by James Meek
‘Did you take your Malarone?’ said Bec.
‘Don’t I get immunity by sleeping with you?’
‘No. You’re not the first person who’s said that,’ said Bec, picking at the sheet. Without thinking, she let her mouth twitch and her look turn inward toward to the memory of a one-week affair with a Kenyan immunologist years before. Alex noticed and fell back on the bed sullenly and she pressed herself against him and put her hand on his heart. ‘But you can be the last.’
‘That sounds like a promise,’ said Alex, looking for a catch.
‘If you’ll still have me,’ said Bec. ‘I’m not easy.’
‘Easy’s soft,’ said Alex. She made a promise to Val too, he thought; is that the catch?
Bec read his doubt. ‘This isn’t like somebody springing a ring on me and me taking it,’ she said. She felt summoned to bring an affirmation into words, some simple, solemn and binding expression, but the society to which she belonged, it seemed to her, had taken away the scripts and parts from the old play of women and men without providing new drafts. So she was free to improvise her vow, and freedom, it was understood, was good, and the first thing a free modern woman did when she had to come up with a sincere and life-changing promise was to reach for some rotten cliché. And it seemed unnecessary; she had the feeling that it’d all been settled long ago, and they were already together.
‘I have to say something,’ she said, and her voice cracked a little. ‘I want to stay with you. Wait, that’s lame.’ She put her index finger to her lips in thought. ‘I’m going to stay with you. How’s that?’
Alex swallowed, held her shoulders and stared into her eyes as if wanting to endlessly devour and recreate her. He too felt that he was groping for the response in an ad lib sacrament. ‘I do love you,’ he said.
‘But?’
‘Somewhere along the way I love you got small. It’s not enough. I want better. I want to plight my troth.’ He looked as if he was ready to be laughed at for this, but although Bec wasn’t sure what he meant, the words made her press herself against him, push her tongue into his mouth and open her thighs around his hips.
Next day she took down from the shelf an old Chambers dictionary, left behind by the Tanzanian professor who owned the house when he emigrated to Canada, and looked up plight. It meant pledge, or promise; from an Old English word pliht, meaning to risk. She looked up troth.
Troth, it said. A variant of truth.
Not long before Alex was due to go back to London, Bec managed to clear time for a day excursion to Zanzibar. They made it early in the morning to the jetty and waited for the ferry. There were few other passengers. A family sat on a pyramid of suitcases, children standing lookout on the apex, elders hunched at the base; a young man with his short-sleeved shirt hanging open over his bare chest squatted on the corner of the jetty, looking out to sea; a pair of American missionaries in caps and knee-length shorts with camera straps slung across their chests were talking about their home town. Bec sat on a bollard and Alex sat beside her on the jetty deck, his head at the level of her ankle, letting his feet kick over the edge. There was no wind. The water was like turquoise milk. The line of the horizon was invisible in the haze. Alex looked up at Bec, who seemed to be searching for something, shading her eyes with her hand. Alex had burned on the second day and his face and neck were smeared with high-factor sunblock.
‘What’s going on with you and the sun?’ he said. ‘He spends the whole day on your skin and leaves it magnificent and whenever I try to spend time with him he just beats me up.’
Bec jumped off the bollard and sat down next to Alex. ‘You really are jealous, aren’t you?’
‘You keep exalted company.’
‘Who?’
‘Well, the sun, for one. And Ritchie.’ He laughed to show he didn’t mean it and showed that he did. ‘He’s my brother! And your friend!’
‘He didn’t want me to come here.’
‘He’s being protective. And proprietorial. He likes to play the father figure with me.’
‘You went to a fancy school.’
‘A bad private school for the daughters of officers to learn to be good wives. They were upset that I wanted to be a scientist.’
‘You went out with a newspaper editor.’
‘You’re the one who found out how to make people live for ever,’ said Bec, putting her arm round his shoulder. ‘You’re the exalted one.’
