Binstead's Safari

by Rachel Ingalls

  “But they’re all young. What are they saying?”

  “The bride goes to her husband in the marriage place. They go to their house. They eat and drink, they are happy all the time. They love each other all the time. They never grow old. They are never sick. They never thirst. All the time they have each other, all the time.”

  Stan stared blankly at the dry ground in front of him. He asked, “Do they always sing this when somebody dies?”

  “No. This is a special song, I think. I don’t know it. They admire very much … what happened. The masaba’s bravery is a thing they can’t forget. That’s something like what would be a hero-thing for a man to do, but for a woman—it’s unknown before. She didn’t even have a knife, anything, did she?”

  “No,” Stan said. She just stepped forward and embraced the horror; like going into a furnace, like throwing your arms around a bomb.

  *

  The chanting of the skinners had sunk to a vague hum, as if retreated into the air. The days seemed suddenly soundless, they burned silently before his eyes. At night he shivered with cold. The Whiteacres wrote from the coast that in two weeks, or possibly less, they would be coming back to their camp; Ian, Ajuma and Mahola were busy getting ready for their arrival. Pippa let Stan sit saying nothing, or cry when he could, or talk. And Nicholas promised, at his insistence, that they would go get the lion. They had to, Stan said. It was a matter of principle.

  It would have been a matter of principle even if it had had nothing to do with Millie. But Stan didn’t say that, nor that from the moment when that blurring faceful of teeth had come flying up from the ground, his life had stopped. He knew no way of going beyond that point except to get back to it and repeat it somehow. The mechanics of revenge, he thought: the ceremony in which you reproduce the previous act in a slightly altered way or with a reversed outcome, and then it cancels what took place before. Good psychology, favoured by many primitive peoples and recommended in folklore. My subject, my field, my specialty.

  He waited with Nicholas through the dawn, into the early morning. Twice they kept watch but there was nothing. They drank cups of tea together. Stan was glad of the company, yet grateful that Nicholas hardly spoke; he too seemed grieved and bewildered.

  “You think this is useless, don’t you?” Stan asked him on the second morning.

  “No, of course not. It’s not the way I should feel about it myself, but I can understand it.”

  “It’s like a personal—”

  “Yes, yes. It’s what I’d feel if my wife had been killed by another man. But the animal kingdom is my profession, you see. These things happen naturally, without malice. Blindly. I couldn’t harbour a grudge against a brute beast. In the heat of the moment, but not afterwards.”

  “Even you must admit, that lion led us around. It wasn’t ordinary. It was uncanny.”

  “It was unusual. I’ve seen every strange thing you can think of from lion and there’s always a new exception to the rule. But it’s merely instinct. None of it’s conscious, like a man. Some people would agree with you, I dare say. Lion experts are all a bit dotty on the subject. They’ll swear there’s a mind there. Harry was an expert and he thought so.”

  Later that day, when they looked in on the leopard cubs, they found that one had died in the night. Nicholas lifted it out of the corner where it lay on its own. The others had moved away from it. “Before Pippa sees it,” he said. “She’ll go mad. She never stopped complaining about the other lot, then she was beside herself when she found they were going to be sent out of the country.”

  Pippa had finished the packing, handed everything over to Stan, and given him the keys. He looked bleakly at the boxes and suitcases. There was a folder full of letters, which had been put in with the painting pads. It didn’t include any of Henry’s letters, since Millie had finally burned them, all except one piece of the last letter she had had from him. That single sheet had been found by Pippa in Millie’s jacket pocket. There had been no signature. The handwriting seemed slightly familiar, but Pippa knew it didn’t belong to Stan or Nicholas. On both sides it just said, “I love you”, over and over again. She left it where it was, then thought that Stan would find it, and didn’t know what to do. In the end, she took it out, rolled it into a cylinder and set fire to it. Of course, the note might have been years old, in spite of its look of having been written recently—a kind of good luck charm. But really it was a mystery. She forgot about it.

  “Shall we go for a walk?” she suggested. “Just a short one.”

  Stan agreed. He took his rifle and they set out down the road, but soon branched off. Pippa realized that on the way back they would pass by the grave in its lovely surroundings. It had been one of the nicest “good views” near the camp.

  Their walk was sad and quiet until it was time to turn around; then Pippa broke into talk about Millie. She praised her poise and natural diplomacy. “That was one of the reasons why the Africans all liked her so much. It wasn’t just the paintings that made her famous among them. Oh, yes—she was. Robert and Odinga were always bringing their friends to come bow to her. I used to see them during our painting sessions, like royal audiences. She was always very gracious about it—respected their dignity, never laughed. She was very patient.”

  Stan said, “Yes, she was,” and almost broke down.

  “There is one thing,” Pippa said. “It’s unimportant, but it upsets me. The necklace she was wearing: I put the two pieces in her shoulder bag. It was one of the first things, when I was packing up her clothes. Well, it’s gone. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “You think someone in camp took it?”

  “It has to be. There’s no other explantion. I don’t like to think it of anyone, but it was a very fine piece, and gold.”

  “What about the ear-rings? Those big gold ones she called her Chinese ear-rings.”

