The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (17 page)

While the frogs simmered in the pan, Noon bathed Mr Pal, first stripping him to the waist and then rubbing his swollen abdomen with the wash-leather from the chauffeur’s glove compartment of the Mercedes. She scraped the mess-tins with a handful of sand, and then poured water over the half-conscious botanist. Mr Pal revived briefly. He lay back, swallowing the sweat that fell from his forehead, eyes fixed on the island of burned reeds beside the jetty. Then he lapsed again into his fever.

There was little I could do for him. Even if I set off down-river and managed to surrender to Captain Kagwa it was most unlikely that he would send Mr Pal on south to Port-la-Nouvelle.

When we had finished our meal I siphoned a dozen gallons of oil into the diesel’s fuel tank, started the engine and cast off from the island. As we moved forward, leaving the waterway and entering the main channel of the Mallory, I listened for any sound of Kagwa’s expeditionary force. Across the reed islands and lagoons the noise of the landing-craft’s engines would be audible for miles, and the layer of sun-lit haze that covered the water would conceal us from the helicopter.

I needed Noon to sit in the bows beside Sanger and Mr Pal, ready to warn me if we ran into one of Harare’s patrols. However, she remained in her den, ensconced in front of her television monitor. All the hours I had spent trying to teach Noon the rudiments of alphabet and speech in an attempt to widen her world had clearly been wasted. The more improbable the picture of Africa, the greater was Noon’s fascination. What most held her attention were the clips that Sanger had salvaged from a Hollywood melodrama of the nineteen-forties, which described the adventures of an African warrior queen, and drew Noon’s eyes to within six inches of the cathode screen. Chin on fists, she gazed at these glimpses of a female Tarzan, played by a statuesque Texan blonde, hunting on elephant-back, rallying her lions, leading the cowed villagers against a gang of white slave-traders. These hackneyed images seemed to provide Noon with the first dream of herself. I remembered her wading bare-breasted as she hunted for the frogs, and realized whose cues she was heeding.

In the early afternoon, when the heat from the sun seemed to melt the surface of the water, the fumes leaking from the diesel at last forced me to leave the wheelhouse. I shut down the engine and let the ferry coast into a shallow creek between two sand-bars on the western bank of the river.

Exhausted by the effort of holding the helm, I sat down in the shadow of the wheelhouse. We had covered some three miles, but in this vast archipelago of reed islands there seemed no sense of progress, as if the Mallory had lost itself in its own watery vastness. Barely recognizing my body beneath the oil and sores that covered my skin, I listened to the shrieking birds as they hunted the lagoons, and to the feverish murmurs of Mr Pal lying beside Sanger in the bows of the ferry.

Noon, however, seemed to come alive in the heat. I heard her hooting and grunting to herself, supplying the missing soundtrack to her favourite film. She had switched off the monitor, shrewdly conserving the battery for the late afternoon, and well aware that it would soon run down once the diesel’s generator was no longer charging it. Oblivious of the heat, she skipped about the deck, riddled out the stove and cast the ashes over the side, watching with a stylized scowl for the few small snakes to rise to the speckled surface. Machete in hand, she leapt into the knee-deep water, and began to hack at the bamboo, as if the saplings were lances borne by an army of opposing pikemen. In her naive way she had modelled her behaviour on the actress she had seen in the film clips, perhaps thinking that these were newsreels of an existing tribe of warrior queens.

Already I was obsessed by Noon, by her slim fingers quick as a card-sharp’s, by her scarred instep and the warts on her left knee, like the markers of some erotic encounter to come. I followed her around the deck as she gathered the kindling. Her eyes never left the satchel of cassettes that lay between Sanger’s feet, a set of instructional tapes from which she would construct a newer and stronger woman.