‘I said it was theoretically possible, for Harry’s sake, and now I’m stuck with the hype.’
Bec put on sunglasses. ‘Is that better?’ she asked.
Alex drummed his hands on the edge of the pier. ‘Look, pelicans,’ he said, and sang
Mr Sheen shines
Umpteen things clean
‘What is it?’ said Bec.
‘Nothing.’
‘You sang one of your jingles.’
‘I want to know why you went out with Val,’ said Alex, turning away from the pelicans and looking Bec in the eye.
‘He was attractive, and powerful,’ said Bec. ‘It started out of curiosity and sex. I thought I was being kind to a man who’d lost his wife but I think I was letting myself be flattered. And given treats. He had a lot to offer in the way of treats and dressing up. I thought he was kind, but he wasn’t. He was only kind to me. I should have known that the tone of his newspaper came from him but I didn’t get it until I gave the ring back.’
‘You were going to marry him?’
‘I was stupid.’
Alex looked behind him sharply as if he’d been stung by an insect. He was responding to an instinct to throw something violently into the water, but there was nothing within reach.
‘Why was he kind to you?’
‘He wanted a new and fitting wife.’
Should I ask if I am fitting? Alex wondered. ‘He could still have been in love with you,’ he said, and Bec didn’t reply.
A faint stream of foam appeared in the haze towards Zanzibar. ‘He called me before I left,’ said Alex. ‘He said he wanted to promote me, said there weren’t enough famous scientists. I felt he knew I was coming to see you, I can’t imagine how.’ It occurred to him as he spoke that Val’s paper had run the most prominent and hysterical story about his findings; the rest of their media had taken their cue from it.
‘Did he talk about me?’ asked Bec.
‘He described you as a friend.’
‘That’s all right, I suppose. I treated him badly and just like that,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘his hinges broke. He started speaking all in capital letters. It’s true I don’t know how to behave. Who does? It doesn’t mean I don’t know the difference between right and wrong. My dad didn’t go to church or push God on us and he knew the right thing to do well enough to get …’ She was going to say ‘get killed’ but wasn’t ready, even in front of Alex.
The ferry arrived, a hydrofoil with no outside deck. From inside they could see nothing through the windows except a bright, foggy azure. The crew put an old Sylvester Stallone movie up on a small screen at the front of the passenger seats and piped the soundtrack through the PA at deafening volume.
There was a line of passengers waiting on the jetty to go back to Dar when Bec and Alex disembarked in Zanzibar, and a group of delicate, abused-looking cats with patches of fur missing and an odd number of eyes. As he approached the queue Alex was gazing at the mould-blackened façades of Stone Town, imagining himself a slave brought for sale in the days of the Sultan, when he felt Bec grip his elbow.
‘That guy in the green polo shirt,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t look! I don’t want to talk to him. Don’t let him see me.’
Alex took a peek, doing his best to hide the slinking Bec with his body. The identified threat was a paunchy, shaven-headed European with dark glasses and a beard carrying a small leather shoulder bag and squinting at an iPad. He glanced up.
‘He’s looking our way,’ said Alex out of the side of his mouth. ‘If you weren’t walking in that daft way he w
ouldn’t have noticed you.’
‘Make him look away,’ said Bec, who had bent her body forward parallel to the ground.
Without breaking stride Alex stooped down, picked up one of the cats by the nape of the neck and tossed it in a shallow parabola in front of the bearded man. The animal flew through the air, shrieking with indignation, landed on its feet with a gentle thump, sank onto its hind legs and coolly resumed licking its crotch. Alex and Bec increased their walking speed as they powered towards the wharf, then heard a faint shout of ‘Rebecca? Dr Shepherd?’ behind them and broke into a run. They trotted into Stone Town, pursued by small boys selling drinks and roses and tours of the city. Bec stopped in an alleyway by an ancient wooden door studded with brass knobs and leaned against the wall.
‘He recognised me,’ she said, over the din of urchins grabbing their forearms and waving Chinese vendibles in their faces.
