Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  “I thought you didn’t allow clients to blare music in the bush.”

  “Did I say that?” Adam grinned a naughty smile and took my hand. “I must’ve been in a very bad mood when I made that rule, then. Come have a drink, city girl.”

  Morag definitely was an amazing shot. Alarmingly good-looking for starters. A Helmut Newton model lookalike, Botticelli blond curls and marble skin, the long white jodhpurs drenched in zebra blood, heavy black boots. No eyes, just that Hockney swimming-pool look with no ripples. The eyes of a drowned Ophelia. Or of dead fish if one didn’t care to be so romantic about it.

  She offered me the tips of her thin fingers to shake, and a blank look. This girl was not interested in sisterhood, and to be honest in her case neither was I. Morag the huntress was possibly the last person on the planet I wanted to have sitting in camp that night between me and Adam. I felt like kicking her in her bloody jodhpurs and calling her a fraud, then radioing the Copelands to come and collect her for good. That was how threatened she made me feel. The clients were clearly mad about her, they’d spent three days in her company and couldn’t imagine a cooler woman than this twentieth-century Greek goddess. Pure mythology at your feet. You should have heard them, the New York Upper West Side Intellectual Family, Morag said this that and the other. Blah blah blah.

  Adam was right; they looked interesting and clever, they didn’t wear stupid clothes, they had a wild sense of humour. I wanted them to like me as well, but when they asked me what I did and I said I worked in a postproduction company in Nairobi, they looked at me with the same embarrassment and pity as if I’d revealed I had a slow but fatal disease.

  Morag went to shower somewhere in the staff quarters and reappeared beautifully wrapped in black, a fat cigar sticking out of her breast pocket. I wanted to scream with rage and smack her in the face.

  Why couldn’t one ever relax in this country? Why was it always like a crazy film without an ending, where new characters kept popping up nonstop just when you thought you’d reached the climax and were only waiting for the grand finale? Your two heroes finally reunited against the African sunset, kissing passionately, music levitating as tears rolled along with the credits.

  But no.

  This fucking long-legged Artemis appears, who has shot buffaloes in Zimbabwe all her life.

  Frankly, one feels like giving up.

  Adam was busy creating the perfect atmosphere, making everyone lethal drinks, selecting music, lighting candles. I hadn’t seen him so full of energy with clients in a long time. But more than that, I’d never seen Adam so concentrated on a woman since the day we met.

  At dinner I sat next to Brian, the art dealer, and across from his younger wife, Anjelica. Morag sat between Brian and Adam, the two clever boys who obviously adored her.

  Brian started elucidating just how extraordinary he thought Morag was.

  “She’s incredibly brave, considering the chauvinism of the hunting world. Seems it’s quite difficult for Morag to get proper professional clients.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. No guy who pays thousands of dollars a day to shoot a buffalo wants to listen to a twenty-five-year-old angelface tell him when’s the best time to pull the trigger. It’s too demeaning,” I said. “You want some rugged guy to be your guru on a hunt, someone who looks like Clint Eastwood and makes you feel just as cool, don’t you think?”

  Anjelica nodded, whereas Brian went on championing Morag’s position in a man’s world.

  “I wouldn’t mind at all going hunting with a woman. I wouldn’t find it demeaning in the least.”

  “Yes darling,” said Anjelica with a grin, “but you are a vegetarian and wouldn’t even know how to kill a bird, so you hardly count as a potential client.”

  Morag was busy discussing ammunition with Adam and pretended not to be listening. I overheard her invite him to join her on the zebra shoot at the ranch next week, after the clients had gone. He said he’d definitely come, that he loved the idea of doing a bit of hunting.

  “She’s completely ridiculous,” I said to Adam after Morag had finally left to go back to the Copelands’ ranch late that night, her shotgun nicely propped behind her seat. The Intellectual Family had turned in much earlier, and I’d had to sit through a tedious conversation about shooting techniques and bullets, the advantage of soft-nosed bullets versus solids, Remington guns versus Holland.

