Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

  He had just reached the door to Mark’s room when it opened and Kobus Vos, Mark’s partner, stepped out. In his hand he held his black doctor’s bag.

  ‘Kobus.’

  ‘Adam.’ They shook hands.

  ‘How is he?’

  Vos sighed. ‘He’ll be fine. But someone roughed him up very badly. He was kicked in the head. One of his ears was almost torn off. His body is very bruised but there are no bones broken—a miracle, if you ask me.’

  ‘Rita says Grachikov did it.’

  ‘There’s no proof, Adam. Grachikov has an alibi. Says he was playing cards with his friends. Who knows if that’s true? But the person who did this was clever. And Mark said there was more than one. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to see properly because it was dark—he had been called out to see a patient—and also because they had thrown a sheet over his head before getting down to business.’

  ‘What about his hands?’

  Vos looked tired. ‘They took off his middle finger.’

  ‘Oh God. Will he be able to operate again?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s his right hand.’

  Adam closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers across his face. ‘Can I go in?’

  ‘Sure. He’ll be glad to see you. But he may not be awake for long. I just gave him his pills.’ Vos nodded at Adam and started to walk back down the passage.

  Adam knocked softly and received a muffled reply. He gently pushed open the door.

  The curtains in this room were only partly drawn. On the bedside table stood three plastic capsule bottles and next to them a glass and a jug of water. There were several arrangements of dried flowers in the room; fresh flowers weren’t really an option in this part of the world. Adam guessed they were from some of Mark’s patients.

  ‘Hey.’ He walked closer, his eyes on the figure in the bed. He could feel his face growing stiff with shock.

  From where he lay propped up against a mountain of pillows, Mark smiled at him. The smile was grotesque. Mark’s upper lip was badly torn and he had lost several teeth. His face seemed to be twice its normal size, his cheeks swollen and gleaming with some kind of ointment. One side of his head was bandaged, as was one hand. His eyes stared at Adam from purple sockets.

  ‘Don’t look so shocked. I’ll live. Weeds don’t wither.’

  Adam cleared his throat. ‘I knew I couldn’t trust you to look after yourself. I go away and look what happens.’

  Mark gave the ghost of a laugh. ‘So, next time, don’t go away.’

  For a while the two men merely looked at each other. Then Adam leaned over and gripped Mark’s healthy hand in his. ‘Mark, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh.’ That dreadful lopsided grin again. ‘What must be must be.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Adam said. ‘I want to know everything.’

  ‘I will, but first… did you find her?’

  ‘Yes.’ Adam smiled. ‘Yes, I did.’

  • • •

  HE LEFT THE ROOM half an hour later. Mark’s words had become progressively slurred and by the time Adam pulled the door quietly shut behind him, Mark was asleep, his head turned from the neck, his body set at a stiff, unnatural angle.

  As he walked down the passage toward the kitchen to find Rita, Adam was aware of a headache that was settling just behind his eyes. He recognised it for what it was: a deep, slow-burning anger. It had been building up inside him as he sat there watching his friend’s battered face. This was a good man. A man whose life made a difference to others. Not many people left a mark. Most people, when they die, leave behind little of value. But if Mark were to fall away, the lives of many people would be affected for the worse. This windswept little town, hundreds of kilometres away from civilisation, desperately needed men like Mark for its survival.

  He paused outside the door to the kitchen. Rita was sitting at the kitchen table facing two white ceramic bowls. She was shelling peas. She did not notice him at first and he was able to observe her. Her long black hair, flecked with grey, was braided and pinned to her head. Her soft, heavy breasts sagged underneath the flowered dress she was wearing. On her face was a great weariness.

  She looked up and saw him standing there.

  ‘Adam. How is he?’

  ‘He’s sleeping.’ He sat down in the chair opposite her.

  She nodded and picked up another pod from one of the bowls. She was looking down at her hands, her expression calm, but from the corner of one eye a tiny, pinched tear was rolling down her cheek.