Perhaps I could insinuate myself into her mimickry of these film roles, model myself on the behaviour of these lovers of extraordinary women? Noon was the first person whom I had completely shaped, and I was reluctant to surrender her to Sanger. In many ways I was running about at her beck and call, but she still existed only within my duel with the river. The confident and intelligent women whom I had known as a young doctor in London had been too tolerant and too affectionate to seize my imagination, however fond of them I had become. Perhaps, in the future, those unique marriages of memory and desire would only take place within some obsessive and distempered union, like that which existed between myself and this great channel …

‘He’s dead, Mallory! Mr Pal is dead!’

‘Mal! Doc Mal!’

Noon’s fist rapped against the wheelhouse, rousing me from this confused reverie. Sanger was calling from the bows of the ferry, arms thrashing about as he struggled with the awning. I went forward and freed him from the guy ropes.

‘Let me see him. Stop acting all the time …’

‘Doctor, Mr Pal is dead!’

‘Dead? You can see him moving.’

The botanist was slumped in his chair, head lolling as if his neck had been broken. Rotted by the moisture that poured from his body, the canvas seat had split and he lay on the deck within the wooden frame, surrounded by a pool of sweat and urine.

‘Stay with us, Mr Pal.’ Sanger knelt beside him, shouting into his ear. ‘We are going back to Port-la-Nouvelle! Dr Mallory will give you medicines!’

Remembering that I had once been a physician, I examined the Indian. No longer conscious, he was expiring inside his inflamed skin, brain cooked by his fever. The enteritis and the ulcerated mucous membranes of his mouth indicated a severe attack of sprue, overlaid by exposure and countless opportunist infections.

‘I’ve nothing – there are no medicines here. Not even a bottle of Scotch.’

‘You fool. He’s a Moslem.’ Sanger pushed me away, raised the botanist’s face between his hands and began to massage his cheeks. ‘Mallory, listen to me! We leave now. Start your engine and set course for Port-la-Nouvelle.’

I tried to move away, but he seized both my wrists and twisted them in his strong hands, as if trying to knot my arms together.

‘Turn the ship around! It’s a bad dream, Mallory. There is no film now. Look at yourself, man, you’re more desperate than Mr Pal!’

He tried to propel me towards the wheelhouse, and then stumbled into the awning. I watched him grapple with the air and sunlight. Noon stepped behind the limousine, gazing without expression at this confrontation between a blind man and his shadow.

Should we turn back? Around the ferry the mist cleared. The harsh, insect-filled light lay over the refuse and vomit on the deck, over the derelict crew of this derelict ship. In a brief moment of lucidity I looked at my reflection in the muddy paintwork of the Mercedes, at my ragged shorts, emaciated body covered with infected bites and exposure sores. Dimly I could remember a lost self, a responsible older brother who had mistakenly sanctioned this absurd journey. I tried to stand back from my own obsession, but I could no longer separate myself from my dream of the Mallory. Was my attempt to scotch the river nothing more than the last instalment of that suicide by easy payments on which I had embarked by first choosing to work at Port-la-Nouvelle? I had killed Miss Matsuoka, and Mr Pal would follow; sooner or later we would all be killed in the coming clash between Harare and Captain Kagwa. Noon would perish before any of us.

‘All right, Sanger.’ I beckoned Noon towards me. ‘Put Mr Pal in the wheelhouse. Then we’ll turn around and go back to Port-la-Nouvelle.’

23

Smoke pumped from the funnel of the
Salammbo
, diffusing into the deep haze that lay over the lagoons. Somewhere through this amber glare I could see a drifting image of the sun, so close that it seemed suspended from a gantry above our heads. When I engaged the reversing gear the diesel juddered against the walls of the engine pit, shaking the wheelhouse like a rotting cage. Mr Pal’s right arm flopped from the bunk on to the deck, and then began to draw the rest of his body towards the floor at my feet.

‘Noon – !’

Refusing to cooperate, Noon sat in the driving seat of the Mercedes with her fist against her chin. She flicked at the controls, as if calculating an alternative itinerary.

‘Trust me, child …’

One hand on the helm, the other easing forward the throttle, I stepped back across the wheelhouse floor. I pressed my right foot against Mr Pal’s chest, forcing the botanist back on to the narrow bunk. His eyes opened and a confused fragment of his endless commentaries came from his lips.

