by Jo Nesbo
‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered:
let them also that hate him flee before him.
As smoke is driven away, so drive them away:
as wax melteth before the fire,
so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.’
* * *
—
The bird shrieks again. Perched at the top of the tree the white, long-legged bird with the red comb on its head looks almost like a cockerel.
‘Isn’t it funny how little we know each other, you and I, Ken?’
Ken jumps. It’s as though his father can read his thoughts. His father sighs.
‘I don’t suppose we ever got to know each other really. I…was never really there, was I? It’s a pity when fathers aren’t there.’
The last sentence lingers in the air and seems to demand an answer, but Ken doesn’t have one.
‘Do you hate me, Ken?’
The buzzing of the insects suddenly stops, as though all of them are holding their breath.
‘No.’ Ken holds the point of the needle up and ejects the air until a drop runs down it. ‘Hate’s got nothing to do with it, Father.’
* * *
—
Emerson Abbott had woken at first light, looked at his sleeping wife as though trying to remember who she was, risen and crossed to the open window, looked at the trees in the park whose black branches reached starkly up towards the grey winter skies, at the asphalt far down below that glistened wetly in the light from the lamp posts, swaying in the wind.
Times were hard, people needed comfort, escapism, cheap lies and dreams, and since he sold these cheapest his publishing business was humming along. An American company had made an offer. The business had been in the family for three generations. Emerson Abbott had smiled. He stepped up onto the windowsill, a gust of wind had wrapped the curtain around his foot and almost made him fall. Holding on to the guttering he raised himself to his full, shivering height. The rain drove in from the side, prickling like icy nails against his skin. He opened his mouth. It tasted of ashes. He knew the time had come for the great leap. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again he was divorced from Emma, whose surname was now Ives, which was not her maiden name but the name of her new husband, who had moved in after Emerson moved out because by the terms of the settlement she kept the house. The Americans had taken down the Abbott sign above the publisher’s door. They had decided they would use their own name, and in truth Emerson was happy that the family name was no longer associated with the products that emerged from behind that door. Through a friend he bought a snake farm in Tuli in the west of Botswana. He knew nothing about the business of farming snakes, only that they delivered snakes to reptile parks and to laboratories that produced serums that could prevent humans dying from snake bites, and that it wasn’t particularly profitable.
Three weeks after he had opened his eyes he shut them again as tightly as he could. The sun hung like an oversized reading lamp above the taxi rank outside the international airport in the not quite so international capital of Botswana, a country town the name of which was, his plane ticket told him, Gaborone. He took a taxi to the government offices, and after a week of running up and down the corridors of bureaucracy he left with all the necessary documentation, the licences, the signatures and rubber stamps, and had not since that day been back to Gaborone. And since Gaborone was the only international airport that meant he hadn’t left Botswana either.
Because why should he? As quickly and instinctively as he had hated Gaborone he fell in love with Tuli. The farm consisted of three old but well-maintained brick buildings where the staff of four lived alongside the eight hundred snakes, all of them with bites that were in greater or lesser degree fatal. The buildings were situated on a high plain surrounded by buffalo bushes and mongongo trees on gently sloping hillsides. The place was rarely visited, save by elephants taking the wrong route down to the riverbank, jackals in search of offal or discarded shoes, or the weekly jeep that came to fetch snakes and snake serum and brought in supplies along the almost impassable roads. Across the green-rimmed horizon dead trees pointed spectral black fingers up towards the sky, but apart from that there was nothing here to remind him of London.
When the dry season came, herds of impala gathered on the plains where they could be close to water, along with their regular fellow travellers, the apes. After them came the zebras and the kudu antelopes. The lions hunted day and night – it was party time for the savannah’s predators – and in the brief dusk they could see the sun flare up in the west before it disappeared, and later on hear the deep growl of the lions rolling through the night as moths swarmed around the outside lamps like snowflakes in a blizzard.
Only once had he doubted that here was where he belonged, and that was when a Naja nigricollis, a black-necked spitting cobra, gave birth to her young and he saw the father start to eat them alive, one after another, before they managed to get him out of the cage. Adolf had told him that small snakes were a natural part of the cobra’s diet – but its own young? It excited a disgust in him, a distaste for the nature of the creature that left him for a time wondering whether or not he could face carrying on. But then one evening Adolf showed him a dead tiger snake, bitten to death by its own young, and explained to him that the way of nature did not recognise ties of kinship, that it was always and everywhere a case of eat or be eaten. That it wasn’t evil or immoral to eat one’s own offspring or one’s parents – on the contrary it was simply living out nature’s imperative, and that was what Africa was about: survival, survival at any price. And in due course Emerson Abbott was able to accept this and even admire it as part of the pitiless system of things, the remorseless logic that kept nature in balance and gave the animals and the humans their right to live. And gradually he rediscovered what he had been missing for so long: the fear of dying. Or more accurately: of not being alive.