  “Why do you say that? She’s just really into it, she has a real passion for it.”

  “She’s obsessed.”

  “I agree,” he conceded, “but I like that kind of obsession in a girl. I think it’s attractive.”

  I felt murderous. I literally had to sit still and breathe to calm down. I felt I was losing everything at an impossible speed, like a Black Friday nightmare on Wall Street when your stocks tumble on the screen and there’s nothing you can do but watch your fortune sink.

  Yes, love was about trust. Not about fear. Not about emotional sabotage. Love was about things people could do together, not about what they couldn’t do.

  How long had it been since Adam had felt he could trust me, how long since he hadn’t felt lonely without me, how long since we’d done anything together? Why was I expecting him to keep loving me like day one? What was so unfair about Adam finally finding a buddy in the bush to listen to his favourite Chopin with and talk about boys’ stuff, someone who on top of everything had the curves of a model?

  Morag must have been sent by a goddess who particularly hated me.

  We heard the lioness grunt in the distance.

  “I promise you, she was right in the middle of camp last night around three. Woke everybody up, it was total mayhem for a while. I wished you were here.”

  “Did you?”

  “What?”

  “Wish I was here?”

  “Yes”—he stared at me—“I always wish you were here.”

  I stared back at him. Tears slowly started trickling out of my eyes. He wiped them off with the back of his hand.

  “Don’t,” he said. “There’s no need to cry. Everything’s all right.”

  “I’m not so sure about that anymore.”

  “Come on, Esmé. You know it is. You’re the one who’s been away. I’ve always been in the same place.” He waved in the dark. “Right here.”

  He said it with such a melancholic look in his eyes it scared me. Now it was impossible for me not to see the nostalgia, the loneliness my absence had inflicted upon him, and I was so afraid to think of the scars my carelessness had left.

  I started unbuttoning his shirt.

  “I want to make love to you.”

  He took me by the hand and we went inside our tent. We undressed each other slowly in the warm light of the kerosene lamp. There was a certain roughness in the way his hands touched me now, how they held me beneath him. We made love with impatient passion, as if we both wanted to see the end of it, to confirm that we still owned each other in the same way as ever and that nothing had changed. We didn’t care to linger, to wait, to smile at each other, to postpone the conclusion. We wanted to get it over and done with.

  In the darkness I brushed his ribs with my finger and kissed the inside of his forearm. No, nothing would ever be the way it had been, before Hunter. I had been mad to think Adam and I could make it through undamaged. We were no longer the same two, and now we both knew it. It wasn’t necessarily the end, but it was pointless to pretend nothing had been broken. And the job of mending whatever was salvageable was entirely mine, I realized.

  “Adam.”

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe I could keep my job part-time, follow only some of the clients, like Jason for instance. That would give me much more time to be here. Would you be happy if I did that?”

  “Yes, of course I would. But I would want you to do it only because you wanted to, not because you felt you should.”

  “I know. But I do want to. I do want to be here with you. I’m so tired of being away from you. From here.”
r />   The lioness grunted again; she’d gotten closer.

  “Maybe she’ll come into camp again,” said Adam. And he turned to me, his eyes shining with childish joy in the dark.

  “Let’s hope she does.”

  We fell asleep and her rasping growls woke me before dawn. Adam was standing, watching her through the netting. This big dark shape, this wild intoxicating smell. I couldn’t believe how close she was to our tent. We both stood watching through the netting without moving, till the sky turned grey and we could make her out completely. She was lying under a tree, sniffing the breeze, flapping her tail. Then she got to her feet and disappeared into the thickets. I felt blessed, welcomed again. I gently pulled Adam back onto the bed and we lay next to each other for a while, without talking, feeling the warmth of our bodies close together, letting our different thoughts dart like swallows and dissolve in the early morning light.

