She remembered: rows of tents like the grid of some gigantic board game; people arrayed like pieces on the board. A handful out in front; knots of others, wary. One or two who offered smiles; not many, most were blank, giving nothing. She remembered the way Miss Strutton marched to overtake the sergeant and reach the inspector first. How she launched into instructions about tents – Joe go to the one he shared with Matt, and Ella to Charly’s. Ella hadn’t expected this teacher to be small and pretty, or to smile a lot at the inspector, encouragingly, like this was just a friendly visit! She’d kept saying things like, ‘I think you’ll agree that using those tents is by far the most convenient arrangement for everyone. It’s really quite unnecessary to go to the trouble of putting up new tents at this point in time –’
Charly’s tent! Spend a night in it – all empty! Just the thought filled Ella with such desolation that she’d struggled to hold back the tears.
I could see the inspector didn’t like Miss Strutton’s idea. Or her smiles! It all made him angry. He just pretended he didn’t hear her. But he stayed very polite and didn’t once shout like I half expected him to, when she kept on and on.
So now, we’ve got a new tent each, Charly. Joe in his and me in mine, both of us right next to the inspector’s (but I don’t think any of us slept much tonight). I looked outside just now, and saw a torch moving about in Joe’s, and there’s been a lamp on in the inspector’s all night. He’s probably reading the interviews again and again – he says funny things like ‘we must find the angle of light that will illuminate what we have not seen before’ but I know what he means. He says he’s going to talk to everyone here again, while the army’s searches go on. Often I can hear Sergeant Kaonga’s voice in the inspector’s tent, too, but I don’t think anything’s happening, there hasn’t been any helicopter noise for a bit, though I heard them a while ago. There’s two other policemen here as well, keeping contact by radio with the helicopters.
CHARLY, WHERE ARE YOU? HAVEN’T YOU LEFT ME ANY CLUE WHERE YOU’VE GONE? ISN’T THERE ANYTHING TO HELP US?
For a very long while, she sat looking at the last sentences, trying to push back the surge of hopelessness. Make a plan. Make a list of things to do as soon as it’s properly light, she told herself. So I don’t just wander about and wait, like in the hospital.
In Charly’s second letter was her sketch of the rock and the camp and a place over to one side marked with a little stick figure sitting down, and labelled, CHARLY’S PLACE. Below that:
There’s this place I go to write up my notes – I really wish you were here to see it, Elly. It’s out of the camp, a beach by the stream – fig and tamarind trees lean over it so it’s always cool. There’s always rustling and scuffling – at first it made me nervous, but then I realised it’s just small animals – two tiny antelopes – dik diks – living nearby (Bambis!), frogs and lizards camouflaged so completely you almost never spot them (though I saw a massive green monitor lizard, a metre long or more, I thought it was a crocodile!) – and of course the birds. Even the names are magic – laughing dove, emerald cuckoo, hornbills, sunbirds, hoopoes, golden weavers, purple grenadiers, turacos. High on the rocks are hawk eagles, falcons, red kites, clouds and clouds of swifts and swallows and an eagle owl with a very spooky call, troops of baboons (babies riding their backs) and hundreds of monkeys.
The bigger animals come to drink at the western end of the rock 3 miles away, but we still have to keep a lookout. At night we keep dim lights round the edge of the camp to discourage four-footed visitors. We’re circled by glittering eyes – antelope and zebra sneaking in for a closer look. The first night it was really unnerving! It’s the weirdest feeling, the way you turn a corner and there’s something wild. Dusk yesterday, a pregnant lioness walked across the grass in plain sight of the tents! She stopped, looked at us, we looked at her, then she just went on! Yesterday, our vehicle alarmed a rhino. He galloped at us, changed his mind, head-butted a tree and trotted away with tail up like a flag! There’s also our resident leopard – afternoons we’ve seen him slumped in a tree, flat on his stomach, legs dangling like a sleepy tabby. But then he crossed in front of us one night (the Land Rover was crawling along after dark – we’d got bogged down in sand on the way back from Burukanda, and had to be shunted out by passing herdsmen. They thought the whole thing was very funny!). The leopard was carrying a kill, and he just dropped it and melted away into the dark. We heard him hunting again last night – Likon picked out the rasping cough and made us stop and listen.
