Prodigies

by Francis King

  As the dancers rotated, so the whole scene began to rotate around her. She clutched Fielding’s arm, swaying against him. The drum beats coalesced into each other, until there was just an arhythmic rat-tat-tat-tat, more and more deafening. Everything seemed to be darkening at its edges, as the horizon had darkened during the long ride of that day. A darkness was invading her, flooding in through her straining eyes, her gaping mouth, her flaring nostrils.

  A vast woman capered zig-zag towards them, shaking her naked breasts and buttocks, her eyes half-closed in a near-trance. Close to Alexine, she opened her eyes wide in a round face streaming with sweat. Her tongue, large and purple, popped out of her mouth. Then her eyes focused on the long pearl necklace around Alexine’s throat. A hand shot out, like the paw of a lioness, and grabbed at the necklace, with such force that the string cut into Alexine’s flesh. The woman tugged and tugged again. The string broke, and two or three pearls scattered to the ground. Because of its careful knotting, pearl separated from pearl, the rest of the necklace remained intact. With her booty, the woman dashed away with an amazing agility and speed for someone of her size.

  Alexine was aware that Fielding had let go of her and had started off in pursuit. Then, like a slap to the back of her head, a rifle shot rang out and she smelled the powder acrid in her nostrils. Alexine had seen gazelles and antelopes leap and plunge when she had shot them, precisely as the woman now did. She lay on the ground, her mouth distorted in agony, a hand to her thigh. Then she screamed.

  Suddenly, as though she were being carried up some uneven mountain path in the chair by the porters, Alexine felt everything around her tipping sideways. The fires roared up, circling her, the white-painted faces and bodies of the dancers merged into a chalk wall, moving towards her.

  Although she felt no pain, she thought: I must have been shot.

  Tasting the priest’s blood, she had thought: I am tasting death.

  Now she thought, as the smell of the gun-powder filled her whole body and everything became totally black: I am swallowing death.

  Later, when she gabbled to them of what had happened or what she thought had happened – she would never be wholly able to differentiate between the two – Harriet, Nanny, Daan and Sammy would all tell her that it was all only the effect of her illness, she had imagined it, it was only part of the delirium that accompanied such a dangerously high fever.

  … The woman leaps up skyward and crashes down to the ground. She screams on and on, endlessly, on a single high, yelping note. She is pressing her hand to the wound, where the bullet has left a deep furrow in the blubbery thigh. Alexine feels no horror, much less any impulse to go to her rescue. Well, you’ve got what you deserved. Frantically, the woman looks about her for help, but the crowds are advancing from all around with a totally different purpose in view. As the woman, the string of pearls still clutched in a fist, struggles to raise her huge bulk, yellow fat begins to coil out of the gaping wound. Fascinated, Alexine watches its extrusion. Then the man leading the crowd pounces. In snatching the necklace, the woman was like a lioness. Lithe and swift, the man is like a panther. He tears at the fat, dragging it out, with both his hands and then he stuffs into his mouth. The woman goes on yelping on that single high note. Others, more and more, now join the man. They jostle and push at each other as they too now pull out the yellow fat from the wound. There is a limitless supply of it. Voraciously they devour it.

  Then a woman, immensely tall and thin, appears with a hatchet. She pushes through the crowd, raises the hatchet and hacks off the wounded woman’s arm. She and two other women fight over it, until, as she snarls and threatens them with the hatchet, they back off. She lifts up the severed arm, and sinks her teeth into the elbow. A man comes up behind her, puts one arm around her neck and all but strangles her before the arm drops from her grasp. He now seizes it.

  Alexine watches. She is filled with the longing to join them. But as she steps forward, she feels the strength draining out of her body and crashes to the ground …

  … She is hungry. She must eat. She is tired of lying out in this chaise-longue, hour after hour, looking at the stars. What has happened to the servants? Why have they brought her no food? She calls but no one answers, even though the tents occupied by Harriet and by Nanny Rose and Daan must be in earshot. Perhaps they have gone off to eat somewhere else, leaving her here alone?

