He puts his hands to my face, palms cradling my chin, thumbs against my cheeks. I look into his eyes, breathing to steady myself. I feel as though I am falling. “Hey,” he says, slowly. “Are you all right?”
I nod, smiling. I am not ready to show him the depths of my desire.
When I get up to the house, I check the kitchen for Sara. She isn’t in there and there is no sign of Jim. The jam has boiled over the sides of the pot, and it has pooled wet and sticky on the floor like blood. I take the pot off the stove and go into the house. I lie on my bed and feel a strange emptiness inside me. As though Michael has carved himself in my flesh and left me unwhole. But there is also strength. I know there will be no fear when I am with him. No one can touch me. He will solder all my edges and absorb me into him.
XXII
The following day. I wait until Sara is having her midday sleep. I have an idea that I want to bring Michael something. I take the radio from my room. It is bulky and weighs more than I thought. I struggle to carry it down the track to the stables.
Michael watches me walk into the yard. I feel suddenly as though I am making a statement bringing it down here, and my face flushes red.
“I brought it from the house—” I say, when we are a few yards away from each other.
“I can see that,” he says, wiping his hands on a cloth, but not coming any closer. I remember him touching me. The closeness of our bodies. His hold over me is like a wave, rising. I cannot breathe when I look at him.
He comes over to where I am standing, but doesn’t look at the radio. I feel the full force of his presence—what it is to have him watch me, so close. I remember him carrying me inside, and it flows like liquid through me. I shift my feet. The radio is heavy, and I have carried it a long way. I want to put it down but he doesn’t help me. I feel the current of his anger before he speaks.
“Why did you bring it?”
“My father hasn’t seen it. He won’t know—” It feels inadequate. I wanted to please him, but I see now that the risk is too great for him, with the Emergency. No Kikuyu—even Michael—are allowed to have access to the news. Trying to save myself, I say, “Anyway, why shouldn’t I listen to the radio when I am down here?”
“When you are down here,” he says, and I wonder if he wants me here at all.
Just when I think I will have to bend down and put the radio on the ground, he takes it from me, and I know that despite himself he is hungry for what it can deliver. He places it on his workbench and begins to stretch out the aerial. I watch his hands, their delicate movement, the same hands that held me yesterday and feel so distant now.
I move away, sitting in the dust with my back to the barn wall, my knees up, in the small strip of shade thrown out by the sun which has moved behind the corrugated roof.
The radio comes on with a burst of sound, and we both flinch. He turns the volume down. I hold my breath, listening for anyone who might be coming down the track, but no one is there.
He turns it up slowly and a voice filters out. The one o’clock news.
In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta has been sentenced to seven years’ hard labor for his part in the organization of the rebel Mau Mau movement. The leader of the Kenya African Union, who was found guilty on all charges, was also given three years’ hard labor for being a member of the movement.
Michael is listening, with every inch of his body. I know what this means—the end of hope for an independent Kenya. In passing sentence the judge, Ransley Thacker, told Kenyatta: “You have successfully plunged many Africans back into a state which shows little humanity. You have persuaded them in secret to murder, burn and commit atrocities which will take many years to forget.” He added: “Make no mistake about it, Mau Mau will be defeated.”
Meanwhile settlers are being asked to exercise extreme caution . . . The clipped English accent permeates the yard with a strange, false security. Reporting from London, thousands of miles away, oblivious to me, to him, to this farm in the very heart of the conflict of which he speaks.
The news gives way to music, a slow song. Michael leans forward and switches the radio off. He doesn’t look at me, and I don’t say anything to break the silence. He is absorbed in thought, taut with anger.
Eventually he speaks. “Who are the British to talk about atrocities? The murders and burnings that will take so many years to forget?” He runs a hand over his face. “I was with the Fourteenth in Burma, the so-called Forgotten Army. For two years we clawed our way through the jungle, sweating with tropical disease. Kabaw Valley—Death Valley. It was a very hell on earth. At first we were terrified of the Japanese—we had all heard stories of what they did to African soldiers. But in the end I felt nothing but pity. They were rotting alive, down in holes, eating boiled grass, driven mad by starvation. I found a man whose teeth had fallen out. His hair had grown long beneath his helmet. And then the killing—”
He swallows heavily and stops talking. As though he has said too much. I can see the muscle ticking in his jaw. I stand up. I want to go to him and touch him, but I am not sure he wants me to. I am terrified by how little I know him; by how much courage I will need to cross the distance.
He does not look up, and I walk out of the yard, leaving the radio, and Michael standing there, his face tight with rage.
—
IN THE STANDARD there are two pages dedicated to Kenyatta’s conviction. One line sticks in my mind: When Kenyatta attempted to explain the nature of the grievances that lay behind Mau Mau, Judge Thacker expressed his exasperation, telling the court: “Grievances have nothing whatever to do with Mau Mau and Mau Mau has nothing whatever to do with grievances.”
