Rift

by Beverley Birch

  So who cares now if that Strutton-monster’s got the harmonica? Anna drapes an arm over Matt’s shoulder as the trills run up and down, up and down, higher and higher, and then finally down again to a deep, belling note, and a smattering of clapping from someone across the fire and a shout, ‘Play something proper, Matt. Play that –’

  Hey! Hey, you!

  The tone unmistakable.

  I said YOU.

  Silence: like an avalanche of ice.

  Yes, YOU. Whad’you want?

  I do not understand.

  Silowa, ignore him, says Joe.

  Don’t understand English, hey? I said, whad’you want?

  Shut up, Sean, says Anna.

  I visit my friends, says Silowa.

  Go visit them somewhere else.

  Sean! Zak’s protest vehement. But snapped off by the way Sean turns and looks at him, and then at Antony. Who says nothing . . .

  ‘Sorry, Joe. Really. Sorry.’ Janey’s voice penetrated the memory, and she was leaning towards him, insistent, as if she saw what was in his head.

  ‘We should have, y’know . . . ’ said Antony.

  Zak grunted.

  ‘What are you on about?’ asked Ella. ‘What are they on about, Joe?’

  No one told her, just stared fixedly at the fire, every one of them. Then someone dropped more wood on it, and it snapped and popped and threw up a volley of angry sparks. Out on the plain, the eyes shifted, pinpricks of flame in the dark.

  ‘Stuff,’ said Joe suddenly, ‘just stuff.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Ella insisted.

  He didn’t.

  ‘Joe?’

  He gave a small shrug.

  ‘You’re not being fair!’ she said hotly. ‘This is about my sister, too.’

  He glanced at her in surprise. Flushed with indignation, the glare she gave him stung. He conceded, ‘Stupid things. People picked on us. Not important now.’

  ‘Sean?’

  ‘Him. He had a few helpers.’

  ‘Like who, Joe? What did they do? How do you know it’s not important if you can’t remember anything?’

  That struck home, because he still couldn’t drag sense from this chaos – fractured and nonsensical, blurred and muddled, memory and dream twisted together, frightening him more than he cared to admit.

  Trying, he began, ‘Like – going on and on at Silowa about being here; Anna and me and Matt about hanging out with him. Like falling about being buffalos blundering through the tents in the night so they’d collapse on us. Like tipping Matt in the lavatory trench, slinging his pipe after him. Flat on his face. He has to wade through the filth to find his pipe. Never got the smell off his shoes, so Strutton throws everything out of the tent because she says it stinks like a toilet!’ He stared away into the dark ferociously. ‘Like Strutton banning us from the trips. Making us dig the new lavatory trenches after the storm because that mob told her we had “an outsider” in our tent, and it was a “breach of security”. Like chucking Anna and Silowa’s fossils because it was a “breach of hygiene”.’ He snorted. ‘Like I said, he had some helpers –’

  ‘They did the scorpion,’ said Tamara, igniting the image in Joe’s head – the two girls tittering, Joe pushing past, ripping open the zip, freezing at the sight of Anna rooted to the bed; the scorpion a finger’s-width from her eyes, tail poised to strike, so that he had to edge back, grab a stick and advance again, stick extended, inch by slow inch, till he was in range and could knock the scorpion away.

  And finding it dead, dead all the time, but Anna had been trapped for an hour, suspended in terror, while two girls spied and giggled at the joke.

  ‘Didn’t you tell anyone? You could tell someone. Someone could do something,’ Ella was saying.

  ‘There’s always comeback after,’ insisted Tamara.

  ‘Nowhere to go, here –’

  ‘Anyway, it got worse. It’s getting worse. That’s what I’m seeing,’ came a boy’s voice from the other side of the fire. ‘Starts off stupid – baby stuff. Gets bigger. You have to keep away. So they don’t see you, know what I mean?’

  ‘But who’s in Anna’s tent? I mean sharing with her? Didn’t they help?’

  ‘What, those two?’ Joe flung his arm out, pointing, and Ella looked. They sat close to Sean, one girl plaiting the other’s hair as she leaned against his legs. With a jolt of comprehension, Ella recognised the two who had confronted her after breakfast.

  ‘Them? She shared with them? How come?’