  She gets up off the chaise-longue and, staggering, makes her way down the baked track to where the others are encamped. But of them too there is no sign. Where is everyone? She has rarely been into the tents housing the kitchens, since that has always been Harriet’s province. But she now raises the flap of one and, her eyes slowly accustoming themselves to the murk after the afternoon glare outside it, makes out the man, the head cook from Cairo, who is squatting on the floor, chopping onions. There is a large pan beside him, and he keeps dropping the chopped onions into it. He looks up at her and smiles, with those narrow, light-brown eyes of his. The colour of them has always fascinated her. She smiles back and edges farther in. Then she sees that there is a basket beside him and in the basket there is lying a naked baby. The baby is white, a boy, with a protuberant belly and a tassel-like penis. The baby smiles when it sees her.

  ‘What are you doing with that baby? That baby is mine.’ She has never had a baby but she knows that the baby is hers.

  He shakes his head, then reaches out for a knife.

  She knows what is going to happen. She screams.

  He transfixes the baby with the knife. Then, with a swift gesture, he sweeps the remains of the onions off the chopping-board and lifts the baby’s body on to it …

  … She is feeling better. She has drunk a gruel, with Nanny Rose holding the invalid cup to her mouth with one hand, while the other hand raises her head from the pillow and then supports it. The gruel has no taste. Is it meant to be like that? She tries to say something but somehow the words will not come. Or is it that the words are willing to come but her mouth is unwilling to release them? Nanny Rose’s lips are on her forehead. As the old woman bends over her, her loose dress falls away and Alexine can see her large, sagging breasts. She has nursed children at those breasts. Alexine knows that she will never herself nurse children, because the cook has killed that baby of hers. ‘There, there!’ Did she say that or did Nanny Rose?

  Suddenly Nanny Rose has, as though by magic, been transformed into Harriet. ‘ He was here to ask after you. He’s leaving this afternoon. I told him you were in no state to see him.’ Alexine feels a terrible sense of loss. She makes a low, keening sound from the back of her throat. Harriet says, ‘That place was cursed. I felt it all the time that we were there.’ What place? Then Alexine remembers the mission. She remembers the priest standing in front of his brother’s headstone and the black woman kneeling before him. What was the priest saying to the woman? Was he giving her absolution? Was he saying: Go in peace, sin no more?

  … Sunny is seated on the chair opposite to her bed. He sits in one corner of the chair, his knees drawn up, and his eyes, large and sorrowful, are fixed on her. She knows that he has been there for a long time. She would like him to jump up and execute some of his cartwheels for her, to speak to her, to laugh. But he merely stares. She closes her eyes, she is drifting off, the bed moving outward and outward and then up and up, soaring away.

  She opens her eyes. He is still there. But now both of his feet are on the floor, spaced widely apart, and his knees are also widely spaced. There is no longer that sorrowful, brooding expression on his face, but one full of mischief, roguish, coquettish. He is still gazing at her as he fumbles with the buttons of the trousers bought – so long-ago, it now seems – from the second-hand shop in Khartoum. He looks down at the buttons and then up at her. He is inviting her to look. She is fascinated. Excitement pulses through her. He draws out his penis. She is astonished by its size. She had never imagined that a boy of only twelve or thirteen – no one, not even he, knows his exact age – could have one so large.
It reminds her of the snake that, when she was once out riding with Osman, they had seen gliding zig-zag along a sand dune. Osman had jumped down from his horse, drawn his sword, raised it above his head and then severed the snake neatly in two. Later he had skinned the snake and offered her the beautiful green skin, chequered with black. But merely to touch it, as she had done briefly, had filled her with revulsion. It was Addy who had eventually accepted it – ‘I’ll have it made into a belt.’

