I feel my face flush red. I know what semen is—my father’s heifers are impregnated with semen from England—but these are dark, secret things that I am not able to talk about. Steven stands close to me, his hands deep in his pockets, his frame very still, watching me, feeling out my awkwardness as a measure of his success.
“I don’t see why he should go,” I say, forcing myself to speak, refusing to be intimidated by him, but my voice is shrill despite myself.
“That is Harold’s decision,” he says, stepping forward and taking the glass of tomato juice from my hand. “Besides, his mother is quite set on it.” He brings the glass to his lips and drinks, and when he has finished the red juice clings to the edges of his mustache. He wipes at it with the back of his hand.
—
THERE ARE NO TEARS when Harold leaves, only a paleness in his cheeks, and a darting, uneasy look in his eyes. Sara does not embrace him—she puts a hand to his cheek and says, “You’ll do a fine job, Harold.” And I have the disturbing feeling that he is being asked to make amends for something. He has his camera in one hand. I wonder what Nate Logan would say if he saw him now, on his way to join the Home Guard. I do not want him to go. I will miss his quiet company in my room at night; the radio spinning its news into the darkness around us. But I accept that if Bowker was murdered in his bath, not fifteen miles away, then it may be no more dangerous at the Home Guard post than it is at Kisima.
—
MY FATHER HAS PROMISED Steven that he will go over to Eric Bowker’s place, after he and Harold have left, to help pack up the house and deal with the livestock that remain. I ask if I can go with him.
“You won’t be squeamish?” he asks.
I shake my head, pulling myself up into the Land Rover beside him.
We drive down the track to the old olive tree, then cut across the valley following a dried-up riverbed. This is the quick route—the route we took when riding horses. It is fifteen miles pretty much as the crow flies, and down here there isn’t another soul. It’s impassable in the rainy season, but the ground has dried out in the last few weeks, and we plunge deep into the bush, through the dense thickets of the gorge. My father stops occasionally to check on a concrete dam or to clear from the track a branch felled by an elephant. And in the quiet of these moments I can hear all around us the forest throbbing with the songs of birds and insects.
The track cuts away from the riverbed, up the side of a hill, and comes over the brow. My father turns off the engine. In front of us is a wide, smooth rock overlooking a hidden valley, a small river dividing the grassy floor below. We are not too high up, and the valley floor is not wide. My mother called it Kidogo Mara—Little Mara—because it looks like the great plains of Southern Kenya in miniature. She loved it here. We took turns with the baboons to sit on the rock and picnic. They always moved off when we arrived—but when we left, our horses picking their way down the hillside, they would stand on the rock and scold us, in loud, jabbering voices.
We climb out, my father sliding his rifle into his hand, crouching down, looking into the valley. The engine ticks over in the heat. The rock is warm beneath my rolled-up trousers, hot against my bare ankles. The world below is caught in a hazy, languorous heat. It is hard to believe that there might be anything dangerous here and I feel no fear. A herd of zebra are drifting down the hillside to the pools at the bottom, their gait short, their heads swaying as they walk. I can hear the soft clopping of their hooves on the dry earth. Two giraffes—a mother and a baby—are already on the valley floor. The baby splays its legs to drink from the river.
The zebra smell something and they stop, heads raised, listening, then trot out of the valley, their flanks, wet with sweat, making a hollow chafing sound; the same sound my pony made when I pushed him into a long uphill trot. The giraffes remain but they are spooked, and the mother has her neck poised, listening. I spot it before my father does and lift a hand. A loping figure that stops periodically and raises its head like a man might, cutting across the valley. A hyena. A few minutes, and it has crossed out of sight.
“Cattle,” my father says, and I stay very still, listening, until I hear the low, hollow clunking of their bells. It is this that scared the zebra and the hyena, driving them through the valley. A car engine will not frighten game, but man on foot, and cattle, will.