  ‘Who knows? Miss wouldn’t move her to our tent,’ said Janey. ‘We had space. Miss said Anna joined the trip late, so she’s got to take what she gets.’

  ‘So they got their kicks out of zipping up the tent from inside and not letting her in, “finding” hairy spiders in her sleeping bag . . . ’

  ‘Yeah, and sniggering about Silowa. Called him her boyfriend,’ said Tamara, mimicking a suggestive drawl. ‘Can’t get their heads round things like being friends,’ she finished, contemptuously.

  But the carcass, dripping. The blood and stench of the carcass. That was something new. For a split second something else lurched at the back of Joe’s mind, and his stomach leapt in a surge of fright.

  ‘But why you, Joe?’ Ella’s interrogation stabbed through.

  ‘I don’t know what gets them going!’

  ‘But you see, Silowa’s an outsider!’ Zak jumped to his feet and mimicked Strutton’s voice and walk with such accuracy that, despite themselves, everyone laughed, even Ella.

  ‘Right, and Matt’s so small –’

  ‘And Anna’s A Troublemaker –’

  ‘And Joe’s their protector.’

  Ella felt Joe tense. There was a silence.

  ‘Didn’t though, did I?’ he muttered after a minute. ‘Didn’t.’ He was quiet for a minute. He began again. ‘It was like it before Silowa came. Just got more – obvious – after.’

  ‘Policeman said, we do nothing, they’ll die,’ commented Zak soberly. ‘Can’t walk away now. Can’t say don’t want no trouble now.’

  They all contemplated this.

  ‘It’s true what they say, Joe – you don’t remember anything about going out of the camp?’ Antony asked. ‘How come?’

  ‘Leave it, Ant,’ Zak protested. ‘You sound like the police. Interrogating and that.’

  ‘No, but is it true? You heard Matt’s pipe?’

  ‘Thought I did,’ said Joe. ‘But it’s too far. They say.’

  ‘Those two,’ announced Antony suddenly, looking at Carl and Denny, sauntering away, ‘are just thugs. They were before. But Sean‘s a predator. He’s testing out his hunting ground.’

  ‘Oh, deep,’ said Janey.

  ‘But, see, predators, real ones like the animals out there, they do it so they can live, if they didn’t they’d die –’

  ‘But what’s it got to do with everyone disappearing?’ Suddenly Ella wanted to yell with frustration.

  Joe looked at her, lifting his shoulders in a gesture of despair, and his face took on that stricken look she’d seen before.

  And as if to echo him, a helicopter suddenly topped the ridge, its searchlight arcing across the rock and raking the camp. And then it sank away, out of sight, only its engine-grumble lingering. As if to fill the returning quiet, the distant roar of a lion swelled from the darkness of the plain.

  ‘Remember Matt when he heard a lion that first night?’ said Janey. ‘It was like Christmas for him! Went on about it all day. Remember?’

  ‘Wish they’d let us see him,’ said Zak. ‘Before they took him off. Wish we could’ve talked . . . ’

  Otaka sat by the small fire, smoking. He raised his pipe in greeting to Murothi. From above, Véronique peered from the roof of the Land Rover. She was kneeling, spreading something out.

  ‘Inspector! Join us – we would be happy,’ she called. ‘I am just arranging my bedroom!’ She clambered down a ladder and pointed to a canvas stool by the fire. ‘Sit!’

  Murothi obeyed. Since nig
htfall the temperature had plunged, and in his thin shirt, damped with dew, he shivered. He watched Véronique throw back the lid of a food box and rattle things busily.

  Otaka, with a long, direct scrutiny of the policeman, observed, ‘My friend, you are troubled.’

  ‘Ah, well, you see a confused Murothi,’ the policeman responded. ‘And his confusion grows!’

  Véronique placed a pot in the fire and settled it firmly. She fetched another stool from the Land Rover, flipped it open and subsided on to it, thankfully.

  Otaka continued to puff on his pipe. Then he took it from his mouth and with the stem traced the long ridge of Chomlaya, fringed with the light of the climbing moon. He said, ‘It is told by the Dumwela people that this is the seat of the God. That he lives here as rock, as elephant, as snake, as fish in the water, as lion, as lizard, as hare. He is in the bones of the rock and the gouging of the rift through its heart . . . ’

  ‘Old friend, you would know that,’ said Véronique, handing Murothi a mug of steaming tea and a biscuit. ‘You have studied the line of this land as no other person living.’

