17
Escape
As I well knew, the Captain would soon be back. Still shaking with panic, I tried to steady myself against the helm, steering the ferry away from the submerged sandbanks that might have stranded us. The great brown back of the Mallory flowed towards us, its beaches already striped by the shadows of the trees in the late afternoon sun. For all their welcome, these pleasant groves of feather-palms and spring bamboo offered far less protection than the overhangs of the rain-forest we had left behind.
Noon sat in the front seat of the limousine, one hand over her mouth, the other resting on the buttons of the cassette player, as if she could again save me from Kagwa and the helicopter with a few paragraphs of correspondence-college sociology. I was still naked, but she had not seen the blood caked on my right shoulder in a dark red epaulette. The wounds to my ear and scalp had dried, but I could already feel the effects of a mild concussion, and the first stray mental confusion. Inside my head the pain seemed to merge with the roar of the Salammbo’s engine, the clicking rush of water against the hull plates, and my own anger at the river below my blood-stained feet. I looked down at the rifle beside me, unsure whether I should have fired the last bullet into Captain Kagwa or the treacherous current that had lured me into his sights. Had the river possessed a heart, I would have stepped from the wheelhouse and fired at the warm stream that had lulled us with the day-long idyll at ‘Port Noon’. I could almost believe that an unconscious conspiracy existed between Kagwa and the river, that the Mallory had enlisted the policeman in its own defence. Naively I had taken for granted that the river would allow me to sail unmolested to its source and cut off its headwaters. Instead, it had beguiled me with sweet winds and floral groves, and dressed Noon in its gayest blossoms …
There was a surge of dialogue from the cassette speaker. Noon pushed the driver’s door to and fro, trying to fan the sound towards me. Through the blood on the stern window I could see the helicopter’s navigation lights reflected in the darker water of the late afternoon. Fifty feet above the river, it came up behind us and cruised alongside, slightly aft of the Salammbo’s funnel. Kagwa crouched in the open passenger seat, a police carbine across his knees. His face was without expression, all trace erased of our sometime friendship. The down-draught from the propeller had already dried his uniform, and the creased and shrunken cotton made his thickset figure all the more menacing, as if in his rage he were about to burst through the rumpled fabric.
Noon climbed into the rear seat of the car and closed the door. She sat back, head against the bullet hole in the seat, clasping a cassette between her hands and crooning to herself. I made a last effort to calm my arms and hands, searching the banks for any foliage that might give us cover. The saplings and shrubs formed a thin palisade that would shelter us if I beached the Salammbo. However, once we abandoned the ferry to Kagwa we would have to make our journey on foot, and be relentlessly hunted from the air.
Fifty yards beyond the port bow a steel post rose from the water, bearing a display of broken glass lamps set into a rusty metal bracket. Here the river had overrun the abandoned French army base which guarded the mining concessions at Saliere. We passed more posts that had once formed a line of landing lights in the approach to the military airstrip. The metal humps of a hangar and several workshops stood in the channel like a family of elephants around their bull, asleep with their heads in the water.
The helicopter drew alongside, its pontoons almost as long as the Salammbo. Above the clatter of its propeller I heard the harsh report of a gunshot, its sound swept behind us in the wake of foam and diesel exhaust that lifted into the air. Kagwa leaned sideways in the cockpit, and fired again at the wheelhouse. The first bullet passed through the wooden roof and knocked the glass from a window, but the second struck the helm between my hands, and tore out a foot-long dagger of stained teak. Exhausted by the heavy rudder, I forced the wheel to port and drove the ferry below the helicopter, trying to clip the pontoons with the iron funnel.
The young pilot pulled his craft away, his level eyes watching me without comment, and set out on a wide circuit of the river. As I steered past the upper storey of the airstrip control tower, still marked with the name of the French commanding officer, the bows sent a gust of spray against the galvanized iron panels. Then the helicopter lowered its nose and came in towards the ferry.
