Rift

by Beverley Birch

  Silence again, expectant and probing. Joe looked from one to the other. Their anticipation scared him. He cast round desperately for something to say. But the tall one spoke suddenly, his voice quiet and quick in contrast to the deeper, louder tones of the other man. ‘It is not to blame you, you understand. District Commissioner Meshami is just hoping that more will come to your memory, to help us.’

  ‘Of course. Inspector Murothi is right,’ said the one Joe now knew was the District Commissioner. ‘We seek help, not blame.’ The man moved to sit down next to Joe, and it was better not having the pair of them drilling into him with their eyes.

  ‘Several puzzles must be solved,’ he heard the DC say. ‘First, there is how you were wandering around, so far from your camp . . . ’ He paused, as if to allow this to sink in. ‘So, Joe, if you will think again, hard, now that you are more rested. How did you go there? What was your route? It will tell us where to look –’

  Joe hesitated. ‘I don’t know about going anywhere. We were just in the camp. We never went over the rock, we only went to the archaeology dig like everyone else, before, and that’s not that way, is it?’

  ‘No, it is not. We can show you a map . . . ’

  Joe’s mind filled with something, like a replay button pushed on.

  In the tent. Anna, Silowa, Matt. No light, dark.

  Tent. Charly’s tent. Charly wasn’t there.

  Something stark and simple penetrated, something he could clear up, that the police had got all wrong. They said Anna, Silowa, Matt and Charly were all missing.

  Urgently, he said, ‘Wait, wait – Charly just went to the archaeology camp at Burukanda, so she’ll be back!’

  DC Meshami put out a steadying hand. ‘Yes, yes, she went, we know. But she came back the next day, Joe. She was in the camp after you had gone. We know this. Did you see her again? Please, please, think.’

  He thought. He hung on as hard as he could, dragging the picture out of obscurity. Charly’s tent. Flare of moonlight through canvas. Silowa cross-legged on the floor. Anna too. Matt lying on the bed, arguing, ‘They’ll just find us here, you know they will, Anna. Joe? Joe, won’t they just do something else? We’ve got to tell –’

  ‘Who? Tell who? What’s the point!’ Anna’s voice sharp with insistence. ‘Charly’s the only one who listens, and she’s not here. No, we’ll show them. Joe, Joe – we’ll do it, right? Silowa? And after we’ll get Charly to –’ and Silowa interrupting, ‘But I think Matt is right, I think this is very bad things –’ and then all stopping, hearing the stealthy brush of movement along the outside of the tent –

  The memory stalled. Something swung on the edges of his vision, swung and turned, then he had a picture of Anna kneeling, looking down, and a face – Sean’s face. It appeared suddenly below, and Anna dodged back, out of Sean’s sight, shoving Silowa back too –

  Then there was just the murk of the tent again and the swing of a black, swaying pendulum –

  He pushed hair out of his eyes. His hands were icy but sweaty, as if the thermostat in his body had packed up.

  Inspector Murothi caught his eye. It was an alert yet sympathetic glance, and Joe suddenly had the urge to tell him about the nonsensical fragments cluttering his head. But there was a knock on the door, and Ella peered tentatively into the room, seemed to sense she had broken a delicate moment and backed away again.

  ‘Miss Tanner, it is all right,’ the DC beckoned her. ‘Please stay.’ He patted Joe’s shoulder. ‘These things will return to you, when you are more rested, I think. Do not be disturbed.’ He got up. ‘For now, Inspector Murothi will be my eyes and ears, and you are to stay with him. Inspector, I will leave you to tell these two young people what will happen now. But I would like a word with you on one or two detailed matters before I leave.’

  A quick, reassuring half-smile to Joe from Inspector Murothi. He followed the DC out.

  With immense relief, Joe looked at Ella.

  Suddenly alone with Joe, every question Ella wanted to ask vanished beneath the temptation to bolt back to the crowded bustle of the clinic. Joe wouldn’t want her here, intruding: she turned away, embarrassed, going towards her bag as if she had something to do.

