The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  It was already almost impossible to see the sides or roofs of the carriages because so many people were hanging or sitting on the outside of each one. Up and down the platform itself surged a river of people calling up to the passengers, offering as wide a selection of items for sale as had been offered in the main station itself - by the shops and by the boys. Robert shouldered his way through all of this, followed by Ann who was perforce content to use his physical strength as a kind of shield. They crossed slowly to the nearest carriage and climbed up into it. It was packed, a long, noisy, glass-sided tunnel full of people - mostly women - children, chickens, goats, vegetables, fruit, anything which could be bred, reared, grown, made, found, collected, created, and sold. ‘Market day special,’ bellowed Robert wryly, and plunged into the throng.

  Two carriages down, they got a seat courtesy of a huge woman who chucked two sulky boys off a broken-sprung bench by the door and gestured at them to sit, beaming cheerfully. They sank gratefully onto the lumpy, uncomfortable seat, but no sooner had they done so than Ann said, ‘How long do we have?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  ‘I’ve got to find the john, Robert. Guard the seat, will you?’

  ‘OK. I think I saw a Ladies at the back of the platform. Cut straight across from here. And hurry, would you?’

  She opened the door and fought her way down onto the platform again. After pummelling her way through the throng for about five metres, she turned and looked back so that she would recognise the door again. Robert, at the window, smiled and waved. She turned and plunged on. Without the camera case she found she could move much more quickly, and as soon as she saw the door with the female figurine upon it, she had surprisingly little trouble in crossing to it. Civilisation at last, she thought, and pushed the door. She stepped through it and stopped dead. She looked around. She looked back at the slowly closing door. She began to laugh, hysterically, tipped over the edge at last.

  There was nothing there. No room, no cubicles, no basins, no marble floor or roof. No roof at all, in fact. There was a wall behind her and a door closing in it. Before her was a small field with a low mud wall across it; a wooden walkway made out of planks led across the sopping, stinking, fly-crawling earth to the mud wall. Beyond the wall she could see a row of heads where women were squatting. From the smell pervading the stagnant air, it was obvious that they were squatting over an open latrine. Ann stopped laughing and took a deep breath to steady herself, which was a bad mistake. She looked around desperately but there was no help for it. This was the Ladies. She should use it or go on her way.

  At least the plank led right round the wall and was firmly bedded in the mud beyond. And it was quite clean, a fact which was of great benefit to Ann’s shorts as she gathered them round her ankles. Burning with embarrassment, she blinkered her mind during the next few minutes, refusing to admit to herself the comings and goings of the other women around her, even though she could sense them pointing at her and giggling.

  It was only when, at last, she felt fully relieved that the unkindest blow of all occurred. In her confusion, disorientation and simple ungovernable need, it hadn’t occurred to her that she would eventually require toilet paper of some kind. In a panic she looked around, wondering what on earth she was going to do. And the woman beside her swam into view. She was a young N’Kuru woman, thin as a wraith, who had settled herself wearily into place, half supporting herself on a great hand of green plantains which she was obviously taking somewhere to market. She saw the look on Ann’s face and understood it all too clearly. Shyly, as though fearing that an offer of help would insult this strange white skin beside her, she reached towards the plantains and tore off a handful of green leaves - and gave Ann the most welcome present she had ever received in her life.

  ~ * ~

  ‘My turn,’ said Robert cheerfully as she pulled herself back aboard. He heaved himself out of his seat. ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Fine.’ Ann meant it. She was feeling much refreshed. She paused beside her seat which was now piled with newspaper and food, looking down with wonder.

  ‘I got some food while you were away,’ he said. ‘The oranges and bananas are particularly good. There’s some bread and cold roast goat. Leave some for me. Oh, and the beer is mine; don’t you dare touch it. I got the Coke for you.’ Then he was gone.

  She quickly arranged the food so that she could sit down and then she put the flat-topped camera case on her lap so that she could use it as a table. Her hands shaking with anticipation, she began to arrange the food in piles: meat and fruit; main course and pudding; his and hers. She glanced up at the woman opposite, gave and received a massive smile. She picked up the first piece of roast goat and brought it slowly, ecstatically to her lips. Her eyes closed and tears squeezed out of their corners at the ecstasy of that first bite. When she opened them, she found she was looking, not at the woman opposite, but at the crotch of a pair of trousers.

  When she looked up, she found herself staring at a suave young man in his early twenties. His skin was dark but his face was long and handsome - a mixture of tribal blood. To go with his blue cotton slacks he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt in bright ochres, browns and greens. It was open and there were gold chains lying like oil on his dark skin to match the bright rings on his long fingers. His hair was cut Western style and parted on the right. He gave her a grin which did not reach his eyes and slowly reached for the waistband of his trousers. Languidly, with all the confidence of a practised gigolo, he pulled the trousers tight enough to show how well equipped he was, then, in a flash, he was sitting beside her, filling Robert’s seat. ‘That seat is taken!’ Ann said, feeling at a terrible disadvantage, under far more threat, suddenly, than from the boys in the station with their wares.

