Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (25 page)

Sadly, the Maasai’s enthusiasm for foreign culture did not appear to be reciprocated by the members of the rally team, to most of whom they seemed invisible at best and a nuisance at worst. Only Stuart, a half-deaf Welshman responsible for technical work on the cars, talked of the Maasai fondly, recalling the time a few years earlier when, twenty miles from the nearest village, as night raced out of the sky, he was forced to push a tyre truck out of black cotton mud and felt an ice-cold hand on his shoulder.

‘I turned around and staring me in the face was this great massive Maasai done up in the full Adam Ant outfit!’ he remembered. ‘War paint, the lot. He just looked at me and said, “Would you like a hand, old chap?”’ I liked Stuart instantly, which was lucky, since later that day, he would be responsible for my safety, driving me along everyday roads back to Nairobi at speeds of almost 200kph in the Subaru Impreza WRC2002 normally driven by Petter Solberg.

‘You’re not going to go
quite
that fast, are you?’ I asked him.

‘Yup.’ He flicked a mosquito off his arm, and I sensed the insect served as a metaphor for my question. ‘The only way these things are designed to be driven is flat.’

‘Flat’ was what the Subaru team said when they meant ‘flat out’. As I was learning, in the fast-moving world of rally, cutting out one minuscule word could make the crucial difference between victory and defeat.

I didn’t wish to appear fussy, but I couldn’t help raising another issue that was weighing heavily on my mind. ‘But aren’t you worried we might hit a cow?’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he said, pointing to the car. ‘These things can stop on a sixpence.’

But I hadn’t seen any sixpences on the route from Nairobi, just Maasai, livestock, spluttering 1970s Toyotas, and a series of terrifying spikes in the road, installed every couple of miles as a primeval speed deterrent. I also knew that, despite what Stuart had said, cows in fact
were
a concern, since, when I’d mentioned them to Tommi Makinen, he’d called them an ‘obvious danger’.

I’d looked at Makinen in sympathy at the time, thinking how gut-wrenching it would be to be responsible for the death of such an innocent, big-eyed creature: the terrible flashbacks and inevitable months of emotional limping that would follow.

‘Yep,’ Makinen had then added. ‘They can do some serious damage to a car.’

There are a couple of things people tend to be surprised at when I tell them about my trip to Africa. One is that when I was finally in the rally car, I was far more scared about the prospect of flying home than I was about hurtling along an ordinary road, with little visibility, at almost two hundred kilometres per hour. The other is that when I arrived at the test run site the morning after the flight, one of the first things I decided to do was chase two ostriches.

The ostriches in question were pecking away on the plains about a mile away from where the Subaru team worked on the cars. By this point, I’d already watched Solberg’s first test run. It had been a brief, spectacular sight: the car shooting away into the hills in a cloud of dust, and disappearing until only the distant, angry wasp sound of its engine remained. The eternally seven-year-old, Scalextric-playing part of me had experienced a small tingle up the spine, but in the end, what I was watching was a fast car, and like other fast cars, its wheels moved, it made a noise, then it wasn’t there any more. For me, this made the excitement of the experience limited. What was less limited was the excitement that behind any bush could be lurking creatures I’d only ever before seen at the zoo and on wildlife documentaries.

Not long after I returned from Kenya, I watched one of those documentaries, in which the narrator pointed out that ‘ostriches can lash out and kill a cheetah with a deadly kick’. Strangely, this had not occurred to me while I was looking at some ostriches in the flesh, and trying to persuade them to be my friends. Perhaps it was that I was still under the sway of the valium, which, while not particularly great at stopping a person from worrying about being swallowed up in a fireball of burning metal, was evidently fantastic at stopping them from worrying about being trampled into human risotto by a big, sod-off bird foot. I can also say that, while the two ostriches might have stood their ground in the face of a cheetah attack, they were absolutely petrified of me. Each time I picked up my pace and gained on them, they moved a little further away, until, finally, feeling a bit like a swimmer lost in the rhythm of the waves who suddenly looks back at the shore and can’t remember which part of the beach he left his towel on, I gave up the ghost and turned back.

This began a pattern that would continue for the next three and a half days: brief bursts of animation from the rally crew, followed by long periods of waiting around, in which I tried to amuse myself by venturing off, sometimes accompanied by Zed, but mostly alone, in search of wildlife. Back in the United Kingdom, I’d been cautious enough about heading through a gently disreputable area of Norwich at night, but out here, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by tribesman and large, hungry animals, I felt unconcerned. Managing the impossible feat of surviving 4,238 miles at a height at which no human should rightly travel had made me briefly invincible. After that, nothing could touch me.

On the second day, having tracked what I thought was a warthog but was actually an undersized mule, I found myself alone, in a clearing, with a lone dark figure walking towards me, holding a spear in one hand and a black rectangular object in the other. Had he skewered me, taken my wallet, and left me for dead, neither Zed nor the Subaru team would have been able to hear me scream. Preoccupied with their front coilovers and torsion mounts, it would only have been three or four hours later, at night’s violent, decisive fall, that they would have remembered that guy in the corduroy flares who seemed so indifferent to the cars and weirdly interested in the animals. By then, it would have been too dark for the helicopter to find me.

As it was, the figure – another Maasai – greeted me with a handshake.

‘Subaru?’ he asked, showing me a mouth full of well-meaning teeth.