Through the approaching clatter of its engine I heard the machine-gun fire a short burst. A bullet rang against the steel hull and another kicked the last of the blood-stained glass from the stern window of the wheelhouse. The helicopter soared past and banked above the partly submerged hangar, ready to attack again. I rolled the wheel to starboard, in an attempt to tack to and fro. The deck tilted and the Mercedes lurched forward and jumped its wooden chocks. Still held by the guy ropes, it slid several feet across the deck, radiator grille overhanging the water.
I tried to change course, throttled back the engine and reversed the rudder. Too late, I saw the long white crescent of a sand-bank emerge from the brown water. The Salammbo ran gently aground, the hull hissing along the sand, and then began to right itself, lifting the nose of the limousine in whose rear seat I could see Noon looking out with the wide-eyed gaze of a child after her first ride on a roller-coaster.
I switched off the fuel pumps to the diesel and cut the engine. In the brief silence I listened to the water lapping at the hull. The river ran past, making its way through the open doors of a drowned workshop. The helicopter flew towards the western bank, its tail pointing towards us, and for a moment I hoped that Kagwa had decided to give up his pursuit, not realizing that the Salammbo was grounded. But then it changed course, banked and approached cautiously across the water. Kagwa had put away his carbine, and sat in the cockpit, looking down at the tilting bonnet of his Mercedes.
He signalled to the pilot, who began a slow descent. Wary of the suction that the wet surface of the sand-bar might exert upon his floats, he landed in the shallow water nearby.
Kagwa jumped down into the knee-deep stream. He stepped on to the white beach of the sand-bar and stood in the fading sunlight, looking up at the grounded hull of the ferry. He walked forward, unbuckling the flap of his holster. As he passed the Mercedes he touched the chromium fender and wiped away the brown silt caked over the headlamps and radiator grille. His face remained closed, and I knew that in his eyes I was already dead, and that my present survival was no more than a brief administrative oversight.
When he drew abreast of the wheelhouse and glanced up at me, he was obviously surprised to see the Lee-Enfield levelled at his chest. I snapped down the bolt, steadying the barrel against the doorpost of the wheelhouse. Kagwa looked back at his footprints in the soft sand, puzzled that they should have led him into this modest ambush. He made no attempt to draw his revolver, and retreated awkwardly along the sand-bar. He raised his right hand in a signal to the young Frenchman, who was watching me from the cockpit of the helicopter, carbine at the ready.
I trained the rifle’s sights at the triangle of sweat above Kagwa’s heart, and listened to the soft thudding of the engine and the silver ripple of the current. I knew that I could not shoot the Captain – if I did the pilot would take off and rake the ferry from stem to stern with his machine-gun, igniting the drums of diesel oil and killing Noon and myself. Even if we abandoned the ferry he would soon track us down. Although Kagwa was determined to kill me, I needed him in order to stay alive. In his attacks upon us he had been careful not to damage the Mercedes, and the car played a potent role in his dream of establishing himself in his secessionist capital.
The pilot had disconnected his headset. He tidied his seat and dashboard in a matter-of-fact way, and then climbed from the cockpit, carbine in hand, as the idling propeller cuffed the air over his head. Kagwa stepped backwards into his water-filled footsteps, almost within the shelter of the ferry’s bows. The pilot stood on the port pontoon, his weight tilting the helicopter to one side and exposing the underbelly
of the starboard float. The water dripped from the rusting metal, revealing its patchwork of cheap welding.
I turned the sights away from Kagwa, and took aim at the underside of the starboard float. Before the pilot could jump into the water I fired the last bullet, then ejected the cartridge and drove the bolt forward, as if loading another round.
Already the pilot had climbed into his cockpit. The rifle bullet had passed through the lower hull of the pontoon, and I assumed that he would already feel the water rushing through the punctures. He replaced his headset and shouted to Kagwa, beckoning him back to the aircraft. While the Captain hesitated, the Frenchman throttled up his engine, dragging the pontoons through the wet sand. In a rush of noise and spray the helicopter rose six feet into the air, and a trickle of water emerged from the lower of the bullet holes. I raised the rifle, as if to fire another shot into the float, but already Kagwa was running to the aircraft.
