Turbulent Wake
Page 23
I shiver as the memories come hurtling back. I was thirteen. The man from the embassy came to the house. I haven’t thought about it since the day it happened. I’d certainly never seen the newspaper clipping. But now I can see it so clearly. Him standing there in the hallway in a white shirt and tie, whispering to our Filipino maid, her bursting into tears. I’d seen the man she was with in the car around the house, when my old man was away, but at that age of course you don’t understand. He was just a nice man who came round now and again. I remember him being very tall and good-looking, and my mother smiling a lot when he was there.
How can two people be so clearly in love, so compatible, and yet hurt each other so? I mean, my old man changed his whole life for her. They always say you can’t change a person, but that’s just bullshit. All these platitudes we accept as truths. All bullshit. She changed him. He stopped drinking. He changed his worldview, his profession. All he wanted to do was make her proud, be worthy of her. He wanted to change. That’s the secret. You have to want to change. The only thing was, she couldn’t change him enough.
Maria wanted to change me. Nothing I ever did was good enough. She wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. OK, I was happy to go along with it at the start, pretending to be this man of her dreams, and for a while it was fun. I mean, it was wild. I’ve never had better sex. Really. But, Jesus, who is this guy she thought she wanted? Be all the things a traditional man is supposed to be: strong, protective, financially secure, generous, all that shit. But she also wanted me to be, well, what can I say? Basically, she wanted me to be Troy.
At first, before Rachel came along, it was OK. We both worked hard, made some money, did what we wanted. After Rachel was born, Maria took a short maternity leave – eight weeks – and then started back to work. Her career started taking off, promotion after promotion. I was working my ass off to try to keep up, do my share, seventy-hour weeks. We had a full-time maid and a nanny for Rachel, so it worked OK, for a while. But then things started to change. Of course, I knew that with a child, they couldn’t stay the same. But it wasn’t what I expected.
It started with the laundry. She decided that I should start doing my own laundry. Told the maid not to do it. She said it was right that I should do it myself. I argued, but the maid took instructions from her, and my shirts and underwear piled up in the laundry room. I started sending my stuff out, dropping it at the cleaners on the way to work. When Maria found out, she was furious, ranting on about male privilege, about how things were different now, that men should realise it, accept it. By now, she was making double what I was, and letting me know it whenever she could. She started leaving all these little Post-it notes all over the house, telling me to dust this room, make this bed or clean and polish this floor. Of course, I ignored them. We went on like that for months, dancing around each other, her leaving notes, me picking them from whatever surface they were stuck to and throwing them in the bin.
Finally, she confronted me. Told me that this was who she was, that she was just coming into her own, that she needed to be the alpha, had always needed it and thought I had realised that at the start. I’d had no idea. None.
So, there it is. We never stood a chance, her and me. I was never the man she thought I could become, and she wasn’t the woman she pretended to be. What a couple of idiots. And the crazy thing is, there is still a piece of me that loves her anyway, her crazy, dark-burning soul.
Kingfisher
They’d only been on the river two days and already he knew it was a mistake. A mistake coming back to Africa in the first place, taking this job; a mistake thinking that anything would ever change, that he could change it.
The old engineer rubbed his aching shoulders and watched the young man feed a mopane limb into the fire. The dry wood flared and caught, casting a sunset glow across the young man’s face. The old engineer did not like this face, the girlish symmetry of fine, high cheekbones, the wavy too-long hair the colour of reed chaff, the burst plum lips, those yellow topaz eyes that could have belonged to a white man, the copper-coloured skin as smooth and perfect as a Himba woman’s painted breasts. The kid looked like one of those impossible male models in the airline magazine ads for cologne and designer clothes, the ones with the peacetime eyes and keyboard teeth, far too young for all that stuff they were trying to sell: stuff he would never be able to afford, even after thirty years of work, especially now, since the divorce.
The young man spooned a steaming heap of poike from the cast-iron pot on to a tin plate. He wore a beaten silver ring on his right thumb. ‘I think the helicopter is better for you, old man,’ he said in a smooth tenor. ‘From here we can still go back.’
The old engineer shifted on his camp stool and looked across the fire at the young man. He pointed to the night sky. ‘What I am looking for, you can’t see from up there.’
The young man looked up at the stars, gazed a moment. The galaxy light brushed his face pale, star-white against the darkness of the river and the hills rising from the far bank and the forest beyond. ‘There are things you will never see, old man.’
The old engineer just shook his head at this, this arrogance.
‘The helicopter is easier for you, old man. No hard work. No danger. There has been much rain. The river is running strong.’
‘Fuck you,’ the old engineer muttered under his breath, his voice swallowed by the Quadrophenia of river and rapids and wind and the night voices of a universe of insects.
‘The other project people, they are only coming in the helicopter. Never standing on this ground.’
‘Bunch of assholes,’ said the old engineer. ‘Incompetents.’
The young man held out the plate of food. ‘What is it, this thing you are looking for?’
