Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  Then—just as the sun is sinking behind the trees in a pool of deep red light—I see the peeling white post that marks out my parents’ farm, shimmering in the dusk. The memories thicken, and my throat catches. Here is the track that I ran down so often to greet my father. The years drop away. It is just as it was in my dreams. Only the potholes in the track have taken on a different pattern. I lean out of the rolled-down window, the metal hot against my arm, and feel the warmth rising from the earth. Here is the old African olive tree I climbed as a child, its gnarled trunk thick and dark against the luminescent sky. I can see light glinting off water—the dam. Then—all of a sudden—we are here. The house—so long imagined—stands just as it did, the purple creeper is a little thicker perhaps, but otherwise the same. The two acacias which grow behind the house cast their long shadows over the ground, the evening light turning their branches to a deep yellow. How can something I have dreamed of for so long be so suddenly upon me? I realize I haven’t allowed myself to believe that I might ever come back, and only now am I giving in to the joy of it.

  I step down from the jeep, the dusty, sun-baked earth warm beneath the soles of my feet. A jackal barks in the clear, cool evening light. I haven’t stood here since the moment I climbed into my parents’ car, onto my mother’s lap, so many years before. My throat is choked with emotion. She is so close to me now that I can almost hear her voice. I know from the hours spent staring at the handful of photographs my father sent me that the first few moments are when I will feel her presence the most; the house will soon lose its power to conjure the ghost of memory.

  I see a tawny dog with black paws trotting toward us, head low, barking a warning.

  “Juno?” I call, softly.

  She stops for a moment, head cocked, then bounds forward, coiling herself between my legs, whining in excitement. She remembers me and I realize how much I have been hoping that she would. The door bursts open, and my father is walking toward me. “Look how tall you are,” he shouts, and I run to him and press my face—wet with tears—against his chest. I cannot meet his eye or look him in the face. There is too much emotion. But I am home, and he is here, beneath my hands, and all the absent bitterness of the last six years will be rolled away. And then—blinking through tears—I see a woman standing in the door behind him.

  V

  Rachel, this is Sara,” my father says, disentangling himself from my embrace. “She lives here—” He boldly speaks the words as though there is no shame in them, as though his tone might remove any awkwardness that the revelation holds.

  The woman walks toward us with a neat step and a smile that never quite reaches her eyes. I can tell by the formality of the introduction that she is more than a recent acquaintance; she has been here for some time. I dry my eyes with my hands and we kiss—Sara barely leaning forward so that I end up just grazing her cheek. The saturating, sweet smell of lilies envelops me.

  “You haven’t been here since you were a little girl, is that right?” she asks.

  “I haven’t,” I say, leaning down to sink my face in Juno’s fur, breathing in the animal smell of her, trying to hide the tears which are coming now for a different reason, or for the same reason all muddled into one. I don’t want this woman to be here to witness my homecoming. Every second is a chance to bring my mother alive, to feel her presence as it was when we left, me scrambling onto her lap in the car, her soft whisper in my ear.

  “Nate Logan,” Sara says, turning her gaze away from me.

  Nathaniel is shaking my father’s hand.

  “Can we persuade you to stay the night with us?” my father asks.

  “No—thank you. I’ve picked up a new camera. I want to be out first thing tomorrow.” He takes a small package from the front seat of his jeep and gives it to Sara. “Extra film for Harold.”

  “He’s out on the farm,” she says, giving him a tight smile, “taking photographs.” I sense a friction between them.

  “Well—send him my regards,” Nathaniel says.

  He turns to look at me and I stand up, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes to stop the tears. I swallow down the choking that is catching at my chest. I scarcely know him, but for a reason I cannot explain I would rather he stayed.

  “Thank you,” I say, smiling.

  “That’s all right, kiddo,” he says, laying a hand on my head. “You look after yourself.”

  A moment later he is gone, the rattle of his engine receding into the dusk.