Five minutes later they were gone, heading south along the river, the noise of the machine vanishing into the dusk.
‘Right, Noon, out of the car. They won’t be back until tomorrow.’
She had crawled between the front seats and now crouched against the driver’s door, the cassette pressed to her lips. She had been terrified by the aerial attack and by Kagwa’s presence, and the scar tissue around her mouth and eyebrows was flushed with blood. The harsh red lines formed vivid pain-marks in her blue skin, a notched score of her abused childhood.
Trying to reassure her, I held her arm, fearing that the violence of the helicopter assault had driven her back into her mutism. But she pulled her elbow away from me. She tapped the cassette rapidly against her teeth, as if trying to talk to me by proxy through this garrulous device. Despite her terror, she was looking me up and down, examining the wound on my head and the blood caked across my arms and shoulders, making certain that I still possessed the will to go on.
‘Fair enough, Noon – I understand you. First we’ll get free of this sand-bar. Then we’ll set off …’
*
As Noon squatted between the drums of diesel oil, I slackened the guy ropes and then kicked away the chocks from the wheels of the Mercedes. Held by its handbrake, the heavy limousine overhung the starboard rail. I sat in the driver’s seat and gradually released the brake. As the car edged across the deck, held by its cradle of guy ropes, I could feel the ferry tilting into the water. The river was still rising, and the Salammbo was almost free of the sandbar.
‘Noon, we’re on our way. Later, I’ll teach you to talk. More lessons soon.’
I replaced the chocks beneath the wheels of the car, unlashed the diesel drums and began to roll them across the deck. Filled with oil, the huge cylinders were almost too heavy for me. The wound in my head began to bleed again, and Noon watched solemnly as the drops fell on to the deck, staining the paintwork of the Mercedes. But with a third drum the ferry was already free. With a faint sigh the water rushed beneath the keel. The vessel slipped off the sand-bar and fell astern on the evening tide. I sat exhausted on the deck, holding a bloody hand to my head, tempted to let the Salammbo drift all the way back to Port-la-Nouvelle. It coasted for a quarter of a mile, and ran down one of the landing light masts before I could recover my strength and start the engine. Then I steadied the helm and moved the ferry up-channel, tilting to starboard as the stern of the Mercedes hung over the rail, its rear bumper washed by the bow wave.
The darkness settled over the river, and thousands of birds, driven away by the helicopter and the gunfire, began to return to their perches along the wooded banks. Noon squatted in the bows, warning me away from the sand-banks. We had seen off Kagwa for another day, time for us to make a few more miles up the channel of the Mallory, which had grown even broader as we moved towards its source. Wary of running the ferry aground in the dark, I steered through the open doors of the partly submerged hangar. There we moored to the rusting superstructure below the galvanized iron roof. Too tired to clear the glass from the wheelhouse, I fell asleep on the mattress among the oil drums, while Noon sat in the front seat of the limousine, crooning to herself as she softly rehearsed the phrases from the instructional tapes, the language of a private liberation that would one day set her free.
18
The Green World
A reverie of great rivers had overwhelmed me, moments marked by the measures of dream and myth. I sat under the canvas awning in the bows of the ferry, as the hours and days slid towards us through the copper haze that lay over the distant channel of the Mallory. Even the progress of the Salammbo failed to disturb the river. Behind the slow beat of the propeller the wake of bubbles soon dissolved and the water smoothed out any memory of our passage. Around us the river flowed between its ever wider banks, the surface as cool as green chrome. The reflected trees hanging below the beaches seemed more real than the feather-palms and desert lavender that had sprung from the dusty savanna along the margins of the channel. I watched the fish jump as they caught the hovering dragonflies. Bitterns and black herons dived through the surface, moving freely through a realm where air and water had merged into each other. A broader sun lay over us, its warm hand pressing upon the air, which had become thicker and heavier, muffling the sounds of the engine and the distant cries of the birds.
