‘You’ll make your film, Sanger.’
‘No – there’s no film … everything is finished for me. You must rest yourself. We can sit here and wait for Captain Kagwa.’
‘We’ll move on – I’m stronger now.’
‘You’re a sick man. Even the Captain may forgive you.’
Losing his footing, he slumped against the oil drums. Noon stepped out of his way. She stood beside the stove with the machete, splitting the bamboo poles into thin spears. She watched me calmly, as if calculating how many more hours or days I could be relied upon. Then, reluctant to take her eyes from me, she skinned the end of her left thumb.
‘Mal …!’
I left the helm and pushed the machete aside. I squeezed her thumb, expressing a few drops of blood. As the wound blanched, I could see a splinter of bamboo lodged in the quick. I raised the thumb to my mouth and teased the splinter between my teeth. I sucked the blood from the small lesion, tasting the faint tang of frog and snakeskin, and a stranger, softer flavour of a woman’s skin.
Wincing with pain, Noon hopped on one foot, gripping the machete in her free hand. As I sucked each of her fingers I knew that she might split my neck with a single slash of the blade. But she let me touch her, and draw the blood from her thumb as if I was lying at her breast. Would she use her sex to ensure that I sailed on to the source of the river? My hand lay against her cheek. I placed my arm around her shoulders, holding the wheel with one hand as I searched the sun-filled channel for a quiet inlet. There, on the cool banks beside a drowning pool, among the lilies and the tamarinds, we would come together, deep in the drowsy silks of her body.
The soft river airs, the sweetened odours of lagoons, breathed over me as I clung to the helm. And so the fever-boat sailed on among the dreaming fish and the giddy birds …
‘Mal!’
The ferry heeled to starboard, its iron rudder scraping an underwater obstacle. The helm spun through my fingers, the spokes beating my hands as if punishing me for falling asleep. Thrown across the deck, Mr Pal lay under the bunk beside the rifle. In the bows Sanger had slipped from his chair, dragging the awning with him. He clung to the forward capstan, clearly fearful that the ferry was about to capsize.
We had struck the remains of a wooden bridge that had once spanned the ancient wadi that now lay in the bed of the Mallory. Crushed by the weight of the ferry, the waterlogged timbers rose briefly above the surface like a group of disturbed crocodiles, and then sank below the foam. I stopped the engine, disconnecting the propeller as the ferry remained motionless in midstream.
Aided by Noon, Sanger leaned against the radiator grille of the Mercedes, right hand fumbling at the headlamps and chromium emblems, his left hand dangling in the water to gauge the direction of the current.
‘Your engine, doctor! Start your engine!’
‘It’s all right, Sanger. We’re safe.’
‘Your engine!’
As the propeller began to turn, pushing the ferry upstream, Sanger plunged his hand into the-current. He took off his glasses, blind eyes raised as he offered his cheek to the sun.
So Sanger now knew that we were sailing north. He had tried without success to test the true direction of the Salammbo, confused by the relative motion of the river. But the sun’s hot light striking his face from the western bank left him in no doubt.
‘Mr Pal! Take the helm!’
He stood up and swayed around the limousine with outstretched hands, ready to wrest the wheel from me. When he reached the open deck he tottered near the edge, the spray from the bows soaking his trousers. I swung the helm to port, trying to throw him into the leaping bow-wave, but he dropped to his knees and groped his way past the film equipment. As his hands moved along the metal deck Noon backed away from him, almost inviting him to seize her ankles, the machete swinging between her knees.
‘Ignore him, Noon. He won’t hurt you. I’ll put him ashore.’
‘Leave the wheel, Mallory. It’s over now.’
‘We’re on course, Sanger. The ship’s following its compass.’
‘Turn back!’
Sanger beat his palms against the deck, drumming out all his hatred of these rusting plates. He clutched the wooden pillars of the wheelhouse, trying to throw the entire structure overboard. Across the broken window I could feel his breath panting into my face through caried teeth. His strong hands seized my shoulders. He fumbled at my skin, feeling the grease and sores on my chest, the oily beard on my face, at last convinced that an imposter who could mimic my voice had taken command of the Salammbo.
‘Who are—? Dr Mallory?’