  Sara links arms with my father, one arm wrapped around his, and smiles, and I notice the coolness of her gaze as she looks at me.

  “I hope you won’t mind,” she says, “but we’ve moved you into a different room. There’s Harold, you see, my son. It seemed silly to let that big room go to waste.” She pauses for a moment, then says into the awkward silence, “If I had known you were coming back—” as though she had thought I might never come home.

  I smile brightly at them both. “That’s fine,” I say, but all I can think is that she is not a guest. She is talking about our house as though it is her own. Who is she exactly? How could my father not have told me?

  My father clasps my shoulder, bridging the distance between us, and the familiar weight of his hand sends a current of emotion through me. “Come on in, Rachel.” I am aware of a thread of tension. It seems to me that their backs are all to the house, on guard, but perhaps I have imagined it. Evening has come, the sun has gone down, and the air is chill—we are at over six thousand five hundred feet here in the highlands, and on the equator nightfall is swift.

  They turn toward the house, and I glance involuntarily behind me—the wind is rustling the long papyrus grass in front of the house, and the silver spires move as though someone is walking through them.

  “It’s all right,” my father says, quietly. “There’s no one there.”

  Kahiki has left my bags by the front door, and I thank him. He calls to Juno as he leaves, but she puts her tail between her legs and drops her head, unwilling to follow.

  “She’s not coming in?” I ask.

  “Not in the house,” Sara says, standing in the doorway.

  “Why?” I ask, looking at my father in surprise.

  “She’s riddled with ticks,” Sara says, but we have always deticked our dogs, and they have always slept in the house. I can’t imagine this evening without Juno stretched out in front of the fire.

  “She sleeps in the stables,” my father says. “It’s comfortable enough.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t adopted your family’s love of animals,” Sara says, with a small, brittle laugh.

  “What about leopard?” I’m shocked. “Don’t they try to get at her?”

  “They haven’t managed it yet,” she says, drily, but I am sure my father can’t approve. Even if they bolt the stable doors so that a leopard can’t get in, it would terrify her with its circling. Leopard like dog almost as much as baboon.

  “Can she stay now that I am here?” I don’t want to go in without her. I will sleep better with her by my bed.

  My father looks at Sara for approval, and I can see the struggle in her face, a flare of irritation that this is out of her control. “Of course,” she says with an indulgent smile that is just a little tight around the edges, and—as if she can sense the outcome—Juno trots past her into the hall.

  My father shuts the door behind us. Standing here, I feel as though I have slipped through time. The house is just the same, with its thick plaster walls stained dark over the years by wood smoke and the rub of shoulders. The grandfather clock—brought by my parents from England on the wagon which drove them to the farm—ticks out the time, achingly slow. In the sitting room a fire spits and crackles in the stone hearth, and the air is sweet with the smell of burning leleshwa. Arched over our heads is the pitched timber ceiling beneath the thatch whose patterns I had endlessly tried to memorize as a child.
The mahogany dresser—which used to hold my mother’s collection of fossils and stones—now shows off rows of matching pink and yellow floral plates and china teacups, but little else has changed. Here are the armchairs gathered round the fire, draped with zebra skins; the rugs my mother and I bought on a trip to Zanzibar, and the floorboards she had laid by hand with my father—the line of the equator—which crosses right through this room—picked out in red cedar. The dark, waxed table where we ate supper every evening is just the same, set in front of the three windows that look out onto the lawn beyond.

  “Where is Jim? And Joseph?” I ask, looking around. Jim was the cook—overweight, sweating and full of laughter—he had been with us for as long as I could remember. Joseph was the houseboy. His long face, his wrinkled hands and his soft, padding feet had been an intimate part of my childhood.

  “Jim is in the kitchen,” Sara says.

  “And Joseph?” I ask my father.

  “We had to let him go—”

  “He was half blind—always knocking things over,” Sara says. “Mungai, the new boy, will get you anything you need.” A slightly built, young Kikuyu boy is hovering in the doorway.

