Zanzibar

by Giles Foden

  The sharks took the fish on the run in the round tank – just swallowed, then passed 360 degrees round the glass before returning for the next mouthful. There was an opportunity, included in the $2 fee, to see a continuously running film about marine life around the world, but she demurred at that and stepped outside into the daylight again.

  At Metro Center she caught the orange line north-east, thinking she’d pick up some capsules from a health-food shop Kirsteen had recommended. Nutraceutica: an all-round whole-food vitamin and mineral supplement that wouldn’t, she reckoned, be available in Africa. Just before the door closed, a derelict woman in a flapping black coat swept in off the platform and sat directly opposite her. She smelt of bonfires and urine and looked weirdly like Madeleine Albright.

  The train had hardly got going before the woman began lifting her dirty sleeve, pointing at Miranda and crying out, ‘She has a perfect complexion! She has a perfect complexion!’ The other passengers looked away; the woman kept repeating the words, with varying intonations.

  Miranda was relieved to reach her stop and leave the train. The health-food store was, however, in a rather grim and desolate area. She felt uncomfortable walking along there. People were just sitting out on stoops doing nothing. Weeds on the sidewalk, potholes in the road. She felt that she stood out very conspicuously.

  The store was next to a dance studio. African Heritage Dancers and Drummers. On the other side was a gas station, and a row of garages with their dull steel shutters pulled down. Each shutter was covered in graffiti so knotted and overlaid it was impossible to tell where one design ended and the next began.

  She went in and bought the supplements. Walking back to the metro, she became aware of a dark green Acura Legend driving past her slowly. Its windows were down and there were four youths in it. One of them, his eyes drug wild, called out, ‘Hey babe, wanna new man?’

  They pulled over a little way ahead of her. Realising she had to get out of there fast, she turned tail and ran back the way she had come. She stopped, breathless, outside a soup kitchen next to the New Bethel Baptist Church. There was a queue of vagrants there, waiting for meals, which were being doled out by a plump, smiling lady in an apron.

  Miranda turned and looked behind her. There was no sign of the green car or the youths. Turning back, she saw that the foul-smelling woman from the train had suddenly appeared on the sidewalk next to her.

  ‘All lost!’ the derelict said abruptly, showing an ink-blue tongue and pointing at a sign on the church noticeboard. ‘TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH WILL I GIVE TO EAT OF THE TREE OF LIFE, WHICH IS IN THE MIDST OF THE PARADISE OF GOD.’

  Thrusting her hands deep into the pockets of her greatcoat, she produced a little bottle containing brown liquid.

  ‘It shall dissolve,’ she said to Miranda, assuringly. ‘This machinery’s entirely new to you?’

  Without waiting for an answer the madwoman said, ‘Be not afeared,’ and shook the bottle vigorously.

  As quickly as she could, Miranda made her way back to the station. Everyone talked about how crazy and chaotic Africa was, what a region of sorrow and despair it was, but were these run-down parts of Washington really any much better? By the time she got back home, to be greeted by her suitcases sitting ready in the hall, she was quite ready to make the substitution. But that was tomorrow. Tonight Kirsteen and Frank, who were chamber-music fanatics, were taking her to listen to an outfit called the Washington Viols, and then out for a farewell meal.

  * * *

  The episode with Leggatt put Nick in an anxious frame of mind and, walking along the beach that evening, he made a discovery which stirred his anxiety still further. The turtle nests had been dug up and their eggs removed. He couldn’t figure out how whoever had taken the eggs had been able to pinpoint the nests with such accuracy.

  As the sun lowered in the sky, he sat down by one of the empty holes. He found himself trying to compute the human time in which the eggs had been removed – five minutes? ten? – against the vaster spans the species itself inhabited. They might have been coming for tens of thousands of years. Every July. Nesting season across the ages. Plying up the beach to lay just here, since the time of the dinosaurs even. The struggle for life most severe when faced by man, with his false conceptions of progress and civilisation … little wonder, from Longboat Pass to Macpherson Cove, that time was running out for the turtles.

