The White Giraffe

by Lauren St. John

  Martine rolled her eyes. Mrs. Morrison was the kindest woman in the world, but she was absolutely clueless when it came to the animal kingdom. “There are no tigers in Africa,” Martine had to keep telling her. “Not unless they’re in zoos.”

  Apart from that one detail, she herself knew very little about Africa. When she tried to picture it, all she could come up with was big yellow plains, umbrella trees, mangoes, dark faces, and baking hot sun. She wondered if wild animals literally roamed the streets. Would she be able to have one as a pet? Martine’s mum had been allergic to animals, so Martine had always been kept away from them, but ever since she was tiny she’d yearned to have one of her own. Perhaps she could get a monkey.

  Then she remembered the tone of her grandmother’s letter and the crashing feeling came surging back. Gwyn Thomas didn’t sound like the kind of person who would say yes to a primate in her living room. If she even had a living room. For all Martine knew, her grandmother could live in a grass hut.

  At school, most of her classmates seemed to have forgotten that barely three weeks had gone by since her home had burned to the ground and that she was hardly going to South Africa out of choice. “You’re sooo lucky,” they kept telling her. “You’ll be able to learn to surf and everything. It’ll be so cool.”

  Listening to them, Martine thought that the one good thing about moving to Africa was that she’d never again have to enter the grim gates of Bodley Brook School. She didn’t fit in here. Come to think of it, she’d never fit in anywhere with children her own age, but somehow it hadn’t mattered when her mum and dad were around, because they were her best friends. Her dad had been a doctor who worked very long hours, but in the summer he took time off and they’d go camping in Cornwall, where her mum would paint and she and her dad would swim or fish or he’d teach her a little first aid. And every weekend, come rain or shine, they always had fun, even if it was only making pancakes. Now it was over and there was a hole in Martine’s heart.

  On Saturday morning, the day before she was due to fly to Cape Town, Miss Rose took her shopping for summer clothes on Oxford Street in London. An icy gray rain was falling and the entire road was a sea of frenzied shoppers and tourists poking umbrellas in each other’s eyes, but nothing could dampen Miss Rose’s enthusiasm.

  “Look at these cute shorts!” she said to Martine as they fought their way around the Gap. “What a great baseball cap! Oh, I can just see you in this stripy red T-shirt.”

  Martine just let her go on. If the truth be known, she felt ill. Her stomach was a bubbling cauldron of nerves and her mouth was dry with fear at the prospect of what tomorrow would bring. “Whatever you think,” she kept saying as Miss Rose presented her with clothing options. “Yes, it’s nice. Yes, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  She ended up with two pairs of khaki shorts, a pair of jeans, four T-shirts, a baseball cap, and a pair of tough, camel-colored hiking boots. The only time she was forced to put up a fight was when Miss Rose tried to insist on a floral-print dress. Martine, who had cropped brown hair and bright green eyes, had refused to wear a dress since the age of five, and she had no intention of starting now.

  “I’ll get bitten by a snake if I don’t have proper protection, ” she told Miss Rose.

  “But surely you run the same risk if you wear shorts,” protested her teacher.

  “Yes,” said Martine, “but that’s different. Have you ever seen an explorer who didn’t wear shorts?”

  Back in Hampshire that evening, Miss Rose cooked a farewell dinner for Martine—a roast chicken with crispy potatoes, garden peas, homemade Yorkshire pudding, and onion gravy. Mr. and Mrs. Morrison came over and Mrs. Morrison presented Martine with a pair of binoculars that had belonged to an old uncle.

  “To help you spot the big cats,” she told Martine.

  Martine was very moved, particularly when Mrs. Morrison also gave her a large slice of homemade chocolate cake carefully packed in a lunch box for her journey.

  “I wish you much happiness, dear,” Mrs. Morrison said emotionally. “Remember that you’ll always have a home with Mr. Morrison and me.”

  Mr. Morrison just grunted in agreement. He was a man of few words. But when his wife turned away to thank the teacher for the meal, he put his hand in his coat pocket and brought out a carved wooden box. “To keep you safe,” he said in a low voice, giving it to Martine. Then he opened his car door and started the engine.

