“Hmm,” he said, frowning. “Do you not feel that the more you discover, the less you know?”
“Yes. No. Maybe.” He had lost me. “So how did you become leader of the tribe?”
“Aha. That is a long story,” said Gdgi, and he must have spotted my involuntary grimace because he added, “But I will tell you quickly. The honour is passed down from father to son. If there is no boy-child then a new dynasty is chosen. But a new leader must always prove himself worthy. He must go into the forest alone with his spear and he must bring back a wild boar to feed his people. If he does not kill such an animal, he cannot return, or it will bring shame upon his family.”
I didn’t know much about wild boars. Weren’t they just pigs with tusks?
Gdgi went on: “My brother, Mkki, who was older than me, was killed by a boar during such a test. That is how I came to be leader. I tracked down the creature that took his life, I killed it and ate its heart, and my people stripped its bones.”
He looked around him. “What do you understand of my people?”
“A little,” I hazarded.
“The truth is you understand less than that, Pilsbury. Though we seem happy tonight, tomorrow we shall be sadder. Many times we return from hunting trips empty-handed. Our forest is being destroyed by companies who bring bulldozers and tear down the trees, encroaching upon our lands. We have sent delegations to speak with them and they make promises, but bring only destruction.
“And as they destroy the forest they kill many animals and drive others far away. If we “Q’tse die, Pilsbury, our ways and our language will die with us. And who will know and who will care? I wonder this often.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“One of your TV explorers came here some time ago and we talked when the cameras were not working, about our histories. He told me that there had been two world wars. I was shocked. My people had not heard of these. I said to him, ‘How could they have been world wars if we were not invited?’”
“Right,” I said.
Conversation-wise, he had waded out of my depth.
Gdgi must have cottoned on to this, because he smiled and stopped talking about himself. “I notice, Pilsbury, many times while we have talked, you have looked at your Shaman. I wondered why. I have never asked how you became friends.”
It was true. I’d been desperate to keep an eye on both shamen. What would happen when mine suspected his dastardly poisoning plan had been somehow foiled?
“We aren’t exactly friends,” I said. “Really I’m helping him out.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Well, it’s a long story. He has a map I need to see.”
“He will not show it to you?”
“No…” How much should I tell Gdgi, I wondered? Perhaps if I gave away enough he would offer to help me out. Might indiscretion be the better part of cowardice? “To be honest, I’m finding him rather devious.”
Gdgi laughed. “You do not surprise me! What has he promised you?”
Tread gently. “He told me he’d show me the map if I brought him here. But he didn’t. And then” – How to word this one? – “…there was a funny thing with his brother…”
“His brother?”
“Yes. Your shaman.”
“Our shaman? But that is not his brother. Indeed the shaman you bring here is a classic only child.”
Really? “So he doesn’t have a brother?”
“No.”
“They didn’t go to shaman school together?”
Gdgi slapped his thigh and roared with laughter. “Shaman school! That is very funny. Oh dear. Shaman school. Goodness me!”
I wasn’t finding it funny. “He said they were big rivals.”
“Goodness me, no. They are great friends!”
“But. That fight when we arrived?”
“Oh, it is for show. They are always doing that. The people love it.” He noticed my deepening concern. “Is something wrong?”
“Do you trust him?”
“No. Of course not.” This time he didn’t laugh.
My mouth opened but nothing emerged.
Gdgi spoke: “Did you trust him?”
I didn’t dare explain. “He wouldn’t want to harm your shaman, then?”
“He would be more likely to harm me, Pilsbury. He enjoys power. I am sure he would love to become leader. That is why I would never accept anything from him. He is a true shaman. He understands the powers of all the plants and trees in the rainforest. There is no poison he could not make… Is there a problem here, Pilsbury?”
