On the outskirts of town, we are forced to stop at a roadblock. Military jeeps are parked up on the side of the road, and crowds of Africans are being corralled into groups by Europeans and askari in uniform, carrying guns.
“A raid?” I lean forward to see better. A canvas tent has been erected, and a few askari are milling round a European officer.
“I expect so,” Sara says. “Steven said they would be making arrests.”
A soldier in khaki waves us on, but Sara pulls in behind one of the army vehicles.
She takes a pocket mirror from her bag and touches up her lipstick, her lips pulled back against her teeth. “Let’s have a little look around,” she says, giving me a crimson smile, and pushing her hair behind her ears. She is excited by the army jeeps, the soldiers, the shouts coming from the market.
“Are you sure?”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” she asks, rebelliously. “Come on. You must be a little curious?”
I climb out of the Land Rover and follow her over to the small tent. An officer is sitting on a safari chair in the shade of a canvas tarpaulin, with a small camp table in front of him, writing notes on a piece of paper. It is Steven Lockhart. My stomach gives a lurch. I want to turn back. I am about to step away, when—“Hey!” a soldier shouts, stepping abruptly in front of us. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Sara smiles at him sweetly, and the English boy—who is about my age—is caught between duty and admiration. Steven looks up, his pale eyebrows raised in a flare of irritation, but when he sees it’s us, his face breaks into a wide smile, his pink lips spreading to show a row of neat square teeth. It is too late for me to back away.
“You girls here to see a bit of British justice in action?” he asks, jovially.
“If you don’t mind,” Sara says, ducking under the shade of the tent and bending down to kiss him on the cheek.
“By all means,” he says, waving his hand, “stay. Watch the charade. They’re wily buggers, but we have our ways.”
From where we are standing, in the shade of the canvas, I can see past the vehicles to the Africans. More—on their way to town, a long walk on a hot day—are being forced to squat down in lines, their hands behind their necks, while policemen prod guns at their backs and shout at them for talking. It is almost midday and the sun is directly overhead. There are over a hundred men waiting to be interrogated. I am hot just standing under the canvas, but they will be squatting here in the dirt for hours before they will all be seen. A soldier jabs a boy forward with the tip of his gun, so that he walks right past the table where we are standing. It’s then that I notice the figure in a white pointed hood with holes for his eyes, standing in the shadows at the back of the canvas. As the boy walks past him, the hooded figure says, “No.”
“The gakunia,” Steven says. “He’s from town. Pretty reliable at pointing them out.”
We watch six more men go past, then—just as Sara begins to shift her feet and look restless—a man is prodded forward, next in line. As he walks past us the gakunia gives a little nod. The man standing before us is in his forties, unshaven. His hair is long enough to form small dreadlocks. I realize—with a jolt—that I know him. It is one of Michael’s brothers—Samuel—the one who had been missing from the labor line. His eye catches mine, and he looks away. Michael was the lucky one, the bright one, picked out by his parents to go to school. Samuel has not eaten on both sides of the table.
Steven talks to the gakunia in Swahili, then turns back to us. “He says he does not recognize the man. He is new to town. Which means he is either on the run or he has been drafted in to cause trouble; to oath in other men.”
“This will be interesting,” Sara says to me in a hot whisper, excited by what we’re watching, and I realize she doesn’t recognize him.
Samuel steps forward in front of the table.
“Your kipande?” Steven holds out his hand for Samuel’s registration card, which is hanging around his neck. Samuel pulls it over his head and hands it to him.
“Do you understand English?” Steven asks, looking at the kipande.
Samuel runs his tongue over his lips as if preparing himself, then says, “Yes.”
“Yes, Effendi,” Steven corrects him. “Where have you been?”
“The market.”
“Say Effendi,” Steven says.
Samuel pauses, just for a second. I feel his humiliation. A man, reduced to a child, so that Steven Lockhart can flex his muscles and assure himself of his own strength. “Effendi.”
“Where do you work?” His identity card must be forged.
“I have no work.”
“Effendi!” Steven snaps, spittle flying from his mouth.
“Effendi,” Samuel repeats, licking at his lips, glancing at the guard, his gun and us, then back at the District Officer as though unsure where the threat is going to come from next.
“Do you have brothers?” Steven asks.
“Yes,” Samuel says, then—too late—adds, “Effendi.”
“Bugger you.” Steven pushes back his chair. His face is hot and red. “Say it again,” he says, giving him a slow, hard slap across the cheek.
“Effendi,” Samuel says, not flinching.
“And again,” Steven says, slapping him on the other cheek.
“Effendi,” he says, his eyes watering, dripping out hate.
“Where are your brothers?” the District Officer asks, sitting down.
“One is in Nairobi, Effendi, working for the government. The others are in Lari,” his eyes never venture to mine.
“And you—what are you doing in Nakuru?”
“I came to Nakuru to find work, Effendi.” The emotion has drained from his face.
“Do you recognize him?” Steven asks, pushing back his chair and looking up at us both, turning his pen end on end with a slow tap on his desk. I feel the muscles in my neck stiffen.
