Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  At dinner there had also been some light relief. Arnold Pryce and Eleanor had been into the nearby town of Karatu earlier in the day to refill one of the Land Rovers with diesel and top up the spare cans, and they had found a week-old copy of the London Times, which they had bought secondhand from a local white farmer they had met at the filling station. Russell North had observed Arnold reading the paper and snatched it from him. At dinner he had asked, “How can you have a newspaper that only has adverts on the front page? Adverts for schoolteachers, for tickets to the opera, for secondhand Rolls-Royces, for pity’s sake? Is that what the British think is the most important news?”

  “It’s meant to calm you down,” replied Arnold testily. “Most news is bad news and that only upsets people.”

  “And there’s a half page devoted to dances. Why are the British so interested in dancing?”

  “That’s the ‘season,’” said Arnold. “Mothers give dances for their eighteen-year-old daughters, so they can meet the best young men in London. It’s an ancient tradition.”

  “Sounds like anthropological gobblydegook to me,” said Russell. “No wonder you Brits have lost an empire.”

  “For traditions to be traditions,” insisted Arnold, “to last they must be successful at some level. But then we know you are not a great respecter of tradition, Russell.”

  That had closed the conversation.

  Today’s discoveries also showed that, so far as Natalie was personally concerned, she was now much more a part of the team. At the table, Eleanor had deferred to her superior knowledge on extinct forms of life, and the others too had heard her out in respectful silence when she was explaining about ancient forms of horse and zebra. She had felt good about that.

  She passed the whiskey across.

  Russell just wet his lips. “Eleanor is warming to you.”

  She had been ice cold where Richard and he were concerned.

  Natalie said nothing. It wasn’t her fight and she wanted to keep it that way.

  He wet his lips with whiskey a second time. “I saw you talking to Christopher in the gorge today. He seemed very animated.”

  She let a long pause elapse, to emphasize that her privacy was her own affair. “He explained the noise the thorn bushes make, and was telling me about his brother, Jack, that’s all.”

  Russell suddenly reached down between his legs, picked up some sheets of paper he had brought with him, and handed them across. “Here.”

  “What is it?” she said, not taking them but guessing what the papers were.

  “It’s the first draft of the article. Richard’s typing, with my corrections in blue. We thought you’d like to see it. He’s going over it again, right now.”

  “Article? You’re going against Eleanor’s wishes?”

  “No. Well, not entirely. We’re going to wait a bit, for her anger to subside, then try again. Once she sees the paper’s written, she’ll be excited, as excited as we are.”

  And by showing it to her now, before Eleanor saw it, Russell was trying to enlist Natalie as an ally, a co-conspirator.

  She took back the whiskey cup with one hand and dabbed at her damp neck with a handkerchief in her other one. “No, Russell. I don’t want to look. Not yet. You’re trying to … it’s as if you’re trying to solicit my support, coerce me, make me take your side. I don’t want you to do that. Leave me out of this, please.” She took a deep breath. “Christopher was telling me this morning that the Maasai are a very proud people, fierce even. He’s worried what they might do—”

  “Another reason for publishing quickly.” Russell laid the papers next to the chocolate. “As soon as they see how important the site is, they’ll see the point of our raid.”

  “The point! Russell!” Natalie let out a loud exasperated sigh. “Even now, you don’t seem bothered by what you did. It’s … it’s awful!” She banged the flask on the table. “Here, have another drink. Let’s break our one-nip-a-night rule and talk about something more pleasant. This conspiracy talk upsets me.” She poured a second nip of scotch and handed it to him.

  As he took it, he held her hand and brushed her fingers with his lips.

  She snatched them away.

  They were both breathing heavily.

  “Don’t be so locked away,” he whispered, after a while. “Loosen up.”

  She was surprised, shocked even, by his choice of phrase, exactly the words she had used herself to describe her father.

  Is that the impression she gave?

  “I … I’m not locked away,” she faltered. “I’ve only been here a few days … I … I’m not ready.”

  She knew it was inadequate as she said it. But it was, in a sense, true enough. Her very presence in this camp, among this elite team, might be a feather in her cap academically speaking, but she was here too because … because of some weird psychological arithmetic, a form of emotional calculus that began with Dominic Fielding, took in her mother’s death, her father’s grief, the anger that she rode with difficulty, and ended with her late-night winding-down sessions, when she faced her demons, alone, as she knew she had to, and tossed and turned in bed until oblivion overcame her.

  That was more than enough emotion for now.

  “You’re not ready? That sounds … that sounds like a long story, with a bad ending.”

  Russell waited, breaking off some chocolate with his long fingers, but she didn’t respond.

  He nodded. “Let’s not fight, Natalie. That’s not what I want.” He paused. “What I want, what I would really like is—”

  “Russell—!”

  He stood up and raised his hand. “Okay, okay, enough for tonight.” With his complexion, she couldn’t tell whether he was blushing, or if his face was flushed with anger at her reaction when he had tried to take her hand. But all he said was “Let’s sleep on it.”

  He went to brush her cheek with his fingers but she moved her head away. He turned, walked back down the line of tents, and disappeared.