The cigar. How easily that could have been laced with something. And I had pretended it was from me. Had Gdgi smoked it? I hadn’t noticed, but then I had hardly watched him throughout the entire feast. I scanned the table for it, for a scrunched-up butt. Checked the ground. Saw nothing. Should I ask him if he had smoked it? But then, what if he had? If I said anything now, I could drop myself into a whole heap of trouble. What to do? Shit. Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit.
Think positive. “No, no trouble,” I replied, smiling weakly. “Tell me, where do you get your delicious honey?”
One can only take so much apiculture when one’s mind is firmly elsewhere. At least it took his mind off our shaman chat, and eventually he seemed to bore himself and announced that he had to answer nature’s call. Seizing the opportunity, I zipped back to my seat. The Shaman was there, his bastard dummy dead-eyeing me through its cracked monocle.
“You’re coming with me,” I said, tunnelling fingertips into his bicep.
“What did you do to the cigar?” I demanded, still gripping him by the upper arm.
He shrugged me off. “Oo-ouldn’t you like to know!” went his puppet.
I grabbed the dummy round its scrawny neck. “Did you poison the cigar?”
The Shaman’s eyes flared. He wrenched the boy away and, pulling back, I tore its fucking head off.
The Shaman screamed, snatched it from me, thrust the wooden neck back into place. Now even the dummy’s eyes seemed aflame. “You klay dangerous gane.”
Rubbish. “I was buying your ‘klowerthul nagic’ from joke shops when I was six years old. You don’t scare me.”
The Shaman peered at me over imaginary specs, dirty grin spreading. “Thery thoolish oo-ords,” he lisped. Not even attempting to speak through the dummy now.
Fuck it, I thought, and punched him, hard, in the face. It surprised even me. I wasn’t a violent person. In my defence, the Shaman wasn’t a nice man.
He saw it coming too late and went down like a gigolo on a client. The dummy flew backwards into the wall of the hut.
I pulled open his cloak while he groaned, found the map, snatched it out and folded it into my back pocket. That still didn’t seem enough payback, not after all his double-crossing and lies. An idea came to me. Striding to the back of the hut, I picked up the dummy.
“Think I’ll take this with me!”
Prone and groggy, the Shaman craned his neck to see what I was doing and howled, though pitifully, like a crone all out of newts’ eyes. He tried to grab my ankle as I made for the door but I kicked his hand aside. As I walked outside, breathing in the jungle and wood-smoke, he croaked after me: “You oo-ill klay thor this.”
I made straight for the motorbike and sidecar, fortuitously parked near the village’s entrance/exit, away from the ember glow of the feast.
No time for second thoughts or guilty concerns. No time for goodbyes. Time to scarper.
As I reached the bike a commotion came from the direction of the feast: voices rising and a woman’s shriek, then more screaming. People were gathered around a prone form – at the table where I had been seated, the head table. It could mean only one thing. Gdgi had gone down.
I had to keep telling myself: it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.
I threw the wooden boy into the sidecar and straddled the saddle. Unnoticed still, my heartbeat in my eardrums, I desperately patted down my pockets for the key. From nowhere
, a boy appeared beside me. The last thing I needed: attention. And I recognised him. What was his name again?
“Hello, my name is Nzonze,” said the kid.
With a surge of relief I felt the key in my back pocket.
“What is your name?” he said.
Ramming it into the lock, I turned the ignition and ripped back my right wrist.
“Forget it kid,” I replied.
That joke wasn’t funny anymore.
The flight had been all about adrenalin. Now, as I steered along a barely existent track, illuminated by a headlight with all the candle-power of a firefly drowning in beer, back – I hoped – towards Gossips, paranoia was setting in.
If the cigar had been poisoned and assuming Gdgi was indeed lying dead, who would the people blame? Not the Shaman, who could lie his way out of a locked trunk. They would blame me – and who could blame them?
