‘Noon is cooking a meal. Afterwards he can lie on my bunk in the wheelhouse.’ I peered briefly at the blanched inner lids of Mr Pal’s eyes. ‘In the mountains it will be cooler.’
‘Mountains? That is mirage-talk. We should turn back, doctor. Mr Pal is clearly very ill.’
Looking down at the jaundiced Indian, I decided to give him half my ration. I knew that I had neglected the botanist. In a curious way, my moral standards and sense of responsibility had declined, although I had become a more generous and a happier man. And, for the moment, I needed him alive. Recalling Harare’s vanity, it occurred to me that Sanger and his television unit might at last prove useful. The film camera was probably the one passport that would allow us through the guerillas’ lines.
‘Doctor? Bring your mind to some kind of focus!’
‘He’ll recover. It’s a transient fever.’
‘There’s an epidemic of them on this ship. We can cure the entire outbreak by altering course for Port-la-Nouvelle.’
‘No – we’ll go on.’
‘You’re still obsessed with this absurd dream? To reach the source of the river? Look at yourself, doctor!’
‘Think of the documentary, Sanger. I know it will astound the Japanese.’
‘Foolishness, Mallory. We must turn back now.’
‘We’ve come too far.’ I looked out at the broad stream, its surface tinted gold by the hazy sun. ‘We’ll reach the source – it’s a point of honour.’
‘It’s a point of lunacy – you’re a small man, Mallory, and a small man’s madness can take dangerous forms.’
Sanger stood up, trying to guide me back to the wheelhouse, his head lost in the Toyota awning. Behind the mud-spattered glasses his weak eyes flinched from the sun. As he fumbled with the canvas flag I realized that Sanger would soon be wholly dependent on me.
‘Noon! Bring water!’ I pushed Sanger into his seat. Noon was squatting by the stove, pulling the legs off the hundreds of small frogs she had caught, and tossing them into the frying-pan. She left the stove and came forward, carrying a video-cassette in her hand. Tapping her teeth in her substitute for speech, she rattled it in front of the two men.
Mr Pal revived at the sound, and reached down to the leather bag which lay on the deck beside his chair. This held a small library of cassettes, the most valuable currency on board the ferry. He and Sanger loaned the cassettes to Noon in return for various favours. She would bathe them, carry water, clean the deck around their feet, wash their clothes, and then retreat to her electronic den with a fresh cassette.
To my surprise, glancing over Noon’s shoulder as she sat before the monitor screen, I noticed that many of the cassettes consisted of extracts from old-fashioned commercial documentaries, sequences of elephants rolling logs, warriors stamping at the coronation of a paramount chief, bare-breasted women carrying water-pitchers on their heads, and other clichés of the earliest days of the wild-life film. These, Sanger had explained, supplied a useful model for his own films, and a stream of pseudo-authentic footage consonant with the images deeply implanted in the minds of their audiences. I had strongly disagreed, and pointed out that the West’s image of Africa was now drawn from the harshest newsreels of the civil wars in the Congo and Uganda, of famine in Ethiopia, and from graphically explicit films of lions copulating in close-up on the Serengeti or dismembering a still-breathing wildebeest. But Sanger claimed that these were merely another stylized fiction, a more sensational but just as artfully neutered violence, and that an authentic firsthand experience of anything had long ceased to be of meaning in the last years of the century. “The truth is merely the lie you most wish to believe,’ he liked to opine. ‘After all, your creation of the river has sprung from a familiar repertory of childhood clichés. I even suspect that your wish to destroy it is really an attempt to destroy television’s image of the world …’
While the frogs simmered in the pan, Noon bathed Mr Pal, first stripping him to the waist and then rubbing his swollen abdomen with the wash-leather from the chauffeur’s glove compartment of the Mercedes. She scraped the mess-tins with a handful of sand, and then poured water over the half-conscious botanist. Mr Pal revived briefly. He lay back, swallowing the sweat that fell from his forehead, eyes fixed on the island of burned reeds beside the jetty. Then he lapsed again into his fever.
There was little I could do for him. Even if I set off down-river and managed to surrender to Captain Kagwa it was most unlikely that he would send Mr Pal on south to Port-la-Nouvelle.
