Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  “We brought her to your father, when she fell into the fire. He asked memsaab to help—but she sent her away—”

  Someone puts a record on the gramophone inside, and the voice of an American singer drifts—incongruously jolly—into the immensity of the landscape.

  “I am sorry—” I say, shaking my head.

  “Your mother had medicines—” Mukami says, ignoring my refusal, and miming the shape of a large box with her hands.

  My mother’s medicine chest. I find it in the bureau in the hall. It looks smaller than I remember it. There is a brass lock, with the key inside. I was forbidden to open it as a child, and I feel my mother looking over me as I turn the key; I do not have her approval yet. In the early mornings, before breakfast, she treated the Kikuyu who waited for her at the foot of the veranda. I would sit on the step in the shade, listening to her quiet voice, watching her skilled hands bandage, mend and heal. Inside are gauzes, rolls of bandages, a tin of iodoform, a large bottle of castor oil—its lid gummed up—Epsom salts, Dettol soap, cough stuff, aspirin and other bottles of pills whose names I do not recognize.

  The smooth steel handles of the chest are cold against the palm of my hand. I carry it outside and place it on the veranda. Mukami squats down and waits for me to open it. Mungai is hovering on the veranda behind us, watching, and she barks at him to fetch water.

  “Warm water,” I say, understanding that Mukami wants to clean the wound. She is right. The first thing is to stop the infection.

  When Mungai sets down a bowl beside me, I take the Dettol and pour out a capful into the water. I am reminded all at once—as the clouded liquid spills into the warm water—of her, of the moment when she had finished treating the Kikuyu and she would take me onto her lap and I would smell the same sharp odor on her skin.

  I bring the lamp closer to the child and begin to wash the pus from the wound with pieces of cloth, dipped in the water. Mukami helps me peel away the dead skin around the burn. The girl stands very still, crying quietly. I find the iodoform—the same tin she used on my own cuts and grazes—and shake out the powder onto the wound. Then I take out an assortment of gauze, cotton wool and bandages and look at them, unsure. Mukami’s hands take them from me, and deftly she does what I could not—bandages the child’s leg and buttocks, the bandage winding around the child’s waist. I should not be surprised. She used to help my mother in the house; I am not the only one who remembers her. I go inside and fetch two clean hand towels for the child to lie on at night, to keep the dirt from the bandage.

  “Come back the day after tomorrow,” I say, “and we will change the bandage.”

  “Asante,” the child’s mother says, and Mukami takes my hand briefly in hers. They turn and walk away, silently into the dark, their children soft, heavy bundles on their backs.

  VIII

  I rummage through my clothes and pull on a pair of clean, loose-fitting cotton trousers, bending down to roll up the bottoms. There is a crunch of tires outside my window and the swing of headlights across the wall; the District Officer arriving for supper. I slip on a blouse, fiddle with the buttons and pull over it a long, woolen cardigan. In the mirror on the dressing table, I can feel my grandmother’s disapproving glance—she disliked me wearing trousers. I worry that I should change into something smarter, but I don’t like showing my legs, and I feel comfortable in these boy’s clothes which hide the curves of my body. I brush out my hair in the mirror, roll it into a tight knot at the back of my neck and look back at my reflection, bracing myself for dinner.

  Sara is sitting in a corner of the sofa wearing a blue wool skirt and a silk shirt, the first few buttons undone so that I can see the top of a lace camisole underneath. Her shoes have slipped off and one calf is stretched along the length of the sofa, her foot resting in my father’s lap. He has a glass of whiskey in one hand, and his other hand is kneading her foot. He stops when he sees me and slides her foot off his lap. Harold is sitting in one of the armchairs by the fire, reading, and his eyes flicker up from his book, in greeting.

  It takes me a moment to notice the other man. He is standing by the bar pouring out a drink. I recognize him before he has turned around—the bulk of his body, the heavy, slouched shoulders, his thin blond hair. My hand grips the side of the doorframe.