I pushed his hands away, and threw him against the oil drums. As I freed myself from his thrashing limbs I heard a familiar concussive noise above the beat of the diesel. An ungainly shadow crabbed across the water. The rotating arms chopped at the air, dappling Noon’s frightened face. Looking upwards through the broken roof of the wheelhouse, I saw Captain Kagwa’s helicopter, machine-gun in its glass canopy, yellow pontoons like two large gas cylinders. Three hundred feet away, it followed the west bank of the river, then crossed the water and began to circle the lagoons and papyrus islands beyond the eastern shore.
Concealed by the mist, and camouflaged by the dirt and leaves scattered across its decks and cargo, the Salammbo had escaped the pilot’s notice. I throttled back the engine, and let the craft drift into a patch of deeper haze that lay near a grove of tamarinds along the shore.
The helicopter clattered across the river. Head down, nails tapping a frantic semaphore against her teeth, Noon took refuge in the rear seat of the Mercedes. Sanger had returned to his deckchair, and sat with a canvas bag across his legs. Among the tape-recorders and aerosols of mosquito repellent he had found a small chromium pistol. He sat stiffly with the weapon raised above his head, like a starting official at a regatta.
As the noise of the helicopter enveloped him, Sanger fired into the air. The brief crack was lost in the thumping blare, but Sanger cocked the slide and raised the pistol through the bedraggled awning. Was this blind man trying to shoot the helicopter down with a handbag weapon? Even Noon was watching him curiously from her passenger window.
When he fired a second shot at the helicopter I realized that Sanger was hoping to catch the pilot’s eye with the sharp flashes from the gun’s barrel. But the helicopter was moving upstream, gaining height as the pilot took care to avoid any possible ground fire from Harare’s guerillas. Lit by the afternoon sun, its exhaust trailed behind the craft like the golden brush of an aerial fox.
‘Stop the engine, doctor! You’re a sick man …’
With the last sounds of the helicopter, Sanger moved forward, hand over hand among the empty fuel drums. Noon sat circumspectly in the Mercedes, like a princess watching a street-corner brawl from the safety of her limousine.
‘Mallory – you will place yourself in Mr Pal’s custody …’
I cut the engine, listening to the last shudder of the diesel. The ferry lost way and drifted on the current, rocked by the faint swell, waves clicking against the hull as if waiting their time. Behind me Mr Pal lay below the bunk, babbling a delirious botany to himself.
Sanger had reached the television screens, marooned among the silent pieces of an electronic chessboard. His free hand searched the greasy tubes. I left the wheelhouse and moved to the starboard rail, but he heard my feet on the deck. He pointed the pistol towards me and fired a single shot, sending the small bullet into the door pillar a few feet away.
I crouched by the rail, trying to calm my shaking hands. For a moment Sanger had tricked me. He had needed the silent engine in order to hunt my clumsy footsteps. I waited as he reached the wheelhouse and seized the broken window frame, cutting his hand on the triangles of jagged glass. Blood dripping from his palm, he swayed into the doorway, and fired a third shot into the rocking helm that creaked beside him.
The shadows of the tamarinds lay like bars of camouflage across the open deck. Masking the sounds of my feet, I
sidestepped between the fuel drums and backed into the circle of television monitors. Kneeling among the silent screens, I waited for Sanger to lose his way in the wheelhouse and blunder over the ferry’s after-peak.
But his sharp ears, their acuity honed by years of myopia, had heard my laboured breath. Before I could move, he had left the wheelhouse. He stepped quickly on his small feet to the cluster of fuel drums, and waited there among the barred shadows.
I backed against the metal cabinets, my feet crushing a dusty cassette. I picked up the plastic sleeve, hoping in a muddled way that one of these absurd films could deflect a bullet so small as to be almost cosmetic.
Hearing me, Sanger lunged forward from the fuel drums. He stood only six feet from me, and behind the cracked sunglasses I could see his emaciated face, covered with insect bites and exposure sores. The small pistol was pointed at the rattling cassette in my hand, as he tried to remember, from whatever evidence, whether I was left- or right-handed.