Sara shakes her head. “I can’t say that I do—but all of Robert’s laborers look the same to me. Rachel—you used to go down to the shambas—”
Steven turns his gaze on me. His cold, blue eyes settle on mine, and I feel for a moment as though I am the one being interrogated.
“I don’t know him,” I say simply, looking away, my heart thudding in my chest so that I can barely swallow. It is the second time that I have lied to Steven Lockhart, and I know him well enough by now to know that he is more perceptive than he seems. And I know also that I am not sure lying is the right thing to do. This man could be dangerous, to me, to my family and perhaps even to his brother.
“Are you sure?” Steven asks, and there is something in the suspicion that hovers at the corners of his mouth, in the hollow emptiness of his eyes, that makes my blood turn cold, but it is too late to change course.
“Yes,” I say, my voice very quiet.
“Take him away,” Steven says suddenly, wearily, with a wave of his hand, and the man is muscled down the line, the policeman holding a gun to his lower back, nudging him forward, tripping into a cordon of Africans who are crouched under the glare of the sun with no shade.
“Where will he go?” Sara asks, dusting down her yellow dress.
“To a detention camp. I don’t trust him. A few weeks at Yatta and the truth will sweat right out of him.” He makes a note in a book. A bead of moisture drips from his forehead into his mustache and his hair is pressed mousy and wet across his forehead. Yatta was a detention camp run by an officer with a reputation for being outside the restraint of the law. “We can’t afford to take any chances.”
“He’s rather impressive, don’t you think?” Sara says, as we get back into the Land Rover.
I don’t reply. I feel sick to my stomach. From Steven Lockhart’s bullying, from the ease with which I lied to him, from the sense that I might not have done the right thing.
—
<
br /> THE DUSTY STREETS leading into Nakuru are a riot of color and noise: rolls of cotton fabric are laid out on the grassy verge, a donkey stumbles under the weight of a cart piled high with tires, cars beep their horns as they wait for the road to clear. The main street is more sedate: Europeans shopping for Christmas, calling to each other from their open-topped jeeps to exchange news and gossip. A newcomer might not guess that we are under a State of Emergency, but looking closely you see the revolvers at every hip, the askari on the street corner, the anxious faces.
Sunlight glints off the corrugated roofs of roadside shacks, dotted amongst newer, faceless buildings made of concrete and brick; shops, banks, dress shops, agricultural warehouses and hardware stores. Sara pulls up outside the hair salon and disappears inside. I make my way to the grocer. The tarmac is sticky under my plimsolls, melting in the heat. Outside, wooden crates are stacked with mangos, figs, runner beans and huge, gnarled squash. Green and yellow bananas hang in bunches from hooks. I duck my head and step inside. A fan turns on the ceiling. Canvas bags full of spices are packed waist-high on the concrete floor: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, paprika. I stand breathing in the potent, heady smell of India as I did as a child. A Sikh boy serves me, filling brown paper bags full of the raisins, almonds and sugar I promised Jim I would buy for the stollen my mother used to make at Christmas.
Outside the Rift Valley Club—where we have agreed to meet for lunch—Sara smooths a hand self-consciously over her newly cropped hair and touches up her lipstick. She smiles at several people as we walk in, and the women smile politely back at her, but they do not rise from their tables, or ask us to join them, and I feel a pang of sympathy for Sara, who cannot fit in here, and dislike for these settler wives I do not know, who make no secret of their disdain.
A waiter comes to our table. I order a soda, and she asks for a martini. “Don’t tell your father,” she says, winking at me.
“Now—I don’t want you being a sourpuss about Steven,” she says, when our drinks arrive.
“He enjoyed us watching. He was harder on the man.”
“Honestly, Rachel—you’d think we were the ones hacking people to death in their beds as they slept. You can’t tell me you sleep easily at night, knowing they’re out there?” She takes a sip of her martini. “You have to remember these officers are the ones out fighting the Micks. It’s their friends—just like ours—being picked off.”
And I know there is some truth to what she is saying. I don’t sleep easy. In fact, I barely sleep at all. The nights sift out slower than an hourglass, and they are full of noises which bring me—startled—upright in bed, reaching a hand out to the gun that lies by my bedside. But I know what it is to be teased by Steven Lockhart’s claws. I have seen his injustice, and I feel sympathy for those who fall across the threshold of his power. But something else haunts the edges of my waking mind. What if Steven Lockhart finds out that I have lied to him? What power would that give him over me?
XVI
Harold returns from his expedition in the bush. He looks stronger—more robust—and older. His skin glows from the sun, and his eyes shine with happiness. He shows us photographs of the Samburu village where he and Nate stayed for a week, sleeping in a hut, recording the customs of the tribe. And the camp in the bush where their Samburu tracker found rhino. In the cold early mornings they heated coffee over a small stove, and at night they roasted antelope over the fire. He exudes a contentment which I have not seen in him before, a confidence that radiates, like the newfound words which tumble out of him.
He tells us stories of the bush—the two bull elephants who ambled through camp, delicately stepping over the guy ropes of their tent, the lionesses who fought over a kill under the silver light of the moon, just a few yards from where they were sleeping. He has transformed, but Sara hovers at the edge of the room, withholding her approval. She won’t sit down to look at his photographs, and he glances at her every few minutes, and I can see he is hoping for a word of interest or praise. Slowly his enthusiasm flattens under her silence, until he puts his photographs away and his eyes lose their quick spark.