  After a while he stood up and followed the swerve of the shore. Some way on, there was an inlet where a stream came down, breaking the smoothness of the sand with rocks and mangroves. The tide was coming in, washing about in the knotted roots, sending sodden leaves and bits of rotten weed to and fro. He leant on one of the trunks and watched the pieces sway in the eddy. Black and green, grey and yellow, the feculent fragments moved across the surface. They struck him as counters in some imponderable game, chaos its only umpire, turbulence its only rule.

  Feeling a pressure in his bladder, he pulled himself out of his shorts and pissed in the stream. His water merged with the other water, tinkling like a little bell. As he tucked himself back in, he happened to look up into the tree on which he had been leaning. To his horror, he saw a large number of bats hanging upside down on the branch directly above his head – twenty or thirty bundles of fur, leather and dried fruit gripping the bark with their claws. He backed away quickly, then stood and stared at the roosting place.

  It was getting dark. The stars were rushing in. Night would be upon him any minute. He began walking briskly back to the hotel, musing as he did so on what it might be like to be a bat. To feel the air rushing by you as you flew through it. To have a head full of blood as you roosted.

  Wondering if perhaps he was going a little crazy, he tramped across the beach. Far in the distance, he heard a prayer call from a mosque in Stone Town. It drifted eerily out over the sands like the thin, piping cry of a seabird. The sound irresistibly led his mind up to the greater mind of God – away from the brute mechanism and clutter of the material world. He was sure the creator of the world in which we lived and moved could never abandon it; or look on his creatures, in the long run, with anything but concern. Evil had to be partial, Nick was convinced, a way of securing some greater good. Some regularity had to exist, a pattern of direction, even if one could not see it.

  Darkness closed in with every stride, all the same. He started tracing his own footprints – following, at a speedier pace, and in reverse, the solitary, slow steps of his earlier passage – till, just in time, he saw the friendly gleam of the Macpherson’s thatched portals, heard the chug of the generator and, finally, the faint chatter of hotel guests at dinner.

  Not feeling hungry, he walked across the courtyard to his room, which was more like a little chalet. Turning on the light, he saw a neoprene and rubber pile of scuba stuff on the floor and, directly in front of him on the wall, a calendar. Disabled American Veterans 1998: America the Beautiful. The photograph that month was of Washington’s Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool. Hanging nearby, on a string between two nails, were some sponges he’d brought up from the ocean floor.

  On the desk, next to his laptop and a Walkman, was something else he’d swum up with: a large conch. Beside it lay a U2 cassette (The Joshua Tree) and two issues of Kids Discover magazine (‘Weather’ and ‘United States History’) which he’d had his mother send him and planned to take to the school.

  Also on the desk was a plastic ‘PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB’ sign with a hole for the door handle, and a postcard from Dino showing the actress Drew Barrymore in an old-fashioned dress, with the words Ever After at the bottom. He picked up the postcard and stared at it. The movie was clearly some kind of costume drama. But all sense of the past was destroyed by the card’s own laminated surface: so shiny and slick – the thought struck him – it might have been done with turtle oil.

  7

  Breakfasting on the veranda at the Macpherson the next day, Nick saw the familiar yacht pass by again. A crescent moon was still visible in the grey mor
ning sky as the yellow craft made its way across the edge of the bay. Between moon and sun, he realised, he could get a pretty fair idea of the yacht’s bearing. He pushed aside his plate of papaya and drank up his coffee. Then he went back to his room and took out a map and compass from his gear. He spread out the map on his bed. If the bearing was right, the yacht was heading here. Tiny letters marked the spot his finger had found on the map. Lyly – one of the small atolls that Chikambwa had told him wasn’t worth bothering with.

