The White Giraffe

by Lauren St. John

  At lunchtime Martine discovered that the gang to which Lucy had referred was the Five Star Gang, a group of the most popular kids in the school. Along with Lucy, there was her twin brother, Luke, also blond and good-looking with caramel skin; Scott Henderson, who was driven to school each morning in a red Lamborghini; the school rugby captain, Pieter Booker; and a black boy named Xhosa (which, if you were English and couldn’t make the clicking noise that the Africans made, was pronounced “Corza”) Washington, who was the son of the local mayor. They all had the latest haircuts and a way of wearing their uniforms that made them seem like designer clothes. Most kids idolized them and over the coming weeks Martine noticed that even the teachers seemed to give them special treatment.

  During break, Lucy introduced Martine to the Five Star boys and several other children. On the whole, they seemed a friendly bunch, and a couple of them went out of their way to make her feel included. Martine sat in the sunshine eating her cheese and chutney sandwiches, smiling and nodding, and wondering how it was possible to be in such a pretty place, surrounded by laughing children, and still feel like the loneliest, most miserable girl on earth. All the old feelings that she’d had at Bodley Brook came flooding back. It was not just that she felt shy and clumsy. She didn’t fit in at all. None of the things they talked about—surfing, hair gel, music—interested her. But what did interest her? Martine didn’t know. Reading, she supposed. And the white giraffe. She was very, very interested in the white giraffe.

  It was while she was thinking about this that she noticed a small figure sitting alone under a tree in the distance.

  “Oh, him,” Lucy said with distaste when Martine asked what the child was doing there. Her nose wrinkled. “He’s either deaf, stupid, or a nutcase. We can’t work out which.”

  Over the next few days, Martine learned that the boy’s name was Ben and that he was of mixed race, with a Zulu father and an Indian mother—a dancer from Rajasthan, so the story went. Martine was small for her age, but he was as thin as she was and not much taller. If you looked at Ben closely, you could see that he was far from weak. His brown arms and legs were strong and wiry. But most children didn’t take enough interest in Ben to find that out. He was an outcast. Hardly anyone ever spoke to him. This was partly because in the three years he’d been at the school, Ben had never uttered a syllable. The teachers had long since accepted that he was mute, mainly because he answered their questions on bits of paper and was consistently top of the class, but to the Five Star Gang, who claimed they’d once seen him holding a completely normal conversation with his dad in the parking lot, he was a source of both irritation and amusement. Every lunchtime, he would take his backpack and disappear to the farthest corner of the school playing fields. There, he would sit under a tree and read a book. His nickname was Buddha Ben, because he had a habit of burning incense and never retaliated if you stole his book or forced him to do your homework.

  Martine found it upsetting that everyone was so mean to him. She made up her mind to try to befriend him, but the first afternoon an opportunity presented itself Lucy waved her over and asked her what she was up to and she couldn’t bring herself to admit that she’d been on her way to talk to “Bonkers Ben,” as Lucy called him. The next day she put it off for some other reason, and after a while she stopped thinking about Ben altogether.

  8

  Those early days at Sawubona were among the hardest of Martine’s life. At times, she felt as if she were undergoing some sort of test, almost as if she were being prepared for something. Everything added to her sense of isolation. It was like being a castaway on a desert island. There was no one she could turn to for comfort or advice. No one who would hold her if she cried. Certainly not her grandmother. Still, she couldn’t help noticing that whenever she was feeling particularly upset or down, Gwyn Thomas would suddenly and unexpectedly make an apricot pie for dinner and serve it up with whipped cream, or leave a vase of wildflowers on her bedside table, or say something like, “Martine, I could do with your help when I go to feed the baby elephant tonight.”

  The little elephant lived in an enclosure in the sanctuary close to Tendai’s house. He had been rescued from a Zambian zoo that had gone out of business. Tendai had named him Shaka, after the legendary Zulu warrior king.

  “So he’ll grow up to be a great leader for the herd, despite his early trials, just like Shaka,” was his remark to Martine.