  “Ready, love,” he called to Mrs. Morrison. “See you, then, Martine.”

  Martine waited until she was alone in Miss Rose’s spare room that night to open the box. Inside she found a pink Maglite flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, and a first-aid kit. She could hardly believe her eyes. She laid everything out on the bed and spent several rapturous minutes reading the survival leaflet that accompanied it all. The generosity of everyone was very touching. After a while, she repacked her presents carefully, turned off the light, and lay on the bed. A full moon beamed in through the window, laying a silver path across the room.

  Despite herself, Martine began to feel excited. By tomorrow night she’d be on a plane bound for Africa and a life she could not even begin to imagine. For better or worse, Fate was closing a door on the past.

  3

  The first thing Martine noticed was the heat. It rose from the airport runway in a soupy, silvery haze so thick that the horizon appeared to bow under the weight of the blue sky, and all the planes had wavy edges as if in a dream. Back in England, it had been a freezing winter’s night, with the weather report forecasting gales and heavy snow, but here Martine felt as if she were burning up. She stood without moving, a small, deathly pale eleven-year-old, and watched the other passengers board the yellow bus to the terminal.

  “Wake up, love, you don’t want to be left behind.” A bald man in a Billabong surf shirt was leaning over her. “Where’s Mum and Dad? Are they waiting for you?”

  Martine wanted to burst into tears and scream so loudly that everyone in the airport could hear her: “Yes, actually, I do want to be left behind. And no, my mum and dad are not waiting. They’ll never be waiting.”

  Instead she mumbled: “I—I’m just . . . I’m not . . . I . . . Somebody’s meeting me.”

  “You don’t sound very sure.”

  “Harry, what are you doing? I’m fed up to the back teeth with you. The bus is leaving and if you’re not here in five seconds, so am I,” a woman called shrilly.

  “I’ll be fine,” Martine told the man. “Thanks for asking. ”

  “Really?” He reached out a damp pink paw and patted her hard on the shoulder. “Cheer up, love. You’re in Africa now.”

  The woman at the information desk at Cape Town airport tapped a little drum roll on the counter with her purple nails and squinted over Martine’s head at the line that was beginning to form. Her name tag described her as Noeleen Henshaw, Assistant Supervisor.

  “My girl, it’s not that I don’t want to help you,” she told Martine in a nasal voice, “but I’m going to need a few more details. Now, what does your grandmother look like?”

  Martine tried to conjure up a picture of the grandmother she had never seen. “Well, I . . .”

  “Do you have a phone number for your grandmother?”

  “Just an address,” admitted Martine. For much of her journey, she’d been taken care of by a cheery flight attendant named Hayley whose job it was to “look after unaccompanied minors,” but as soon as they landed in South Africa, Hayley had pointed her in the direction of the airport bus and just as cheerily waved good-bye.

  Noeleen gave an exasperated shake of her henna-red hair and looked again at the line. “Sweetie, I think the best thing for you to do is to sit over there, where I can keep an eye on you. If your grandmother doesn’t show up, I’ll try to find someone to help you.”

  “Okay,” Martine said uncertainly. “Thank you.”

  She picked up her suitcase and her new olive-green backpack—a present from Miss Rose—and walked into the arri
vals hall, taking a seat under the Welcome to South Africa sign. Never in her life had she felt less welcome. More than an hour had gone by since her plane had landed in Cape Town and still no one had arrived to collect her. Martine was close to tears. Her worst fears had been realized. Her grandmother hadn’t wanted her and so she hadn’t bothered to come and fetch her. What Martine was going to do now with no money and nowhere to stay, she had absolutely no idea.

  Added to which, she was weak with hunger. It was ten o’clock in the morning and all she’d had to eat since the previous evening was Mrs. Morrison’s chocolate cake. The food on the plane had been inedible. The scrambled eggs were watery, the rolls had the consistency of tennis balls, and the main meal smelled like pet food. Martine made up her mind that she would never fly again without extensive supplies of cake and maybe some ham sandwiches for good measure. Opposite her, a smiling customer left the Juicy Lucy stand with a smoothie and a large muffin. Martine’s stomach rumbled enviously.