There is a cave behind the rock. Kahiki showed us the paintings deep in its interior, holding up a torch to its walls, and my mother found old stone tools buried in the earth. At the mouth of the cave are the scattered ashes of a fire. My father feels them—they are cold. Nothing to suggest that someone has been here recently. That anyone is hiding out.
“The cattle,” my father says, when we are driving away, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the engine, “they must be Bowker’s. Mau Mau drove his herd into the forest and they scattered. I’ll have to try and pick them up later.”
Erik Bowker’s house sits on a flat plateau a few miles above Kidogo Mara. It is a strange place, surrounded by bush, with no view beyond the clearing that was made with his own hands. Eric Bowker built this place himself, as any European did who arrived more than thirty years ago. Unlike many others, he had never enlarged it, modified it, adjusted it for the increased sociability that usually came with a wife and children. He lived alone. I remember him as an older man, tall, wiry gray hair, always with a hat on his head. Eccentric, and tough.
I see smoke above the scrub, before I see the house, and then we pull onto the main track and come into a clearing. The house is a simple bungalow. A trail of belongings is strung along the path that leads up into the bush—a shirt has snagged on an acacia tree and hangs like a puppet stuck full of thorns. Two young policemen sit smoking, their rifles propped up against the wall of the house. They stand up as we approach, stubbing out their cigarettes.
The barns have been burned to the ground, the walls are black and the corrugated roof has fallen in. I can feel the heat from the fire, still smoldering, as I approach.
“Does he have any family?” my father asks the soldiers.
“We haven’t been able to reach anyone.”
There is a dark patch on the earth by the door. Flies gather over it, buzzing. “Dog had water?” my father asks, looking at an old collie standing by the house, head low, panting. The soldiers look embarrassed—it hasn’t occurred to them—and one of them goes inside to fetch a bowl.
We walk around the barn. There is nothing left of any value. The Land Rover has been stripped down. “They use the metal to make guns,” my father says. When we step back out into the sun the dog limps toward the bowl and laps softly at the water.
Inside the house is dark, the ceilings low. No one takes off their boots. I step behind my father into a small hall—to the right is a sitting room, with a fireplace, a small sofa and a single chair. The room has been ransacked: cushions slashed and pulled onto the floor; shelves emptied; three plates broken where they fell; books spread open facedown, spines trodden in. I can feel the size of the men in this small room, I can feel the adrenaline, the speed with which they rifled through what was here. And I can smell the thick sweet smell of their bodies, unwashed, high and strong. Or is it Bowker’s body soaking in the bath?
“I don’t want you going into the bathroom,” my father says. “Just in here and in the bedroom. Two piles. One for anything his family might want—a few things, keep it small. Who knows whether anyone will ever turn up. The other—anything we might find useful on the farm.”
“Can we just take his things?”
“No use leaving anything here. The Micks will be back to strip the place. Better we have it than them.”
I hear him walk into the bathroom. Try to picture what he sees. Hear his silence. The creak of his boots on the wood floor. In the bedroom the chest gapes open, drawers pulled out onto the rug. I make a small pile of personal belongings, choosing quickly, trying to imagine
what I might want to remember this man by. The book—open—on the armrest. A photograph of him as a boy, with a man who must be his father. A pen on the floor that has pooled its ink into the rug. And a handkerchief initialed EJB, which lies trodden on the boards.
My father comes to help me pack. I want to ask him what is next door, in the bathroom—is Bowker’s body still there? But I don’t dare. We sort through religious books, farming manuals, packets of seeds, breeding pedigrees, letters from England, an old diary, addresses.