The deck tipped slightly under out feet, shifting the cargo around us. I steadied myself as the metal cabinets scraped against each other, looking round for some means of escape. I saw that Noon had released and reapplied the handbrake of the Mercedes, pitching the heavy car against its guy ropes.
‘… the river as ecological stereotype, saved by Kagwa’s wise administration, has …’
Confused by his own voice emerging from the limousine’s speaker, Sanger turned his shoulder to me. Before he realized that I was beside him, I raised the cassette and struck the sunglasses from his face. I seized his shoulders in both hands, ran him forward across the deck and pitched him head-first into the water below.
As he drifted across the shadow-filled waves, arms raised in a struggle to remain afloat, Noon turned up the volume of the speaker, drowning his cries in fragments of his own monologue.
Later, when I had fished Sanger from the river with a boat-hook, I went forward and ransacked his canvas bag. Sanger lay on the deck beside the Mercedes, breathing in sudden gasps, his safari suit threaded with water-weed. His pallid face was stained with oil from the propeller shaft, as if his immersion in the Mallory had transformed him into one of those black-skinned natives celebrated in his bogus documentaries.
Noon crowded my elbows while I rooted in the canvas bag. She hopped about, tapping her teeth in relief, snapping her fingers at Sanger and uttering a stream of subvocal epithets. I hoped to find another pistol or, conceivably, a few cartridges that would fit the Lee-Enfield rifle. But among the mosquito creams and vitamin capsules were a half-empty flask of whisky, and a cassette with a label in Mr Pal’s handwriting: ‘Dr Mallory and native girl bathing naked.’
I placed the cassette in her hands.
‘They misjudged you, Noon …’
‘Mal?’
‘You’ve got us all under your thumb. God knows where you’re leading me …’
I admired her for the canny and self-contained way in which, despite her fear, she had distracted Sanger, and even for the touch of cruelty she had shown in turning up the volume as he floated helplessly in the river, ducking him in the sounds of his own voice.
I threw the bag at Sanger’s oily feet, and looked up into the late afternoon air, listening for Kagwa’s helicopter. Too exhausted to continue our voyage, I shut down the engine and moored the ferry against the western bank. Bands of cerise cloud crossed the sky to the east as the dusk advanced through the papyrus swamps. The light was softer, and the saffron air above the river was still warm and honeyed, but in the shadows of the tamarinds the deck of the Salammbo seemed suddenly chill. My fever had begun to shake me again, and a frozen sweat bathed my arms and chest.
I unscrewed the flask and drank a draught of the whisky, gasping as the spirit stung the sores on my lips and gums. I leaned against the Mercedes, trying to stiffen my unsteady legs. At my feet I saw Sanger’s broken sunglasses, cracked mirrors reflecting my emaciated body, the crooked captain of a crooked ship …
I bent down to reach the glasses, and fell across the deck, spilling the whisky on to myself. I held the black frames, and then hurled them over the rail into the water. I remembered slapping the glasses from Sanger’s face when I should first have knocked the pistol from his hand – but these opaque sunglasses symbolized that imaginary vision of the river which Sanger had tried to impose upon my own.
‘… came a crooked camera, cruised a crooked river, caught a crocodile …’
Mulling over this jingle, I wandered back to the bullet-riddled wheelhouse. Mr Pal had moved himself across the floor, and now lay below the helm, his hands gripping the spokes as if trying to reverse the course of the Salammbo.
I bent down, seized his legs and pulled him from the helm. His hands clutched my ankles, but I kicked them away and began the task of starting the engine.
Dusk had fallen, twenty minutes later, when the ferry pulled away from the tamarind grove, and a sepia light lay over the river. Panels of dark air rose from the surface, as if sections of a dream were being screened from a sleeping mind. I steered between them; alcohol and fever guided my hands. The Mallory had spread outwards, as if making its last attempt to deceive me, dividing itself into a maze of channels between causeways of papyrus grass that formed blood-red palisades. The water had ceased to move, and I reduced the ferry’s speed to a walking pace. The shallow bow-waves moved across a surface of oiled silk. Their gentle motion soothed Mr Pal as he sank into the deep peace of the hepatic coma, rousing him to a murmured description of the last truth he had glimpsed at the doors of his own death.