‘I’m sure it won’t be the lead item on the Zanzibar nightly news.’
‘I didn’t realise how quiet it was until you threw the cat.’
Up the street they found a hotel in a converted merchant’s house and sat with beers in the shade in a colonnaded courtyard. A tiny fountain spat and gurgled in the centre of the yard and every few minutes a dappled shadow crossed the sunlit part as a flock of doves flew overhead.
‘His name’s not important,’ said Bec when Alex asked who they’d run from. ‘He’s from the Karolinska. I couldn’t bear to have a conversation with him. He was one of the researchers who stopped me doing what I wanted to do with gregi.’
‘Actually stopped.’
‘You know what I mean. He campaigned against it in journals, on the conference circuit. He was one of the ringleaders.’
‘You told me it was the World Health Organization and the Tanzanian government who stopped you trialling the live parasite.’
‘Under the influence of those carpers.’
I see why Harry liked you, Alex thought. He said: ‘What about the eyesight issue?’
Bec fumbled impatiently in her rucksack and banged a plastic pill bottle on the round mosaic-tiled table top, which rocked from side to side, its cast-iron frame ringing dully on the flagstones. ‘I’ve had gregi in me for six years, the population is stable, and my eyes are fine. I get the occasional episode, that’s all. If I ever need to get rid of them, I take two of these a day for a week, and they’re gone.’
‘Why don’t you take them?’
Bec stared at him, stiff and with her eyes narrowed, as if she thought he must be pretending not to understand. ‘It’s named after my father,’ she said.
The response Just because of that? travelled from Alex’s mind to his mouth, but instead he said: ‘Of course.’
41
Ritchie had been surly at dinner on the eve of their father’s last tour, Bec remembered, shovelling food into his mouth with the fork held at right angles to his fist and his fringe falling over his eyes. Later, when the summer darkness fell and Bec was in her room, tying the laces of her walking boots, she’d heard Ritchie yell ‘Fascist!’ and his door slam shut.
She put her nightdress on over her clothes and opened the window. The air smelled of chestnut blossom and the sound of the stream came up from where it rushed through the coomb at the foot of the garden. She got into bed with a book, but she couldn’t read. There was an owl call from outside and a plastic box flew in through the window and bounced on the floor. Bec got out of bed, grabbed it and ran back under the covers. She opened the box. It had a mirror in the lid, like a make-up compact, and three troughs of cream – one black, one green and one brown. She heard her mother coming, snapped the box shut, hid it and pulled the quilt up tight around her neck. Her mother put her head round the door and asked if she’d seen her father, and when Bec said she hadn’t, her mother told her it was time for her to go to sleep. She kissed Bec, switched off the light, went out and closed the door behind her.
Bec stared at the darkness through the window. As her eyes picked up the faint gradients of blacks and browns the square of nothingness began to take on substance and form. What had seemed like an opening into pure night now puckered and solidified into a shape, as if the air was curdling. A pair of disembodied eyes opened, their whites so pale as to seem to shine, like the moon. They swivelled and came to rest on Bec. A few inches below the eyes, two rows of teeth appeared, parted and let out a voice.
‘You haven’t cammed up,’ said her father.
‘I didn’t have time,’ said Bec. She got out of bed and carried the box to the window.
‘You have to blend into the darkness like a panther,’ said her father, taking the box from Bec’s hands and opening it. Reaching through the window, he began to dab and smear camouflage cream onto his daughter’s face.
‘What about my eyeballs?’ said Bec.
‘And nor does the panther have black teeth. We must give our prey a chance.’
Once he’d darkened Bec’s face and hands to his satisfaction, her father lifted her out of the room and set her down on the flowerbed under the window. From the far end of the house Bec could see the grey light cast by the television shrink and brighten.
‘Ready?’ said her father. ‘Remember the rules?’
‘Don’t make any noise. Don’t leave anyone behind.’
