If I can convince him of this, just this, then perhaps everything that has happened in the last few months will be understood. It is the key to unlocking everything. But he starts the engine, and I fall silent.
We turn out of the factory gates, onto the road to Nairobi. A few miles from Uplands, the road takes us through Lari. There are no signs of the massacre, until I see a wooden contraption behind trees.
“What is it?”
He doesn’t say anything, and I look more closely. A structure. Then we are past it.
“The gallows,” he says, after a moment. “The hangman came up from Nairobi yesterday.”
“For Lari?”
“Yes. They’re hanging a man every fifteen minutes. Mass trials. Mass executions.”
I glimpse cages through the trees; high wire fences; barbed-wire compounds holding men. A truck with a closed wire top, crammed full of Africans, guarded by a white man with a gun. Most are facing away from the road, but one man holds the wire with both hands and gazes steadily out at me and my gaze locks onto his, until the truck pulls off the road and he is gone.
—
WE DRIVE THROUGH the outskirts of Nairobi, over a high bridge. A man far below bends down and dips a yellow drum into the brown river, collecting water. Men dig trenches shoulder-deep in the rich red earth. Fires burn in the distance, smoke spiraling into the hazy heat of the afternoon. A girl runs barefoot alongside us, in a dress edged with frills, which might once have been pink but is now soaked in dirt. The car sweeps past her, drenching her in dust.
The sun has slipped down the sky behind us, and the low corrugated buildings sit deep in shadow. I do not recognize this part of town, and I am suddenly and unaccountably anxious. “Where are we going?”
He glances at me again. That quick look of curiosity, shot through with guilt. As though he doesn’t know how this thing will play out.
Then I see the golf course. I have been here after all, with Nate Logan. This is where the Muthaiga Club is, on the outskirts of town.
We pass a row of light blue railings. I glimpse a dirt courtyard beyond, buildings edged with low shrubs and hedges. The trappings of an institutional world. My uncle is slowing the car. This is not the turning for the Muthaiga Club. I crane my head to read the sign. MATHARI. I grip my uncle’s arm. I have heard of it—but I can’t remember where. Something Nate Logan said. A thread of panic is needling its way into my skin, stitching a pattern out of half-remembered words. An excellent doctor. Very good results.
“Why are you turning in? What is this place?”
He doesn’t answer. The security guard at the gate waves us through.
My uncle drives the car up the short driveway to a series of low, single-story concrete buildings, with tin roves and walls painted half height in blue—a municipal space. A hospital. Time slows down. I see in the rearview mirror the blue gates closing behind us.
He turns to look at me. The engine is still running. “They are waiting for you inside. You have to try to understand that this is for your benefit.”
“What is? What do you mean?” I take in a gulp of air. Try to hear myself through the panic that is surging up inside me. I need to listen to what he says. I need to understand what is happening so I can try to stop it.
“They will look after you here. Assess you. Treat you if necessary. They specialize in cases like yours.”
“Cases like mine—how do you mean?” I take another deep breath. I need to see and speak as clearly as I can.
“Your mother, Rachel. It affected you more than you realize. You are not yourself.”
Mathari Mental Hospital. I remember it now. Nate Logan had said it was where they sent Kenya Colony’s insane. “Does my father know?”
He turns off the engine. Opens the car door. I glance through the windscreen—a white woman in a nurse’s uniform and a black man in a white shirt and khaki shorts are walking in our direction. Her eyes settle on mine, and I realize with a quickening in my stomach, that they are walking toward us.
“Does my father know?” I scream at him.
He doesn’t reply. Instead, he steps out of the car and nods slightly to the woman. She speaks through the open window to me.
“Miss Fullsmith? Would you like to step out of the car?”
I don’t answer. I am looking around the car; my eyes see but they can’t make sense of anything. I need to act. How to get away?
I push the door lock down. Wind the window up. My uncle is outside of the car now. I scramble into the driver’s seat but my uncle has the keys, and he has his hand on the door. They come around the car, force open the door against my grasp and reach in. Put their hands on me.
“Let me go!” I scream, but they are implacable. Like cats fishing a goldfish out of a bowl. I try to slip away, but they have their claws on me. Slow and precise, they pull me out.
“Why are you doing this?” I say to my uncle, turning my head, though they have my body fixed in their grasp. “Tell me why?”
“They are going to help you, Rachel.”
“Why do I need help? What have I done?” I am shouting. Rage spills out of me. Desperation.
“Come with us, Miss Fullsmith,” the nurse says, needling my arm with her fingers. “Come along now.” And in her voice I hear the years of boarding school, so recently escaped, the complacent power of institution, the crushing weight of an inescapable authority.
I turn one last time. My uncle has lit a cigarette, and the smoke is caught in the evening light. He looks haggard, pale, drawn.
“Tell me why.”
“Look at yourself—” he says, gesturing at me with his cigarette. I see the ripped silk dress, the bandaged feet, the mud beneath my fingernails; a picture of madness.