  ‘Rita.’ He placed his hand on hers.

  ‘I’m scared, Adam.’

  ‘Don’t be. He’s going to be OK. Kobus told me so.’

  ‘But what if they come back?’

  ‘Come back? No, sweetheart. I don’t think they will. These guys are cowards.’

  ‘They told him they would.’

  ‘What?’ He stared at her. ‘Mark didn’t tell me that.’

  She nodded. The tears were flowing easily now. ‘They told him they weren’t finished with him. That they’re coming back for the other hand.’

  He continued staring at her, but he wasn’t seeing her face. The anger that gripped him was now a black thing that blotted out thought.

  ‘Adam?’

  The apprehensive note in her voice got through to him. He blinked. She was looking at him with alarm. The tears had stopped but her eyes were wide.

  ‘I have to go.’ He squeezed her hand, got to his feet carefully. ‘Tell Mark I’ll be back.’

  • • •

  IT WOULDN’T take him long to track the man down. Grachikov was usually in one of two places: his office at the canning factory, or the Purple Palace. As the sun was still high in the sky, he was probably in his office.

  And so it proved to be. Even before he pushed open the office door, Adam could hear Grachikov’s voice on the other side. The man was talking in Russian, the rapid stream of words and thick consonants sounding like a round of machine-gun fire. He turned the handle and placed his shoulder against the door.

  Grachikov was in a swivel chair facing the window, the telephone to his ear. As Adam burst into the room, he spun the chair around. The expression on his face changed from annoyance to caution. He mumbled something into the phone and replaced it slowly on its stand.

  ‘Mr Williams… you’re back. I thought maybe you leave us forever.’

  Adam walked to the desk and gripped the edge with both hands. ‘I only need to know one thing from you. Did you do it?’

  Grachikov leaned back in his chair. His face was expressionless. His eyes were cold and calculating. He didn’t answer.

  ‘You fucking coward. You don’t even have the guts to own up to what you’ve done. What a man.’

  Grachikov flushed brick-red. In a quiet voice, he said, ‘As I told your friend, you look for trouble, you find it.’

  Without hesitation, Adam launched himself across the desk. His hands gripped the sides of Grachikov’s collar. Grachikov was a very big man indeed, but Adam’s anger was so great that he pulled the man right out of his chair and threw him across the desk. Grachikov crashed to the floor. He shouted. Adam pulled back his arm and smacked his fist straight into Grachikov’s face. He felt the nose break underneath his hand.

  His mind had shut down. He was hitting the face in front of him again and again. Blood. So brightly red he felt some surprise. The flesh underneath his fist soft, pulpy. Grachikov’s head lolling on his shoulders. Again and again. The muscles in his arm bunching painfully as he smashed his fist downward. Grachikov’s mouth moving wetly. He was saying something but he made no sound. His eyes rolled whitely inside his head and again he said something.

  Please.

  A trivial word. It stopped him like a bullet.

  He looked down at his hands. One hand was smeared with blood and what looked like snot. He slowly wiped it against his shirt and stared, stupefied, at the red streak his fingers left behind.

  He got to his feet. His ears were buzzing as though they he
ard the roar of a thousand oceans. He felt lightheaded and inside his head was a black hole, a vortex sucking in all sensations, all rational thought.

  He stumbled out the door and down the steps, past two men who had come running. As he walked away, his legs buckling, he heard them shout after him.

  He stopped and bent over from the waist. The sunlight beat down on him, but his skin was cold as ice. The next moment he was throwing up, his stomach muscles jerking violently, a stream of thin, sour liquid leaving his mouth.

  Oh God. He closed his eyes. Oh God.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  SHE COULD HARDLY believe she was almost there. Her journey’s end was in sight.

