was wearing those same socks, which didn’t look too dirty. Harry tried to tell himself that they had always been on her feet, safely inside her sandals.
Later, since they had only booked into Mikumi Camp for one night, Helen and Harry drove off. A police Land Rover had arrived from Morogoro, but this had nothing to do with them. If Desai’s family had mentioned the meal and the proposed leopard hunt, this mustn’t have seemed to matter; and Harry had avoided going over to the Asians’ tent. Desai, after all, had hardly even been an acquaintance.
They drove back in the direction of the coast in silence along the main road, through the dust-storms of oil trucks till they reached the hard-top stretch. Then they sped faster.
Just short of Morogoro, an African man tried to flag them down. He was old, wizened, rather neatly dressed.
Harry broke their long silence to suggest, ‘Maybe we should –?’ He even slackened off the accelerator.
‘Don’t stop,’ Helen said coldly. ‘Don’t ever stop. I hate this country. I want to leave.’
‘What? But I have a three-year contract …’ Harry’s words sounded phoney, almost rehearsed.
‘You do. I don’t. I want to leave; I want to fly home.’
‘Be reasonable.’
‘Reason has gone away,’ she said. ‘There only seems to be reason. There’s madness. And shame. And death. And ghosts.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘No, you don’t. That’s true.’
Something was puttering inside the engine at the back of the car. To Helen’s ears this sounded like the pad of feet pacing the car, pursuing it effortlessly. It was a sound she feared she would always hear.
‘My socks smell like an animal’s mouth,’ she said. ‘Do you know why?’
‘No.’
‘Because you didn’t bring them back. The leopard brought them back for me last night.’
Harry couldn’t answer. He knew that he would never be able to answer such a statement. Yet somehow he knew too, in this moment, that he had escaped – whereas Helen hadn’t escaped. Even if she carried out her threat to leave him, to pack her bags and be gone on the next week’s flight, she wouldn’t escape from whatever possessed her now. But he would be free of it. Free of hate.
Of a sudden he felt bitterly glad. He tried to detach himself further, by squaring his shoulders and pressing down on the accelerator.
Already he suspected that after their divorce he might marry an African woman. Miss Nsibambi, yes. Why not? She was a graduate in economics but she had to work for the Ministry during her first three years after graduation at National Service pay rates, to help this poor country with its nation building. So her life was difficult; but she was beautiful. And black. How dare Desai say that about black girls! Desai was a racialist.
After Helen had gone, Harry would take Miss Nsibambi to the cinema and buy her dinners of Malayan lobster curry on the roof restaurant of the Twiga Hotel. He would identify more deeply with Africa. Then when his contract was up, he would take the black Mrs Sharp away with him and she would be happy to go – happier than Helen had been to come, in the event.
With the experience of one marriage behind him, the next one should work out much better. And whilst he remained in this country, with Miss Nsibambi he would be safe.
Beside him, Helen cocked her head attentive to some sound he couldn’t hear, yet.
He wondered what it would be like to make love to an African woman. He would have to leave the light on, to know. To lighten her ebony darkness.
He drove a little faster, to bring this future closer.
Twenty miles further on, he reached for Helen’s hand, knowing in advance that she would jerk it away. Which she did.
‘If that’s how you feel,’ he snapped.
Ahead, another African man danced right out on to the road to wave for a lift. This man was raggy, his sandals cut from old car tyres.
‘Why, he’s just like –!’ Harry checked himself.
‘Run him down,’ said Helen. ‘Run – him – down!’
‘But I can’t possibly –!’ She was insane. Quite insane. Run the man down? That would wreck everything. Miss Nsibambi would never marry him then.
‘It’s the only thing you can ever do for me! Run him down!’
The closer they approached, the more the man thrashed his arms about and grinned and nodded. Harry angled the car out to pass the man. He was only fifty yards ahead.
Suddenly, Helen grabbed the wheel and wrenched it over. The car slewed. Harry was aware of it striking the man. Then they were skidding off the road, turning right over. The world went black.
Voices, speaking Swahili. A stink of petrol. Harry’s head ached fiercely as the hands pulled him up and out through the window. Blurred, he saw two oil trucks parked. Before the hands lifted him clear he looked down, saw Helen, the blood on her face, the angle of her neck.
As the two African drivers laid him down on the warm soil he shivered in the aftermath of shock. Then he calmed; relaxed. It was over – and all so soon. And he would be pitied. Miss Nsibambi especially would pity his loneliness, and admire the way he worked on despite bereavement.