  Shaka was one of several animals in the sanctuary, which was a sort of hospital and holding area for new arrivals before they were relocated to the main game reserve. At present, Tendai and Samson, a wizened, white-haired man who looked at least 104 years old, were tending to a jackal that had been hit by a car and had a leg in a cast, an owl with an infected eye, a springbok with a nasty abscess, and an orphaned bush baby. The bush baby was one of the sweetest creatures Martine had ever seen, with huge brown eyes in a tiny gray apelike face, a long curling tail, and paws like a koala, made for climbing.

  One of Martine’s chores was to make sure the sanctuary animals had water morning and evening, and she’d also been allowed to feed Shaka three times. Once, when she was giggling at his wobbly gait and funny pink mouth gulping at his milk pail, she’d caught her grandmother watching her with an enigmatic, almost pleased expression. But even on those occasions when she seemed to be making an effort to be nice, Martine still couldn’t shake the feeling that her grandmother didn’t want her there.

  Much to her frustration, she hadn’t yet been allowed into the game reserve itself. Martine consoled herself with the thought that at least she could see the wildlife through the fence, and devoted all her spare time to reading up on the animals in the books she found in her room. She’d been fascinated by the facts she’d learned about giraffes. For instance, the spots on each giraffe are as unique as fingerprints; no two are alike. And although their necks are very long, they have the same number of vertebrae as other mammals—seven. Nowhere did she find any mention of white giraffes.

  It was the animals at Sawubona that made Martine’s life bearable. She’d never imagined she would live in a place with lions at the bottom of the garden. At night, when they were hunting, she could hear their spine-tingling roars, and just knowing she was so close to them was unbelievably thrilling. Curiously, creatures of all shapes and sizes seemed instinctively to know when she needed a friend. Take her grandmother’s cats, Warrior and Shelby. They showed no interest in Martine at all except when she was feeling miserable, and then she could hardly move without them rubbing themselves against her legs and clamoring to sleep on her bed. And on two occasions the baboons had appeared in the garden when she’d had an awful day at school and performed so many funny antics that she got a cramp from laughing.

  The second time it happened, Tendai came to the house on an errand while Martine was watching them. He crept up beside her and said teasingly, “So, little one, this is what you get up to when you are supposed to be doing your homework?”

  Martine was spluttering an excuse when he cut her off with a chuckle. He told her that according to Zulu folklore, the baboons had once been lazy field hands. Instead of removing weeds from the crops, they spent their days sitting on their hoes, gossiping, or sleeping in the sunshine. They sat there for so long that eventually their hoes became tails and the weeds attached themselves to their bodies and became hair.

  “You’d better watch out,” Tendai said. “If you sit here too long without doing your homework, you might grow a tail and we’ll have to put you in the game reserve.” He grinned over her shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Thomas?”

  Martine swung around guiltily to find her grandmother shaking with mirth, her blue eyes dancing.

  “Tendai,” Gwyn Thomas managed at last, “you’re pure gold.”

  But none of this stopped Martine from lying awake at night aching for her mum and dad. Or from wondering about the secrets at Sawubona. After nearly three weeks on the game reserve, she was convinced that Grace was right—there was a
wall of silence at Sawubona. Everything she asked about was met with the same blank response.

  “A white giraffe!” exclaimed her grandmother when Martine mentioned the tale Tendai had told her. “As if a white giraffe could go missing at Sawubona!”

  “But Tendai said he saw some tracks.”

  “Martine, if there was a giraffe in the game reserve, don’t you think that Tendai, who can track the path of a python across bare rock, would have found it by now?”

  Martine had to admit her grandmother had a point.

  But there were other secrets at Sawubona. For starters, there was the mystery of why her grandmother was on a mission to keep her out of the game reserve. And there was no question that that was what was going on. Sawubona was a private reserve, owned by her grandmother, but on weekdays it was open to tourists and visitors who prebooked appointments. They were guided around by the game warden, Alex du Preez, or Gwyn Thomas herself. That still left weekends. Yet every Saturday her grandmother had a thousand excuses for not allowing Martine to go into the reserve, from a shortage of staff to the late delivery of fuel to Sawubona. “You wouldn’t want Tendai to run out of petrol when a charging elephant was around, would you, Martine?”