  The moon had moved on in the sky and Natalie turned her chair so she could sit facing it. She lit another cigarette and picked up the whiskey. Russell had hardly touched the second nip. She held it to her nose, smelling the liquid. She wasn’t a drinker but she did like her nightcap. Russell’s visits just pushed back these quiet moments that she loved.

  How different he was from Dominic. Dominic had been fulfilled by his music and that had given him an inner certainty that she had loved, as if he knew some great big secret about life, about how to enjoy what life had to offer, about how to slow it down as it went by. That was the effect Dominic had had on her. When she was with him, life slowed down, its details were magnified, it was like living in a novel. Dominic had even made love slowly, knowing they would get there eventually, that it was worth the wait.

  How she missed those moments, that change of pace.

  She had snatched her hand away from Russell without thinking twice. His gesture had been … flattering, but she didn’t want flattery. She wanted to be less angry and … she wanted … she wanted what she couldn’t have. She wanted Dominic and her father back in her life. She couldn’t have Dominic, she couldn’t have her mother, but was her father lost to her forever?

  Getting her father back would help her loosen up.

  Russell was right about that.

  She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, turned, and extinguished the hurricane lamp. There was so much light from the moon, she didn’t need it. The moon was almost a perfect circle, a silver-white disc that made the sky around it appear blue.

  Barks and screams from the trees broke into the silence. She saw the light in Russell’s tent go out.

  She looked up at the moon again, letting the whiskey pass her lips and trickle down her throat. There it was again, that sensuous feeling. That was the one shortcoming of life in the bush, which otherwise for her was near perfect. There was no … sensuality in Kihara. Dominic had awakened that side in her—and oh, how surprising and wonderful that awakening
had been. A fire ran along her skin even now, just thinking about some of the times they had first made love. Sex with Dominic had been quite different from the sex described in this new book by that Russian author, Vladimir someone, about a young girl called Lolita, which had been published only after a change in the law.

  She ran her tongue around her lips, feeling the fire of the whiskey fade. She must put Dominic behind her.

  A wisp of cloud drifted in front of the gleaming silver disc of the moon and immediately vanished. A movement caught her eye, a figure in white. It was Mutevu Ndekei, the camp cook. He walked—or rather he shuffled—carefully, his silhouette passing by the dim glow of the campfire, clearly trying to make as little noise as possible. But she would know that shuffle anywhere.

  She smiled. He was doing what Russell North had done, visiting someone in their tent, no doubt one of the women who helped out as cleaners or assistant cooks, or ironers of the khaki shirts that had to be washed every day.

  Mutevu disappeared. She wondered with another inward smile whether he would have more success with whoever he was visiting than Russell had had with her. She crushed out her cigarette and poured what remained of the whiskey back into the flask.

  Once she was in bed, sleep wouldn’t come. As usual. She had slept well the first night because she had been exhausted after the long journey, but then her usual sleep pattern—or nonsleep pattern—had reasserted itself. Tonight, as well as the usual barriers to oblivion, there was the added distress about Odnate.

  What a waste. Why was life so untidy? Why could people not see where their best interests lay? Where did her best interests lie? Was she always going to be a scientist? And just a scientist? She had never dwelled on having children—Dominic had two and, he said, that was quite enough. But Odnate had been … cute. To lose a son: how Odnate’s mother must be feeling tonight. And here Natalie was, worrying about getting to sleep.

  The noises off—the baboons and chimpanzees and the occasional hyena—accompanied her thoughts like a Greek chorus, keeping a respectful silence one minute, generous in their vocal support the next. Somehow, amid the theater of the night, she drifted off to sleep.

  • • •

  She was awake at dawn. That was nothing new. In Cambridge, she was used to getting up when the rest of the college was still asleep, walking by the river with only the mist for company, watching a milky sunrise over the roofs of this college or that, the yellow-white light striking the ornate stone fretwork of King’s College Chapel, where Dominic had given his recital.

  She lay on her bed, listening to the African day getting going, the unceasing, seemingly urgent gossip of the nightjars and lapwings, the early morning coughs and complaints of the baboons, the deeper snort of a water buffalo.

  She raised her hand and touched the roof of her tent. It was warm, the sun already baking the canvas. She looked at her watch: just before six. She swung her feet out of bed but looked down before she let them rest on the floor. You never knew when you might get a visit from a snake or something equally unpleasant. But the floor was disfigured by nothing more dangerous than dust.

  She stepped across to the front of her tent, untied the opening, and looked out. The sun was already fiercely bright but the heat hadn’t built up yet. There was a faint smell of dung in the air. A herd of something herbivorous had passed by the gorge during the night.

  Natalie got dressed. She didn’t wash or clean her teeth but she did run a brush through her hair. Lacing up her boots, she stepped outside, and tied the tent flaps closed behind her. She made her way to the refectory. She wasn’t sure what time the kitchen staff started, but she knew how to turn on the gas and where the water bottles were stored. She could make her own coffee.