  He eased forward until his trousers were tight across his powerful thighs. Ann looked up at the woman opposite, desperate for help. The woman was looking out of the window.

  The young man’s hand brushed the bare skin of her forearm. She flinched. Turned towards him. ‘Get away from me!’ she spat. Spat, literally, for her mouth was still full of saliva summoned by the succulent roast goat.

  He flinched and his face darkened with rage, losing all of its confident good looks in a moment. His nostrils flared and he swung round to face her. Shocked by what she had done, she stared at him and when he reached into his pocket she numbly assumed he must be reaching for a handkerchief. He pulled out something made of black wood and silver. She looked at it uncomprehendingly and it was only when he pushed the button and razor steel flashed out of it that she realised it was the largest flick knife she had ever seen.

  The abject horror on her face triggered a new expression in his. He sat back a little, fitting his shoulders into the corner of the seat, and leered at her, stroking the white steel and the black wood slowly and suggestively.

  Wildly, Ann looked around the carriage, but nobody seemed to notice that anything unusual was going on at all. The woman opposite stared steadfastly out of the window and her sulky children teased a piglet on the floor. Everyone else was fully occupied with loud, amusing conversation. The man waited, caressing his flick knife arrogantly, knowing that her eyes would inevitably be drawn back to him again. As indeed they were. First to the knife, held so suggestively in his tight, bulging crotch, then to the supercilious, sadistic gaze.

  It was the sort of expression, she realised, with which the soldiers in the village would have looked at the naked N’Kuru girls before they started playing their games with them.

  With that thought, Ann’s hands were in action, almost independently of the rest of her shaking body. With short, ugly, brutal movements, she shoved the food down onto the seat between them, revealing the camera case. The black eyes flicked down then up again, speculative greed warring with stirring lust. She jerked the zips with convulsive movements like punches until the sides gaped open. His eyes fell languidly again, and lingered on the seductive shadows of the interior - the black leather, the expens
ive-looking plastic. He licked his lips. His fingers stopped sliding up and down his knife.

  And Ann pulled out Harry Parkinson’s pistol. With one flowing movement, as though in some previous existence she had been a master gunfighter, she pulled out the automatic and, two-handed, slammed its butt onto die top of his nearest thigh, pointing downwards at point blank range. Her whole face was aflame, her skin literally burning with rage as though with sunstroke. She looked at him through a faint blood mist and his eyes when they met her red gaze had lost all of their arrogance. His knife drooped in his numb fingers and his skin was suddenly dewed with great drops of sweat.

  She flicked her right thumb upwards and he jumped and began to whisper. Perhaps he was praying. A bright red dot pointed unwaveringly to where his trousers strained at their tightest. The bulging cloth began to look looser very, very quickly.

  She looked up again, feeling a little calmer. The knife was gone and so was the last vestige of that arrogant expression.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, her voice like a rusty hinge.

  He understood but he did not move until she lifted the gun off his trembling thigh. Then he was gone, silently into the sudden, overwhelming silence.

  In the middle of that silence, the train jerked into motion. Ann jumped as though shocked awake by the unexpected movement. The carriage gave another lurch. The seat patted her firmly in the back. The noise of wheels squealing and couplings straining stormed across the air. Ann’s head whirled. She thought she was going to faint. The thought of being trapped alone in this train, so utterly, absolutely alone, brought a wild scream to her throat and tears flooding to her eyes.

  In the last twenty-four hours, Africa had reduced the confident, worldly-wise reporter to the level of a confused, lost and lonely child.

  When Robert tore the door open and hopped easily in, she swept him into a wild hug, oblivious of the fact that the camera bag tumbled to the floor between them or that she was still holding Harry’s gun.

  A few half whispered words served to acquaint him with what had happened in his absence and to explain the reason for her well-armed and unexpectedly enthusiastic greeting. His black visage set sternly and his dark eyes raked the carriage, though Ann was unsure whether his ill-contained rage was aimed at the vanished gigolo for importuning her in such a way, at her fellow passengers for failing to defend her, or at herself for reacting in the manner she had. The last one, she concluded gloomily. Her panic had attracted even more notice than her skin had and the gun, protection for ten seconds, was now a massive liability. They would have to be very careful indeed throughout the journey - especially if they met any of General of Police Nimrod Chala’s checkpoints.

  ~ * ~

  After they had finished their meal, Robert took the first watch and suggested that she sleep. She would dearly have loved to do so, but she was still too full of adrenaline. She settled herself back in her seat, half closed her eyes as though at least trying to rest, and watched through the window at her side. The township’s outskirts fell back rapidly to reveal the red earth of the same sort of country that they had crossed in Harry’s Land Rover. But instead of the scrub and brush of the grassland, here it was covered in orchards and grassland badly run to seed. There was some sign of farming, but it seemed ill-organised and increasingly desultory, a far cry from the great communal farms of Julius Karanga’s time, though the fact that they were still producing marketable fruit and vegetables so long after his death testified to the way they must once have been. The train snaked through the farmland as it slowly surrendered to the bush proper. Soon there was no sign of any trees other than baobabs. The fields became rough grass filled with herds of ubiquitous goats guarded by sharp-eyed teenagers armed with rifles.