  “Miss Martine, you will be thinking we have forgotten you,” boomed a voice so deep that it rumbled in her chest like a bass drum. Martine looked up to see a mahogany giant bearing down on her, arms outstretched and the broadest smile in Africa on his face. He had a scar in the shape of a question mark on one shining cheek and a tooth on a leather thong around his neck. He was wearing a bush hat with a zebra-skin band, and khaki hunter-type clothing that had seen better days.

  “Miss Martine?” he queried. Without waiting for her to reply, he gripped her hand and pumped it up and down furiously. “I’m Tendai,” he said. “I’m very, very happy to meet you. Your grandmother has told me all about you. She was very sorry that she couldn’t be here to collect you, but, oh, what a morning we have had! Late last night we received a call to say that, due to a mix-up with some paperwork, a shipment of elephants we were expecting next weekend was being delivered early this morning. There was nobody to supervise their arrival except your grandmother and myself, and she had to stay until the vet had checked each one. I offered to fetch you instead. I forgot that a man of the bush knows nothing about the highway! I have been driving all over Cape Town! I hope you can forgive me. I will get you home to Sawubona just as fast as I can.”

  Martine hardly knew how to respond to this torrent of words, but she immediately warmed to the big, gentle man who delivered them. He carried nature with him, almost like an aura.

  “Pleased to meet you, Tendai,” she said, adding shyly, “Of course I forgive you.”

  At these words, Tendai laughed. Picking up her suitcase and tucking it under one arm as if it weighed no more than a hen, he led the way out into the sunshine.

  4

  Afterward Martine would always remember her first journey to Sawubona, a name that Tendai explained was a Zulu greeting. He was from the Zulu tribe himself. They took the coastal road out of Cape Town, riding in his battered jeep past a series of magical bays and inlets where the sea was navy blue against the clear sky. Some beaches were wild, with flying spray and forests growing almost to the shore. Some had rainbow beach huts and surfers riding the breakers on bright boards. Some had rocky colonies of penguins or seals. And all of them were overlooked by the mauve-gray cliffs of a flat-topped mountain, which was called, for obvious reasons, Table Mountain.

  After about an hour they turned inland and Martine was amazed at how quickly the scenery changed from a heathery type of vegetation and became like the Africa she’d always seen in photographs. Pale spiky thorn trees and ragged shrubs dotted the long yellow grass, which glowed beneath the blazing summer sun as if it was lit from underneath. The empty road stretched on forever. Martine rolled down her window in the hot cab and the dusty, animal smell of the bush poured into the jeep.

  Tendai talked about Sawubona along the way, describing his job as a tracker at the game reserve. Sawubona, it turned out, was not just a game reserve, it was a wildlife sanctuary, and it was Tendai’s role to check on the progress of every animal in the park. About a quarter of the animals at Sawubona had been born there, but all the rest had been rescued. Some came from drought-stricken areas or game reserves or zoos that had gone out of business. Others had been brought to Sawubona with injuries or because they’d been orphaned in hunts or culls.

  “In twenty years,” Tendai said, “I never saw Henry Thomas, your grandfather, turn a single animal away. Not even one.”

  This was the first mention there had been of her grandfather, and Martine pricked up her ears. But Tendai’s next sentence caught her totally off guard.

  “I’m so sorry, Miss Martine, that I wasn’t there at his side, watching over him, the night that he died.”

  Martine’s head was already spinning from jet lag and lack of food, and this news made it spin a little more. It was clear that it hadn’t occurred to Tendai that she might not know she even had a grandfather, let alone that he had died.

  She said carefully, “Would it be okay if you told me what happened?”

  Tendai’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Yebo,” he said. “I can try.”

  It turned out that nearly two years had passed since her grandfather’s death and yet the events surrounding it were still shrouded in mystery. The police theory was that Henry had stumbled upon a gang of poachers trying to steal a couple of giraffes or maybe kill them for trophies. It had happened on a weekend when Tendai was away in the north of the country visiting his relatives—a weekend when Sawubona was at its most vulnerable. There had been a struggle. When it was over, Henry had been fatally wounded and the giraffes left for dead.