  But I don’t need anything. I only want to see Jim. A homecoming isn’t a homecoming without him bursting out of the kitchen to greet me, clasping me to his huge belly, his arms smelling of onions and treacle.

  “I’ll go find him in the kitchen.”

  “Don’t you think you’d better have a bath first?” I follow Sara’s gaze to my shoeless feet, and my calves, spattered red-brown with mud. I pause for a moment. There is something in her voice—a challenge—that stops me from going.

  It is Sara, not my father, who shows me to the guest room, on the other side of the sitting room. I step inside, with Juno at my heels, and Sara hovers at the open door watching me.

  “I expect you’re wondering what I’m doing here,” she says, her gaze settling unflinching on mine, her forefinger winding round the thin gold chain at her neck. I look at her then—taking her in. She must be in her midforties—a little younger than my mother would be now. Her dark hair is cut short around her ears, accentuating the white curve of her neck, and she wears a sleeveless silk shirt that tightens over her breasts. Her mouth is a glossy lipstick red. The skin on her arms is pale and smooth, and as she drops her hand to her waist, thin ivory bangles slip down her wrist, clinking against each other like bones. She is so pale she might be in England, and I wonder if she ever goes outside. My eyes slide away from hers. She seems the very opposite of my mother, who wore only the simplest things, who smelled, not of lilies, but of the warm sun mingled with antiseptic, and of the sharp, green lettuces that she cut from her garden.

  “I said he should write and tell you but he never did,” Sara says.

  “Why not?”

  “Men don’t like change. They choose the path of least resistance, and generally don’t step off it unless pushed.” I struggle to match this assertion with what I know of my father, the way he was with my mother when I was growing up. But then—with a hot rush of blood—I remember how easily he gave me up to my grandparents.

  “Are you married?” I ask. I know it’s a risk and I feel my blood beat a little faster.

  “Not yet,” she says, holding my gaze, letting me understand there is no shame for her in their arrangement. I feel a tiny chink of relief that she is not yet family. That my father hasn’t given all of himself away.

  She calls Juno to her as she leaves, but the dog drops to her haunches on the floor beside me, her head low in apology for not following.

  Sara clicks her tongue in irritation. “She’s filthy.”

  “I’ll give her a bath,” I say, wanting to hold on to this one thing.

  “As long as I’m not the one who has to do it.”

  Just as she is about to leave, she turns in the door. “Why did you come?”

  I stare at her. The question is so direct, so lacking in grace, that I do not know how to answer.

  “Why would anyone come back to this place—” She says in a low voice. I do not think she wants me to answer. After a moment she glances at me. “If you need anything in the night, you know where your father and I are sleeping.”

  In my mother’s bed.

  When she is gone I sit down on the floor, stroking the smooth, whiskered fur around Juno’s muzzle. A sudden, panicked sense of unbelonging wells up inside me. I am a complete stranger in the one place where I expected to feel at home. Even this room isn’t familiar to me. The walls are covered in a blue-flocked wallpaper, which has dark patches where the damp has crept in over the years. It is on the north side of the house, and it feels chill and unused. The three rooms on this side were reserved for guests—the family bedrooms are on the other side of the house, off the main hall. I have always been, ever since I was a child, afraid of the dark. I know I will be scared here, on my own, so far from the others, but I am determined not to show it.

  Juno is all skin and bones, and her coat is matted stiff with blackjacks—burrs that cling tight to her fur. And Sara is right. There are ticks—fat, leathery sacks—nestling behind her ears and in the corners of her legs. I’ll get rid of them later, but for now I am eager for a bath.