  I left my job at the office and worked on a freelance basis with Jason Winters, on postproduction of his ads. He paid me little but pampered me and kept me in an excellent mood. We’d spend long hours together in front of the Avid machine, then go to the Mud Club and dance ourselves stupid.

  The rest of the time I was with Adam at the camp, entertaining clients at dinner and becoming rather good at it, climbing the escarpment with Lenjo and getting the names of the plants and birds right once and for all. The Christmas holidays went by, and still we had bookings until Easter. Adam said he’d never had such a good season.

  My instincts told me the time had come for me to mark that territory, make it mine, before I lost my foothold. Therefore I concentrated on keeping Morag at bay, not letting her annoy me more than I could bear. Her zebra-culling job had come to an end, but apparently the Copelands loved having her around, so she was still living with them at the ranch. I knew she came around the camp a lot more often whenever I was in Nairobi, and it infuriated me that I didn’t seem to intimidate her one bit.

  I couldn’t help thinking she and Adam were having an affair. Why else wouldn’t she leave? I couldn’t make myself ask him; I still had much too much to hide from him myself.

  “Why doesn’t she go back to Tanzania, where at least it’s legal to shoot? She insists on hanging around in a country where hunters are loathed, killing animals is taboo, and she whines about it nonstop. What’s the sense of it?” I asked Adam.

  “I think she wants to get a job with me,” he said, as if admitting something, “that’s why she’s sticking around. She’s totally broke.”

  I felt no sympathy for her poor financial state.

  “Well, there are millions of safari companies who would love to hire her. She’s stalking you, that’s what she’s doing.”

  He laughed, as if I was being outlandish.

  “Come on, Esmé, what’s wrong with you? I can’t believe you’re jealous.”

  He was absorbed in yet another manual operation and went back—innocently—to unscrewing some tiny bit from the radio. I watched him closely. Suddenly I saw his embarrassment. Yes, they had slept together. I could feel it.

  “I am not. I just find her incredibly irritating. And she’s so stupid,”I said, just to annoy him. I did feel a pang of jealousy now and it hurt, but at the same time I was relieved: if Adam had had a fling with Morag it evened the scales. Not only did it make me feel less guilty, but it also gave me motivation to win him back.

  I needed that motivation, I needed the spur. It was part of the regimen I’d put myself on the day Hunter had left Africa.

  I made myself never think of him.

  Not his voice, not his eyes, not his smell. I never opened the shoebox where I kept his few letters, never dared glance at his tiny handwriting or at the only photograph I had of him—I loved it because he was smiling—it was black-and-white and slightly out of focus.

  These were strict rules. One had to forget.

  I had found, unexpectedly, an internal delete button. I had to be careful never to fiddle with it, otherwise the whole thing could come back in one go. One huge overwhelming wave of desire for Hunter would have drowned me on the spot. I couldn’t afford to be that suicidal.

  But it wasn’t easy.

  Even if you want to, for some reason it seems impossible to lose track of anyone if you live in Africa.

  You’d imagine it would be the opposite, that once someone leaves here, he or she vanishes into the unknown. Instead not only is it virtually impossible to disappear from view within this vast and wild country—your car will always be spotted, even in the Chalbi Desert, by some Ker and Downey safari guide who will report your exact location for the sheer pleasure of keeping track—but you’re even less likely to vanish once you’ve physically left the country. There’s a very good overseas network which keeps every bit of info regarding Kenya residents circulating daily.

  I never asked, but I would meet Ruben or Miles and they would say nonchalantly:

  “Hunter’s doing a really excellent job in Kabul, they want him to stay on. He says he loves it.”

  “Oh you heard from him?” I would say with a quiver.

  “Got a fax the other day. Sounds pretty wild over there.”

  “Right,” I would say and then change the subject, trying to overcome the faint feeling that always took over me anytime his name was mentioned.

  Kabul sounded safely remote and unreal. Then one day one of them would slap me with a new piece of information.