  Suddenly excited, grabbing his knife, the new starting cord he had bought the previous day, and a pair of binoculars, he rushed over to the boathouse. Pulling da Souza’s outboard from the musty shed, he humped it down the beach to where, newly repaired, the USAID boat was sitting on the sun-baked sand. Attaching the motor to the stern, he dragged the dinghy further down the shore into the shallows.

  He paused with his bare legs in the water and the boat knocking against his thighs. The tide was incoming, pulsing slowly, indolently. He looked back at the furrow the dinghy had made through the sand, his own splayed footprints either side of the trough.

  Then he stepped in and, sitting on the cross-bench, began unwinding the new starting cord from its spool. The dinghy was rocking gently. He began rewinding the cord onto the dynamo of the outboard. He had only pulled it a couple of times when he heard a shout behind him.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’

  Nick looked up. It was the Goan, running down from the veranda. He was carrying something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sir, if you are taking the boat, you must have these.’

  ‘What?’

  Da Souza was carrying a tattered and dusty lifejacket and an old canvas bag, from which he produced what looked like an antique pistol.

  ‘A gun?’ said Nick, looking at the pistol. It hung on a belt stuffed with fat cardboard cartridges. He splashed back through the shallows, keeping hold of the lanyard.

  ‘Flare, sir,’ said da Souza, handing it over. ‘If you use the hotel engine, I must insist you have this for safety. Insurance.’

  Nick inspected the ancient firearm. ‘Does it work? It looks like it came from the Second World War.’

  ‘That is right, sir.’ Da Souza smiled with gleaming teeth. ‘Second World War it is. I found them in stores. And this too.’

  Nick gave him a quizzical look and, returning the gun to its bag, took the life jacket. He returned to the dinghy.

  ‘I’ll be a couple of hours.’

  ‘Be careful, sir. I do not want another death from this boat.’

  The engine gave out a puff of blue smoke and then, as the cord snickered back into its housing, started up with a satisfying whump. Nick manoeuvred the small craft out into the bay, checked his bearing, and set off.

  Enjoying the feeling of the cool air on his face, and the vibrations of the motor as they came up through his hand and arm, he watched the clouds drift across the horizon. In the wide, blue expanse, he couldn’t see any sign of the yacht.

  A flock of white birds passed, skimming low and calling out, then swiftly disappeared above the folding waves. He thought of the muezzin he’d heard the previous night. Its ancient sound had called the faithful to prayer for generations, promising them a life after this life. Which, if he understood it correctly, Muslims thought an illusion.

  Half an hour went by before the island came into view: a green lump sitting on a line of exposed coral. Nick scanned it with his binoculars. The green, he knew, must be coral-rag forest. What surprised him was the tall white building rising from the middle. He hadn’t expected a lighthouse.

  As he got closer he spotted the yellow yacht, moored outside the reef. Within the curl of foam that marked the coral was a lagoon skirted by a small beach. As well as the lighthouse, there were a couple of other buildings on the island – one a dilapidated house, the other a small church. Then a line of trees behind. He looked again. The church had a little minaret. It wasn’t a church. It was a mosque.

  Thinking he had best approach quietly, he cut the engine and rowed round to the other side of the island – with some difficulty, since the oars were heavy and the tide more insistent now. Eventually, by chance rather than design, he managed to land the dinghy after passing through a rough gap between the coral.

  As he pulled the boat up and looked for somewhere to secure it, he noticed a spike of metal sticking up out of the rock. It was some kind of cable. The metal was copper, Nick reckoned, although most of its colour had gone, disguised under verdigris and the jelly-like attachments of algae. Still, it would do as a mooring.

  After tying up, he turned to face the rag forest, which arced round him like a curtain. There was no sign of cultivation, and no activity except for two big, orange coconut crabs, moving slowly across the sand like a pair of halting dancers towards a fringe of undergrowth.

  He set off through the rag, a little uncertain which direction would take him to the place where the yacht was moored. Eventually, emerging from the green-clad walls, he saw – crouched down in the sand not some sixty feet away from him – the figure of Ralph Leggatt.