  Justine shifted in her seat and tried to stretch her cramped legs. Twelve hours in an aeroplane cabin did wicked things to your body. And since her fall down the staircase at Paradine Park, her back acted up at the slightest provocation. Whenever she stayed in one position for too long, a red-hot poker would replace her spine. She couldn’t wait to get out of this seat.

  The plane had left Heathrow last night, crossing the continent of Africa in darkness. They had encountered bad weather and for the first part of the journey she had seen blue flashes of lightning just beyond the wing of the plane. Thousands of metres below her, cloaked in black, were forests, crystal rivers, teeming cities and barren plains imprinted with the fossilised footprints of giant lizards. But she saw nothing: not a light, not even the glow of a fire. She had gone to sleep with a vast continent drifting by silently and invisibly beneath her feet.

  But now, long fingers of molten light were burning into the inky blackness of the sky. Red and orange streaks stabbed the horizon. And as she looked down with sleep-dazed eyes, she had her first glimpse of the desert.

  It looked old. That was her first thought. How old, how ancient the corrugated mountain ranges and vast open plains. The chain of mountains looked like the spine of an immensely old animal; the dry riverbeds and their tributaries streaked across the cracked earth like shallow veins. And there, in the distance, coated in apricot light, the dunes, long ribbons of shimmering summits. The enormous ripples of sand stretched ahead as far as the eye could see.

  She placed her forehead against the window and stared down unblinkingly at the terrible beauty of the landscape below her.

  • • •

  THE BLAND modernity of the city of Windhoek was a shock. As she looked out of the dust-streaked window of the taxi, the scene that met her eyes seemed deeply strange. Independence Avenue, which appeared to be the main thoroughfare, was lined with pavement cafés, shops, even fountains. From her research she knew that Windhoek was the country’s capital city and seat of government, as well as home to a significant number of Namibia’s population of one and a half million people. But the sheer ordinariness of the place was mind-bending after her glimpse of the vast primordial landscape that slumbered just outside the town’s borders.

  Her hotel was nondescript and the room with its bed, TV and speckled carpet looked like a million other hotel rooms anywhere else on the planet. She lowered her suitcase and collapsed on the bed. She had made it. Finally. She still couldn’t believe she was actually here. It had taken so much longer than she had thought it would.

  In the end the police were not the problem. They had pretty much accepted her story of the night’s events. Tim March would be spending the next two months in jail. Things seemed to be going better than she had any right to expect.

  But then, one day before she was due to leave the hospital, she came down with nosocomial pneumonia. How the hell one managed to contract pneumonia lying in a well-heated hospital room was still beyond her, but there it was. For two weeks her chest filled with fluid and on top of it a virulent infection settled in her ear. Not good. She had never felt as ill before in her entire life. When she finally left her hospital room, she was so weak, her only choice was to move in with her mother. But her sojourn in the house in St John’s Wood had been unexpectedly calm. To say that she and her mother had found each other during this time would be a gross exaggeration, but they had managed to discourse like civilised people, even finding some small pleasure in each other’s company. Her mother had even accepted without comment or reproach her explanation that she would be travelling to Africa on assignment as soon as she felt better and that she did not know how long she would be away. And her mother hadn’t mentioned Barry’s name once.

  Last night she was finally well enough to board the plane that would take her south. And now, here she was. Tomorrow she would take yet another plane—a prop this time—which would deposit her deep within the south-western Namib.

  She glanced at her watch. It was difficult to believe that, although she had travelled for twelve hours by air, the time difference between the UK and Namibia was minimal.

  She opened her handbag and took out her wallet. Tucked in between her credit cards was the slip of paper with the telephone number Adam had scribbled down in such haste. She had been very tempted to call it after she had moved into her mother’s house. Once she had even found herself with her hand on the telephone pad, the receiver against her ear. But her paranoia had stopped her going through with it. What if she was wrong? What if the police were suspicious after all, and were simply waiting for her to make a wrong move? What if they were unobtrusively monitoring her? Even the slightest risk at this stage of the game was unacceptable.

  But here she was at last.