And then came the rainy season. He would never forget that first time. He fell asleep to the first rain at night, and when he looked out across the plain the next morning it looked as though some insane painter had gone berserk on the grey and yellow canvas. Within a day or two the plain was transformed into a billowing field of pungent smells, wildly psychedelic colouring and insects that flashed low above a carpet of petals and the swelling brown waters of the river.
And he thought: where else could he possibly want to be?
Six months after his arrival he sent a letter home to Ken, and then, having waited six months for a reply, a second letter. He concluded his monologue the year after with a Christmas greeting and, since he’d heard in a roundabout way that Ken hadn’t settled to anything meaningful in London, the offer of a job on the farm.
He wasn’t expecting an answer and he didn’t get one either. Not until three years later.
* * *
—
Ken liked almost everything about cocaine. He liked the effect it had on him, the people around him liked the effect it had on him, he didn’t get hangovers, and he didn’t notice any signs of dependency. The only thing he didn’t like was the price.
That was the reason, after two terrible weeks at the dog track had brought on a minor financial crisis, he’d turned to the poor man’s version – amphetamines. And he met Hilda Bronkenhorst. An ugly and surprisingly stupid health freak he’d slept with a few times in the hope that she’d loan him some of her father’s money. Each time he watched her open her legs and demand to be served he thought that at the very least he would have earned the money. Anyway, she was the one who told Ken that amphetamine is a synthetic product. That the body never manages to completely break down synthetic products. Meaning: once you’ve taken amphetamine there will always be traces of it in your system. And since there were two words that put Ken in an absolute panic – never and always – he stopped at once. He swore that from that time onwards he would never take any
thing but healthy, organic compounds like cocaine, and realised that he needed money. And quickly.
His chance came when he called in at the office of a former colleague in the City with the intention of refreshing the friendship so that the next time they met he could ask him for a loan. Just for fun Ken’s former colleague showed him an illegal betting ring on the World Cup final between France and Brazil which a couple of the big stockbrokers were running though their own encrypted pages on the Reuters screens. When his ex-colleague left the room to get more tea without logging out Ken didn’t hang about. He closed his eyes, saw an image of Ronaldo’s dinosaur-thick thighs, typed in his own name and address, navigated across to the stakes column, closed his eyes again, saw Brazil’s gold-clad heroes raising the trophy aloft and wrote ‘£1 million sterling’. Enter. He held his breath as he waited for a response, knew his name wasn’t registered, that the stake was too high, but also that in the Reuters world people dealt every second with obligations for ten times that amount without asking who was at the other end. He thought he had a chance. And the message came back: ‘CONFIRMED’.
If only Ronaldo hadn’t suffered an epileptic fit that night following a protracted PlayStation session then Ken might not have had to worry about how he was going to keep on paying for his cocaine habit nor – as the situation then unfolded – felt any anxieties concerning the immediate state of his health. Two days later, early in the morning, which in Ken’s case meant shortly before eleven o’clock, his doorbell rang and a man was standing there wearing a black suit and sunglasses and carrying a baseball bat and explaining to Ken the consequences for him if he wasn’t able to get his hands on a million pounds within the next fourteen days.
Four days afterwards, late in July, Emerson Abbott received a telegram in which his son returned his Christmas greetings, accepted the offer of a job and asked him to meet him at the airport in Gaborone in five days’ time. Plus details of the bank account for the money for the plane ticket, to be transferred as soon as possible. Emerson was delighted with this turn of events and annoyed only that it meant he would have to go back to Gaborone again.
* * *
—
Ken looked at his watch, a Raymond Weil in South African gold that ticks its way towards Judgement Day with Swiss precision.
This day had started the same as the twenty-six others. Ken woke up wondering where the hell he was and why. He remembered why first. Money. Which should have turned his thoughts in the direction of his creditors in London but which instead turned them to that white powder, which was now like a woman he was no longer quite so sure he had a platonic and no-strings-attached relationship with. The symptoms were classic, but it seemed to him the irritation and the bouts of sweating were just as likely the effects of being in this godforsaken place full of poisonous bugs, insects that were everywhere, and the disrespectful Blacks who seemed to have forgotten long ago just who it was that colonised and attempted to civilise this land. But the depressions were new. Those sudden, dark hours when he seemed to lose his grip on reality, the floor vanished beneath him and he fell down into a bottomless pit, and all he could do was wait until it passed.
‘Snake hunt,’ said his father at breakfast.
‘Fantastic,’ replied Ken.
Ken had tried to show an interest, he really had. For twenty-six days he’d sat up straight in his seat as his father lectured him. About everything you should and shouldn’t do when dealing with snakes, about which snakes produced which venom, the mortality rates associated with each one and the various symptoms. This last thing was important if one didn’t know the type of snake the patient had been bitten by and had to be able to choose the right kind of serum among the forty that were kept on the farm. But if Ken were being honest – something he tried as far as possible to avoid – the poisons, the serums and the symptoms all got jumbled up into one big litany of terrible ways in which to die. Though at least he’d understood that the test tubes of serum had codes and blue caps, and the ones containing the poisons codes and red caps. Or was that the other way round?