“You’ll have to get down to some proper work,” Sara says eventually, when she sees that her disapproval has had the desired effect, “now that you’re back. You’ve spent enough time roaming around in the bush with Nate Logan.”
I glance up at her, trying to read in her face what her voice will not tell me—the threat she feels from Nate Logan. Is it simply his liberal politics; or is it that when Harold is with Nate, he slips beyond her grasp?
—
I GO DOWN to the stables in the late afternoon to put Juno inside for the night. Michael is in the garage looking at the engine on one of my father’s jeeps.
“How long do you think she has?” I ask him.
He crouches down, and Juno pads over to him. Her belly is heavy, and she walks awkwardly. He lets her push her head into his hands, then he runs them down her neck and she shudders. She stands with her head low. He puts a hand under her belly and pulls at one of her teats, and a few drops of milk fall into the dust.
I lead her into the stable, and she turns circles in the straw, but she is too restless to stay lying down for long. I sit with her for an hour. When dusk falls, she is standing in a corner facing the wall, shuddering. She vomits a little on the straw. It is late, and I have to go back to the house. When I step out into the yard I see that Michael has already left.
I go to my room after supper, but do not undress. I stand at the window. Outside there is no moon, and the land is completely dark. They say Mau Mau never come down from the mountains unless there is a moon. I hear my father checking the windows in the sitting room, turning out the lamps, the tread of his feet moving away from my bedroom toward his own. After a long moment, I open my door carefully, walk into the hall and take my father’s torch from the bureau near the door. I go back to my bedroom and pull a chair close to the window. I rest the torch and my gun on the window ledge, open the latch and scramble out. My feet drop onto the earth outside.
The torch casts a small pool of yellow light onto the ground. I swing it over the bushes, looking for eyes reflected in its beam, but all I see are the tiny white pupils of a dik-dik. I pick up the gun. A bird calls out into the blackness—wheep wheep wheep. I am afraid out here on my own, and I stand caught between the house and the path for a long moment, the blood pounding so loudly in my head that I can scarcely hear my own breathing. Could the same leopard I heard a few nights ago be out again tonight?
I push myself into motion, walking down the path toward the stables, the bush close and dark around me. The light from the torch makes a tiny imprint on the vast blackness of the night. My plimsolls grind too loud on the dry earth. At last I see—with relief—the edge of the garage wall. I am here. Within the walls of the yard I feel safer. I feel for the top of the stable door. My hand slips forward into dark, empty space. With a lurching sensation I pull it back. Someone has opened the top door. I can hear a panting inside. Juno. I grip the gun—cold and damp in my palm—and force myself to lean over the top of the door and scan the torch over the stable. Blades of straw, Juno lying down on her side, and then—the legs of a man, crouched in the corner. Just as I find his face with the beam, he says, “Rachel—” and I breathe out a ragged breath.
“Michael?”
“Come inside.”
I hesitate for only a moment, then I lift the latch and slip beyond the door. He is Kikuyu and I should not be alone with him like this—I cannot forget it, but I do not feel afraid.
Juno’s ribs are heaving up and down. Her tail wags a little when she sees me and I remember the same look on her face when she was a small puppy. The goodwill, in the midst of her pain.
“Turn off the torch,” he says, softly.
I sit down against the wall, a little way from him, my feet deep in the straw, and switch off the beam of light. The darkness closes in around
me, thick and tangible. I blink to clear it—to see something in its depths, but there is nothing.
I feel the graze of his skin, dry against mine, as he pushes his hands toward me, then something warm and soft between them. I take it from him and hold it to my face. It smells of blood and milk and I can feel its short, damp breath against my cheek.
After a moment, he reaches out a hand for the torch, turns it on and rests it on the straw. I see a wet sac, newly born, and Juno licking at it until the sac splits and comes away and there is a puppy. She licks it, over and over, coaxing it into life, her tongue rasping on its wet fur, but it lies motionless, wet and black and not moving.
“Is it all right?”
Michael turns the puppy over with one hand so that it lies on its back. Juno is still licking with her tongue and I can see its pale, hairless belly, then—just when I am sure that it must be dead—it stretches out its tiny paws and opens its pink mouth, showing a set of sharp white teeth.
“It’s alive,” I say, breathing out.
“Yes,” he laughs softly. “She has done well.”
He takes the other puppy from me and places it close to Juno—where a third puppy is already suckling—and she lies with her head in the straw and then the three puppies are at her nipples and I can hear the mewling, the gentle sucking. I can see the fur of the two older puppies already drying to a golden color, the same color as their mother, the same color as the straw.
He turns off the torch and we sit with the darkness settling thick and impenetrable around us.
“I saw your brother in Nakuru,” I say.
He says nothing.
“He has been sent to Yatta.”
“Yes.”
“You know?”
“A man said that there were two white women from Kisima. That you told Lockhart that you did not know him.”
Leopard at the Door Page 17