  “Rachel,” my father says, standing up, gesturing toward him. “This is Steven Lockhart, the District Officer. A good friend of your uncle Eliot. Used to operate down at Uplands. Now he’s on our turf.”

  The man turns around, drink in one hand, and looks at me, and there can be no doubt now—it is the officer who killed the striker at my uncle’s factory. My heart is racing in my chest and my throat has dried up.

  “Ah—Rachel—” he says, smiling at me. “I have been looking forward to meeting you. I’m afraid you’ll see rather more of me than you might like. I’m setting up a Home Guard post to help monitor unrest within the Kikuyu. Kisima is my nearest stop for refreshment, and I have been taking undue advantage of your parents’ hospitality.”

  I feel my cheeks burning. Memory rushes in on me; not just what I saw him do in the upstairs room of the factory, but what happened afterward, at my uncle’s house. My hands flicker in and out of my pockets. They are all looking at me.

  “A drink?” Steven asks, tipping the gin bottle at me, his eyes shining, enjoying my discomfort.

  “Rachel?” My father’s voice is touched with concern.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, turning to walk out of the room, down the corridor to the bathroom in the hall. When I am inside, I shut the door and lock it.

  I put my forehead against the door and close my eyes, taking in a ragged breath. It isn’t just what I saw him do at the factory. There is something else.

  —

  TWO MEN ARE SITTING on the veranda of my uncle’s house when I come running back from the factory. One is Roger Manning—a factory manager. The other man is the officer who killed the African striker.

  “Where is my uncle?” I ask, swallowing heavily.

  “Up at the factory,” the officer says in a slow drawl, ashing his cigarette on the floorboards and kicking a chair out toward me as though he has been waiting for me. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  I walk up the steps onto the veranda and sit, hesitantly, on the chair. I can feel the telegram still crushed in my pocket.

  “He was worried about you, Rachel,” Roger says. “Came back and you weren’t here.”

  “Been up at the factory?” the officer asks, swilling a bottle of beer in his left hand.

  I nod slowly. I am so thirsty my throat is sticking, and I don’t trust myself to speak.

  “Should have listened to your uncle,” Roger says, running a hand over his jaw. “Said he told you not to go anywhere near the factory today.”

  There is something surreal about both men, their speech slow, their conversation inward. I know drunkenness—I have seen it before at the farm.

  “Don’t be rough on her,” the officer says, leaning forward to look at me, with both elbows on his knees. He is younger than my father, but his cheeks are coarse and red. There is something corpulent and louche in his manner. Not quite the neat self-discipline of the army officers who are my parents’ friends. His eyes—now that he has turned them on me—have a flashing, intuitive directness, as though he might poke about in my soul and fish out what he wants. I swallow, wishing my uncle would come home. “She might have learned a thing or two. What did you see?” His voice is slow and inviting, a deep drawl. He is seeing what he can wind in.

  “The pigs. They were scared.” I look him straight in the face. “They shouldn’t have taken in so many of them.”

  “Ah—the pigs,” he says with slow sarcasm, leaning back in his chair and kicking out his boots. “They do tend to be the losers in a place like this.”

  They both laugh.

  “Have you been fi
xing something today?” the officer asks suddenly, his eyes settling on mine.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, confused.

  “The mark on your dress,” he says slowly. “It looks like engine oil.” I follow his gaze. There is a dark streak of grease across the white sleeve of my dress, running under the seam. The grease that covered Michael’s palm, oily black against the cotton. For a moment I think it might all tumble out of me—that I was on the first floor of the factory, that I saw him kill a man, but I swallow it down. “My bicycle,” I lie, “the chain came off. I tried to fix it.”

  His eyes slide away from me, and Roger stands up, waving us both good night, walking heavily down the steps of the veranda into the darkening evening. I stand up, wanting to shout after him, Don’t go. Don’t leave me here with him, but my chest is too tight, and no words come out.