Altogether there’s something about this place that makes you feel so SMALL. Night’s sudden – one minute fiery horizons, next minute deep deep blackness going on forever, you FEEL the size of the sky! Like it’s the beginning of time. We had a storm last night, air suffocating, then lightning like glass breaking, the clouds on fire. Water poured off Chomlaya and boulders smashed down. The camp was a mudbath in minutes. It was just a freak downpour – the rains are weeks away, but it felt as if it could wash us right off the earth!
Abruptly Ella stopped reading. The last words hammered in her head. She could not stand being alone any more. She listened for sounds in the camp. After a minute she located low voices, a swish of footsteps through the grass nearby. She unzipped the tent. Two girls were pouring water from a bucket carried between them, first into a plastic bowl outside the inspector’s tent, then Joe’s. There was one already left for her.
She took it into her tent, washed, found clean clothes, and suddenly the simple, ordinary tasks gave her a burst of optimism, as if Pirian’s words about hope and courage and Chomlaya being the place of life flew into the air around her and lifted her to a brighter place.
I will find you, Charly.
She took the bowl beyond the edge of the camp as she saw others doing, and poured the used water under a thirsty-looking bush. Then she stood looking back at the camp, at how it spread through the trees in the sweeping curve of Chomlaya’s precipitous cliffs. On both sides they folded round the cluster of tents, in deep shadow at this hour, for the sun was not yet above the eastern shoulder of the rock. Everything under the trees rippled with green light, leaves and hanging vines rustling in the updraughts of air that constantly stroked the face of the crags. Everywhere, birds alighted daringly on guy ropes or swirled upwards in a glory of crimsons and yellows, purples and greens. Never had Ella heard such a chirruping and warbling, or moved among so many free, wild creatures, so untouchable yet so close; she held tight, in her mind, to Charly’s list of magical bird names, to Charly’s pleasure at this place, and again she heard her sister’s voice, I wish you were here, Elly, so I could show you . . .
I am here, Charly. You will.
Then the inspector’s voice sounded, calling her and Joe. They all three went together to join Sergeant Kaonga beneath the large white awning furnished with long trestle tables, into the clamour of plates thudding on wood and the hubbub of voices that echoed the moan of search helicopters buzzing on the far side of the rock.
Miss Strutton strode towards them. ‘Joe, join that table over there. Inspector, there is a place for you here.’
Ella felt the inspector straighten sharply. ‘Thank you, but Joe will stay with me.’
‘Inspector, it is inappropriate for Joe not to eat with the other students. He should rejoin the routine of the camp –’
‘The boy is here only to assist the police. Otherwise he would be in the hospital. He is not fully well yet, I am sorry to say this, Miss Strutton. It is better that he faces no expectations except the return of his memory. I hope you will see that it is appropriate for this boy to stay in my care. Your routines must go on without him.’
‘Inspector, I really don’t see . . . ’
Ella cast a glance at Joe. He kept his eyes down, refused to look at the woman even when she spoke to him. Except, Ella saw, for a fleeting astonishment when Miss Strutton suddenly stopped arguing and moved away.
‘Now the smiling Miss Strutton is not in good humour,’ she he
ard the inspector’s murmur to the sergeant. ‘It is this way always?’
‘Oi, I have seen this!’ came the reply. ‘If you contradict her too much, she will give you a detention!’ The sergeant waggled his head, grinning at his own joke.
Murothi grunted, and Ella noticed how deliberately he turned his back towards Miss Strutton’s position at another table. He ushered Ella and Joe to seats, and went off with the sergeant to fetch bowls of food ladled from a large metal pot.
Joe, sitting opposite Ella, was lost at once in some private web of thought. His face was so forlorn, Ella itched to smooth it away.
‘Joe?’
He looked up at her.
‘You OK?’
As if seeing things for the first time, he looked round, then back at her.
‘Bit weird. Sorry – dunno . . . ’ he spoke hesitantly. But perhaps he looked a little less haunted. Smiled at her even, just slightly.