“This is not me—” I say, shaking my head, exhaustion clouding my speech.
He takes a step backward. “You are a danger to yourself, Rachel. You are a danger to your family.”
“What I said at Uplands—” The words are wrenched out of me. “It is true. It is not a lie. Steven Lockhart killed the man. I saw him do it.”
He looks at me directly. His hand holding the cigarette hovers in midair. And I realize—suddenly—that he already knows. That this has something to do with why I am here. I stare at him—his face impassive as he registers what I have seen—swallowing down the cold taste of panic. The nurse jabs her fingers again, and I am dragged away from him, down the path into one of the buildings.
We walk into a long hall, with a black-and-white linoleum floor that smells of bleach. She steps into the first room on the right and I follow, the man closing the door behind us. It smells of something sharp and acrid in here that sticks in the back of my throat. Voices echo from the corridor. The room is small, with a white tiled shower cubicle in one corner. There is a chair and I begin to sit, but the nurse asks me to stand. She comes round behind me and unbuttons my dress. The green fabric falls, muddied and torn, around my feet.
“Now you can sit.”
I step out of the fabric and lower myself onto the chair.
The metal is cold and hard against my thighs. She takes a pair of scissors and walks around behind me.
“What are you doing?” I ask, craning my head to see. She places a hand on my head and straightens it. She unties my hair. It falls soft against my shoulders, and she begins to cut at it, the scissors cold against my neck, sawing under her fingers, struggling to sever so much at once. I feel the weight of it falling to the floor. Then the metal is close to my scalp. She is shearing my head. And I am crying, warm tears running cold down the inside of my bare legs.
She sits down in a chair next to me and takes my hands, and one by one cuts my nails, right down to the quick so my fingers feel blunt and raw.
“Go stand over there.” There is a cubicle that looks like a shower. She picks up a long tubular contraption from the wall and co
mes toward me. It has a nozzle on the end of it.
“What is it?” I ask, backing away from her.
“For the lice.”
“I have no lice.”
But she is spraying me already, in great spurts, a thick white powder drenching my hair, under my arms, and once between my legs.
Then she hands me a white smock. “Put it on.” And I do, because I am cold and naked and I want to cover myself. She gives me a pair of leather sandals.
She opens the door and we walk across a courtyard, past buildings with wired-in yards, where Africans hang their arms through the wire and stare.
We come to a building with its own garden plot, smarter than the rest.
“What is this?” I ask.
“The European blocks.” There is a sign on the gate which says in capitals WARD 9—WOMEN. She unlocks the padlock on the gate and we walk inside. It is three-sided with blue-painted steel doors at intervals down each side. A few women sit on the step that raises the block from the dusty earth below. Two play checkers. They stare at me. Another woman is lying stretched out on the ground, rolling back and forth. The nurse goes to a door in the middle and unlocks it. Inside the room is small, with an iron bed against each wall. The floor is boarded. I step inside, ahead of her. A woman is lying on the bed on the left, facing the wall. The nurse nods at the bed on the right.
“You cannot leave me here.” I turn to the nurse. My voice sounds very loud in the room. “I want to explain.”
“The doctor will see you in the morning.”
She leaves the room, and the door remains open. I have no belongings. Nothing to claim the bed as my own except the weight of my own body. It has grown dark and the blue-painted window has wire on the outside. I remember the fire and it sets my skin prickling. I do not want to be locked in again.
I cannot face the other women, outside, in the near darkness, so I climb beneath the cold sheet. The springs stretch beneath my weight. I put my head on the thin pillow. Outside a bird chatters in the dusk, and then there is the low call of an owl. I try to remember the words I heard between my father and Sara, but I cannot recall them clearly. I was in a half dream. Had he agreed to sending me here? I feel him kissing my forehead; unable to put his arms around me, crippled in a prison of his own making. Why did my uncle not want to admit to the death of the African at Uplands? Was he involved? Has Steven told him that I am a threat? Steven. Crouched over me. She is having a fit. Holding me down. Sara putting a hand to my cheek. He was trying to protect you from yourself—you are not yourself, Rachel. Don’t you see?
Later the door is shut and bolted. The woman in the bed next to me still doesn’t move. The moon has risen and the room is full of shadows. I stand up and go to the peephole. I can see a small patch of the yard, and the wire beyond. Laughter rises from one of the rooms, unearthly, like a hyena, spilling through the night.
I see Michael as he was at the dam, when we said good-bye, the feel of his body beneath my hands. You are stronger than you think, Rachel. I want to believe him but I feel nothing but fear. I draw in air to steady myself. Where is he now?
I sleep fitfully. I dream that I am consumed by fire. That I am hanging by my feet, blackened, from a rope. I can hear it creaking. There is Steven in the skin of a leopard bending down to look into my eyes. Not quite dead, he says. Give her another half an hour. And my father is there, but I cannot see him, and I shout but he does not hear me, and there is only the fire, and the rope spinning me round and round.