I had lost all sense of how many days had passed, or of how far we had travelled since the helicopter attack. We had rested through the night under the roof of the hangar, where the wounds to my head and ear had dried again. But the torn muscles of my scalp set it askew on my skull, and in turn seemed to tilt my mind, so that it perceived the world at an odd angle, like a misaligned camera.
Noon had kept away from the circle of oil drums where I lay on the mattress, not wishing to be present if I were to die in the night. But at dawn, when I returned to the wheelhouse, I found that she had swept away the glass and pulled the wooden splinters from the bullet hole in the helm, laid the rifle on the bunk and tidied everything like the servant of a wounded warrior.
However, within minutes of casting off I was already too exhausted to hold the helm. The pressure of the current against the ferry’s rudder almost forced me on to my knees as I steered the Salammbo between the submerged telegraph poles that marked the northern limits of the military base. Noon stood beside me, and when I faltered she pressed her strong hands over my own. She tugged at the helm with the same grunts with which she had first driven me on to the beach at Port-la-Nouvelle. Clicking to herself, she caught sight of an approaching sand-bank. She pushed my hands aside and spun the helm to starboard, then released the clutch and disconnected the propeller shaft.
Dead in the water, the ferry stopped fifty feet short of the sand-bank, around which a school of excited fish darted to and fro as if waiting for us to run aground. Once we had drifted out into the deep channel, Noon reengaged the propeller, and we set off again, scarcely disturbing the green lacquer of the surface. As she snapped the spring-loaded clutch lever, Noon mimicked my own gestures and fumbles. She spat on her hands, pretending that the throttle was red hot, and reproved herself in a bass voice that partly imitated my own and partly the cassettes from whose instruction I would clearly benefit.
‘Are you in charge, Noon?’ I patted her head, aware how much she had grown in the three months that I had known her. She was still a child, but her legs were longer and less bony, and her hips had begun to swell. In a gesture of annoyance she butted my hand with the back of her head. Glad to leave her to it, I stepped from the wheelhouse and made my way to the bows. There I sat in one of the ferry pilot’s canvas chairs. Bathed in the cool air funnelled through the anchor housing, I listened to the clicking of the cutwater, and watched the passing parade of the green world that I had created.
I had intended to sit in the bows for only an hour until my head had cleared, but in fact I was to spend several days in that canvas chair. Noon had already recognized the combined effects upon me of exposure, fatigue and the infected wound in my head. I found that I could no longer smile at
her, for fear of tearing at my scalp. In the wheelhouse locker she found a cotton flag bearing the Toyota emblem. She tied lengths of cord to its corners, fastened them to the bow-mast and to the door pillars of the limousine, and set up a small awning to protect me from the heat.
There I sat like a totem, propped in the bows of this strange ship piloted by a child on its journey towards the sun. As my mind drifted into a shallow fever, I was already convinced that Noon’s presence at the ferry’s helm would in some way shelter us from any further act of treachery by the river. After our escape from Captain Kagwa I had become aware that a duel was taking place between myself and the Mallory.
Since its birth from beneath the root of the oak tree, springing to life between the tracks of the bulldozer, the river had done everything to survive. It had tried to trick, evade and kill me, it had set traps for me, and given me delusions of grandeur by showing me ever more lavish parades of flora and fauna that were no more than cunning decoys.
Yet my wariness of the river soon dissolved in its dividing glass. At nightfall, as a mauve light lay over the water, we moored beside a grove of fan-palms whose foliage would shelter us from Kagwa’s helicopter. When I woke in the canvas chair the next day, my fever had passed and with it all my fears of the Mallory. As Noon slept in the Mercedes, I gazed out at the green channel that I had created, now almost three hundred yards in width. Once again I was struck by the richness of the vegetation that sprang from the desert’s edge, and by the abundant birds and flowering plants, as if an army of aviarists and florists had moved downstream in the night, casting their blossom over the shrubs and saplings, perching the colourful birds among the fragrant nectaries.
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 13