‘… soft waters, made plentiful by a benevolent rainfall … clear streams will cool all fevers …’

I ignored him, steering the ferry into the main channel of the river. The eastern shore was barely visible through the haze, lost somewhere among the reed-islands and sand-bars.

Pulled by the propeller, the ferry reversed into the centre of the channel. The current turned the bows towards the south, pointing the
Salammbo
on the long voyage to its home port. The waves clicked and tutted against the hull, as if regretting that its rusting plates and weary timbers lacked the resolve to carry her through the rigours of our quest.

‘Doctor! Which way …? Tell me our bearing!’ Sanger was shouting from the bows, hands raised to catch the confused air streaming around the vessel. For a few seconds he disappeared in a cloud of smoke from the funnel, and then emerged like a magician sprung from a pantomime trap-door.

I shielded my face from the sun, listening for any sounds of Kagwa’s helicopter. The wavelets chattered against the hull, dribbling their half-forgotten messages, their whispered secrets which they had carried all the miles from the spring waters of the Mallory.

‘Doctor! Our bearing?’

‘South … we’re making our journey towards the rain planet.’

We were drifting downstream at two or three knots, the current outrunning the slow thrust of the propeller. I eased the helm to starboard, drawing the ferry stern-first across the channel. Noon looked up from her sullen perusal of the car’s instrument panel, staring at me as if she suspected that hunger had made me lose my sense of direction. I avoided her eyes and let the ferry complete its sternward arc. When we lay beam-on to the current, I disengaged the propeller, and wound the helm hard to port. The cutwater of the vessel began to point into the stream, bearing north as the stern swung round and tucked in behind the bows. Re-engaging the propeller, I gradually increased the throttle setting.

We were moving north again, towards the source of the Mallory. Unaware of this simple deception, Sanger leaned back in his deckchair and set his hat at a satisfied rake.

So Sanger’s myopia, perhaps aggravated by scurvy, was as total as I had guessed. For how many years had he concealed this, relying for his picture of the external world on the reports brought back to him by his assistants, filming his scientific documentaries that were as fictional as Dürer’s rhinoceros …?

Noon, meanwhile, had stepped from the Mercedes. Keeping the hull of the limousine between us, she stared at me across the grimy roof, clearly puzzled by this small show of duplicity. I realized that she cared nothing for Mr Pal, and found it hard to grasp why I should bother to trick Sanger into thinking that we were returning to Port-la-Nouvelle.

Yet the deception had served its purpose. I had never intended to abandon the hunt for the Mallory, but this small deceit was a last act of deference to those human and professional debts which I would once have owed to the dying botanist.

I stood against the helm, clasping it to my bare chest, feeling the teak crosspiece cut into my breastbone. The pain bonded me to the
Salammbo
. As I swung the heavy wheel, steering the ferry down the centre of the channel, I happily felt the infected wound on my head, a gaudy plume of hair and blood that I wore like a cockade. I pressed the throttle forward, listening to the smoke beating like a fist inside the funnel.

‘Doctor?’ Sanger shouted from the bows. ‘Conserve your fuel. The current will carry us.’

‘Don’t worry, Sanger. We’re in good time.’

‘When will we meet Captain Kagwa? His forces must be close.’

‘Soon, Sanger. We’ll meet him soon.’

‘We’ll transfer ownership of the Mallory.’

‘Of course, Sanger. We’ll call it the Kagwa.’

‘No, no. It remains the Mallory. How is Mr Pal?’

‘He’s resting – his dreams are calmer.’

‘Good. He’s dreaming of the Ganges and the Irrawaddy.’

Noon had left the Mercedes and stood by the wheelhouse door. She glanced down at Mr Pal, who was lying on the floor beside the bunk, and then turned her attention to me, tapping her teeth like a cashier as she made a rapid inventory of my feverish state.

‘Not too good, Noon? You may have to take over from me.’