  Nick lifted his binoculars. Through the roundels he saw that Leggatt was digging up turtle eggs. He felt a tide of anger rise. So that was why the sour old man had been so antagonistic towards him. He watched the Englishman for a moment, unsure what to do. Just as he was about to go and confront him, he heard a sound across the water. He looked over.

  It was a small dhow. Narrower than Leggatt’s yacht, it had been able to come right into the lagoon. Two men and a boy jumped out and started swimming towards the shore. Nick swung the binoculars back round: Leggatt had seen them too. He was running away across the sand. The three figures reached the beach, splashing through the surf. Nick recognised the large, muscular man as the octopus whacker he’d seen on the quay when he first arrived. Now he was carrying a panga, a machete. But it was the other guy who caught Leggatt first, tackling him like a football player.

  Transfixed, Nick watched the man lay into Leggatt. The big one joined in too, hitting Leggatt with the flat of the machete, while the boy began gathering up the turtle eggs which the Englishman had unearthed. Perhaps these were Chikambwa’s men, marine wardens … but they were beating the hell out of the Englishman.

  Nick was about to come forward and show himself when they stopped. One of the men shouted an instruction in Swahili to the boy, before dragging Leggatt to a palm tree. He began tying him to it with a length of coconut fibre.

  They meant to leave him there, Nick could see. Now they were taking off their ragged shirts and placing the eggs inside.

  The binoculars found Leggatt. There was blood running from the old man’s mouth. Something was wrong. Wardens wouldn’t do this. He let the binoculars fall in confusion, then took them up again.

  Balancing their precious packages on their heads, the Africans were swimming back to their boat; the one with the machete was holding it between his teeth. The boy was swimming in a different direction – towards Leggatt’s boat.

  As soon as they were a safe distance away, Nick ran over to Leggatt and undid his bonds.

  ‘You!’ cried the old man, falling forward.

  ‘I would have come earlier, only …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now. Quick, before they get my boat. Where’s yours?’

  ‘You’re hurt!’

  ‘I’m all right. Where’s your boat?’

  Nick gestured over his shoulder, and then the two of them were running, crashing through the undergrowth back to where Nick had moored. They hurled themselves in. At first the motor wouldn’t start.

  ‘Get out the way,’ spat Leggatt from his broken mouth.

  He reached over and fiddled with the filter on the outboard’s fuel supply.

  ‘Now try it.’

  Nick pulled, and the motor coughed into life.

  By the time they had rounded the island, the boy was already on Leggatt’s yacht. He was up in the rigging, tearing at the sails with a knife.

  ‘Lit
tle bastard!’ cursed the Englishman. ‘Can’t this go any faster? If they haul the anchor she’ll drift onto the coral.’

  Two small rivers of blood ran down his chin.

  ‘I’m trying as best I can,’ said Nick, squeezing the throttle. In his head he was trying, too – trying to work out exactly who was the villain in all this.

  The men on the dhow had seen them by now, and were wheeling round.

  ‘Come on!’ cried Leggatt. ‘They’ll get there before us!’

  ‘She’s at full throttle,’ said Nick.

  They were about two hundred metres from the dhow. With the wind behind it, it was clear that it would get to Leggatt’s yacht before them, even though they were closing rapidly.

  ‘We’re not going to stop them,’ said the Englishman grimly. ‘Unless you happen to have a shotgun.’

  Nick paused for a moment. ‘Down there,’ he said.

  ‘This?’ Leggatt picked up da Souza’s canvas satchel. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Flare,’ said Nick.

  ‘What? No one will get here in time to save the boat.’

  ‘At them, I meant.’

  ‘Ah,’ Leggatt said, with a sudden grin. ‘I see what you’re up to.’

  He introduced one of the cartridges into the breech of the flare gun, took aim at the dhow, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Leggatt. ‘Give me your knife.’

  Nick tossed it to him, and looked up at the dhow. They were close now. He could see the faces of the sailors. The bare-chested man with the panga was standing up on the deck.