  “Hunter’s back in London for a couple of weeks. They may post him in Moscow, you know.”

  “Moscow?” I would pretend to find that amusing. “Will he like that, you think?”

  And my heart would sink again, as I felt his presence suddenly near, his voice within reach: London.

  One could be there in eight hours and track him down in two minutes. The mere thought elated and terrified me at the same time.

  At such moments the junkie in me was back: she’d been on strict rehab, but she knew she could start it all up again in a second, and she’d be right back where she’d left off. There with all the guilt and the passion, the ecstasy and the wickedness, the frightening chaos.

  Whereas now I’d become this heavily sedated patient, fed three times a day, on sleeping pills, who no longer cracked a decent joke.

  Yes, the guilt and the chaos had slid out of me, but life had as well.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,

  Nay, I have done: you get no more of me,

  And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,

  That thus so cleanly, I myself can free.

  MICHAEL DRAYTON

  Jason had rented a grand old house in Karen.

  “Just for a laugh,” he said, then began the tour, proudly showing me the dining room panelled in dark oak, the imposing fireplace in the sitting room, the wraparound verandah with old stone pillars covered in creepers.

  “An expensive laugh, this must be,” I said, having counted four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a huge salon, sitting room and dining room.

  “What the hell. We’re doing Omo next week, Tampax beginning of next month and probably Smirnoff.”

  Jason and I had become a good team. I was working as his assistant on the shoots now and I sometimes helped to dress the sets, bringing things from home. My teapot had been immortalized on a breakfast cereal commercial, my leather armchair had been the pièce de résistance of a particularly atmospheric brandy ad.

  He shrugged as he showed me the vast kitchen.

  “Plus my girlfriend is coming in June. I need to impress her to persuade her to stay.”

  “You have a girlfriend in London?” I don’t know why, but I had always assumed he was a single-minded bachelor having a good time on his own.

  “Daisy. She’s a costume designer. I kind of miss her, you know.”

  “How come she didn’t move out here with you?”

  “She has tons of work in London,” he said, as if to justify the fact Daisy wasn’t right there, knitting by the
fireplace. “Actually she thinks I’m mad to have moved here. Careerwise.”

  We sat by the fireplace in the huge living room and Jason slipped the Out of Africa tape into the VCR.

  “Oh please,” I said. “Let’s watch something else.”

  “I just want us to get ideas for sets and costumes, in case we end up getting the Smirnoff job.”

  “All right then.” I sat next to him, pad and pen in hand.

  I tried to watch the film with a professional eye, but by the time Meryl reads the poem on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Ngong hills, whispers “He wasn’t mine” with a dead stare and walks away in the grass, Jason and I—the deserted souls—had used half a roll of loo paper to wipe away our tears.

  “I wonder what it means when you feel that schmaltzy film plots are starting to fit the plot of your life,” I said, drying my eyes and getting up to go home.

  “I don’t know,” said Jason, shaking his flaming red hair and blowing his nose. “But it doesn’t sound good.”

  March came, the rains were about to start again. Every morning we’d wake up to the distant rumbling of thunder and smell mist in the air. Adam closed camp once more and drove to Nairobi with all the equipment in his truck.

  The day of the first downpour I sat on the verandah clutching a mug of hot tea, looking at the muddy pools in the garden, and realised this time for sure my brain was going to rot. I couldn’t stand the thought of all that water pounding on my head for months to come. I hadn’t been home in almost two years. I needed to get out.

  I phoned Teo.

  “Come, my love,” he said, “you’re the only person I want to be with for the rest of my life.”

  Oh, my magic child brother.

  “Say that again,” I begged him with a laugh. “I can’t believe I’ve managed to stay away from you for so long.”

  “Just come. But this country is hideous, I warn you. You mustn’t read the papers or watch television, ever. If you do you’ll run away immediately. You must promise to do only what I tell you.”