  She’d also overheard Gwyn Thomas warning Tendai not to take Martine anywhere near Grace, to whom her grandmother again referred as that “crazy old magic woman.”

  “I won’t have it,” she told him. “I don’t want her filling Martine’s head with silly ideas. Grace is out of bounds as far as Martine is concerned.”

  All of this added to an air of secrecy that Martine could almost touch. She snooped about as much as she could and eavesdropped on one or two conversations, but she discovered nothing that could answer her biggest question: Why had Mum never told her about Sawubona? She’d found several books belonging to Veronica on her bookshelf and now knew her mum had probably spent much of her life here, but there was nothing to explain why she’d never told Martine about it.

  Nor did Martine understand why her grandmother continued to maintain a stony silence on the subject. She found it odd that Gwyn Thomas never once said a word about her own daughter. Even if she was still grieving, one would have thought she might occasionally say something like: “This was your mum’s favorite meal,” or “Your mum loved to play the piano.” But no, there was nothing. There were plenty of photographs of her grandfather, a silver-haired version of Harrison Ford, with her mum’s sparkling green eyes, but none of her mum and dad, even though her grandmother had described them in her letter to Social Services as “the finest people I have ever known.” And Tendai, who evidently did know something about her mum, refused point blank to give her any information.

  “Please, Miss Martine,” he kept saying, “you must ask your grandmother.”

  One evening, when Gwyn Thomas seemed to be in an unusually good mood, Martine plucked up the courage to do just that. A huge storm was raging outside and they had just eaten dinner.

  “Grandmother,” Martine began, “before Mr. Grice wrote to you, did you know about me?”

  “Of course I did, Martine,” said her grandmother impatiently. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Then why didn’t I know about you?”

  “That’s your mother’s business and none of yours,” her grandmother said, her voice rising. “Your mother made decisions in order to protect you. If you knew why she had done the things she did, you would be more grateful.”

  “How can I be grateful when no one will tell me the truth?” Martine burst out.

  “Martine!” thundered her grandmother. “I won’t tolerate this rudeness. Go to bed at once.”

  Martine jumped to her feet. “Fine,” she said. “I will go to bed. But I am going to find out the truth about my mum and everything else that’s going on around here, and nobody is going to stop me.”

  Upstairs, Martine sat on her bed watching rain lash the window. It was pitch black outside. Tears ran down her face. She’d lost count of the number of times she had cried since she had moved to Africa. She wished she could be back in England with Miss Rose or Mr. and Mrs. Morrison, but somehow she knew in her heart that she was exactly where she was meant to be—in this wild, amazing place with its strange, hostile people.

  “Everything,” her father had told her, “happens for a reason.”

  Martine couldn’t for the life of her imagine what that reason could possibly be, and right now she didn’t care. She just knew that she needed a friend.

  Outside, the wind slapped and banged around the house and the thunder cracked as if a thousand boulders were breaking across the heavens. Lightning split the sky. Martine gasped. A white giraffe was standing beside the water hole and it was looking straight at her! For a split second, their eyes locked, the small, sad girl and the slender young giraffe, and then the sky went dark. Martine pressed her face to the glass, desperate to see the white giraffe again, but it was impossible. There was no moon and the rain was coming down in sheets.

  Martine felt so crushed she could hardly breathe. It was like getting the best present you could dream of—a pony, say—and then having it snatched away again before you even had a minute to enjoy it. It was almost too much for her to bear.

  She tried to pull herself together. Had she seen the white giraffe or hadn’t she? Could it have been a trick of the light? From this distance, there’d been something almost ghostly about it. In the lightning’s blue flicker, it had had a phosphorescent glow. But when she relived the instant their eyes had met, she was certain. The white giraffe was out there. It had looked at her as though it were looking for her.