  ‘But I do not breathe it, like the men who walk it,’ replied Otaka. ‘I do not hear the call of ancestors.’ He laughed. ‘I fear in my old age I will be like those polished men in fat black cars that fly above the land on shiny roads, and do not touch it.’

  ‘I have met those,’ said Murothi, thinking of the Minister who had sent him to tidy away this disaster. The tea was warming him. He had eaten little; hunger hollowed out his tiredness. His eyes seemed to stand out on stalks, but he did not want to go to the solitude of his tent and the muddles of his mind.

  As if sensing that, Véronique refilled his mug. ‘Perhaps such stories of Chomlaya are why we have never come to dig here. As if we believe them, and are afraid.’

  ‘Silowa’s cousin Mungai has told me of these tales,’ said Murothi, sipping the tea.

  ‘Mungai is not of the Dumwela. He is of the Kigio,’ murmured Otaka. ‘The Kigio have a story that is like the story told by the Dumwela, but it is not the same.’ Thoughtfully, he puffed on his pipe. ‘Some do not call this place by any other name than Snake Rock. But others tell how when the God enters his human form he leaves his footprint here. To guard the place where the first people were born. It is like this, my friend: there came a day when the Creator looked at the trees and flowers, the mountains and rivers, the animals and birds – at every good thing he had made – and he said, “There must be a creature to love and tend this, to reap its riches.” So the Creator took the soils he found at Chomlaya’s feet: the rich moist soils, the soft powdery soils, the black soils, red soils, white soils, yellow soils. He took some of each and mixed it to a clay, and from the wealth of clays he made people of all the colours. He moulded legs to run, to hunt, to wander with the cattle and dance for joy, hands to gather food, to plant and sow, and reap, he gave eyes to see, a mouth to eat, a tongue to speak and sing, for people would need celebration when the work was done . . . ’ He gave Murothi a long, sober look. ‘You see this: it is told that in the shelter of Chomlaya, the Creator has made humans. It is the place of life. And here he calls his creatures when their time is done; the place of life, the place of death. For these children, their time of calling is not yet here. And so Chomlaya will give them back. This we must believe.’ He straightened suddenly, smiled, lightening the mood, tapped his pipe and relit it, puffing hard. ‘Tales told in many ways by many different peoples in these regions. But we should hear them and take heart, my friend.’

  Long fingers of firelight probed grass and bush and the cones of termite mounds around them. There was the guttural grunt of a leopard hunting, the scuffle of hoofbeats as something fled the predator, and Murothi wondered if he should feel fear here: of the rock that might be a god, and the leopard and lion that might be a god, and the rock that had taken people but would give them back, and he felt foolish for breathing these stories that were just stories into himself.

  In truth he did not feel fear. He felt Chomlaya hunched above them, black against a high yellow moon. But his dread was not of the rock.

  He said, after a while, ‘I have a question. I have many questions, but this is one you can perhaps answer. Likon says that a week ago Silowa came to talk to someone at Burukanda, specially. Otaka, was that you?’

  ‘Silowa is always talking to me,’ the other man answered, with a deep chuckle of amusement. ‘He has appointed himself my pupil. He wishes to learn this skill of fossil hunting.’

  ‘Silowa is already like you,’ put in Véronique. ‘He lopes across the ground like you. He has your eye for these invisible things! Otaka and Silowa see a single tiny fossil among the black lava pebbles on a slope. They see fossils that not one other person would see! They conjure them from the ground as they pass, Inspector!’

  ‘Murothi,’ said Murothi. ‘I am Murothi. I do not know this Inspector! He is quite new to me.’

  Véronique raised her mug of tea in salute.

  ‘You are right,’ remarked Otaka pensively. ‘Silowa came to me some days ago. I think this is the time Likon is meaning. I remember that the boy wanted to know about tuffs.’

  ‘Tuffs? What are these?’

  ‘Layers of volcanic ash, compacted to rock,’ offered Véronique. ‘Murothi, think of a volcano spewing out the ash. Or the volcanic ash carried far by rivers and dumped. In the heat and pressure of volcanic eruption, there are changes in the minerals –’

  ‘I do not understand,’ protested Murothi, already lost.