  One of the boys has lit the boiler that sits at the back of the house. When I test the water it runs hot. I undress, peeling off my shirt, my trousers, the layers of my dusty journey from Nairobi. The baths at Kisima are twice the length of my grandmother’s in England. I am no longer a child, but they are still long enough to swallow me whole. I shake out the thick, matted coil of my hair, letting it fall to my chest, and step into the mineral brown water. My hands and feet are darker than my legs and arms, and I rub at the rings of dust until they dissolve in clouds in the water. The lamp flickers its orange light over the walls, and I lie back as I did as a child so that I am submerged, my hair weightless. Except my body is not the same as it was. My thighs are longer, heavier, and my breasts emerge like pale rocks from the water. Along the soft curve of my belly, there beneath the surface, are the dense, dark curls between my legs. I shut my eyes. There is this—a woman’s body. I am not the same at all.

  Once I have risen dripping from the water, I get changed in a hurry, squeezing the moisture from my wet hair, twisting it into a bun and pulling on a sweater over my shirt. I have forgotten how cold the nights are here.

  There is someone standing in the corridor when I step out of my room. I get a fright when I see him because it looks as though he has been waiting for me. There is a camera in his left hand. His cheeks flush a hot red, clear even by the kerosene lamp that hangs from his hand, illuminating him from beneath. I feel a moment of unaccountable fear which I banish by speaking.

  “You’re Harold?”

  “Yes,” he says, stepping forward, breaking the spell. He is a fraction taller than me, but he must be a few years younger. He puts the lamp on the floor and holds out his hand. It is hot and dry in mine. He gives me a quick, shifting glance, a small intense look that is over in a second, before he looks away, embarrassed. I see the door is open to the small room at the end of the corridor, and realize he has come from there. He must have heard me running my bath, perhaps he even heard the conversation with his mother.

  “Any trouble on the way up?”

  “Not really,” I say, thinking of the raid on the market, the woman with her baby. I’m not ready to share these things with a stranger.

  “Sara won’t like her being in the house,” he says, nodding his head at Juno, who stands at my heels. I find it strange that he should call his mother by her first name. “She doesn’t like dogs.”

  “I’ll keep her out of the way.”

  We stand in silence for a few seconds, then he looks up. “Your room. I’m sorry—”

  “I don’t mind,” I say, although it is not quite the truth.

  There is a whooping, leering call outside and
I start. It is the first time I have heard a hyena since I have been back and it catches me unawares. I had forgotten its awful, mocking sound, the undulating wail of a lunatic.

  “Are you scared?” he asks.

  “Should I be?”

  “They mimic the call of wild animals.”

  “Who?”

  He looks at me strangely and all of a sudden I know who he means—Mau Mau. In that moment his fear is contagious, and I am acutely conscious of how unprotected we are against whatever might be outside. I glance down the corridor to the dark panes of the uncurtained window. It is a long time since I have been in the bush, so far from other people, other houses. My father has cleared a few thousand acres for his crops and grazing, for the native shambas, but most of the fifty thousand acres on the farm are still forested, thick heavy scrub with gorges and valleys full of caves—perfect hiding places.

  “There aren’t any Mau Mau here,” I say, banishing the fear by naming it. He must have been wound up by the stories in the newspapers and the reports on the radio of men living in the forests, stockpiling weapons.

  He shakes his head slightly, then beckons with his hand—the hand with the camera—and walks down the corridor to the spare room, taking the lamp with him. I find myself following, unsure what he wants of me or what to make of him. He is all angles, narrow hunched shoulders, slender hands, a rash of fuzz on his cheeks. His hair is muddy blond, but I can see his mother in the delicacy of his cheekbones, in the curving slope of his lips.

  He has taken ownership of the room, turning it into a workplace of sorts. The single bed, with its metal frame, has been pushed against the wall, and there is a wide plank of wood resting on crates which serves as a desk. One section is covered in little bottles with screw tops, a stack of trays, Kodak boxes, clips, something that looks like a thermometer. The curtains are open but a piece of felt has been tacked neatly to the window frame. He has made a darkroom. He lifts his lamp to place it on the desk, and I see a pile of photographs strewn across the worktop. They are all of the same image, in varying exposures, showing the lower half of a man, upside down, protruding from the earth, his body held up by the depth of the hole.