  Martine had a sudden urge to rush out into the game park and find the shy creature. She knew there could be terrible consequences. She had been forbidden from ever going into the game reserve by herself, and not even Tendai would risk going in on foot after dark. Snakes, scorpions, lions, buffaloes, and even leopards were all on the prowl at night, and many of them would be out hunting. Martine was well aware that if she disobeyed the order, she could be attacked or gored or worse.

  For a long time she sat at the window trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t stop thinking about the white giraffe.

  At last, she made up her mind. She took off the shorts she’d changed into after school and put on her jeans, boots, and navy blue school Windbreaker. Behind the bookcase, she’d concealed the carved wooden box Mr. Morrison had given to her. She removed her flashlight and knife and put them in her back pocket. At the door of her bedroom, she listened. The only sound was the slowing rain, muffled on the thickly thatched roof.

  As silently as she could, she tiptoed down the stairs. The timber boards were old and with every creak Martine fully expected to hear her grandmother’s enraged shriek or feel her hand on her shoulder. But nothing stirred.

  When she reached the kitchen she stood for several minutes, breathing deeply and taking comfort in the reassuring hum of the fridge. Then she unlocked the kitchen door. There was something very final about the click it made as it swung shut behind her. She checked her watch.

  It was one minute past midnight.

  9

  Out in the garden, the storm had slowed to a drizzle. Confronted with the sights and smells of the African night, Martine’s courage almost deserted her. Had her grandmother’s bedroom light not come on right at that very moment, she would have rushed back inside. But very moment, she would have rushed back inside. But it did. Martine decided that if she had a choice between her grandmother and a hungry lion, she’d rather take her chances with the lion.

  The air was perfume-sweet with the scent of fallen mangoes and gardenia blossoms. Martine set off blindly through the dripping trees in the general direction of the game park gate. The one useful thing she’d overheard during her investigations the previous week had been Tendai telling her grandmother the new code for the padlock. She’d made a point of committing the numbers to memory. When her hands touched the cold metal gate, she felt for the heavy chain that bound it and th
e lock that secured it. Only then did she switch on her flashlight and enter the numbers on the wet dial. The padlock clicked open! Martine stared down at it, unable to believe that it had been so easy. She realized then that she’d been secretly hoping all along that something would happen to prevent her from going into the game reserve. She glanced over her shoulder. Once more, the house stood in darkness. Whatever happened now, there was no turning back.

  Martine stepped through the gate and stifled a cry of terror. Two red eyes glared at her. The bushes shook violently and a waterbuck sprang up so close to Martine that its fur actually brushed her. With a shake of its horns, it bounded away into the blackness.

  Martine’s heart smacked wildly against her rib cage. She tried to imagine what Tendai would do in a similar situation. Not that he was likely to be in a similar situation, but if he were, she was sure that everything would be about staying calm and thinking clearly. Focus, she thought. I have to focus. I can do this.

  More than anything in the world, she wanted to find the white giraffe. Why, she wasn’t sure; she just knew she had to do it. And as frightened as she was, just doing something for herself and rebelling, even in a small way, against the stifling atmosphere of her grandmother’s house, made her feel good.

  The beam from her flashlight picked out the path that led down to the water hole, where the frogs were competing in a noisy chorus. Blue lightning shuddered over the mountains on the far horizon. Martine set off as quickly as she dared, trying to avoid the puddles. Even so, her jeans were soon soaked through. In places the grass was taller than she was, and cold droplets drenched her hair and ran down her neck.

  As she walked, unseen creatures slithered and scurried and hopped away through the undergrowth. Martine tried not to imagine the worst. She wasn’t sure which she was most scared of, snakes and creepy-crawlies or man-eating carnivores, but she fervently hoped that she didn’t meet any of them. After what seemed an age, the temperature dropped and she saw she’d reached the water’s edge. She tried to pinpoint the exact spot where she had seen the giraffe. She was pretty sure it had been beside the old gum tree that stood, like a startled skeleton, on the left bank of the water hole.