For the first time I noticed the machete in her hand. She was staring in a hard and adult way at the bows of the
Salammbo
. Sanger had left his deckchair and was separating himself from the awning. Eager to check on our progress, he felt his way past the Mercedes, and then climbed hand over hand around his film equipment. His face masked by the sunglasses, he poked among the lights and monitors, nostrils flicking at the passing air for any scent of Captain Kagwa. As he swung between the silent screens he resembled a blind Quasimodo sniffing his bells.

‘Mallory?’ His hands scrabbled through the broken windows of the wheelhouse. ‘Are we on the right course? All these channels, I can hear the grass breathing. You’ve constructed a maze.’

‘We’ll find our way back. I recognize all the landmarks.’

‘Good … there’s a map inside your head. You’re feverish, doctor. How is Mr Pal?’

‘He’s a little calmer. The infection has passed. Some waterborne fever.’

‘A disease called a river. A dose of Mallory …’ He ran a hand across the sores on his face, as if trying to recognize himself. ‘I blame only myself, doctor – I urged you on. This small eccentricity, how could I know that you would go so far? Now it’s all lost …’

‘You’ll make your film, Sanger.’

‘No – there’s no film … everything is finished for me. You must rest yourself. We can sit here and wait for Captain Kagwa.’

‘We’ll move on – I’m stronger now.’

‘You’re a sick man. Even the Captain may forgive you.’

Losing his footing, he slumped against the oil drums. Noon stepped out of his way. She stood beside the stove with the machete, splitting the bamboo poles into thin spears. She watched me calmly, as if calculating how many more hours or days I could be relied upon. Then, reluctant to take her eyes from me, she skinned the end of her left thumb.

‘Mal …!’

I left the helm and pushed the machete aside. I squeezed her thumb, expressing a few drops of blood. As the wound blanched, I could see a splinter of bamboo lodged in the quick. I raised the thumb to my mouth and teased the splinter between my teeth. I sucked the blood from the small lesion, tasting the faint tang of frog and snakeskin, and a stranger, softer flavour of a woman’s skin.

Wincing with pain, Noon hopped on one foot, gripping the machete in her free hand. As I sucked each of her fingers I knew that she might split my neck with a single slash of the blade. But she let me touch her, and draw the blood from her thumb as if I was lying at her breast. Would she use her sex to ensure that I sailed on to the source of the river? My hand lay against her cheek. I placed my arm around her shoulders, holding the wheel with one hand as I searched the sun-filled channel for a quiet inlet. There, on the cool banks beside a drowning pool, among the lilies and the tamarinds, we would come together, deep in the drowsy silks of her body.

The soft river airs, the sweetened odours of lagoons, breathed over me as I clung to the helm. And so the fever-boat sailed on among the dreaming fish and the giddy birds …

‘Mal!’

The ferry heeled to starboard, its iron rudder scraping an underwater obstacle. The helm spun through my fingers, the spokes beating my hands as if punishing me for falling asleep. Thrown across the deck, Mr Pal lay under the bunk beside the rifle. In the bows Sanger had slipped from his chair, dragging the awning with him. He clung to the forward capstan, clearly fearful that the ferry was about to capsize.

We had struck the remains of a wooden bridge that had once spanned the ancient wadi that now lay in the bed of the Mallory. Crushed by the weight of the ferry, the waterlogged timbers rose briefly above the surface like a group of disturbed crocodiles, and then sank below the foam. I stopped the engine, disconnecting the propeller as the ferry remained motionless in midstream.

Aided by Noon, Sanger leaned against the radiator grille of the Mercedes, right hand fumbling at the headlamps and chromium emblems, his left hand dangling in the water to gauge the direction of the current.

‘Your engine, doctor! Start your engine!’

‘It’s all right, Sanger. We’re safe.’

‘Your engine!’

As the propeller began to turn, pushing the ferry upstream, Sanger plunged his hand into the-current. He took off his glasses, blind eyes raised as he offered his cheek to the sun.