I nodded yes, even though I had an instinct to disassociate myself from the brand. I could have told him that, had he come to Norfolk, and been cut up by one of the county’s many Impreza drivers on the stretch of the A11 yet to be transformed into a dual carriageway, his rose-tinted vision of the vehicle would soon be muddied, but what kind of crucifier of fun would that have made me?

As the Maasai had got closer to me, I’d realised that the object in his non-spear hand was a boombox. I recognised the tune playing as ‘The Eye of the Tiger’ by Survivor, made famous by the movie
Rocky III
.

This was not the right continent for tigers, of course, but I had my hopes of seeing a lion. In retrospect, I hadn’t really thought through how this would transpire. I suppose I imagined I would just happen across one from just the perfect distance: not so close that it would have an instant instinct to bite my chin off, but close enough to get a good view, and a photograph to prove it.

In truth, Brown had somewhat exaggerated the element of intermingling between rally folk and animals. ‘There are lions and ostriches and rhinos getting out the way of the car and everything! It’s fucking wicked!’ he said. While a car had once heartbreakingly hit a giraffe during a practice run, many years earlier, now a helicopter zoomed ahead of the cars, preventing further similar mishaps. I also found out that the ‘personable’ cheetah that I’d seen posed in photos with members of the Subaru team had actually been sedated for the purposes of the shoot.

‘What is the worst experience you’ve had on a rally here?’ I asked Makinen.

‘Oh. One time, one of those big birds smashed the windscreen,’ he said.

‘What? Gosh. You mean an ostrich?’

‘No. Like a chicken. You know.’ He spread his arms as fully as he could. I had never seen a chicken even half that wide, and felt it was imperative that, before I headed home the following day, I made an effort to track one down.

When my article about my time with the Subaru team was published in
Jack
, it was accompanied by a photograph of one of the Imprezas skidding through a cloud of dust. Beneath it was another, of a giraffe, strolling innocently along what could potentially be a track carved out through the dirt for rally cars. ‘Danger on the dirt,’ read a caption connecting the two photographs. ‘200km/hour Subaru Impreza shares the same route with pedestrian 1900kg adult male giraffe!’ In actuality, the giraffe in question was nowhere near the rally route at all, but safely sequestered in Nairobi National Park, where the greatest automotive danger it faced was a Renault Espace, being driven by a rotund, jocular Kenyan man called Maurice, who was carefully observing a sign reading ‘Speed Limit 20KPH: Warthogs and Children Have Right of Way’.

As if to underline the rally stars’ emotionally detached relationship to the wildlife around them, they had been known to eat at The Carnivore, a restaurant specialising in the meat of many of the animals they might potentially run over.

At The Carnivore, a different waiter was assigned to each different kind of game, which they carried from the grill on large swords. I didn’t know if they got commission on the meat they offloaded, but the system did appear to bring a competitive element to proceedings, making the restaurant a sort of inadvertent afterlife version of the battles the animals in question fought daily on the Serengeti. On my visit there, I was invited to eat an unlimited supply of hartebeest, zebra, crocodile, waterbuck and impala, and reluctantly obliged. I felt particularly sorry for the waiter assigned to waterbuck, who was having some wretched luck.

The waiter’s sales technique didn’t involve anything more elaborate than saying ‘
Waterbuck
?’ to each table he approached, but in those three syllables, an ocean of hurt was conveyed. You might think that a man saying ‘
Waterbuck
?’ is just a man asking if you want some water-buck, but in truth, there are lots of different ways of saying ‘
Waterbuck
?’: there’s the ‘
Waterbuck
?’ that says ‘Are you hungry? Would you like some of this?’, the ‘
Waterbuck
?’ that says ‘I have a wife and four kids to support, and the carburettor has just messed up on my 1981 Mazda’, the ‘
Waterbuck
?’ that says ‘this is an extremely big sword, and has many other potential uses, besides its function as a meat carrying apparatus’. And then there is the ‘
Waterbuck
?’ that quite simply says, ‘I am dying inside: rescue me’.

I wanted to help, but I was already feeling a bit queasy. That night, in my hotel room, suffering from the Meat Sweats, I felt the ache of the traitor coming from deep in my abdomen. I was not a vegetarian, and the meat I had eaten could hardly have been more free range, but by eating it, I had gone over to the side of the enemy, betrayed the animals I had tentatively aligned myself with. If I had actually enjoyed it, it might not have been so bad. The zebra had been dry, and tasted suspiciously what I imagined horse might taste like, the hartebeest left no lasting impression in my mind and, while I would never have admitted it to its face, the crocodile had only been passable. As for the water-buck, the less said about that the better. I could only assume that, before its unfortunate demise, it had been an unusually sedentary kind of antelope.

With Maurice’s help, I did see my lions in the end: two females, basking in the morning sun a matter of four or five yards away in the road in front of the Espace. Standing up with my head and shoulders sticking out of the sunroof, I was an easy target. A couple of relatively languid movements of their powerful limbs, and they would have had a hearty corduroy-flavoured breakfast. This was a National Park, a controlled environment, not the ‘real’ wilderness surrounding the rally track, but it was still a brave move, by my standards. You could say the same about my bumpy, skidding attempt to traverse the same rally route that the Subarus did, in a Range Rover, in record time, or the moment later that day when, following an engine failure, I was left to guard the abandoned spotter helicopter alone, putting my arm protectively around its chrome tail as thirty intrigued Maasai encroached, and appeasing them by handing out water and fruit that I’d found in the cockpit. I had my mind on bigger things. Specifically, one significantly bigger thing that, by some sort of Satanic magic that I neither understood nor wished to understand, would be transporting me back to the UK later that evening.