  Instead I walk past the officer, into the house. My heart is rapping against my ribs. My uncle will be home soon. I try to breathe in the truth of it—but it doesn’t stop the giddiness. I have caught his interest—I saw it in the way he looked at me.

  The clink of a beer bottle, then the scrape of his chair as he stands up. I hold myself absolutely still, willing him to leave, but after a moment I hear the tread of feet on the veranda and the door pushes open. He comes a few paces into the room and stands in front of me, his face breaking into a slow smile, and I am immediately afraid. I see the blond hair on his thick forearms, his tongue licking at his lips.

  At the last minute I move, but he reaches out, catching hold of my wrist, drawing me into him so that my face collides with his chest. I cry out, trying to get away, but his hands hold me fast, the skin on my wrist twisting under his fingers. Then he turns me around, so that my back is to his stomach, wraps his forearm around my waist, and sinks down into the armchair behind him, drawing me down with him, deep into his lap.

  “Shhh shhh shhh,” he says, pinning me effortlessly against him, laughing softly as I hit out at him with my free hand. “You’re a prickly thing, aren’t you?”

  Like a dream in which your limbs are powerless—I feel with horror the feebleness of my own strength. After a moment I stop fighting, realizing it is only making it worse.

  “That’s a good girl,” he says, loosening his grip, his hands cradled in my lap, his breath so close that I can feel the wetness of his mouth against my ear. “Now tell me what you saw today at the factory.”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Oh, but you see, I don’t believe that’s true. You came back looking like a rabbit that’s been shot up the arse. You must have seen something.”

  “I heard the strikers. And the guns.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Yes,” I whisper, praying for my uncle to come home.

  “So you should have been. Have you thought about what those Africans could do? They’re the ones with the knives, who know how to separate the soft parts of the body, bone from bone.” He picks up my hand, unfurls two fingers and traces them down my throat. “The anatomy of a man is not so different from a pig. One slice to cut you from end to end.” His hand drags my fingers over my shirt, down my chest, across my stomach, until my skin crawls and I can’t bear it any longer. I leap up. He laughs and lets me run into my bedroom.

  I sit on the floor with my back against the door, panic roaring in my ears. But he never comes, and eventually I hear his footsteps walking down the steps of the veranda. When my uncle comes home—in the dark, I can smell the stench of sweat on him and the thick, animal smell of blood. His eyes are hard and staring.

  “Why didn’t you come back sooner?” my voice breaks.

  “There were four hundred of them,” he says, sitting down to pull off his gumboots. “The engine was shot to pieces—we had to finish them all by hand.”

  His hands have been scrubbed clean but the bottoms of his trousers, where they tuck into his boots, are clotted with a thick, wet ring of blood.

  I pull the telegram from my pocket and hand it to him, my heart beating darkly in my chest. He glances at my face before taking it, then sets his boots to one side and stands up. He turns on the electric light, and I blink in the sudden glare. He holds the note up to read it, and I see his fingernails edged black with blood. He has no choice then but to look at me. The crickets keep up their steady, urgent throbbing outside.

  He shakes his head and passes me the bit of paper.

  “What is it?” I ask in a whisper, not taking it from him, all the muscles in my body tense in anticipation as though this might make me less vulnerable.

  “An accident. In the car, on the way to Southampton.” He pauses for a second, dragging the words into reality. “It’s your mother. She is dead.”

  His words fall on me like a knife—cutting through that soft part of me that I hadn’t known was there until the moment it was severed. I reach out my hands to pull it back, anguish spilling out of me in a cry that comes from deep in my guts. Everything is quiet. I see my uncle lick his lips, uneasy with the responsibility the message thrusts upon him. I see Juno, oblivious, scratching at the door to be let out. And there is me standing in the middle of the room, my arms outstretched, the world falling away beneath my feet.

  She died on her way to the boat that would take her home to me. My head explodes in a kaleidoscope of fractured images: the slaughtered pigs, the African on the floor of the factory, the blood in the car, on the road, and my mother, motionless, caught in time so many thousands of miles away, while I spin on into a future without her.