The old engineer took the plate and set it on his lap. At the last meeting, held in the tin-sheet cinderblock project office on the edge of town, the project leader, a young Namibian engineer from a South African university he had never heard of, had set out the expectations of those in power – that this be done, and be done here. No discussion. Find a way. ‘None of your goddamned business,’ said the old engineer.
The kid – that’s what he was, couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty – looked at him a moment and then sat down in the sand and stared at him. ‘And you are not afraid?’ he asked after a couple of stars had disappeared behind the edge of the hills.
It was an interesting question, one with many answers. Travelling through a Cygnus of time, alone, without her, without their sons – what the hell was he supposed to feel? Of course he was scared. Living in an air-conditioned trailer inside a chain-link and razor-wire compound since he’d started here didn’t help. There had been trouble reported in the news, demonstrations, a couple of pipe bombs gone off in the town, jumpy, red-eyed conscript soldiers everywhere. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Not afraid of the crocodiles?’
‘I was told the crocodiles had all been shot.’
‘That was in the war. A long time ago now. Some have returned.’ The young man looked down at his hands and then into the fire. ‘But war is coming again,’ he said after a long time. He looked tired, resigned.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Do you know of the war, old man?’
‘I want you to stop calling me that.’
The kid looked at him, frowned, said nothing.
The old engineer grunted and sniffed the stew: vegetables and meat, some kind of broth. ‘The Border War,’ he said. ‘Back in the eighties. South Africa fighting the communist insurgency from Angola.’
The young man pointed to the far side of the river, the silver thread of the bank and the dark weight of forest. ‘From there.’
The old engineer pushed a fork into what looked like a chunk of potato and brought it up to his mouth, blowing through pursed lips to cool the food. Not bad. He tried some of the meat. ‘It was the Cold War. A different thing.’
‘War is always for the same reason,’ said the young man.
But the young man just smiled, helped himself to the stew and moved off to the edge of the firelight. His limbs were long, his movements languid, almost careless, like the lope of a painted dog the old engineer had seen in Etosha a few weeks before. ‘Lucky to have seen one,’ he had been told by the guide. ‘Almost gone from here now.’
The young man sat on the sand and leaned back against the fibreglass hull of one of the boats they had drawn up on to the shore. He ate in silence. Upriver, the rapids churned white in the starlight. The sound they made was like a city street, a river of cars hissing along wet pavement. After a while, the young man stood, walked over to where the engineer was sitting and reached for his plate.
‘Explain to me, old man, why you do this.’
The old engineer grunted and thrust out a tin mug. ‘How about some coffee instead?’
The young man filled the mug with steaming water from the kettle, reached into one of the plastic packing boxes and passed him a tin of instant coffee and a spoon.
The old engineer stirred in the coffee, took a sip and spat it out. ‘It’s not me,’ he said, pushing himself to his feet and wedging his hand into the small of his back to straighten his spine. He looked out across the river to the dark forest on the Angolan side. ‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘Your people, your government.’ He dumped the coffee into the fire, turned away and started across the shadowed sand towards his tent, knees stiff from sitting, calves sore, gait uneven, glad of the darkness.
‘And there is no problem for you?’ the young man called after him.
The old engineer stopped and turned to face the voice. ‘None what so goddamned ever.’
‘I think you are empty, old man.’
‘I really don’t give a shit what you think, boy.’ The old engineer turned and walked back to his tent, the African night passing through him like an X-ray.
The next morning, he stood on the bank and watched the dawn sky blush pale over the dark mountains. Earlier worries about handling his boat in the rapids had gone. Yesterday he had run both sections of whitewater without incident, enjoyed it even. And he had slept well, better than in a long time, deep and tired and black and without the dreams. He pulled on his fleece jacket and walked to the fire. The kettle was nestled up against a small pile of glowing coals, steam wisping from its spout. The boats, two-man Canadian canoes, had been pulled down to the water’s edge and most of the gear was loaded and strapped down. The old engineer stood looking out across the water as day came.
A shriek skipped across the water like a flat stone, the river a couple of hundred metres wide here. A pair of vervet monkeys playing in a tree on the far bank, tumbling like circus performers high above the water. Something caught his eye, downriver, in the shadow of the far bank. It was a head, low in the water, just submerged, blistering the surface as it surged through the current. A crocodile. He’d never seen a crocodile in the wild before. The kid had not lied.
The old engineer watched the thing carve a disturbed wake through the green surface. The monkeys had gone quiet and now sat perched in the tree, staring down at the water. Suddenly, the crocodile changed direction and began traversing the river towards camp. As it moved out of shadow, something flashed about its head, pale in the sunlight: a limb, a leg. A burst of white spume rose and fell, a flurry of splashes churned the surface. The old engineer’s heart spiked – it was the boy. He was fighting for his life. The old engineer took two quick steps towards the water’s edge and stopped dead. He thought of the sat phone buried deep in the kit in one of the boats. Another spasm, a flash of limbs, an explosion of whitewater. And then it was over, and there was just the green river running laminar towards the sea. The boy was gone.