Why on earth had I claimed the cigar as my own gift? How could I have been so stupid as to trust the Shaman? Was I even going the right way? Surely I was low on petrol? What would happen if the fuel ran out in the middle of the jungle? Were the tribespeople already on my tail? What if…
Stop it, I told myself. Panic wasn’t helping. I needed a little perspective…
Did something just touch my arm? Not possible.
My senses were alert. Was that pressure I felt, on my other shoulder? Did it really feel like… a hand? I twisted my head but saw nothing. Tension coursed through my bones like liquid calcification. Then… No. Not. Possible.
Something was crawling over my back, something large.
As I turned to look, my gaze whipped past the sidecar. Double-take. The passenger seat was empty. The wooden boy had disappeared… No. Not. Possible.
Breathing, in my left ear. Breathing.
A shape entered my peripheral vision. A head, beside mine.
Rouged cheeks, chiselled jaw, monocle. We stared at each other, the devil-boy and I, nose-tips touching, flesh on wood. Dead, malevolent eyes.
“Ny Daddy skliked your drink,” he whispered in my ear.
The dummy threw back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.
The laughter would not stop.
The world exploded.
And fire rained down on me.
Faces, places, memories and shapes, swirled outwards. Out towards a pinprick placed in unreality, stationed at infinity.
Time shifted, rose, fell, billowed in a heat haze. Lasted a full lifetime or vanished in a vacuum.
Within the vortex a shadow appeared. The shadow expanded. Developed features. Called a name. “Pilsbury?” Shifted, replaced by red.
Something wicked this way came, hurtling towards the distance between my eyes.
Wind. Burn. Collision. Speed.
I screamed. You screamed. We all screamed.
Then void.
“Pilsbury?”
“Pilsbury?”
The voices pricked my subconscious, eventually rousing me awake. Other noises joined the repetition of my name: familiar animal calls, the sounds of humidity.
My head felt furry and my spine hurt like hell. I was lying on my back with hard ridges digging into my flesh. What had happened? And where the hell was I?
I opened my eyes, which baulked at the sunshine. There were twisted branches and broad, verdant leaves above me, though not as high above me as I might have expected. As I shifted a shoulder, my right side began to drop, sharply. I threw out an arm, grabbed at a handhold and looked over my shoulder.
What the fuck was I doing halfway up a tree?
I puked, the matter tumbling to the ground where it splattered noisily, and instantly I felt a little better.
People were looking for me – people with local accents, whose voices I failed to recognise, but who knew my name. Why? Who could they be? While arteries around my scalp throbbed, recent memories began to filter through. When they reached the point where I had inadvertently poisoned Gdgi, my head cleared in an instant. Wonderful what fear can do.
At once it became obvious who these people were. Trackers. Hunters from Gdgi’s tribe intent upon bringing his killer to justice. But I didn’t kill him – that wasn’t my cigar! I had lied, to make myself look better! (And, oh, how that had backfired.)
The Shaman was the guilty party. But who would believe me, the interloper?
The voices had been getting closer. Too close. I focused upon them.
“Pilsbury?”
Different male voice: “Pilsbury?”
The name came again and again; as far as I could make out, there were only two of them. Only two. It was a start. But who was I kidding? A single one of those hard-as-nails tribesman could have taken me down, even if he were half my size… And what if they were armed?
They were bound to be. What self-respecting hunter would travel without some form of weapon? I imagined myself being picked off up here, in this sodding tree, spears or arrows whistling past my ears, until the inevitable.
Oh Jesus Christ. What was I going to do?
As I assessed the situation, I could not help but wonder again: what was I doing halfway up a tree?
How on earth had I got up here?
Though I strained my brain, it offered only so much, then dug in its heels. I remembered getting on the bike after decking the Shaman. I remembered rifling through my pockets for the key. I even remembered that little kid’s name: Nzonze. After that, white-out. Not a clue.
I might as well have beamed here via Mars.
“Pilsbury?” That jolted me back to the instant. Not 20 yards away, at most.
How was I going to persuade them that the Shaman was the real killer?