So Sanger now knew that we were sailing north. He had tried without success to test the true direction of the
Salammbo
, confused by the relative motion of the river. But the sun’s hot light striking his face from the western bank left him in no doubt.

‘Mr Pal! Take the helm!’

He stood up and swayed around the limousine with outstretched hands, ready to wrest the wheel from me. When he reached the open deck he tottered near the edge, the spray from the bows soaking his trousers. I swung the helm to port, trying to throw him into the leaping bow-wave, but he dropped to his knees and groped his way past the film equipment. As his hands moved along the metal deck Noon backed away from him, almost inviting him to seize her ankles, the machete swinging between her knees.

‘Ignore him, Noon. He won’t hurt you. I’ll put him ashore.’

‘Leave the wheel, Mallory. It’s over now.’

‘We’re on course, Sanger. The ship’s following its compass.’

‘Turn back!’

Sanger beat his palms against the deck, drumming out all his hatred of these rusting plates. He clutched the wooden pillars of the wheelhouse, trying to throw the entire structure overboard. Across the broken window I could feel his breath panting into my face through caried teeth. His strong hands seized my shoulders. He fumbled at my skin, feeling the grease and sores on my chest, the oily beard on my face, at last convinced that an imposter who could mimic my voice had taken command of the
Salammbo
.

‘Who are—? Dr Mallory?’

I pushed his hands away, and threw him against the oil drums. As I freed myself from his thrashing limbs I heard a familiar concussive noise above the beat of the diesel. An ungainly shadow crabbed across the water. The rotating arms chopped at the air, dappling Noon’s frightened face. Looking upwards through the broken roof of the wheelhouse, I saw Captain Kagwa’s helicopter, machine-gun in its glass canopy, yellow pontoons like two large gas cylinders. Three hundred feet away, it followed the west bank of the river, then crossed the water and began to circle the lagoons and papyrus islands beyond the eastern shore.

Concealed by the mist, and camouflaged by the dirt and leaves scattered across its decks and cargo, the
Salammbo
had escaped the pilot’s notice. I throttled back the engine, and let the craft drift into a patch of deeper haze that lay near a grove of tamarinds along the shore.

The helicopter clattered across the river. Head down, nails tapping a frantic semaphore against her teeth, Noon took refuge in the rear seat of the Mercedes. Sanger had returned to his deckchair, and sat with a canvas bag across his legs. Among the tape-recorders and aerosols of mosquito repellent he had found a small chromium pistol. He sat stiffly with the weapon raised above his head, like a starting official at a regatta.

As the noise of the helicopter enveloped him, Sanger fired into the air. The brief crack was lost in the thumping blare, but Sanger cocked the slide and raised the pistol through the bedraggled awning. Was this blind man trying to shoot the helicopter down with a handbag weapon? Even Noon was watching him curiously from her passenger window.

When he fired a second shot at the helicopter I realized that Sanger was hoping to catch the pilot’s eye with the sharp flashes from the gun’s barrel. But the helicopter was moving upstream, gaining height as the pilot took care to avoid any possible ground fire from Harare’s guerillas. Lit by the afternoon sun, its exhaust trailed behind the craft like the golden brush of an aerial fox.

‘Stop the engine, doctor! You’re a sick man …’

With the last sounds of the helicopter, Sanger moved forward, hand over hand among the empty fuel drums. Noon sat circumspectly in the Mercedes, like a princess watching a street-corner brawl from the safety of her limousine.

‘Mallory – you will place yourself in Mr Pal’s custody …’

I cut the engine, listening to the last shudder of the diesel. The ferry lost way and drifted on the current, rocked by the faint swell, waves clicking against the hull as if waiting their time. Behind me Mr Pal lay below the bunk, babbling a delirious botany to himself.

Sanger had reached the television screens, marooned among the silent pieces of an electronic chessboard. His free hand searched the greasy tubes. I left the wheelhouse and moved to the starboard rail, but he heard my feet on the deck. He pointed the pistol towards me and fired a single shot, sending the small bullet into the door pillar a few feet away.