  Searching her face for a response, whether of horror or delight, Sunny begins to massage his penis. It grows and grows. It reaches monstrous proportions, reminding her of the donkey on which Daan rides. She puts out a hand. But the hand is leaden. It falls back on the sheet. She stares down at the hand. What is the matter with it? Why won’t it move for her? When she looks up again, Sunny has vanished. What has happened to him? How could he have gone so quickly? …

  … Where is the revolver? Captain Scott showed her his Robert Adams revolver. It was cold, heavy and hard in her palm. She decided there and then that she would herself have such a revolver, unique in its design. John reluctantly bought it for her and sent it out to Cairo. Every night, before going to bed, she has placed it under her pillow. Waking up during the night, she has comforted herself by putting her hand under the pillow and holding it As though by magic, it has unfailingly helped her to fall asleep again. But now, when she puts her hand under the pillow, it is no longer there. One of them must have taken it from her. But she needs it, she needs it! Anyone could come into the tent and kill her and she would have no protection. ‘ Where is it?’ she repeatedly asks them, always to receive the same answer: ‘What are you talking about?’ from Nanny Rose or Harriet. Once Harriet adds: ‘ Who is this Robert Adams?’ Without the revolver, she is often too fearful to sleep. Once she even staggers off the bed to look for it and collapses, knocking over a folding table and smashing it beneath her. Sunny finds her and somehow gets het back on to the bed again …

  ‘Your delirium lasted for four days.’

  Alexine was lying out on the chaise-longue and Harriet and Nanny Rose were seated beside her. The air was cool. Alexine ran a hand up her arm and felt her cool flesh. For so long it had been burning, as though the flames from those bonfires had been constantly playing on it.

  ‘We thought we were going to lose you. I think it was the quinine that saved you. Or the Good Lord,’ Nanny Rose added, not believing that.

  ‘You said such extraordinary things. And you seemed to be seeing such extraordinary things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t remember.’ But Harriet remembered perfectly well. ‘Rubbish. All jumbled together. Nothing of any importance.’

  ‘Mr Fielding wanted to bring you an Arab doctor, but we said no thank you to that. He’d have probably finished you off. No, I said to him, the best hope for her is quinine and good nursing. But, as I said, there were times when I really thought …’

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s talk any more about it,’ Harriet interrupted. ‘Let’s talk about something more cheerful. The good news is that Trudy has had four puppies.’

  ‘Oh, how wonderful!’

  ‘Sunny was present with Daan at the birth. He wants to bring the puppies to show you but I told him it was early days for that.’

  ‘He was so sweet when you were barely conscious. So attentive. He would sit for hour after hour by your bedside, never stirring. We had difficulty in getting him to come and eat his meals.’

  ‘He’s become absolutely devoted to you,’ Harriet said. ‘He adores you.’

  During those days of convalescence, Alexine would struggle to differentiate between the things that had really happened and the things that had happened in her delirium. Those things in her delirium were so much more vivid than the things before it and now after it. Her walk through the village with Fielding, the leaping flames, the jostling crowds, the music and the dancing: all were hazy, as though now seen through a window streaming with rain. Hazy too were the appearances of people who bent over to ask her how she was, told her what preparations were being made for the next stage of their journey, or attempted to cheer her up or at least elicit a smile with some gossip of the camp or the town. But those scenes of the crowd tearing the woman apart and devouring her, of the matter-of-fact killing of the baby, of Sunny masturbating before her: all those scenes and others hardly less terrible, still had a devastating vividness.

  As she made the comparison between the one set of happenings and the other, she was overwhelmed by horror and disgust. How could she have brought out of some deep, dark recess of her being prodigies far more terrible than even this huge, frightening, fascinating continent was capable of spawning out of its pitch-black womb? That question haunted her, perpetually coming between her and the world in which she had once taken so much pleasure.

  Chapter Eighteen

  HARRIET, ALONE IN HER TENT, was writing to Addy.