Can the judge be right? I do not think so. Mau Mau must surely be born out of a sense of injustice. I remember the man killed by Steven Lockhart. The list of demands for the strike. The words he spoke before he died. Kenya is a black man’s country. You should go back to where you belong. Nothing is as simple as I used to believe it was; the lines of right and wrong have blurred.
At the back of the paper is a short news piece. At dawn yesterday an army patrol operating in the outskirts of Nairobi stumbled upon a strangled, mutilated cat hanging from an archway of tree branches. A note fixed to the branches told the Kikuyu: We are going to Mount Kenya but will be back like lightning. It was signed: The Mau Mau.
I think of Michael traveling from Nairobi, here to the foothills of Mount Kenya. I do not believe that he has come to kill Europeans, to force us off our land, but the story nevertheless makes me uneasy.
XXIII
My father’s Land Rover pulls up outside the house just after dawn. He will only stay a few hours. He tells us that they have caught three men from a gang living in the forest above Bowker’s farm. He thinks they were responsible for raiding and mutilating our cattle. He says that he does not think they will come back.
“How large was the gang?” I ask. “What about the men you did not catch?”
“They fled—we don’t expect them to continue operating in this area.”
I struggle to be reassured. He looks exhausted. There are black rings under his eyes and his face is pale and drawn. He says they do not sleep more than a few hours on patrol, that it rains in the forest and they are never dry, and Mau Mau are always just ahead of them.
He leaves after breakfast. When we have said good-bye I sit against the wall of the house, in the sun, cutting fabric into triangles, with Juno and her puppies at my feet. Kahiki brought them up from the stables this morning to run on the lawn, along with my mother’s sewing machine. I will take the cuttings later and hem each one, and sew them onto ribbon. The house is absolutely quiet. The heat is saturating. It warms my blood, my back, my skin so that every part of me submits to it.
I deliberately stay away from the stables. I do not know if he wants to see me.
When I have hemmed twenty triangles, I sew them to five meters of white cotton
ribbon. Sara nods her approval, but says we need the same length again. As I sew I think about Michael. I worry that the things that passed between us in the barn might not be meaningful to him. That he might not need or want them from me again.
—
MICHAEL COMES UP to the house the following day. I am sitting on the steps of the veranda, with the fabric in my lap, a needle in one hand, oversewing the corners of the bunting. His eyes settle on mine, for just a moment, and I feel—with a lurch—the power he has over me. The weaver birds chatter in their nest in the tree overhead. Juno leaps up and trots over to him, and he drops a hand to her head. Sara is sitting in a wicker chair. She slips her gun off the table when he approaches. It is midday, but she has not changed out of her nightdress. There are stains down the front. Michael bows his head to her. The gun flickers in her lap as she turns it in her hand.
Sara says she wants four trestle tables made up for the party. Michael tells her that they are short of labor. More men have left. They need him at the dairy. His face, when he talks to Sara, is calm, neutral.
“I don’t want excuses,” she says, waving him away. She is keyed up, breathless. My father leaving again has unhinged her.
He turns and goes, and I watch his back as he walks away, and feel the loss of it wrench at me, deep in my stomach.
Later that afternoon, I walk down to the stables. I cannot keep myself away. He is not there, and I try to quell the panic that starts up inside me. What if he does not come? I sit with my back to the wall, waiting. An hour later, he walks into the yard, his blue overalls peeled down around his waist. He stops when he sees me. I watch him. There is nothing I can say. He is both strange and familiar—I am not prepared for the shock of seeing him alone. The knowledge of what he might do to me.
“Rachel—” he says, “I am glad you are here.” His words unravel something in me. I take a breath.
He walks over and squats down opposite me, his legs open. I want to stand up, to run away, but more than that I want to stay.
“I have been waiting for you,” he says, softly.
My head brushes against the wall but his lips are on my mouth. I can taste him, all of him. We kiss for just a moment, then he leans back. I want him so completely, to be with him so absolutely, that the strength of it stuns me. I want him to put his hands on me, to close the distance between us. He is smiling at me, as he looks at me, and I know he will take me inside, where it is dark. My heart thuds in my chest. I cannot smile back. Desire is like pain. I feel as though the surface of my skin has been peeled off. Every part of me is raw to his touch. It hurts, and the anticipation of the hurt is almost greater than the touch. Everything has changed. I have moved over to the other side and there is no going back.
Afterward, when it is over, he pulls open the door of the barn a few feet. Light floods in. I see that I am lying on an old rug taken from one of the boxes. He pulls on his underwear, his vest, then crouches down. “You should get dressed,” he says, placing a dry hand over my thigh. I can feel the skin on his fingertips.
I sit up slowly, struggling to move out of the strange world he has left me in. I pull on my shorts, do up the buttons of my shirt. I feel raw, exposed. I think I might cry. His hand comes away from my thigh.
“Look what’s here,” he says, pulling a book from an open box. I stand looking over his shoulder. It is an old textbook. Geography. He turns a few of the pages and laughs. I have scribbled down the margin; a childish scrawl.
“Boring class?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. I never liked geography.