  As she passed the fire, she paused to kick soil-sand over a log ember that still glowed red. As she did this, and looked up, she saw a monkey running out from one of the tents along the top right arm of the T. It was carrying something, something black but shiny. It looked to Natalie like a camera.

  No! Whose tent had the monkey been in? They were a perennial problem, these monkeys, and a camera was a valuable object, in both a financial and a scientific sense. She knew that Arnold, Jonas, and Richard occupied the tents in that arm of the camp. One of them was obviously up early and had left his tent flaps open, something they were all warned against, something that invited trouble.

  She set off toward the tent which she had seen the monkey leave. There was no point in giving chase—the creature had already slipped through a diminutive gap in the thorn fence and disappeared, taking the camera with it.

  The tent was four along, last but one in the row. Sure enough, as she approached, she could see that the flaps were open, swaying idly in the light breeze. Keeping the tents closed up against the animals of the Serengeti, especially at night, when the camp was quiet, was such a basic piece of bushcraft that Natalie, as she neared the tent, was immediately apprehensive. Whose tent was this? Who had made this basic mistake? And why?

  She stood in front of the tent, close up.

  Now she noticed that the tapes used to close up the tent were in fact still tied in knots. The flaps hadn’t been left open, they had been cut—sliced, slashed. Entaillé—involuntarily the word came to her in French.

  Natalie’s throat began to sweat.

  She called out softly, “Hello? Hello?”

  No answer.

  She called out again.

  Silence, but for the sound of the breeze. A warthog or a hyena made a grunting sound in the distance.

  The back of her neck was sweating now.

  She stepped forward and bent down. She pulled back the flap and at the same time took half a step further forward.

  It was dark inside the tent and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

  What she first noticed, before her eyes had accommodated fully to the gloom, was a buzzing sound.

  Flies.

  And then she saw them, a small black cloud, buzzing back and forth above the bed. There must have been hundreds of them, thousands, zigzagging, circling, hovering.

  It took her another moment to register that, this side of the cloud, was a body, a torso: arms, legs wearing undershorts, an abdomen with hair over the chest. It was very still, utterly motionless.

  Flies were moving in on her now, bombarding her cheeks and chin.

  She swallowed, to keep down the vomit that was rising in her throat, as she took in, beyond the cloud of swarming, swirling, seething insects, the parted lips and nose and open eyes of Richard Sutton.

  There were flies buzzing in and out of his mouth, invading his nostrils, crawling around the rims of his eyelids.

  They were feeding on him. They burrowed in his hair, lodged between his toes, were laying eggs in his ears.

  She threw up.

  And again.

  The bulk of the flies—a cloud, a grinding, growling cloud—was gorging on Richard’s throat, picking at the blood that had sprouted where his windpipe, as she could now see, had been cut, and then congealed when his heart had surrendered.

  Black blood was wrapped around his throat, on either side of his neck, like a surgical collar. Flies bustled each other out of the way in their eagerness to gorge.

  Her stomach heaved again but it had nothing more to give. She retched but had only spittle to show for it.

  She looked around the tent. It had been ransacked; there were papers everywhere, a table overturned, clothes pulled out of drawers, the water jug was on the floor, books appeared to have been chewed. Was that all the monkey’s doing?

  She took in the smell of what she assumed was urine. That must be the monkey’s also.

  The dull drone of the flies drilled through the tent, filling it with sound. The cloud was—if anything—getting bigger, and Richard’s mouth had all but disappeared. It was as if he were spewing flies.

  Her eyes watered and she turned, to escape the horror, half stumbling and half falling out of the tent, chewing savagely at the fresh air, no
w warmed by the clear, clean sunshine.

  Natalie remained for a moment on all fours, her abdomen continuing to heave, swallowing huge chunks of air, breathing out in a series of gasps, letting her stomach regain its equilibrium, the spittle she had retched drying on her chin. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and clambered to her feet. She had to get away from the insistent drone of those flies, that menacing black cloud of unstoppable cannibals.

  She stood, her eyes still watering as her stomach continued to swell and subside in an involuntary staccato arrhythmia. The hair at her temples was damp with sweat.

  She had to raise the alarm. At the very moment she thought this, she noticed three monkeys appear through the thorn fence and just sit, watching her. As soon as she moved away from the tent, she knew, they would invade. The flies didn’t bother them.

  It couldn’t be helped. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, wiped her eyes and the spittle on her chin with the sleeve of her shirt, and then half ran and half stumbled toward the Land Rovers, parked under the acacia trees. Reaching the first one, she snatched open the glove compartment, fumbled where she knew the keys were hidden. She found the ignition and switched it on.

  She looked back and saw the three monkeys edging towards Richard’s tent.

  She forced the plam of her hand against the steering wheel of the Land Rover and blared the horn again and again and again.

  • • •

  “Drink that,” said Jonas Jefferson, handing Natalie a steaming cup of coffee. “If I had any brandy I would give you that, too. You’ve had a shock.”

  Natalie sat at the refectory table, where meals were usually served. Her blaring of the Land Rover horn had wakened the entire camp, as she had intended. Christopher had been the first to appear, then Russell. She had told them what she knew, what she had seen.