She concentrated on the bowl of thick, sweet maize porridge the inspector placed in front of her. But hunger warred with a new churning of her stomach at Sergeant Kaonga’s morning report to the inspector, delivered rapidly between gulps of tea.
‘The climbers have begun again, just now. Yesterday they are going up the gully where Joe was found. They are looking into all the little ravines on the sides. They must go carefully, carefully. Now it is dry, but when the rains come, it runs down this way, angry, angry, everything slips, down, down, sometimes, the rock is just clinging, ready to fall. These people are looking everywhere. Nothing. Today they will go again, straight to the top. This ridge has not been surveyed from close up, on foot. We will hear if they see anything. This is certain. Constable Lesakon and Constable Lakuya will call me on the radio, Sir.’
Ella put her spoon down. The inspector, ever alert, turned to look at her, questioningly.
‘There’s Charly’s place. Like she says in her letter, where she likes to go –’
‘Of course, of course,’ the sergeant interposed. ‘That is not far. Inspector Murothi has already asked of this, and others have told us of your sister’s liking for this place. It has been searched. All – from there to there,’ he flung his arms to denote the length of the rock. ‘It is certain, the whole of the flat area on this side was investigated, on foot and from the helicopters, the first day. Many people came to help! Now it is the turn of the other side.’
‘Yes,’ Ella said. She picked up the spoon again. She couldn’t face even a mouthful. She dropped the spoon into the bowl.
‘Eat, Ella,’ said the inspector. ‘We need you to help us think. The brain needs food. This is our task, to think, to ask, to make others think. No despair. The answer is here. The answer is here. We will find it.’
Sergeant Kaonga nodded energetically. ‘Eat!’ he echoed, aiming his words at Joe who was hunched over and staring into space again.
Suddenly two girls at another table stood up, looked round at Joe, and then peered further along where Miss Strutton and the other teachers sat. Joe, with his back to the girls, did not see them.
Rapidly and decisively they crossed the grassy gap between the tables and stopped beside Joe.
‘Hey, Joe,’ one said. ‘How’re you doing . . . ?’ She trailed off at the inadequacy of the question.
As if stung from a daydream, Joe straightened up.
‘Where’ve you been, Joe? I mean, where’d you go? Where’s Anna –’ stopped by the nudging elbow of the other girl. She reddened, ‘Oh, yeah, sorry, only . . . just . . . no one’s telling us –’
Joe shook his head, ‘It’s OK, Tamara – well, it’s – sort of . . . ’
At which point Tamara seemed to notice something behind Joe. She moved round him sharply and turned her back towards whatever it was. It was such a defiant, blocking gesture, that Ella leaned to see past her at what was there.
Just another group at the next table. Boys and girls. No one looking their way. Nothing in particular Ella could see.
Tamara turned her attention to Ella. ‘They say you’re Charly’s sister? Are you going out on the searches? We’re not allowed to. They’re afraid we’ll get lost. So we’re just all hanging about. I’m Tamara, this is Janey. Are we allowed to talk to you? Miss says –’
‘Miss doesn’t get to say any more,’ Joe broke in, abruptly shedding the vagueness. ‘He does,’ indicating Inspector Murothi. From his determined concentration on the empty plate in front of him, Ella could tell the policeman was listening to every word.
‘Oh, right.’ Tamara glanced at Janey as if for guidance. There was none. She went on, ‘I s’pose, we’ve got to go, really. We’re on kitchen duty in a minute. We’re not doing trips out of the camp, till everyone’s found, so Miss’s got this B-I-G Idea to get us working on the Competition, and she’s doing a Briefing, at 8.30.’ She rolled her eyes elaborately, threw a nervous smile at Joe and Ella, then moved away. Janey followed her a few paces, stopped, turned round again, and said in a rush, aimed at Ella.
‘Look, if you – you know – want to hang out, that’s our tent over there.’ She pointed along the first row. ‘Fourth along, the greeny-browny one. Any time, we’re just round there all today.’
Surprised, grateful, Ella looked where she pointed, ‘Oh! Thanks, if it’s OK –’
‘Can I say this,’ interrupted the inspector, ‘you may talk to anybody you wish to, Ella.’