  As the train escaped from the last vestiges of civilisation, the straight track began to twist from side to side. At one moment Ann could see the whole profile of the train, all the way up past the festooned carriages to the great puffing monster of the engine itself. The next, she could see nothing of the train itself but was instead granted a spectacular view of the great tectonic cliff towards which they were heading. Tall and damson-dark, even at this time of day, it towered across the northern horizon and rolled towards them with all the power and inevitability of a great slow wave.

  Soon enough, as the train coiled round in front of her dazzled gaze, the jungle-green foaming crest of the great rock wave seemed to be about to break over the very top of it. Not long after that, the train rattled hollowly over the huge span of the Stanley Bridge which stepped across from the plain to the cliff over the valley of the River Mau. The river should have been in full flow, brimming dangerously close below them, greeny-brown and still carrying the quick lace memory of white foam from the Leopold Falls ten kilometres upstream. It should have been a sweep of water reaching out from the swift currents of its heart where only the great fishes lived to the slow, shallow bays at its sides where the hippos sported and the crocodiles waited patiently in the lush foliage along the slick, verdant banks.

  Instead there was a stinking trickle in the midst of interminable mudflats where indistinguishable corpses had rotted into unrecognisable skeletons and even the scavengers that had scattered the bones were long gone.

  The train swung wearily to the left, as though it bore all the responsibility for the failure of life below, and began to toil along the cliff face, following a wide ledge which occasionally allowed a glimpse over a scrub-strewn, black gravel edge down into the vertiginous, mud-bottomed depths of the dying river. And whenever the wind dropped - and there was precious little wind - clouds of flies would rise in search of a replacement for the food sources which had dried with the blood of the great river animals.

  The last image Ann was aware of was that of the massed bodies of the hungry insects as they oozed across the window pane immediately in front of her like melting tar, or cooling blood.

  ~ * ~

  Robert’s firm hand shook her out of a nightmare in which she actually witnessed the destruction of the N’Kuru village. She awoke with the sound of her own cries of horror in her ears. She looked around in groggy confusion, never at her best on first waking. It took her some moments to register his look of deep concern and the fact that the train was first silent and secondly absolutely still.

  ‘Are we there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, what—’

  ‘Ssssh!’

  Distantly on the still, faintly buzzing air came a shot and a long, falling scream. The sounds accorded so horribly with her dream that her flesh crawled and she shivered convulsively.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, her voice a feathery whisper.

  Robert shrugged his ignorance and then looked across at the woman opposite and raised his eyebrows.

  She met his look of mute enquiry and at first it seemed that she was going to maintain the same distance that had protected her when the gigolo accosted Ann. But this was even more dangerous. She relented. ‘Sometimes,’ she said in a rich contralto voice which half-sang a liquid mixture of French and N’Kuru which Ann could only just follow, ‘the police stop the trains looking for Lions.’

  ‘And do they ever find Lions?’ asked Robert, frowning, his eyes sliding busily around the carriage already, looking for an avenue of escape.

  ‘Always. Or N’Kuru men and women who they say are Lions.’

  ‘And do they arrest these people?’

  ‘No. They make them fly away home.’

  The distant, falling cry was repeated. Ann had spent a lot of time on or near the sea during the last few years. The noises made her think of gulls who had forgotten the art of flight.

  This cry was much nearer than the last one had been. A wind of concern blew through the carriage. Robert was in action at once. He reached up and grasped the Remington with one hand while pushing her roughly with the other.

  ‘Out.’

  Without thinking, she obeyed, opening the door and rolling through it with her camera bag clutched t
o her belly.

  She stepped down out of the high train onto the very edge of a sheer cliff. On her right the black rock reached out into a stubby pulpit as though a high diving board had been started but never finished. On her left, a ridge of rock spread in a thin pie-crust over the abyss. Immediately in front of her was next to nothing. A metre of gravelled black rock ledge, surely no more, then a sheer drop of hundreds of metres straight down to the cracked mud of the river bed. Spewing stones over the black rock lip as she moved, she hurled herself backwards under Robert’s feet as he climbed down. He came very close to tumbling over her and pitching right over the edge himself. Instead he collapsed straight down between her and the side of the train, rolling backwards under the carriage as he landed. This was only halfway towards being an accident. As soon as his square body was on the cinder road bed, he scrabbled further back beneath the carriage. ‘This way!’ he hissed. She was glad enough to follow, but it soon became obvious that there was nowhere, in fact, to follow to. The inner edge of the train was almost as near the foot of the cliff as the outer edge had been to the drop. The inner side might have felt safer, but it was every bit as exposed. The best cover offered was a thin mess of scrub lying defeated in the angle between the horizontal and the vertical rock.