  Joe put a hand out to stop her; she felt his fingers hot and tense. ‘I was going to come and find you. To ask – things. They said I’ve been gone for days. Is it true?’

  She turned to face him. She said carefully, ‘They found you the day before yesterday in the afternoon. Inspector Murothi says you disappeared the day before, maybe quite early in the morning, maybe during the night, even. They don’t know, really. So you’ve been gone maybe a day and half.’

  ‘So the others – it’s . . . ’ He didn’t finish.

  She filled it in. ‘Third day today.’

  She saw his shock.

  ‘Charly too?’ the question came in a whisper.

  This time she didn’t answer, just looking at him, helplessly.

  After a minute, she said, ‘I’m going to make the inspector take me to Chomlaya.’

  ‘Well, you have succeeded!’ Inspector Murothi’s voice rang from the door. ‘We go, all of us, to Chomlaya. We will look for your friends, Joe, and for your sister, Miss Tanner. And we will find them.’

  I should not have said that, Murothi thought. I should have been truthful. I should not make promises to these children that I may not be able to keep. I should have said If they can be found, we will find them.

  ‘You understand, man,’ DC Meshami had told him, ‘the temperatures out there are killers. The most urgent thing is to know which direction they took. We need to focus our searches.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Murothi had reassured him. ‘These interviews of yours, Sir, they tell a story, but I cannot see it clearly. A two-pronged attack, Sir – your searches continue outside, I will look from inside, get to the bottom of things. Sir, I can undertake this for you.’

  The DC had appeared to calculate, staring through the window at the encampment of blanket-awnings thrown up by the long-distance travellers waiting their turn in the clinic.

  Then, ‘Well, we understand each other, Inspector Murothi. I will maintain contact with the British High Commission and the British police. I will tell you as soon as the other parents are contacted. There are unexpected delays – with their children here, they seem to have gone on holiday! But we brace ourselves for their imminent arrival. We are looking for Silowa’s people: herders. They move all the time.’ He sighed. ‘So, now, I will arrange a vehicle to take you to the landing-strip, and you will be flown to Chomlaya. You will receive full cooperation – I have a young sergeant there, Adewa Kaonga, coordinating the continuing investigation. He is intelligent and diligent, and he is aided by two constables, both very good men. They will remain in contact with me and with the team we have assembled with the army on the north side: 24-hour helicopter surveillance, two teams of climbers, with local people who know the terrain . . . ’

  A pause. Murothi seized it. ‘The newspapers speculate about elephant poachers and cattle raiding . . . ’

  ‘Not here. We have active game guards in this region. If the children were caught up in something, we would hear! Inspector Murothi, I have considered whether it may be kidnap. Across the border, between the warring rebels and the out-of-control army in that country . . . ’

  A chill descended on Murothi, contemplating the missing people taken. But emphatically the DC shook his head. ‘No, no! No evidence of this – people are not slow to talk. Look, here is what I say to you, my friend: there is enough senseless death and misery in my region. You see it in this hospital! If the rains fail again, there will be desperation. Conflict about access to water will flare up and may reach even here. We are powerless in these matters, men like you and I. But this nonsense of disappearing people – this is something we can do. We will solve it, yes? If these people are alive, we will bring them back. And if they are not alive, we will learn what has happened.’

  For a long moment, DC Meshami h
ad regarded Murothi. ‘Truthfully, man, are you sure you wish to take both these children back to Chomlaya camp?’

  Murothi was sure: Joe to conjure up obscured memories. Ella – why Ella?

  ‘She has her sister’s correspondence. She has knowledge of her sister,’ he offered.

  But it was not the only truth. It seemed to Murothi that it was the only way to prevent the British High Commission sending Ella back to London. In the remaining camp at Chomlaya, with the other students and teachers and the police presence, she would not be alone while they searched for her sister.

  That, Murothi thought, was something he could do.

  3 p.m.

  Leaving the shadow of the helicopter, they step out into the sunlight. A stifling blanket of heat engulfs, and then submerges them, and Ella feels the light as a white pain behind the eyes. It merges with a new, raw fear that is something to do with the vision of Charly lost in this furnace of a place, and something to do with the line of unknown people waiting for them across the expanse of browning plain.