‘… environmentally … paradise … may be seen as an excess of solutions in search of a problem … Professor, Nihal, Madhur …’
By evening, as the last ruby light slipped away through the mist, I found that we had entered a large lagoon. I stopped the engine, and let the Salammbo drift across a dark mirror that contained no reflections.
Noon was sitting in the Mercedes, too tired to tap her teeth. When I touched her shoulder she looked up at me with surprise, as if no longer remembering who I was. In the faint light reflected from the instrument panel her face was thin and drawn. She seemed to have grown younger, once again a child, and I realized that she was starving.
‘Noon … Let me sit with you. I’ll keep you warm. Tomorrow we’ll trap the birds.’
I was about to climb into the car, but the far-side passenger door had opened. In the darkness she slipped away from me, her feet limping across the deck as she retreated among the cases of film equipment. Faint with hunger, I swayed against the car. I finished the last of the whisky, and then walked forward, tripping over Sanger’s outstretched legs.
Behind me I heard voices across the lagoon. An engine sounded beyond the wheelhouse, as if the diesel had come to life on its own. A small wave tapped the hull plates, and the ferry rocked on the stationary water. I slipped on the oily deck, and tottered backwards into the mast.
A spotlight flared across the water, its harsh glare illuminating the Salammbo and its cargo. The beam picked out the chromium triton of the limousine’s radiator, and Noon’s blanched face as she crouched behind the fuel drums. Shielding my eyes, I saw that another vessel had crept alongside us and had coasted to a halt twenty feet from the starboard rail. Two figures stood below the open bridge, pointing the spotlight into my face.
I pushed myself from the mast and stepped unsteadily across the over-bright deck with its shadows swerving like hallucinations. Were these sudden visitors the members of a film crew who had come to help me in my seduction of Noon?
Then a woman’s voice called from the darkness.
‘Dr Mallory – you can take Sanger and the river. But we’ll take the child.’
24
A Dream of Fair Women
I woke into a dream of fair women. I lay across a dusty mattress on an ornate bed whose gilded headpiece rose towards a painted ceiling. Beneath a sky of electric blue a group of nymphs swam around the fountain of a celestial swimming-pool. Their breasts played like
porpoises among the waves, and the foam leapt between their welcoming thighs.
The cheap paint flaked from the ceiling, above which I could hear footsteps and a woman’s voice calling across the lagoon from the deck of this waterborne brothel. The frogs honked mournfully in reply, as the mosquitos circled the tiny cabin, dodging the fragments of plaster that each footstep released from the ceiling.
Rested after my long sleep, I lay in this fine rain of the bodies of beautiful women, each like a mature Noon, that fell upon my oil-smeared skin. The wooden shutters were latched across the small window, shielding me from the bright sunlight beyond the iron casement, but through the cracks in the rotting timbers I could see the spears of papyrus grass twenty feet away at the edge of the lagoon.
Gripping the rails behind me, I pulled myself upright. The figurine of a naked dancer topped the brass column, and shed her skin of cheap gilt into my right hand. I wiped the metal flakes on to the mildewed mattress and gazed round the small cubicle, somewhere under the restaurant deck in the stern of the Diana.
As I opened the shutters, the hot sunlight flooded the cabin, warming my skin. My fever had subsided, and I felt strong but empty-headed, as if part of my brain had been siphoned away during the night by the women whose firm hands had seized me in the wheelhouse of the Salammbo.
A sluggish wave crossed the yellow surface of the lagoon, losing itself in the reeds and papyrus grass. For all the intense light, the water seemed inert, as if the Mallory had been infected with the same fever, and was waiting for me to revive before it could flow again. A few rails and coucals called to the air in a half-hearted way, but they too seemed defeated. Even the river, I reflected, was waterlogged.
Leaning through the window, my head against the metal grille, I saw a rubber dinghy approach the starboard gangway. Two of Mrs Warrender’s women stood shoulder to shoulder, each pushing on an oar as they rowed across the water. Behind them, in the stern, was a packing-case loaded with film equipment and television monitors. Three hundred yards away, the Salammbo sat abandoned in the centre of the lagoon. A slack anchor chain hung from its bows, and the forlorn craft seemed about to sink under the weight of the dusty limousine.
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 18