  Well, here goes. She was suddenly nervous; her mouth felt dry. She picked up the receiver. As she waited for the connection to go through, she glanced out the window. The sun was so bright.

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE SUN WAS BRIGHT. The morning mist had already burned away and the sky above them was an unbroken blue. The air was filled with the screeches of seabirds and the bass-baritone honking of seals.

  The two men stood side by side, their hands quick, their movements neat, as they went through the checklist of diving equipment: line reels, waterproof lamps, cylinders, harnesses, compasses, regulators, gauges, knives.

  Mark placed his hand on a green diving cylinder. On the side was stencilled in white lettering: OXYGEN. Mark was using his right hand, clutching the bottle in a four-fingered grip. Adam looked away quickly.

  This morning they were planning a three-and-a-half martini dive, going down in the caves at Giant’s Castle to a depth of fifty metres. They had considered using ‘trimix’, a combination of helium, oxygen and air which would lessen the effects of narcosis and help them maintain better mental clarity down there, but in the end they had decided against it. Apart from the fact that trimix was expensive and had to be carefully prepared, it would require them to carry even more bottles, including a separate bottle of argon to inflate their dry suits. Both men had done dives to fifty metres before on air alone, so it made sense to keep it simple.

  Mark was whistling under his breath. If you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy… Adam knew that Mark usually whistled when he was feeling tense, and he looked at his friend with some concern. Mark was a good diver, but he was suddenly worried that Mark might not be fit for the dive today. Mark looked OK; the bruises he had sustained in the mugging were mostly gone, except for the scar at the top of one eyebrow, the result of a fourteen-stitch wound. Still, a dive like this was stressful and you needed to be on peak form mentally and physically.

  But Mark had insisted on this dive. ‘If I do it, maybe Rita will stop treating me like an invalid.’ Adam guessed it was also Mark’s way of trying to establish control over his life again.

  As he checked the metre-long hose of the octopus regulator, Adam’s eye fell on the thin scar that ran across his own knuckles. The scar was the result of Grachikov’s teeth slicing into the skin as he had tightened his hand into a fist. It looked as though the scar would be permanent. For a moment a memory of hard teeth and soft bloodied lips sprang to his mind and he winced.

  Grachikov had ended up in hospital with concussion but he hadn’t pressed charges an
d for that Adam was grateful. The police might have started to probe into his own background more deeply during an investigation. The reason Grachikov had refrained from making trouble for him was probably because he did not want his own movements on the night of Mark’s attack to be scrutinised in greater detail. So the police were out of it, but everyone in town knew what had happened.

  Adam had no illusions: the war between him and Grachikov was not over. Retaliation was inevitable. But this was not what troubled Adam.

  Lying on his bed at night, eyes wide open, he would remember the moment he had succumbed to violence once again, as though for one instant a curtain of rotten fabric had given way, exposing a yawning black hole in which rage swirled like something dark and viscous. He could have killed the man. He almost did. And he’d lie there, filled with self-loathing and fear.

  At these times his longing for Justine was fierce. Hold me, he thought. Place your hands on my lips. Close my eyes. Rescue me.

  But where was she? Fifty-one days had passed since he had left her at the door of Paradine Park. The memory of that cold night—Justine shivering, her eyes frightened, her shoulders set with such determination—was starting to fade in the heat and wind of the desert. A few days after they had said goodbye, he had been able to recall every gesture, every word. But now his memory was softening, as though hollow pockets were developing inside his mind.

  Two nights ago he couldn’t stand it any more and had called Paradine Park from the post office, only to be informed that the number he was trying to reach had been disconnected. He had stood with the receiver to his ear, suddenly—irrationally—terrified. Justine, where are you?

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  He looked up. Mark was standing with his head to one side, listening.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I heard the sound of a motorboat.’

  Adam concentrated but all he heard was a massive stir of echoes boomeranging around the cliff face: hundreds of birds, all of them screeching at once.