  —

  “WE’VE MET BEFORE, you know,” Steven Lockhart says in a low voice as we make our way to the table. He has grown a mustache since I saw him last, trimmed short and not so thick that I can’t see the pink skin between the white blond hairs. He licks at the tip of it, his tongue flickering in the corner of his mouth.

  “I know.”

  “I hoped you might remember. That’s good. I like to make an impression.”

  I don’t reply and he says, “You’ve grown up.” He brushes my hair lightly with one fat hand, an intimate gesture, and I flinch. “You were a scrawny brat when I last saw you.” He doesn’t say it with affection. There is something assertive and controlling in his voice. His gaze falls to my wide, turned-up trousers. “Do you enjoy dressing like a boy?”

  I feel the blood rushing to my face, and I look away without answering.

  —

  “SO, STEVEN—what’s the news?” my father says at dinner, helping himself from the platter of roast beef that Mungai is serving.

  “You heard they burned down a power station last night?” Steven chews at his meat and takes a slug of wine. “A farm on the foothills of Mount Kenya.”

  “Yes—” says my father. “And slaughtered some cattle?”

  “A dozen heifers—hacked about with pangas.”

  “Where was the farm?” Harold asks, quickly, voicing my own concern. We can see the snowcapped peak of Mount Kenya from our terrace.

  “About fifty miles from here—” Steven says, his eyes flickering to mine. “The Commissioner flew police dogs up from Nairobi this morning. They’ll be out all night I expect—hunting them down.”

  “Honestly—” Sara says, licking wine off her teeth. “Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. You’d think they would be grateful for everything we have done for them—”

  “I don’t know about gratitude—” my father says. “They’re caught in the middle of this—and what is the government doing to protect them?”

  “Robert is right—” Steven pushes away his plate and leans back in his chair, and I find there is something unpleasant in the assumption with which he uses my father’s name. “We’re looking at a community which has advanced from the early Iron Age to modern times in little more than fifty years. Naturally it hasn’t had time to adjust to the pressures of civilization. What we are seeing is the inev
itable return to the kind of savagery from which they so recently emerged.” He lights a cigarette, then turns his silver lighter end over end on the table. “The important thing is how the government tackles it from here. They need to come down on Mau Mau swift and hard.”

  “I believe we need a show of British justice,” my father says, slowly. “They need to see that the law is both fair and firm.”

  “You’ve been here as long as I have, Robert,” Steven exhales smoke, “and you know as well as I do that the African doesn’t understand legislation. He only grasps what touches him on the raw; land, cattle and—ultimately—his neck. If this is a rebellion, and it obviously is, then anyone who takes part in it is guilty of treason and the proper punishment is hanging by the neck until dead.”

  “After a fair trial,” my father says, holding Steven’s gaze.

  “After a fair trial,” Steven agrees, his voice yielding, as if surrendering to the trivial niceties of a meddling conscience.

  I glance at Harold. He has stopped eating, though he has barely touched his beef. He must feel the tensions around this table as keenly as I do. He has spent time with the Kikuyu; but he chooses to say nothing. I wonder as I look at him what he is thinking. There is a strength in him, in his quietness; he has learned to be invisible. I understand why my father—a man who likes to look something in the eye, and say it how it is—might not know what to make of his sideways, awkward reticence.

  “I blame it on the whites in Nairobi,” Sara says, dabbing at her mouth with her napkin, “mixing with the Africans, drinking at the same bars, sharing the same boardinghouses. If you had seen what I have seen, living in the city. The worst thing this government ever did was encourage immigration. I believe that what we’re witnessing is a whole-scale loss of respect for the white man, and it jeopardizes our entire mission here in Kenya. Our prestige is being eroded by the bricklayers, electricians, hairdressers—who rub shoulders with the blacks, share their workload, and don’t give a damn if this country goes to the dogs.”