  “There was no telephone in the village where I was staying, ” said Tendai, “so I never knew that this terrible thing had happened until I returned on Monday. By then it was much too late. In the summer, many Zulus ask the Rain Queen to bless their fields with rain, but that week it seems she had been listening far too well. For two days, the storms had been washing away the tracks, and the police and their vehicles had been driving all over the grounds. By the third day, when I came, there was no sign to be found.”

  None of the hunters had ever been caught. To this day, nobody knew whether Henry had been murdered or just shot by accident in the struggle. Most puzzling of all was why the poachers had fled without the giraffes they had so obviously come for.

  “Did the police manage to find any clues?” Martine asked worriedly. It was sad to hear about her grandfather, but it was even more disturbing to know there were killers on the loose in the very place she was expected to make her new home.

  “Tch, those baboons! Don’t worry, little one, even the spider leaves a trail. It might take some years, but eventually we will find those who did this. Maybe, if we are patient enough, they will even find us.”

  The Zulu’s face had darkened during the conversation and now he gave himself a little shake, as though remembering that he and Martine had only just met and perhaps he was saying more than he should. He smiled his amazing smile. “Your grandfather had a warrior’s heart,” he told her. “He was the best game warden. Number one.”

  Martine felt a pang for the grandfather she had never known. He sounded like a good man. The new game warden was a young man by the name of Alex du Preez. There was something in the way that Tendai said his name that gave Martine the impression that Mr. du Preez was not on Tendai’s list of top-ten favorite people.

  They were passing a village of thatched huts and scattered houses with sunflowers and maize stalks in the yards. A group of African children were playing soccer in a field. The jeep slowed and turned onto a driveway overhung by banana palms. At the end of it was a pale green house with a corrugated iron roof. A peeling Coca-Cola sign was propped against one wall. Three chickens wandered out through the front door.

  Martine climbed out of the jeep. “Is this my grandmother’s house?” she asked, unable to hide her surprise. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

  “No, chile, Tendai is jus’ bringin’ you to see me.”

  Martine turned arou
nd to see one of the fattest women she had ever encountered waddling toward her across the threadbare lawn. She was wearing a traditional African dress in the most brilliant colors, with a matching head-scarf of banana yellow, Kalahari red, and lime green. “I tole him you would be hungry,” the woman continued in a voice as warm as buttermilk, “and I see I’m right. Look at you, chile, you just skin ’n’ bone.”

  “Miss Martine, meet my aunt, Miss Grace,” said Tendai with evident pride. “The best cook in the world.”

  They followed Grace into the little green house. The smells coming from the kitchen were divine.

  She and Tendai made themselves comfortable on handmade wooden chairs in Grace’s simple but spotless living room. There was a woven grass mat on the floor and an out-of-date calendar on the wall, depicting a tropical island.

  In a matter of minutes Grace emerged from the kitchen with two huge plates containing omelettes made from fresh farm eggs and wild mushrooms, a heap of crispy bacon, and tomatoes fried with brown sugar. Martine felt as if she hadn’t eaten in years and she savored every mouthful in silence. By the time she had finished, she agreed with Tendai wholeheartedly: Grace was the best cook in the world.

  She turned to Grace to thank her and found the woman watching her intently.

  “Chile looks just like Veronica,” Grace commented to Tendai.

  Martine jumped as if she had been scalded. “You knew my mum?” she cried.

  “Aunt!” shouted Tendai, leaping to his feet. “I told you not to say anything.”

  “Quiet, boy,” ordered Grace. “There be too many secrets at Sawubona. The chile has a right to know the truth.”

  “What truth?” demanded Martine.

  “Miss Martine,” said Tendai, “I’m sorry, we must go now.”

  “But . . .”

  “Please!”

  Martine looked from one to the other, her head buzzing with questions that it was clear she was not going to be allowed to ask. Grudgingly, she followed Tendai out to the jeep. Grace grabbed her arm. “Wait,” she said. She put her hand on Martine’s forehead and Martine felt an electric current pass through her. Grace’s eyes widened.