  “Still there. They were right in with the pieces of the chain.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. Maybe you could send the ear-rings—or give them to me. Her sister may want them.”

  “Yes, all right. I’ll remember.”

  “And that painting she did for Jill—I told you about that—and the one for Dr Hatchard’s wife: all the elephants squirting water at each other.”

  Pippa nodded and said yes. They turned the corner, came out near a small stand of trees and were in sight of the grave. Directly on top of the plot of earth where they had buried Millie, the lion was sitting, as still and massive as a monument and looking as though it might actually have been the headstone of the grave.

  Stan rushed forward. “You bastard!” he screamed. He slung his rifle up and began to fire, reload, and fire again.

  Pippa ran to him. “What is it?” she said. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  He gritted his teeth and took another sighting. The lion was gone. He lifted his head.

  “Did you see it?”

  “No. What? What was it?”

  “You didn’t see a lion there? Sitting right there, looking around so satisfied?”

  “No, Stan.”

  “It was there. It must have run off at the first shot and I was too wound-up to notice.”

  “Let’s look.”

  They approached the grave. Stan bent down to inspect the mound and the earth and grasses surrounding it. He saw no sign of animal traces, nor even of digging, which he had feared so much. He had had nightmares about the hyenas and jackals digging her up. It was important that she should be happy. The idea of animals scrabbling away at the place where she rested was more loathsome to him than anything he had ever imagined, even worse than the dream he had had years ago about the tropical insects eating the eyes out of his brother’s face as he lay on his back in the jungle.

  There was nothing at all. The pleasantness of the landscape around them made nonsense of his hysteria, his fears, his love, his loss, his life.

  Why had he ever come there? And what reason could there have been, other than the necessity of war o
r starvation, so urgent that it would force a man to bring his wife to a place where she was in danger of being killed? It had been such a stupid thing to do that nothing could ever explain it.

  And yet, she had loved everything about the country. She had blossomed there. And it was there that she had finally come back to him.

  “Stan,” Pippa said, “shall I wait for you over by the trees?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just a minute.” If there were no prints, no hairs, no disturbed places or crushed stalks, there had been no lion.

  But that didn’t matter. Forget all that. What mattered was that she had loved him after all.

  She saw it before I did, he thought, and she threw herself in front of me to save me. She did love me. She wouldn’t have left. It was all the unsettling new experience of having a child, that was all; like the depressions she used to go through—they were all probably caused by hormones or something like that.

  *

  Pippa mentioned the incident to Ian. He spoke to Nicholas, who said, “All right, we’ll start tomorrow. See if the lion’s anywhere to be seen. And if he isn’t, get out and beat the bushes. Give him something to do with himself. It’s better than sitting about in camp.” That afternoon he talked to Stan.

  Stan said, “Pippa didn’t see anything. And I couldn’t see a sign of him either when I got up close. She probably thinks I’m bats.”

  “She thinks you’re going without sleep and seeing objects and movements out of the corner of your eye, rather like hallucinations. It happens frequently in bereavement. When you hear of people seeing their dead relations walking, that’s what’s behind it. It doesn’t mean you’re deranged, Stan.”

  He managed to laugh. He said, “You should have my job. That’s just the kind of thing I used to send in to the folklore journals as an introduction: ‘Ghost Stories of the Southern Highlands’, and so on. She thinks I’m crazy. She also thinks you were having an affair with my wife.”

  “Pippa wouldn’t believe that. She knows how kind Millie was to me. She helped. I could talk to her.”

  “Yes, I know. Okay. Tomorrow. Do you think he’s still hanging around camp?”

  “No, but we’ll try that first.”

  Stan drank an extra whisky that night. He also opened the bottle he kept in the tent, but nothing had any effect. He could tell that even if he finished off the whole bottle, it wouldn’t help. Everything would only feel progressively flatter until he passed out. He borrowed a pack of cigarettes from a carton the Whiteacres had left behind, although he didn’t really want them, either. They tasted bad and made his mouth smell like a room fumigated against contagion. He hadn’t smoked since his early twenties.

  In a way, her death was easy to understand. It had come about because among all the dangers he had thought about, he had forgotten to take the wild animals into account. He had expected trouble from people—protection rackets, politics, obstructive officials. And possibly also from the climate and local fevers or infection. But what had happened was so much simpler, and he’d overlooked it. Jack hadn’t suspected, or Lavalle. Yet it was obvious. Any child who had seen a few Saturday morning movies back home could have told him: Africa was full of wild animals. Of all the world’s continents, it had the biggest supply of large, ferocious four-legged animals. And they spent their entire lives killing. Killing was their life.

  He looked at all the cards and papers and addresses in her wallet, put them back and pulled the photographs out of the section of plastic holders.

  There they were: at home, inside their living-room with the Murchisons, at his parents’ house. There was her mother and father and Millie herself with her sisters and schoolfriends. There he was too, many times over, at different ages.