Or was that only the angry fantasy born of a quarrel? Marry Miss Nsibambi: what sort of delusion was that?
Helen and I would have got over it, he thought. We’d have made it up. Now we can’t. Not ever.
‘Man on road,’ he said in bad Swahili to one of his rescuers. ‘How he?’
“Hapana mtu,’ said the African. ‘No man on road. Only you and Memsahib here.’
“Hapana mtu,’ his rescuer repeated.
Harry began to feel afraid.
Away in the bush, a zebra foal was born. Licked by its mother, it staggered on to its legs, which were frail and rickety as yet. Unlike the other zebras, this foal’s hooves and fetlocks were an unbroken snowy white, for all the world like ankle socks. Its nostrils sucked the amazing air. Its ears pricked up, when it heard a far-off growl – as though it had always known that noise.
Ghost Lecturer
As soon as Lucretius materialized, stark naked, at the focus of the Roseberry Field, one of the Institute technicians rushed to drape a bathrobe round him. Another technician furnished our ancient Roman with a pair of sandals.
It seems a genuine toga took at least half an hour to don; so a bathrobe was the next best thing.
Then Jim Roseberry advanced to greet our honoured guest and explain the set-up, in Latin. Jim really radiated benevolence – you felt you could trust him. With those twinkling blue eyes, that shambling gait, that wild halo of grizzling hair, he looked like a friendly bear whose only wish was to hug you.
‘Magister,’ he declared, ‘welcome! We of the future salute you, who are about to die. With our science we have plucked you from, your deathbed, to honour your wisdom …’ And so on.
Titus Lucretius Carus stood listening, his head cocked. He was a short skinny fellow with a crimped, tiered hairstyle surmounting a large, lined forehead. His nose was long and thin; lively brown eyes were encased in lugubrious lids.
He didn’t look on the point of death, but of course Jim had already explained to me the night before that in snatching a dying man from the continuum and prolonging his dying moment into seven days’ life in the present, the Roseberry Effect revitalized its subject thoroughly, for as long as he remained with us.
Me, I’d originally suspected that the resurrectees weren’t real people at all but were more like a sort of ectoplasm, like ghosts at séances. No, Jim had assured me: real flesh and blood. And if I wa
s a continuum topologist like him, I’d understand why.
Real flesh and blood: that gave me an idea or two for livening things up. Because of course the problem facing us at the Network was that Roseberry’s Memorial Laureate Lectures were simply not prime TV material. Naturally the first announcement of the Roseberry Effect and the fantastic piece of science behind it had been a sensation. But following it up was the problem. Charles Darwin was simply not entertaining, and as for the second resurrectee, Galileo … well, computer translation in that monotonous synthesized machine-speech is a real bromide, and we couldn’t expect millions of viewers to rent hypno-teach equipment to learn medieval Italian. It was only the rumour that Jim was thinking of resurrecting Jesus Christ which persuaded us to buy TV rights to Lucretius, in order to get an option on subsequent resurrections. I mean, who cared about Lucretius or what he had to tell the world?
So here was I burdened with directing the show. We just had to concentrate on the personal angle: the week this old Roman would spend after his lecture, en famille with the Roseberry family. And already I knew it would be up to me to personalize his visit.
Once the initial shock was over, Lucretius approached this whole business of his resurrection with admirable composure – though from my point of view it wouldn’t be so admirable if he kept his cool all week long.
So presently we all adjourned from the resurrection room with its power cables, continuum-matrix-engine and other doodahs, next door for a buffet of canapés, cookies, and cola prior to the guest lecture itself …
… which Muhammed and Carl dutifully filmed and recorded, while Lucretius held forth from the podium to an invited audience in Latin on atomic theory and the nature of the universe. Obviously we would have to edit 99 or 100 per cent of this out. My thoughts drifted to Tony, who was away at the Roseberry home elsewhere in the Institute grounds, fitting it up with auto-mini-cams and snoopy-mikes as per the check-list I’d handed him.
After a while I began watching Jim Roseberry; and noted how slyly he smiled from time to time during the lecture, how knowingly he nodded.
It occurred to me that something wasn’t quite kosher about Jim …
Afterwards, when the audience of Nobel laureates and whatnot had departed, we walked back through the rhododendrons towards the Roseberry residence, leaving the mirror-glass and concrete of the Institute behind: Jim and Lucretius and me. With Carl and Muhammed pacing us assiduously, taping every golden moment.