When Ken’s concentration failed, when his thoughts drifted off and his pen ceased to take notes, then his father would just glower at him.
After breakfast they drove for thirty minutes along something that was vaguely reminiscent of a road, passing variously from thick green scrubland to mudholes half a metre deep and through a desiccated and yellowish lunar landscape. At a certain point, that seemed to Ken to be quite arbitrarily chosen, his father stopped, jumped out and retrieved three cloth sacks and a long pole with a metal loop at the end.
‘Put these on.’ His father tossed a pair of swimming goggles to him.
Ken gave him a baffled look.
‘Spitting cobra. Nerve poison. Can hit you in the eye from eight metres away.’
Then they started searching. Not along the ground but up in the trees.
‘Pay attention to the birds,’ said his father. ‘If you hear them screeching or see them hopping from branch to branch you can be pretty sure there’s a boomslang or a green mamba close by.’
‘I don’t think –’
‘Shh! Hear those clicking sounds? Those are polecats, hunting. Come on!’
His father ran in the direction of the sounds with Ken reluctantly trailing along behind him. Suddenly he stopped and signalled for Ken to come closer and be careful. And there – on a large flat rock – sure enough, a long black brute of a thing lay basking in the sun. Ken guessed it must be at least two metres and, maybe, thirteen centimetres long. He wished he could have placed a bet on it. His father made his way stealthily around the rock until he was directly behind it, lifted the pole up high and looped the wire carefully down over the snake’s small, distinctive head. Then he tightened it. The snake gave a jerk and opened its jaws wide as though yawning in some incredibly dangerous way. Ken stared in fascination down into the pink gullet and was at once reminded of Hilda Bronkenhorst.
‘Can you see how the poison fangs are located at the front of the mouth?’ his father shouted enthusiastically.
‘Yes?’
‘So then what do we have here?’
‘Please, Father, let’s just get this over with first. It’s making me nervous.’
He dropped the snake into the sack that Ken was holding open.
‘Black mambo,’ said his father, shading his eyes as he peered up into the trees.
Whatever, Ken thought, and shivered as he felt the snake wriggling about inside.
After half an hour in the baking sunlight Ken allowed himself a smoke break. He leaned up against one of those trees his father had tried to teach him the names of, and he thought of the rifle in the car, that this was probably about as good a time as any, when he heard his father’s scream. It wasn’t really much of a scream, more a short bark, but Ken knew at once what had happened. Maybe because he’d dreamed about it, thought about it or just unconsciously hoped it would happen. He stubbed out his cigarette against the tree trunk. If he was lucky this might turn out to save him a whole lot of bother. He shaded his eyes, and there, over by the riverbank, he saw his father’s back, bent over in the waist-high, stiff grass.
‘Dammit, Ken! I’ve been bitten and I didn’t see what kind of snake it was. Help me look for him!’
‘On my way!’
His father hesitated a moment, perhaps taken aback by the tone of his son’s voice.
Ken remembered his father saying that if you couldn’t identify the snake and were left to make a choice between the forty different antidotes there was no use in trying to cover every option by injecting all of them; do that, and the antidotes would kill you quicker and more certainly than the poison. He also remembered something his father said about moving your feet quietly when you were out hunting snakes, that they leave as soon as they pick up the vibrations through the ground. Ken put his feet down as heavily as he could.
‘Got it!�
�� his father shouted as he dived down into the grass. Another of his lessons: the risk of being bitten a second time is less than not knowing what it was that bit you the first time.
Ken swore inwardly.
Poor bastard, thought Ken as he saw his father swinging the sack over and over again against the nearest tree trunk. And he wasn’t thinking of the snake or of his father. The image of the guy in his doorway in the suit and with the baseball bat had appeared on his retinas again. As usual, Ken Abbott was thinking of Ken Abbott.
His father slumped to the ground by the tree trunk as Ken approached. His skin was red and his breath came in hoarse gasps.
‘Find out which one it was,’ he whispered as he tossed the sack over towards Ken. The cloud of dust whirled up from the ground made Ken cough. He opened the sack and gingerly poked his hand inside.
‘Don’t…’ was all his father had time to say.
Ken felt the rough, dry fish skin against the palm of his hand. Over the past few weeks he’d touched more of them than he cared to think about. This one hadn’t been any different. Not until he realised that the movement he had felt beneath the scales was muscular and that the animal wasn’t dead. Not even close to dead. He screamed, more out of fear than pain, as he felt the fangs penetrate the skin of his arm. He pulled his arm away quickly and saw the two circular puncture marks just below his elbow and screamed again. Then he put his arm to his mouth lightning quick and began feverishly to suck at the holes.