  He remembered the slightly off-angle snapshot she had taken with Pippa’s camera, of him and Pippa and Ian at the dining table in one of their first camps. But several of the other pictures he didn’t know: Nicholas from the waist up and smiling, and a full-length shot of a man Stan had never seen before; the background was Africa, but the man was a stranger. There were some copies of the London street scenes he himself had done all in one morning to wind up the roll, and then another picture of the stranger, this time just of his head, which might even have been a passport photo. He put the whole bunch into his own wallet and forgot about them. He went to sleep in her bed.

  In the morning, he was ready to go. He packed everything he’d need, lifted the knapsack, took his extra canteen and his rifle, and went to join Nicholas.

  There was a second man standing by the tea tent, whom Stan could not make out until he came closer. It was Robert, Millie’s special friend. Nicholas evidently hadn’t wanted to let him come with them, but Stan didn’t mind. As long as they got the lion—that was the main thing, and as long as he was the one to get it.

  They waited. Time passed so slowly, he couldn’t imagine the morning would come, ever, nor that his life could change from the greyness out of which something was supposed to appear, although he didn’t believe it would. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to go to sleep for a year at least, but he was strung up too high for sleep. Spasms of sorrow rushed over him every few minutes like nausea or approaching unconsciousness. And then, for long periods he’d seem to blank out, not thinking of anything.

  Nicholas tapped him on the arm. Stan stared ahead. He saw nothing. He saw darkness. The darkness began to move.

  He raised his rifle and pushed up the safety catch. Now, he thought, just as soon as I get it perfect. I’ll blow you right off the earth.

  The world was still formless. The outlines, the exact definitions were not there until all at once everything was there and the lion too, hurling himself off to the side and breaking away, out of camp.

  The three of them followed on foot, signalling to Amos as they went past the car park.

  *

  It was like the afternoon Millie died; the lion would allow them a glimpse of himself, then turn and make them follow. At the end of the first day, they had been led on in a circle almost to where they had started from, but they didn’t go back to camp.

  “Most peculiar damn beast,” Nicholas said. They took turns to watch through the night. Anything was possible with this animal.

  In the morning, Robert had a fever and couldn’t stand up. “Malaria,” Nicholas said. “We’re not too far from camp. Shall we go on? If we lose him, we can walk home.”

  “Let’s keep going,” Stan said.

  They added some extra rations of water and food to their packs and sent Amos on to the camp with Robert in the landrover.

  Stan was feeling as if he too might have a fever. His eyes itched and he thought the dusty air pressed all over him like the country itself, earth and sky together breathing their heat on him. The rash he’d been afflicted with weeks before had come back. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except the lion. He kept walking.

  Every once in a while tears slipped down the corners of his bloodshot eyes. He thought he heard Millie’s voice a couple of times. It came to him in pieces rather than sentences or phrases. He was aware of her having spoken—perhaps, and then the sound wasn’t there. He thought back to the first apartment they’d had: the one with the broken-down stove, the old icebox out in the back hall, the luscious green bank of leaves at the windows from the tree outside, which had been his real reason for choosing the place. He remembered her opening the oven door, reaching up to the cupboards, sewing his buttons on. Her image came to him looking happy, or thoughtful, or any way—all her looks, and the gesture she sometimes used—of leaning her head a little to one side; her special look for birthdays and Christmas when she was keeping a secret, like the look she’d had recently; her sweet ineptitude if she got things mixed up. He didn’t understand how he could ever have lost his temper with her. But he had, all the time. All the time. And no one had ever been as nice as Millie.

  He went over their lives through all the seasons of the year. One day came back to him when they had been wa
lking side by side, he couldn’t recall exactly when, but he knew where, and it had been in the fall: they were in town during the rush hour, as the offices had let out. The sun was going down into a lingering, autumnal evening, the hurrying crowd around seemed in a good mood, all—like them—young. He’d felt that everyone was going someplace exciting, but not hurrying too much, enjoying the last of the day. Most of the trees were still green, but it was fall all right, suddenly. The air was crisp and spicy and contained a trace of smoke. They were walking home across the bridge, through the long reaches of the blue, lilac, purple dusk. The streetlights started to come on. They walked arm in arm the last few blocks. To the door, up the stairs, to the next door. The kitchen smelled like flowers from the apples she was keeping there.

  *

  It would have been easier if he could go on walking in a straight line and let his thoughts take their own course, but the day wasn’t going to be like that. He would have to work hard to achieve his vengeance.

  It was as if the lion knew. It repeated its usual strategy and they pursued, not in a circle this time but going ever deeper into the territory that belonged to the cult.

  Just before noon, the animal climbed in among some rocks. Nicholas said, “You know, this is senseless. If we go on like this, we’ll be trailing him clear across Africa. It’s impossible, Stan.”

  “I have a feeling he’s taking us into his own neighbourhood.”

  “He’s still in there.”

  “I mean, in the long run. That’s what he has in mind. What’s he doing?”

  “Let’s have something to eat while we think about it.”

  Stan was glad of the rest. He put his hand up to his head. All day long, beginning with the fuzzy, colourless pre-dawn, he had strained for the sight of shapes that hadn’t appeared. He had been looking at everything as if his eyesight itself might call things into being. At times now the world seemed to roll over, its surfaces merging, and he felt himself ready to fall away backwards into sleep.