He stops on a double page—a map of Africa, blocked out in primary colors, each one representing the country which had colonized it. He stops turning the pages—he is reading the text now, interested. “This is what they’ve started teaching in Kikuyu schools. Since the Emergency. In the old schools, Kenya was a black man’s country. Now they are telling children that Kenya was virtually uninhabited before the Europeans discovered it.”
I am conscious that he is trusting me, that it is dangerous for him to speak like this. Over his shoulder I read:
KEY MOMENTS IN KENYA’S HISTORY
1849—Mount Kenya—discovered by Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf
1858—Lake Victoria—discovered by John Hanning Speke
“It’s as though our people don’t exist,” he says. “How can something be ‘discovered’ when people have lived there for hundreds of years? Or at least how can you agree in good conscience to teach that to Kikuyu children whose grandparents lived on the slopes of Mount Kenya long before Europeans set foot in this country?”
And I feel the awful, comic absurdity of imperialism, but also the danger. That these children might grow up to disown and disrespect the parents, the grandparents, the culture from which they come.
—
SARA AND I sit in near darkness waiting for the news. Mungai has laid the fire and left out supper for us. We are lighting fewer lamps, by instinct, as though the house will attract less attention if the windows are dark. The doors are all locked and the curtains drawn. I think of Michael in his hut behind the stables, and wish I could be there with him, instead of here with Sara.
A night of waiting ahead of us, hoping that we will get through until morning without an attack. Big Ben chimes, ringing out the hour, and for a moment we are captivated by the idea of London, solid and immutable, so many thousands of miles away. But the news when it comes shatters the illusion that we might be safe.
We regret to announce, says the voice on the radio, that a young farmer and his doctor-wife, together with their six-year-old son, were cruelly slashed to death with pangas near their farmstead sometime last evening. The Rucks recently opened up a free surgery for the Africans, and it is thought that they unlocked their door expecting to find a patient needing urgent treatment.
“It’s madness,” Sara says, in a queer high-pitched voice. “Primitive, irrational madness. It’s Africa laughing at us for trying to civilize her.”
The room suddenly feels very small, as if it were a cell, and I am conscious that the doors are locked. We are aware of our backs, of the softness of our stomachs, of the sound of a gunshot when it ricochets through the silence.
I stand up and go to the window, lifting back the curtain to peer outside. The land beyond the house is black. I want to know what is out there, what it looks like and whether it will dare come for me.
“Perhaps we have driven them to it,” I say.
“What do you mean?” she asks in a tight voice, going over to the drinks cabinet and pouring herself a gin.
“How else can they make us listen?”
“Rachel—I will not have it,” she says, sitting down, her voice tremoring, her hands turning over and over on a tassel from the cushion in her lap. But I cannot stop myself.
“We have taken away their lands, crippled them with taxes, closed down their schools. Kenyatta—their only political voice—has been arrested. England has introduced a police state the likes of which we last saw under Hitler. But no—” I can feel my words coming faster than I can think them through, my face hot with anger. “We will never admit that Mau Mau might be political. That it might be rooted in a failure of British policy.”
“There is nothing rational or political about terrorists who murder children in their beds, with knives. It’s a sickness. We brought them down from the trees, we civilized them too fast and now they are reverting back to savages.” She takes a gulp of her drink. “Killing a child—and with a panga. It’s bestial. Unthinkable. They cannot be called human.”
I do not disagree that it is a savage thing to do. But as I stare out into the dark, words come to my mouth. A passage we learned at school. “And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And th
ere was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.”
“What on earth are you saying?” Sara says, looking at me with wide, staring eyes.
I do not reply. Her face is very white. She stands up, holding the cushion, her fingers still turning the tassel over and over. I remember Harold and too late I say, “I did not mean—”
But she is backing away from me. “I will tell your father that you are unwell. That you are possessed. No normal person could say such things. You might as well throw open our doors and invite them in to slaughter us all.”
She leaves the room, her glass in one hand, and I hear the door to her bedroom click shut.
Later, in bed, I reach out to touch the gun on my bedside table, and I am only faintly reassured when I feel the metal, cold against my fingertips. I want to light a candle, but I do not dare. They might see the light in the dark. A hyena calls out, a lurid, human sound, like the whooping of a lunatic approaching the house, and I think of Harold, the first time I met him. They mimic the call of wild animals. How often had he lain in his room, alone and scared? And how scared had he been, just before the bullet hit him?
—
I WALK UP to my mother’s eyrie. It is a rare overcast morning, and the air is full of humidity. I want to break free of the tight, claustrophobic fear that has descended on the farm. I want to get away from Sara. And I am wary of seeing Michael; I need to hold myself back. I am falling too fast.
The track—made by game—is not as overgrown as it might be—and I wonder if my father has ever come up here, and whether he thinks of the nights we used to spend camping, high on the hill, looking out over Kisima, the fire flickering under the moon. He will be home in a week. Sara is anxious that he gets back before the Coronation. There can be no party without him.
Leopard at the Door Page 24