“Back in a minute,” my father says, stepping into the hall. I wait inside, the air settling around me, my breathing loud in the small bedroom. It is unearthly in here and I shiver. I have the odd feeling that now my father has gone the walls might start talking to me. Telling me their secrets; what they have seen. I step into the hallway. Here is the bathroom door. My father has pulled it to—but it has swung open a little. I can’t see inside. My father’s voice is far off—he is talking to the soldiers. I push the door with my hand and it swings open silently. A white tub smeared with blood. Handprints black against the side. The floor dark and wet. Something sticky and solid inside the bath. And a buzzing, filling my ears. Like a pig at the factory, the blood washing over the floor. A fly settles on my hand, another on my face. I wave my hand and more rise and fall, the sound of their wings roaring in my ears. There is no body. Only this—the butcher’s bath. My jaw is clenched. My stomach rises in my throat.
I think I might be sick—when a gunshot shatters the air. I freeze in terror, this world of horror suddenly become real. Have Mau Mau come back? There is silence for a long moment, then I hear my father’s voice. Ordinary, relaxed, talking to the soldiers. I run from the room, from the smell, tainted, contaminated by what is inside.
My father sees me. He is hitching his gun into his belt.
“What was it?” I ask.
He doesn’t say anything. Walks past me inside the house. And I know from his posture what he has done. I stumble around the back of the house and see the collie on the ground. Blood pooling from her head. Thick drops sitting in the dust. Lips pulled back on yellow teeth. The crickets call grating and urgent. I turn away, crouch down and vomit on the earth, and watch as the flies settle in the liquid at my feet, before I have even had time to stand up.
“He would have done it himself in a month or two,” my father says, when I come back round to the front of the house. He is carrying a pile of linen to the car. I lean against the bonnet, waiting for my head to stop spinning, the metal hot against my forehead.
The soldiers have taken it upon themselves to retrieve the belongings which are scattered along the track. After a moment I lift my head and watch—one of them holds up a pair of graying white underpants and he gyrates his hips, miming a dance. The other smiles at him. He has a pipe in one hand and he polishes it on his trousers, sucks it between his teeth, then slips it into his pocket. Two vultures wheel in the sky overhead, and I wonder if they can smell the blood inside the house.
“They’ve taken the pots and pans, the cups, the kerosene, any fuel that was here. His coats, his rifle, his revolver—all gone.” My father looks up into the bush, to the mountains that rise green and heavy against the sky. “Every time they do this they get stronger—more supplies, more fuel, more weapons, more confidence. The cattle will keep them going for months.”
“Why haven’t they cleaned it up inside?” I ask.
He looks at me, his eyes reading in mine that I have seen it.
“These boys will do it once we’re gone.”
I glance at the soldiers, and they smile, walking back down the path to help my father load things into the car. The smell of blood is in my mouth, the taste of vomit in my throat. I am numb.
—
WHEN WE GET HOME my father hammers wire grills to the windows to stop anyone getting in. The danger feels much closer than it did before. Erik Bowker’s house is only fifteen miles away—Mau Mau are close by. When he is finished, we feel more like prisoners than we did before. I have heard stories of Mau Mau throwing flaming torches onto the tinder-dry roofs of settlers’ houses, and I imagine the crackling of the fire, the windows barred, the doors guarded by men with guns. My father sleeps in the sitting room, his rifle pointed at the door, and I feel safer with him closer to my bedroom. I keep my gun loaded by the bed.
XVIII
The newspapers are full of descriptions of Kikuyu oathing ceremonies. The oaths the men take, to burn European crops and cattle, to steal firearms, to kill no matter who is the victim—all this is nothing new to me. But there is one oath that sticks in my throat and I wish I hadn’t seen it. They are said to vow—when killing—to cut off the heads of their enemies, to extract the eyeballs and drink the liquid from them. I keep telling myself that it is the Kikuyu who are being killed, that only a handful of whites have been murdered—but each night the news seeps like fear into the quiet of my bedroom.
. . . This is the third attack on the same Catholic Mission School. One of the fathers was injured whilst raising the alarm. He is now seriously ill in the Nairobi Hospital.
. . . The girl escaped by climbing onto the roof. Her mother was killed as she was attempting to scramble up after her. Her father, who went onto the veranda, had disappeared. It is believed that the terrorists carried him away.