When we had finished our meal I siphoned a dozen gallons of oil into the diesel’s fuel tank, started the engine and cast off from the island. As we moved forward, leaving the waterway and entering the main channel of the Mallory, I listened for any sound of Kagwa’s expeditionary force. Across the reed islands and lagoons the noise of the landing-craft’s engines would be audible for miles, and the layer of sun-lit haze that covered the water would conceal us from the helicopter.
I needed Noon to sit in the bows beside Sanger and Mr Pal, ready to warn me if we ran into one of Harare’s patrols. However, she remained in her den, ensconced in front of her television monitor. All the hours I had spent trying to teach Noon the rudiments of alphabet and speech in an attempt to widen her world had clearly been wasted. The more improbable the picture of Africa, the greater was Noon’s fascination. What most held her attention were the clips that Sanger had salvaged from a Hollywood melodrama of the nineteen-forties, which described the adventures of an African warrior queen, and drew Noon’s eyes to within six inches of the cathode screen. Chin on fists, she gazed at these glimpses of a female Tarzan, played by a statuesque Texan blonde, hunting on elephant-back, rallying her lions, leading the cowed villagers against a gang of white slave-traders. These hackneyed images seemed to provide Noon with the first dream of herself. I remembered her wading bare-breasted as she hunted for the frogs, and realized whose cues she was heeding.
In the early afternoon, when the heat from the sun seemed to melt the surface of the water, the fumes leaking from the diesel at last forced me to leave the wheelhouse. I shut down the engine and let the ferry coast into a shallow creek between two sand-bars on the western bank of the river.
Exhausted by the effort of holding the helm, I sat down in the shadow of the wheelhouse. We had covered some three miles, but in this vast archipelago of reed islands there seemed no sense of progress, as if the Mallory had lost itself in its own watery vastness. Barely recognizing my body beneath the oil and sores that covered my skin, I listened to the shrieking birds as they hunted the lagoons, and to the feverish murmurs of Mr Pal lying beside Sanger in the bows of the ferry.
Noon, however, seemed to come alive in the heat. I heard her hooting and grunting to herself, supplying the missing soundtrack to her favourite film. She had switched off the monitor, shrewdly conserving the battery for the late afternoon, and well aware that it would soon run down once the diesel’s generator was no longer charging it. Oblivious of the heat, she skipped about the deck, riddled out the stove and cast the ashes over the side, watching with a stylized scowl for the few small snakes to rise to the speckled surface. Machete in hand, she leapt into the knee-deep water, and began to hack at the bamboo, as if the saplings were lances borne by an army of opposing pikemen. In her naive way she had modelled her behaviour on the actress she had seen in the film clips, perhaps thinking that these were newsreels of an existing tribe of warrior queens.
Already I was obsessed by Noon, by her slim fingers quick as a card-sharp’s, by her scarred instep and the warts on her left knee, like the markers of some erotic encounter to come. I followed her around the deck as she gathered the kindling. Her eyes never left the satchel of cassettes that lay between Sanger’s feet, a set of instructional tapes from which she would construct a newer and stronger woman.
Perhaps I could insinuate myself into her mimickry of these film roles, model myself on the behaviour of these lovers of extraordinary women? Noon was the first person
whom I had completely shaped, and I was reluctant to surrender her to Sanger. In many ways I was running about at her beck and call, but she still existed only within my duel with the river. The confident and intelligent women whom I had known as a young doctor in London had been too tolerant and too affectionate to seize my imagination, however fond of them I had become. Perhaps, in the future, those unique marriages of memory and desire would only take place within some obsessive and distempered union, like that which existed between myself and this great channel …
‘He’s dead, Mallory! Mr Pal is dead!’
‘Mal! Doc Mal!’
Noon’s fist rapped against the wheelhouse, rousing me from this confused reverie. Sanger was calling from the bows of the ferry, arms thrashing about as he struggled with the awning. I went forward and freed him from the guy ropes.
‘Let me see him. Stop acting all the time …’
‘Doctor, Mr Pal is dead!’
‘Dead? You can see him moving.’