  ‘It sets a kind of atomic clock going, which we can use to tell when the eruption happened. So, we date the tuffs! If we find something trapped below a tuff, it is older, if it is above a tuff, it is younger. Of course, sometimes things have been twisted upside down, as in Chomlaya, making it difficult to trace the line of the tuffs from one place to another. Is the archaeological find really above or below? Has some great rift in the earth flung everything on its head? I tell you, we can go quietly mad with this!’

  ‘And this enquiry about tuffs. This is the kind of question Silowa would usually ask? Did this talk seem different?’

  Emphatically, Otaka shook his head. ‘This boy is always eager. He drinks knowledge like it is the water of life. We have many of these conversations while we work.’

  Murothi, sipping his third cup of tea, could think of nothing else to ask. Whispers seemed to float in and out of his head. It is the tiredness, he thought. He passed a hand across his face, pressing his eyes. It is sleep that calls –

  ‘You have the face of a haunted man,’ commented Otaka, getting up and fetching sticks, placing them on the fire, sitting down again and studying Murothi.

  ‘I am haunted, Otaka. These voices haunt me.’ Murothi waved a hand at the little pile at his feet, shining pale against the soil. He leaned down and picked it up. ‘Here, you see, Anna’s drawings and your friend Charly’s notes. Then we have these police interviews, the students’ camp diary, Charly’s emails and letters to Ella. I have what the students have said, and what Joe has told me. I have talked and talked to Joe since Matt was found. I have the voice of his distress that he does not know the answers. I have Ella who knows her sister.’ He sighed. ‘And now I have your voices too! Ah! They all tell different stories and I know, in here,’ he tapped his head, ‘that they are the same story. But I cannot see the joining points.’

  deep night

  Ella struggled free of the sleeping bag and flopped on top. Sweat dried, sticky on her skin.

  There was a slight, furtive, rasping sound. It came to her at the same moment she saw a change in the light through the canvas. With a flip of alarm, she knew that someone stood there.

  Not Joe. Too tall.

  She sat up, swinging her legs to the ground. The zip was opening, a figure slipping deftly through the gap.

  ‘Who –?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  He came on silently and fast, reached the bed and stood over her, legs wide, her knees trapped between his,
close, pressing.

  She pushed, trying to twist from his hold, throw herself sideways. But he held her effortlessly by the shoulder, one hand pressing her down, the grip painful, his other hand groping for her mouth.

  ‘Wha-?’ she mumbled, frantic to think straight.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Makes it interesting?’

  ‘Get out.’ Joe was a square of black against the opening, without form or feature, except his voice.

  ‘You’ll make me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sean laughed. ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t know. But I will . . . ’

  ‘Well, won’t wait while you figure it out.’ He shoved Ella’s shoulder spitefully. It flung her against the metal edge of the camp-bed with a bang that drew a yelp of pain, and instantly Joe launched himself, toppling Sean sideways over Ella’s backpack on the floor.

  Expertly the taller boy rolled to his feet and dived at Joe, the whole taking place in a muted, grunting fury: thud, thump against the ground, hoarse, strangled breaths, Ella tumbling with them, scrabbling to hold Sean, weigh him down, drag him off. Fetch someone pounded through her brain even as running feet and torchbeams split the dark. Boys’ voices, girls’ . . . Miss Strutton’s bark, ‘Where DO you think you’re going?‘

  ‘He came here, Miss. He’s –’

  ‘Back to your tents this minute.’

  ‘ – looking for Sean, Miss –’

  ‘How DARE you run about like this? You know the rules!‘

  ‘Yeah, but he’s not meant to be out, either –’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that!‘

  ‘We saw Sean come this way –’

  ‘Since when is that your business?‘

  ‘Since now, Miss. We got to find what Sean’s doing!’

  Then everyone silenced as Ella pulled the tent flap wide and stumbled out.

  It took seconds – the two wrestling boys tugged apart, Sean kneeling viciously on Joe as he got up, aiming a last vindictive kick. ‘Later,’ he muttered. To Ella, not Joe. He shouldered past her, shrugged everyone else off and flung away, hurling a glance of open scorn at the dumbstruck Miss Strutton.