by Giles Foden
On the coffee table in the middle of the room stood a glass of whisky. Next to it lay his AMT automatic pistol. He went over to the table and, using the prosthesis, picked up the glass and drank from it. Good. Having put the glass down, flexing his shoulder muscles to control the angle of elevation and strength of grip, he reached out once more.
He picked up the gun. Then, thinking of his wife in the way a homing bird yearns for its destination, he lifted it to his temple and pulled the trigger.
* * *
Nick found a little split cocoon on the wooden boards of the veranda. That was putting it rather grandly. He had made a kind of deck for the cottage on Lyly, which was all cleaned up and very accommodating now. He flicked the cocoon with his toe and watched it bounce down the steps. He didn’t consider it symbolic that it was split – he had long ago left that side of himself behind. What he had now was occupation, responsibilities, the satisfaction of getting up and doing his work each morning, a chronicle of day by day. Those days to come: he vowed he would eat them like fruit now, tasting them slowly, drawing from them what meaning he could, undeceived, without expectation.
It would have been so easy to stay in America: to shut the door on Africa and forget all about it. And he had very nearly done so. Then he had made a trip down to Florida to see his mother and Dino. They were together now. He had talked everything over with Dino, and this time the old guy had tried to persuade him to stay. But it was the voice of another old man, Leggatt, that spoke loudest. Nick felt indebted to the Englishman, and the only way he could repay him was coming back here and looking after the turtles. Sometimes, when he went to check the nests, he imagined Leggatt by his side: upright, leonine, puffing on his pipe.
Nick looked out to sea. The light of the evening sun glowed above Zanzibar’s main island, bruising the clouds as they passed. It would be dark again soon, but the night held no terrors for him now. He lit the lantern and began walking down to the beach, to the palisade he had made with Leggatt and Miranda.
He thought of her often, and sometimes wondered if he had made the right decision. It would have made a nice end to a love story. But then, what they had was never a love story, even though they might have been in love. He’d accepted that now. Just as he’d accepted Zanzibar was not paradise, and never had been. It wasn’t really a resignation. He felt happier these days, in the main. He’d a sense of inner calm, a feeling things were going his way – one he immediately corrected, knowing it was the old thing creeping up on him. It wasn’t enough to dispel one’s delusions one time only; they constantly threatened, always ready to take over, building anew on the memorial of their former condition.
With lingering steps, he walked down the beach. He could see the lighthouse and, perched on its summit, a fish eagle. He stopped and stared at the white-capped, imperious bird for a while, wishing he had a fish for it. Then it struck him it might be waiting for the turtles. He was about to clap his hands and make it fly away, when it took wing of its own accord – lifting towards a window in the high cumulus. He watched till it disappeared in red-orange streams of light, issuing from sun to sky like molten iron from fire.
He sat down by the palisade round the nests. Looking towards the darkening gulf of the horizon, his resolution faltered a little. It was so hard to live in the present, as it slipped glassily by, so hard not to fall into presumptious hopes of how the future would be sent to you, so hard not to be tricked by an ideal conception of one’s own personality. Having another human being by your side didn’t necessarily make it any easier either.
He felt a pang of loneliness all the same. The truth was, he missed Miranda. However much they had been swept up by everything that had happened, they had, even though it was just for a short time, climbed a branch of the tree of life together. Why had he lopped it off?
He hardly knew now. The tale he’d been telling himself, the arguments he’d been rehearsing – about turtles, about Africa – didn’t run so smoothly through his mind as before.
The beat of the waves filled his ears. It was not regular, not quite clear – he lit a cigarette and saw her face – but there was a pattern all the same. The fourth or fifth wave was higher in pitch, the process itself – he felt an urge to speak her name – rising in little ridges of elevation and then, though it was hard to tell when, falling again.
Was there, looking at things dispassionately, a chance for them? There was certainly time in the world. But nothing would come of nothing. Without the hand of providence, or some other fate, if neither was moved to make a change, what they had would go out like a fire from want of fuel.
Nick made a gap in the palisade, as he had done the past three nights. Spray settling on his brows and hair, a dying sun fusing a new moon’s spectral light, he sat waiting there. Cool beneath the sand, oblivious to his paternal care, smooth eggs waited too. When their time came, a kind of tremor would pass through the tiny bodies in their caskets, and they would start to hatch: to immediate threat – the gulls that were whirling above even now, the predatory crabs that ceaselessly patrolled the sand. So against all odds, having broken the shell, burrowed up four feet, and completed a fraught passage across the moonlit beach, the turtles would enter the ocean. But not yet, not yet.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their advice, help and support at various stages in the period of this novel’s gestation: Claire Armitstead; Will Atkinson; Phil Baker; Anna Borzello; Zev Braun; Lorraine Breen; Steve Caplin; Angus Cargill; Alex Clark; Victoria Coleman-Smith; Peter Couzens; Jim Crace; Michael Downes; John Dugdale; Bridget Frost; Nick Harris; Rachel Hore; Veronica Horwell; Julian Hunt; Derek Johns; Martin Kettle; Julian Loose; Joanna Mackle; Chris McLaren; Ian Pindar; Steven Poole; Eva Sallis; Ian Sansom; Linda Shaughnessy; Elaine Showalter; Paul Theroux; Kate Ward; Sarah Wherry; James Wood. Thanks are also due to Officer Jeremy Young for filling me in on details of the Boston Police cap badge, and to Sarah Spankie for commissioning the article that took me, at the time of the bombings, to Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar in the first place.
About the Author
Giles Foden was born in 1967 and spent his youth in Africa. Between 1990 and 2006 he worked as a journalist on the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. In 1998 he published The Last King of Scotland, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was later made into a feature film. The author of three other novels and also a work of narrative non-fiction, he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007. He lives in Norfolk.
Copyright
First published in 2002
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© Giles Foden, 2002
Cover design by the Senate
Cover artwork by Steve Caplin
The right of Giles Foden to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26736–1
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