“Pilsbury!”
“Pilsbury!”
I could hear their footsteps now, heard them stop to sweep a hand through dead foliage, talk to each other in their own tongue. Then carry on.
I tried to curl myself up at the sides, to roll myself like a rug, so that I might hide behind mere branches, never once daring to look down.
So close now, I swore I could hear their hearts beating. Again they stopped. I screwed my eyes tight shut and dared not to breathe. Every muscle tensed.
“Hey! We see you up there!”
I waited for the spear shaft to lance my heart, praying for just a flesh wound.
“Pilsbury. Please come down. It looks very dangerous up there.”
“Yes, Mr Quench will not thank us if we return you broken.”
Their names were Benzani and Hagadro and they were friends and occasional customers of Livingstone Quench. Like myself, Quench had expected my trip with the Shaman to be a swift return journey and, knowing how temperamental old bikes could be, he had sent out a search party when I had not returned by nightfall, just in case.
They had followed my tracks out until coming across the vehicle, some yards off the path, its sidecar crumpled into a significant tree, yet with no sign of myself thereabouts. Tracking my footsteps, they had traced a haphazard route well into the jungle, until they had spotted me up the tree.
“You were lucky,” said Benzani. “There were many signs that you were bouncing off trees on your way, which would have scared off predators. But you would not have lived for long without water, had we not found you.”
“Yes,” agreed his compatriot. “And many are the tree snakes.”
Though I had assured my two saviours that they had done enough already and that I was quite capable of walking, they had insisted upon taking it in turns to give me piggy-backs home. What surprised me was that the journey did not take that long. Whatever had happened during my bike ride back from Gdgi’s ‘lost’ village, I had somehow almost made it back.
Bobbing along thus – frankly uncomfortable, given both Benzani and Hagadro’s boniness – did I return to Mlwlw to find Quench sitting outside his bar, reading a cigarette packet. He leapt to his feet when he saw us and came to greet me, arms outstretched. No sign of Harrison Dextrose.
“W
hat ’appened to you?” asked Quench. “You look like shite!”
Cheers. “I’m not entirely sure,” I replied.
“By the way,” Quench said. “There’s someone here been looking for you.”
“For me?” I felt my face blanche. Had the Q’tse come straight here? Had I not eluded them after all?
Quench continued: “Yeah. Called you by your old name: Alexander, weren’t it? Took me a while to work it aht.”
I breathed again. It couldn’t be any of the Q’tse, who knew me only as Pilsbury, nor the Shaman himself. But if it weren’t them, then who could it possibly be? Someone from my old life?
I could think of only one possible candidate… Surely not? Suzy Goodenough?
My motivation to follow in Dextrose’s footsteps, I should explain – it wasn’t purely about self-improvement. That wasn’t the whole story. There was also a woman. (Isn’t there always?)
Back home in Glibley I had two long-term friends: Benjamin Grebe and Suzy Goodenough. The latter, I had lusted after since schooldays. ‘The goddess’, Benjamin and I called her, though she remained off-bounds to us sex-wise, an unattainable angel, an ache.
There had been one incident: her 16th birthday when she had demanded I help her lose her virginity (coincidentally involving mine also), and we had both become naked in her bedroom. Fabulously nervous, I’d tried to think of something romantic to utter and had blurted out, “I like your vagina.” It had gone downhill from there and the prospect of anything carnal had trailed off into obscurity.
So, when she’d offered to sleep with me should I complete the route of Dextrose’s Quest in a faster time than the great explorer himself had managed – knowing I couldn’t possibly turn the chance down – I had leapt at it like an adolescent on a pogo stick.
Had she come out here to find me?
My hopes were piqued.
I dusted down my tanktop, ran fingers through my hair (which emerged covered in dust, twigs and four dead beetles), cleared my throat and followed the bar owner into his den.
Looking for Mrs Dextrose Page 7