  Before her, on the desk that had come all the way from the house in The Hague, three other letters were piled, awaiting the runner who never came and was less and less likely to come. In those earlier letters she had written of Alexine’s long and bewildering illness (‘ We think that she must have picked up something at that terrible mission station, where everyone was dying’)’, of her eventual recovery (‘When the crisis came, her sheets got sopping wet, so that we were constantly changing them’), and of their thankfulness that they still had her with them (‘We really thought that we had lost her forever’).

  Now she wrote:

  Alexine stands the journey surprisingly well. Well, you know how courageous she is, allowing nothing to daunt her. She is still terribly pale and thin, and Ahmed has to tempt her with all sorts of delicacies if we are to get her to eat. Sunny has been wonderful. He is no longer the child whom you will remember, but a little man, fully aware of his responsibilities to this woman whom (I am sure) he has come to look on as his mother.

  To travel she has a stretcher with a canopy above it to keep off the sun – you know how trying it can be. There’s a mattress on it, so that she rests very agreeably and often takes a refreshing nap. I have a chair, as we both had when you were with us. Nanny Rose now has your chair. She, too, has been a boon and blessing. I don’t know how I’d have managed through those terrible days without her support. She was a rock.

  We are each carried by four negroes, with eight in reserve, so that they can take turns and so get some rest. The twelve men are always the same, with the result that we have become very fond of them, always so cheerful and kind, and they – I sincerely hope and think! – have become fond of us. We now have fewer negroes for our immediate baggage than when you were with us – some 120 in all. Over the months a number have deserted.

  All today was lovely – the ground a vivid green full of flowers, and everywhere groups of tall, elegant trees. I defy any part of Europe to show anything better.

  ‘More letters!’

  Harriet laid down her pen. ‘How are you feeling, darling?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘You mustn’t overdo things. You must remember that you were very ill indeed.’

  ‘This is my idea for where we go next. I wanted to show you.’ Alexine began to unfold the Colonel’s tattered map.

  ‘Oh, no. I can’t read maps, you know I can’t! I leave all that to you. What’s worrying me is the maize.’

  ‘The maize?’

  ‘We ought to have bought more in that town where you fell so ill. We could have done. That was my fault. I miscalculated, I’m afraid. Osman says that we’ll soon reach another town, quite prosperous, where we can buy some. But you know how unreliable he is, much of the time one can’t believe a word he tells one.’

  Alexine raised a hand and yawned behind it.

  ‘You’re tired! See! I knew you were overdoing things.’

  ‘I’m not tired. It’s just that all this talk of provisions bores me. I leave all that to you and Ahmed.’

  ‘Oh, he’s a rogue!’


  ‘Well, then to you alone.’

  ‘Now go and lie down for a little. Before we eat. Our supply of oil for the lamps is also running out.’

  The last of all Harriet’s letters to Addy began:

  This will only be a brief note, since I have a terrible headache and feel generally rather under par. Nanny has doubled my daily dose of quinine. The old dear, in her usually pessimistic way, has decided that I must be coming down with African fever. But if I were going to get it, surely I’d have got it long ago? If it’s anything, I think that it may be a recurrence of that dysentery I had a few weeks back. It was very inconvenient but the Dr James Mixture soon put a stop to it …

  She gave up there, deciding that she would complete the letter on the following evening. Ahmed had reported that there had been more thefts from the kitchen stores – this time of sugar and jam. She must see to that. She must also have a word with the two personal maids, who had been quarrelling again, each accusing the other of not doing her fair share of the work. Oh, why were so many of them so often at loggerheads? She put a hand to her forehead. Yes, she must have a fever. Her forehead was hot but a chill was beginning to rattle her bones. Oh, well, she’d better get over to the kitchens …

  Next evening, she sat making one of her lists.

  Provisions urgent – to be purchased as soon as possible:

  Flour

  Sheep (for mutton)

  Hens? (Poor layers to be slaughtered?)

  Then she got up stiffly, her teeth chattering, and, without even removing her shoes or her shawl, lay out on her narrow bed. She closed her eyes but, so violent were the rigours that now shook her, she could not sleep.