The botanist was slumped in his chair, head lolling as if his neck had been broken. Rotted by the moisture that poured from his body, the canvas seat had split and he lay on the deck within the wooden frame, surrounded by a pool of sweat and urine.
‘Stay with us, Mr Pal.’ Sanger knelt beside him, shouting into his ear. ‘We are going back to Port-la-Nouvelle! Dr Mallory will give you medicines!’
Remembering that I had once been a physician, I examined the Indian. No longer conscious, he was expiring inside his inflamed skin, brain cooked by his fever. The enteritis and the ulcerated mucous membranes of his mouth indicated a severe attack of sprue, overlaid by exposure and countless opportunist infections.
‘I’ve nothing – there are no medicines here. Not even a bottle of Scotch.’
‘You fool. He’s a Moslem.’ Sanger pushed me away, raised the botanist’s face between his hands and began to massage his cheeks. ‘Mallory, listen to me! We leave now. Start your engine and set course for Port-la-Nouvelle.’
I tried to move away, but he seized both my wrists and twisted them in his strong hands, as if trying to knot my arms together.
‘Turn the ship around! It’s a bad dream, Mallory. There is no film now. Look at yourself, man, you’re more desperate than Mr Pal!’
He tried to propel me towards the wheelhouse, and then stumbled into the awning. I watched him grapple with the air and sunlight. Noon stepped behind the limousine, gazing without expression at this confrontation between a blind man and his shadow.
Should we turn back? Around the ferry the mist cleared. The harsh, insect-filled light lay over the refuse and vomit on the deck, over the derelict crew of this derelict ship. In a brief moment of lucidity I looked at my reflection in the muddy paintwork of the Mercedes, at my ragged shorts, emaciated body covered with infected bites and exposure sores. Dimly I could remember a lost self, a responsible older brother who had mistakenly sanctioned this absurd journey. I tried to stand back from my own obsession, but I could no longer separate myself from my dream of the Mallory. Was my attempt to scotch the river nothing more than the last instalment of that suicide by easy payments on which I had embarked by first choosing to work at Port-la-Nouvelle? I had killed Miss Matsuoka, and Mr Pal would follow; sooner or later we would all be killed in the coming clash between Harare and Captain Kagwa. Noon would perish before any of us.
‘All right, Sanger.’ I beckoned Noon towards me. ‘Put Mr Pal in the wheelhouse. Then we’ll turn around and go back to Port-la-Nouvelle.’
23
Journey Towards the Rain Planet
Smoke pumped from the funnel of the Salammbo, diffusing into the deep haze that lay over the lagoons. Somewhere through this amber glare I could see a drifting image of the sun, so close that it seemed suspended from a gantry above our heads. When I engaged the reversing gear the diesel juddered against the walls of the engine pit, shaking the wheelhouse like a rotting cage. Mr Pal’s right arm flopped from the bunk on to the deck, and then began to draw the rest of his body towards the floor at my feet.
‘Noon – !’
Refusing to cooperate, Noon sat in the driving seat of the Mercedes with her fist against her chin. She flicked at the controls, as if calculating an alternative itinerary.
‘Trust me, child …’
One hand on the helm, the other easing forward the throttle, I stepped back across the wheelhouse floor. I pressed my right foot against Mr Pal’s chest, forcing the botanist back on to the narrow bunk. His eyes opened and a confused fragment of his endless commentaries came from his lips.
‘… soft waters, made plentiful by a benevolent rainfall … clear streams will cool all fevers …’
I ignored him, steering the ferry into the main channel of the river. The eastern shore was barely visible through the haze, lost somewhere among the reed-islands and sand-bars.
Pulled by the propeller, the ferry reversed into the centre of the channel. The current turned the bows towards the south, pointing the Salammbo on the long voyage to its home port. The waves clicked and tutted against the hull, as if regretting that its rusting plates and weary timbers lacked the resolve to carry her through the rigours of our quest.
‘Doctor! Which way …? Tell me our bearing!’ Sanger was shouting from the bows, hands raised to catch the confused air streaming around the vessel. For a few seconds he disappeared in a cloud of smoke from the funnel, and then emerged like a magician sprung from a pantomime trap-door.