  Chomlaya rises a few hundred metres away. Its towering russet walls stretch away to right and left, fringed with green along its base, where Ella knows, from Charly’s letter, that the stream runs. In places, foliage drapes its flanks; as they near she can see the hanks and loops of trailing creepers, contours of bushes and trees jutting from ledges and crevices. Between, the rock leans in massive naked slabs or bulges in huge knobbled fists and fingers sculpted by shifting light and shadow so that they seem almost to move against the bleached, painful brilliance of the sky.

  In a thicket of green straight ahead are the tents, and to one side an encampment that she can discern as more makeshift, like the one near the hospital, and she guesses it was thrown up by people coming to help with the search.

  Then she finds herself wondering, having not thought of this before, if among them is there a father or mother, a sister or brother of Silowa, waiting, hoping, dreading, feeling just as she does.

  Murothi has always had feelings about places: calm where contented lives are lived, fear where bad things have happened. He’d sensed that last year where he found the body of the unfortunate murdered tourist – a turmoil in the angry whine of insects along the barren beach that was a remnant of an earlier, bitter quarrel.

  Now, he feels Chomlaya. It is a sensation so strong that he slows in his step, and comes to a halt, looking up. As if he is entering the sphere of a vast, quiet, watchful presence. There is no malevolence. Only an overwhelming certainty that everything passing around and over and under it is known, and the rock is unmoved. It is simply there; has always been, will always be, a gigantic rocky spine eroding out of the plain like a beast breaking from the soil. What has it endured? he wonders. What has it survived? And in a fanciful, uncharacteristic way, he finds himself speculating that the rock hears his questions and perceives his profound insignificance against its own unguessable history.

  There must be stories about it. Snapping back to his police-man’s thoughts he senses this may be something missing in the investigation. Stories can move people in unexpected and astonishing ways . . .

  He must ask the DC’s Sergeant Kaonga. He can see a figure in police uniform leaving the trees and coming towards them, raising a hand in greeting. In response, Murothi raises his own.

  And then Joe falters, stumbles, and Murothi reaches to steady him.

  The boy is not well, he thinks. I should perhaps not have brought him here; I must pay attention to this too and do what is right, not just what is useful . . .

  Beneath Joe’s feet, the earth tilts; he is awash with sound; tremors pulse through him even as the inspector’s grip jolts him back, to here, now, the hot soil beneath his feet, the scratchy bushes, the helicopter behind, the rock, camp, people ahead.

  He swallows, and fear is wedged hard between wanting to be back, out there looking for them, to remember, and the fog of an unnameable gloom at the emerging tents and people ahead.

  Ella slows beside him. Gives him a small, tight smile and keeps steady step with him. She’s scared too, for Charly.

  He gives way to the inspector’s hold. Lets him usher them both carefully towards the camp.

  Above it all, the rock shimmers: the skitterings and flutterings of myriad insects and lizards, monkeys and birds moving on its ancient cragged face. They ignore the three new animals entering the ring of tents far below. But they look up, restive and wary, as the racing shadow of the eagle spans the cliffs, twists towards the high pinnacles, splinters the air with its harsh, trailing cry – so that even impala and eland far out on the plain raise their heads, and turn towards Chomlaya, and wait.

  Second day: Chomlaya

  daybreak

  In the gloom of the tent at first light, alone, Ella found notebook and torch in her pack and wrote,