Time slowed, and then stopped. The old engineer stood on the bank and gazed out across the river as the reality of what he had just witnessed calcified and set hard, a moment moulded and driven into the catacomb of his bones along with the other moments he would never forget. The wind dying and the trees like rows of silent crosses when they came to tell him about Helena, all those hours and years ago. Even the clouds had stopped then, shocked into frozen mourning.
The old engineer watched time re-establish its dominion. The river was moving again, swirling thick and green, as if nothing had changed. Eddies were born and twisted in the current, carried along before disappearing again, random lives extinguished and replaced. This river had been here, coursing through this valley, deepening it, filling its calms with sediment for hundreds of thousands of years, since before human civilisation. And it would be here long after he and everyone he had ever known was gone.
He stood and looked out across the river. Suddenly, a blister appeared on the water’s surface. It was moving towards the bank now, trailing a smooth, languid wake. The same head. The crocodile. Coming straight towards him. The old engineer took a step back, stumbled over a stone, checked his balance. It was still coming. Then something broke the surface, pale against the green water, just near the head. An arm. It hung there for an instant, suspended above the water, and then arced back down without a splash. And then again, its mirror twin, rising and falling, in smooth regular strokes now, a duet, the thing’s head turning, first one way, then the other, breathing.
The old man slumped to the ground and sat on the sand, clutching his knees, the fear draining from him as through an opened valve. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he muttered.
The young man reached the shore and emerged dripping from the water. He stood for a moment there, shin-deep in the current, naked, the morning sun bathing his wet skin. He was tall and lean, with broad, muscled shoulders and a torso of ropy basalt, forearms veined like turgid leaves, not a mark on him. He waded to the bank and waved, his cock and balls swinging heavy beneath a nest of dewy black wire. He flashed a wide smile and combed a hand through his hair.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ the old engineer barked.
The kid stopped and looked at him, shrugged his shoulders in a what-are-you-talking-about way.
The old engineer pointed to the river. ‘We have a job to do.’
The kid smiled, another shrug rippling through him. ‘Good swimming here, old man. You should try. No crocodiles here.’ He pointed downriver. ‘There, yes.’
The old engineer scowled, turned away and walked back to his tent. One of his own sons would have been about the same age as this kid now. He tried to picture him at nineteen, emerging sunlit from a river, perhaps, but after a few steps, his imagination died and nothing came, those pathways too long repressed.
By nine o’clock it was already hot. The old engineer wiped the sweat from his brow with a corner of his T-shirt and adjusted his cap. Even after a couple of hours of paddling, yesterday’s soreness had returned, deep behind the clavicle and into the rotator cuff, the calcifying joint tearing at the tendons. He let the boat drift in the current. He raised his binoculars and scanned the cliffs, studying the structure of the rock, the orientation of folds and faults, the sheets of olivine basalt, the pink blush of the metamorphics. He rolled open the topographic map and laid it on the flat-folded mattress he had arranged across the gunwales as a tabletop. He traced his finger along the line of the shore.
The young man drew his boat alongside. ‘Old man,’ he said.
The old engineer picked up his binoculars and pretended not to hear.
‘Are you seeing it?’
The old engineer jerked his head around and glared at the kid. ‘Seeing what?’
‘The colours in the rocks, the designs, the shadows. Can you see it?’
The old man shook his head, went back to his binoculars, kept scanning the folds, the points of stress, the splays of brittle fracture.
‘This ending will not be good, old man.’
The old engineer looked up from his map and stared into the kid’s eyes. ‘Endings usually aren’t,’ he said.
> In mid-afternoon, with the sun waning overhead, they pulled the boats up on to an ellipse of sand on the Namibian side and sat on the grass under the fractured shade of an old leadwood. The young man produced a salami, tomatoes, South African Camembert and a loaf of dark bread. They ate in silence. Afterwards, the old engineer set out his camp mattress, lay down, pulled his cap over his eyes and listened to the birdsong and the water flowing over the rocks.
He awoke to the sound of voices.
The young man was standing by the boats talking to two Himba women. They laughed, flashing strong white teeth, naked bodies quivering under the ochre mud that covered every part of them. The old engineer pushed himself up, smoothed back his hair and walked, stiff-jointed, down to the boats.
As he approached, the young man turned and faced him. ‘These young girls are from the village past this hill,’ he said with a quick smile. ‘They are coming to collect water and plants for medicine, to pray to the river spirits.’ He put his hand behind the taller one’s back, but did not touch her. ‘This is Ogandou. She will be married next month. You can see this by the way she has her hair. She is seventeen years. Old to be married. The other is Mokanou. She learns to be a healer. She is sixteen.’
The old engineer stepped forwards, trying not to stare, muttered hello. A thick musk – earth and sap, sweat and something more powerful that he could not place – pulsed from the women’s bodies, filling his senses. Their breasts were large and firm, one pair round like cassava ends, the other longer, gourd-shaped. Mudded braids caressed fat nipples. He had hardened. The realisation surprised him. A memory came unbidden: Helena by the sea the first day of their honeymoon, so long ago now, but still so clear that he had to push it away until it was gone.
He shifted his stance and looked up at the women’s faces. They smiled at him and laughed at something the young man said. The old engineer felt his cheeks flush and he looked away.