‘And?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Good girl. If we find the poacher, you wait while I work my way behind him.’ Bec’s father took a small pipe hanging from a cord round his neck and blew into it. It was a reedy, lonely call. ‘As soon as you hear that sound, clap your hands and shout, scare our friend, and I’ll nab him. Let’s get cracking.’
Bec followed her father through the garden, through the back gate and along the path that ran downhill along the edge of the coomb. When they smelled the stand of pines that marked the fork in the way, they turned right into the thick wood that grew on either side of the stream, in the deep, narrow cleft in the hill. The path ran closer and closer to the stream, over ground ribbed with old roots and tasselled with the remnants of the spring’s bluebells. Bec stepped on a twig and she and her father stopped. Her father looked round and Bec knew she had made a mistake but her father pointed to the sky. Bec looked up to see the Milky Way like something frantic that had been frozen there.
The path now ran just above the water. Bec’s father signalled to her to get down on all fours and they crawled forward to a thick root that rose up across the pathway. They hid behind it and raised their eyes over the top. Ahead of them they could see where the stream opened out to a set of pools, with clumps of rushes and partly submerged alder trees. Bec followed her father’s pointing finger and saw their quarry twenty yards away, standing still in the shallows on one leg, head hunched into his shoulders, the crown of feathers serrated against the water and the long beak sticking out like the peak of a cap. Bec’s father looked at her, pointed to her, pointed to his ear, pointed to the bird-caller, pointed to her again, mimed a handclap and a shout, and made a thumbs-up sign. Bec made a thumbs-up sign in return. Her father stared at her, blinking a little. It was only for a moment. He pressed his lips together, cupped her cheek with his hand, got up and vanished silently into the trees.
Bec settled down to watch the heron. How could it stand for so long without moving, with one foot in the cold water? Was it asleep? Was it waiting for a fish? She yawned. She mustn’t fall asleep. She had heard that soldiers who fell asleep on guard duty were executed. She would never fall asleep if she thought she’d be executed for it. She was cold and wished she could jump up and down. She would be as patient as the heron, as invisible as the panther and as brave as her father. He’d spent nights without shelter in the snow and the jungle with men he called ‘the blokes’. Bec wanted to be a bloke, although she wasn’t sure what a bloke was.
She heard her father’s bird call. She stood up, clapped her hands together and shouted ‘Heron! Fly away, heron!’ The heron unfurled its great wings, hopped lazily into the air and skimmed across
the water to the far side, disappearing among the trees. Bec listened. She could hear nothing except the sound of the water. Could her father have made a mistake? Could something have happened to him? What if he’d slipped on the rocks at the edge of the stream and broken his leg? How would she find him?
‘Dad!’ she shouted. ‘Dad!’ After her second shout, she heard his bird call. A few minutes later something touched her shoulder and she wasn’t surprised, she knew it was him.
‘It got away,’ she said.
Her father lifted a net hanging from his right hand. Something twitched angrily inside. ‘It did not,’ he said.
Bec asked how he’d caught it.
‘One day I’ll show you,’ said her father.
They walked back towards the house. Bec’s father held her hand. She asked him if she was one of the blokes.
‘You’re my best bloke,’ said her father.
‘What about Ritchie?’
‘He’s my best son.’
‘You’ve only got one!’
‘How lucky it is that he is the best.’
‘Did you ever take him out at night to catch a heron?’
‘Ritchie doesn’t like being in the woods at night,’ said Bec’s father. ‘He doesn’t like camming up.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘Your brother’s going to get what he wants. He’s going to be rich one day.’
‘Can I say a bad word?’
‘If there’s a good reason.’
‘He told me rich people are bastards.’
‘There you are,’ said her father. ‘He’s interested in them already.’
They came to the house. Instead of hoisting Bec back through the window of her room her father led her round to the front, where they could see that Ritchie had his light on upstairs. They heard him strumming his guitar.
‘Shall we put the heron in Ritchie’s room?’ asked her father.