XXVI
In the morning I wake. There is no mirror. I have nothing that shows me to myself. I run a hand over my head and feel the short hair flicking between my fingers. I am a stranger to myself.
I am led out of the compound to a separate building. A European doctor sits at a desk. A window. Curtains. He looks up benevolently, over the top of his glasses, when I come in. His glasses are pointed, turned up at the corners, giving him an eccentric look.
“Miss Fullsmith. I am Dr. Measden. Take a seat.”
He puts down his pen, crosses his hands and looks at me. I am aware of my nakedness under my smock. I feel stripped of any defense. Silence stretches out between us. The way he is watching me makes me uncomfortable. His lack of shame gives him authority over me. He does not care what I think of him. I am here to be inspected.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Mathari Mental Hospital.”
“Why am I here?”
“Why do you think you are here?”
“I do not know.” I lick my lips to moisten them. Yesterday I might have told him there was nothing wrong with me, but I cannot say it now. I am scared. I do not feel myself.
“Do you remember having a fit?”
I shake my head. My voice is very quiet. “It wasn’t a fit.”
“The District Officer has told me that you had to be restrained. Your limbs went rigid. You foamed at the mouth.”
The weight of Steven’s body on top of me, riding me; my father not visible; Sara’s voice. I try to push the images away—I cannot bear the power of them; the panic, the physical weakness, the violation. I look away from the doctor.
“Can you tell me when you first heard that your mother had died?”
“My mother?” I am not expecting it. The question strikes me in a soft place, where I am least protected.
“Yes. Your mother.”
“It was almost seven years ago. I was staying with my uncle. There was a telegram from England.”
“Where was your father?”
“He was in England.”
“How did you feel when you heard?”
A long silence draws out between us. I begin crying. I cannot stop myself. The tears run down my cheeks. My mouth is wet. “I’m sorry,” I say, wiping at my eyes with the sleeves of my gown, embarrassed by so much emotion, but I cannot stop them coming.
“That’s quite all right. You don’t need to apologize.”
I take a deep breath and try to pull myself together.
“Miss Fullsmith?” His eyes are searching out mine. “Do you remember putting on your mother’s dress?”
I remember the green fabric in my hands. My father’s face when he saw me wearing it.
“She gave me two pills. She made me swallow them. I don’t remember everything clearly—”
“She did the right thing. You might have been a danger to yourself.” Then—“Do you remember why you put it on?”
“There was a party the next day. For the Coronation. I wanted to see if it would fit.”
“But why that particular dress?”
I wonder what he is getting at. He is losing me, though I feel the shadow of significance in the accumulation of his words, in the soft surety of his voice.
He looks at me again, and I am unsettled. It is as though he is undressing my soul. There is shame there. I want to keep parts hidden, but he won’t let me. He wants to see all of me. More than that—he is using the undressing to his advantage. For the first time I feel afraid, but I am also drawn to him. He can save me from this place. I cannot escape.
“I do not know.”
“Do you feel anger toward your father?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I do not know how to answer. No one has asked me this question. I have not had to articulate it even to myself.
“Is he living with another woman?”
“Yes.”
“And you feel he has betrayed your mother?”
“Yes.” I nod. I cannot deny it.
“Perhaps you hold him accountable for your mother’s death?”
I say nothing. I feel the pain swelling inside me.
“Is it hard to watch this new woman with your father? Do you wish it was your mother and not her who was with him?”
I shake my head. “It isn’t that.”
“I don’t know.”
Then his voice comes, with such deft confidence that I think he must have meant to say it all along. “Do you feel he has betrayed you?”
The truth of what he has said brings a sob from me, like he has hooked a dirty rag inside me and is drawing it up my throat from my belly.
“Why? Why do you want to know all this?” The tears are streaming down my cheeks. He has me pinned. It hurts.
He is speaking faster now, and his questions do not follow in sense, one from another. “There is an African at your farm that you felt particularly close to?”
“Yes.”
“What was his name?”
I do not want to say his name, here, in front of this man.
“What was his name?”
“Michael.”
“Were you physically close to him?”
I don’t answer.
He asks it again, more intimately this time. “Did you have sexual relations with the boy?”
“What does that have to do with any of this?”
He ignores me. “Was he intimate with you?”
“Yes.” I cannot deny it, but I begin to hate him. He has dragged Michael into this place of horror.
“And you did it to get attention from your father? So that he would notice you?”
“No—” I say, taken aback.
He looks at me, over the top of his glasses. “There are many ways to harm yourself, Miss Fullsmith.”
“It was nothing to do with my father.”
He gives me a small, indulgent smile.
“Did you know that he was Mau Mau?”
“No.”
“But you knew that he was planning to attack the house?”
“No.” I stand up. “That’s not how it was. It was not him.”
He glances up at me, standing, and makes a note in his pad.
“And you arranged an escape plan with him?”
“No.”
“But he assisted your escape?”
“Yes.” I feel awkward now, hovering above my chair. “He helped me to get out.”
Leopard at the Door Page 31