. . . The disappearance of a man who had lived all his life since coming to Kenya among the Kikuyu. He was loved by everyone in the nearby location and some years ago was “blooded” as a member of their tribe and was one of the few white men so honored. Two sporting guns and ammunition were stolen. The funeral . . .
. . . The Mau Mau society is demanding immediate self-government . . . Members are called on to steal firearms from Europeans and to kill Europeans when asked to by the leadership.
. . . has still not been found. The police fear that, since he has been missing for six days, he is dead. The search for his body is still going on. Tracker dogs, police and troops are . . .
. . . Reports that a captured terrorist said that a young girl, operating with one of the gangs, claims to be a seer. She dreamed that things would go well for Mau Mau if a white man were taken and . . .
. . . feared that he may have been buried alive. The search still continues.
. . . The terrorists got away with two rifles and two hundred rounds of .303 ammunition.
. . . The funeral will take place at 3:00 p.m. at the European Cemetery.
. . . Up to two-thirds of the Kikuyu population are thought to have taken the oath.
. . . a precision rifle and a revolver were stolen.
. . . at 11:00 a.m. at the European Cemetery.
The Standard lists the names of the Europeans who have been killed; eight in total, and as many again seriously wounded. This doesn’t include the Seychellois farm manager and his six children who were brutally attacked and murdered, or the two elderly European women—Dorothy and Kitty—who managed to fight off their attackers in their living room, killing three of the assailants. Meanwhile, the article says, hundreds of loyal Kikuyu have been murdered.
A letter is released from an official Mau Mau source. It says there will be a spate of Christmas killings. We want a dozen heads this month. My father admits he has taken to having a bath with a revolver in the soap dish.
—
A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS, I am sitting against the barn wall reading the Standard, when a jeep pulls into the yard. It is Nate Logan. I jump up, happy to see him.
“How are you holding up?” he asks, putting a hand on my head.
“All right,” I say, and it is the truth. Despite everything, I am glad to be at Kisima.
“Are these your puppies?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, smiling proudly. They are a month old, and they have found their legs, tumbling over to greet him and chew at the laces on his boots.
“Who’s this fellow?” He scoops one up
with a large hand.
“That’s Pirate,” I say, laughing as Pirate snaps at his fingers.
“He’s feisty, isn’t he?” he says, rubbing a hand over him. Then—“I couldn’t find anyone up at the house. Have you seen Harold?”
“Haven’t you heard?” I ask, surprised. “He volunteered. He went off with Steven Lockhart to the Home Guard post. A couple of weeks ago.”
“Did he really?” he asks, looking at me, his jaw squaring off in anger. “Why in hell’s name did she let him do that?”
He isn’t looking for an answer and I don’t say anything.
“The boy can’t have been barely sixteen!” He swears under his breath, placing the puppy on the ground. “I was hoping to take him back with me to the Markhams’ farm as an assistant. Damn it, I should have come sooner—” He kicks the toe of his boot through the soil, and I feel as though he isn’t sorry so much for himself as for Harold. As though perhaps he had come to save him and now it is too late.
“I tried to tell him he didn’t have to go—”
“But of course we both know that’s not true—”
“Isn’t it?”
“You don’t know about Harold?” he asks, slowly.
“What is there to know?”
“There was a scandal in Nairobi—” He breathes out and his eyes flicker to mine. “Harold got too close to a regular guest at the Norfolk—a boy.”
“Too close?”
“He was found in Harold’s room one morning—”
And I understand suddenly what he is implying. I remember Harold struggling to explain—“I have to try”; the photographs on his desk; the unambiguous masculinity of the Kikuyu boys which had made them so striking; his mother’s refusal to look at his photographs. He liked men. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before. It explained why Sara kept such a close eye on him—why she didn’t want him spending so much time with Nate, who was too liberal for her tastes and most likely wouldn’t discourage him. And it explained her power over him—he lived in fear of her shame, of his own shame perhaps.
Leopard at the Door Page 19