‘That’s what I said. I’m saying,’ Joe muttered with extraordinary ferocity, ‘if it’s how Miss wants, no one gets to talk to anyone about anything!’
Janey flashed an embarrassed look at Ella and then Joe. ‘Look, Joe, you come over to our tent if you want. There’s me and Tamara and Antony and Zak . . . and, you know . . . like, sorry, really . . . ’ and she marched away rapidly without risk of possible answer, throwing a last, fraught look at Joe.
Light-headed from a night of ragged sleep, Joe watched her go, tensed against the next weird feeling to hit him – flares of colour, tilting ground, like he was on some invisible roller-coaster; or the echo, some bird, twanging his nerves –
Got to work it out. Got to. About Charly, about us being in Charly’s tent.
Ask Inspector Murothi. Can’t be the same reason, Charly being gone. But not in front of Ella. She thinks Charly’s with Anna and Matt and Silowa. Don’t want her to hear, don’t want to make her more scared. Tell her to go with Janey and Tamara, like they said.
Matt. Tent. Matt . . . the struggle to recall, to understand, was a pounding in his head, like trying to batter a door open. Shadows twisted across the edge of his sight, gone when he tried to look at them. No, not shadows, fired with red . . .
Why were we waiting? Why Charly’s tent? Why did we GO there, when she wasn’t there?
He felt someone stand beside him. Close. He looked up. There, leaning against the table, was Sean.
7 a.m
Sean.
Rewind two weeks. Four days into the trip – Joe’s stuttering memory dumps him there all over again.
Breakfast. Matt’s on the far side of the table. He’s yammering at Anna, peppered with sounds on his harmonica to demonstrate. Joe, sitting opposite, can’t really hear, just notes the attentive tilt of Anna’s head and likes her for it: Matt rants on a bit about music.
Anna’s nodding, offering suggestions. Matt’s telling her his new idea – mimicking birdsongs, animal grunts, roars, snuffles. There’s been a few in the night, bringing everyone out of bed to the netting at the front of their tents, straining eyes through darkness to spot anything move. Matt stayed up for hours, his shape outlined against the sky as Joe drifted back to sleep.
In the morning he’s all charged up about it. ‘You can hear a lion’s roar five miles away! Tomis told me.’ The ranger has been giving them talks: ‘Animals of Chomlaya’; Matt fires endless questions, experiments on the harmonica for Tomis’s approval. The ranger laughs a lot, entering into the spirit of the enterprise, hooting and snorting and squealing to show Matt.
‘Look, look, Joe! Imagine a lion b
eing right up at the tent! Tomis says they come to drink just along the ridge there. And that laughing thing, ending like a groan? That’s a hyena, he says they’ll sneak right into the camp at night. The snuffly, snorty stuff – that’s an anteater. We might get elephants too! Imagine falling into these big holes outside the tent and they’re elephant footprints that weren’t there when you went to bed. Just think what it’d feel like! It’s happened to Tomis. He’s sleeping near this river, right? The elephants just come round him and drink and then they go away again. He doesn’t wake up, just finds it all in the morning!’
‘You could do water and wind sounds too,’ is Anna’s suggestion. ‘Let’s go along to the stream. There’s that place where it gurgles in the rock, and then the swampy, reedy bit with all the rustling. Hey, let’s do that later. Joe, what do you think? Matt could call it “Wildsong”, or something?’
Joe doesn’t know it then, but it’s setting her off on some obsession of her own, too. Some time that day she begins the sketching in her logbook. They’re all meant to keep a logbook of Chomlaya Camp. But none of them are.
Miss Strutton’s spotted that. She’s announced a Logbook Inspection. Rewards and Punishments To Follow.
Joe’s really thinking about that, half-listening to Matt and Anna. He’s deciding: sort something out, quick. Preventative action. Collect stuff – feathers, leaves, seeds – even flakes of bone and flint from the archaeology place. Stick them on the pages, quick. Label them later. Evasive tactics. Stop Miss registering his existence.
Third ‘inspection’ she’s called. She’s got a thing about inspections. Infusing discipline and team spirit, she calls it. Points given for this, points cancelled for that. Weird. Like they’re a bunch of primary school kids.
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