I shielded my face from the sun, listening for any sounds of Kagwa’s helicopter. The wavelets chattered against the hull, dribbling their half-forgotten messages, their whispered secrets which they had carried all the miles from the spring waters of the Mallory.
‘Doctor! Our bearing?’
‘South … we’re making our journey towards the rain planet.’
We were drifting downstream at two or three knots, the current outrunning the slow thrust of the propeller. I eased the helm to starboard, drawing the ferry stern-first across the channel. Noon looked up from her sullen perusal of the car’s instrument panel, staring at me as if she suspected that hunger had made me lose my sense of direction. I avoided her eyes and let the ferry complete its sternward arc. When we lay beam-on to the current, I disengaged the propeller, and wound the helm hard to port. The cutwater of the vessel began to point into the stream, bearing north as the stern swung round and tucked in behind the bows. Re-engaging the propeller, I gradually increased the throttle setting.
We were moving north again, towards the source of the Mallory. Unaware of this simple deception, Sanger leaned back in his deckchair and set his hat at a satisfied rake.
So Sanger’s myopia, perhaps aggravated by scurvy, was as total as I had guessed. For how many years had he concealed this, relying for his picture of the external world on the reports brought back to him by his assistants, filming his scientific documentaries that were as fictional as Dürer’s rhinoceros …?
Noon, meanwhile, had stepped from the Mercedes. Keeping the hull of the limousine between us, she stared at me across the grimy roof, clearly puzzled by this small show of duplicity. I realized that she cared nothing for Mr Pal, and found it hard to grasp why I should bother to trick Sanger into thinking that we were returning to Port-la-Nouvelle.
Yet the deception had served its purpose. I had never intended to abandon the hunt for the Mallory, but this small deceit was a last act of deference to those human and professional debts which I would once have owed to the dying botanist.
I stood against the helm, clasping it to my bare chest, feeling the teak crosspiece cut into my breastbone. The pain bonded me to the Salammbo. As I swung the heavy wheel, steering the ferry down the centre of the channel, I happily felt the infected wound on my head, a gaudy plume of hair and blood that I wore like a cockade. I pressed the throttle forward, listening to the smoke beating like a fist inside the funnel.
‘Doctor?’ Sanger shouted from the bows. ‘Conserve your fuel. The current will carry us.’
&
nbsp; ‘Don’t worry, Sanger. We’re in good time.’
‘When will we meet Captain Kagwa? His forces must be close.’
‘Soon, Sanger. We’ll meet him soon.’
‘We’ll transfer ownership of the Mallory.’
‘Of course, Sanger. We’ll call it the Kagwa.’
‘No, no. It remains the Mallory. How is Mr Pal?’
‘He’s resting – his dreams are calmer.’
‘Good. He’s dreaming of the Ganges and the Irrawaddy.’
Noon had left the Mercedes and stood by the wheelhouse door. She glanced down at Mr Pal, who was lying on the floor beside the bunk, and then turned her attention to me, tapping her teeth like a cashier as she made a rapid inventory of my feverish state.
‘Not too good, Noon? You may have to take over from me.’
For the first time I noticed the machete in her hand. She was staring in a hard and adult way at the bows of the Salammbo. Sanger had left his deckchair and was separating himself from the awning. Eager to check on our progress, he felt his way past the Mercedes, and then climbed hand over hand around his film equipment. His face masked by the sunglasses, he poked among the lights and monitors, nostrils flicking at the passing air for any scent of Captain Kagwa. As he swung between the silent screens he resembled a blind Quasimodo sniffing his bells.
‘Mallory?’ His hands scrabbled through the broken windows of the wheelhouse. ‘Are we on the right course? All these channels, I can hear the grass breathing. You’ve constructed a maze.’
‘We’ll find our way back. I recognize all the landmarks.’
‘Good … there’s a map inside your head. You’re feverish, doctor. How is Mr Pal?’
‘He’s a little calmer. The infection has passed. Some waterborne fever.’
‘A disease called a river. A dose of Mallory …’ He ran a hand across the sores on his face, as if trying to recognize himself. ‘I blame only myself, doctor – I urged you on. This small eccentricity, how could I know that you would go so far? Now it’s all lost …’
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 17