  Well, Charly, I’m here, where you are, and it’s just like you said, but also SO different! When we were in the helicopter coming here, Inspector Murothi asked the pilot to fly along the rock, and we followed it winding across the plain like the great big snake you described. I saw how steep and high it is, so I understand why everyone thinks Joe couldn’t climb over it. Where they found him it’s really just the rocks and dry plain spreading for miles – we flew over that too. There’s just one waterhole far out in the middle with herders and cattle milling around a bit of water in a kind of bowl of cracked mud. The pilot said it’ll fill up if the rains come next month, and it’s the only place that never completely dries because it’s fed by some underground source in the volcanic rock below, like the stream along Chomlaya. Then when we got to the camp and I saw all the trees round the camp, I knew why you said you’re puzzled why no one lives there – all that water in such a dry place! It is strange, isn’t it? The pilot also took us in a big loop over the Burukanda archaeology place – down quite low over the tents and the diggings, and everyone waved at us, and I thought of you going there to email me. I’M SO GLAD I’VE GOT YOUR LETTERS AND EMAILS, CHARLY. I showed them to the inspector. He read them all and asked if he could keep them. But then he looked at me hard, like he knew I need to have them with me, and said he didn’t have to take them after all ‘but perhaps I can borrow them again later, for a short while, Miss Tanner.’ It’s odd when he calls me Miss Tanner so I said he didn’t need to and now he just says Ella, which is better. When he was reading your letters and emails he showed me where you talk about the ‘interesting boy from Burukanda who’s friends with some students’, and wanted to know if I thought that’s Silowa. It is, isn’t it? You’re friends with Silowa and Matt and Anna, and that’s why you’re in the photo with them. And maybe you’re with them now, but the trouble is we don’t know, we can’t work anything out, not even if Joe was with you at the beginning. He still doesn’t remember anything. And the photo is important, isn’t it? I don’t know why but I just feel that when I look at it. I told the inspector, and asked him what he thought of that bit in your email about elephants.

  She read Charly’s email again.

  Hi Elly. Here’s More Notes from Chomlaya! Third day, and we’ve started getting visitors! Miss S ‘disapproves’ and instructs us not to ‘encourage it’. Haven’t figured out yet what she’s so knotted up about. The visitors are all children, SO curious about what we’re doing here. They wander the plains with goats and cattle, v young, v inquisitive, v lively, v keen to show off their English (lucky for me)! There’s 4 local languages spoken just round here, 300 in the whole country! The national language is Kisewa, but because English is taught in schools, these children are pretty much fluent – and worth a library of information, I could fill notebooks and notebooks with their chatter! Most of them are from nomadic herder families. There’s 3 schools for the whole vast area, and they attend when they’re near, when their parents have scraped fees together, when they can be spared from looking after livestock. So by the time they’re 14 some have 1 or 2 years at school, others manage a year or 2 more. But they natter on IN ENGLISH about schools, exams,
hopes, plans, AMBITIONS. Here’s a list: airline pilot, vet, ‘environmental’ scientist, ‘big shot farmer’, teacher, to have an enormous herd and get very rich, doctor, rally driver (they’ve seen the cars going through). They don’t have 2p between them, but they don’t know the meaning of narrow horizons or limited ambition! It’s awful to know the chances of even one of them realising their hopes are so slim as to be almost invisible. They all want pen pals (that’s something I CAN DO with some of the students in the camp, and WILL DO when I return, let’s do it together, Elly – maybe get your school involved?)

  Then one small girl told me her school is closed because of elephants, and I thought she was winding me up! Tomis heard, though, and explained that the elephants have shifted their usual migration route, creating havoc in plantations round several villages. Fences, noise, nothing’s turning them away, so they’ve called in an elephant-diversion-specialist to help sort it out.

  I showed him that bit, Charly, Ella carried on writing, because I keep wondering if you’ve been hurt by animals. We see the vultures in the sky all over, and the animal bones lying in the grass. And Pirian, the nurse in the hospital, said a boy was crushed by an elephant. I can’t stop thinking things like that. But the inspector said it isn’t likely because we’d find you. Then he got this expression on his face, and looked quickly at Joe too, and sort of hesitated. I think he wished he hadn’t started saying that, he meant we’d find your bodies, or maybe your skeletons, so then I wished I hadn’t asked, and he said there’s no point in wondering about everything that could happen, everyone’s got to keep searching with the helicopters, and we’ve just got to work out where you’ve gone. That’s why Joe’s coming back to Chomlaya, to try and help him remember. It makes him feel really scared that he can’t, he looks as if he’s hearing things in his head all the time. When we were walking in to the camp I saw he wanted to avoid that teacher – the one you write about. Now I’ve met her, I see what you mean.