The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (18 page)

I crouched by the rail, trying to calm my shaking hands. For a moment Sanger had tricked me. He had needed the silent engine in order to hunt my clumsy footsteps. I waited as he reached the wheelhouse and seized the broken window frame, cutting his hand on the triangles of jagged glass. Blood dripping from his palm, he swayed into the doorway, and fired a third shot into the rocking helm that creaked beside him.

The shadows of the tamarinds lay like bars of camouflage across the open deck. Masking the sounds of my feet, I sidestepped between the fuel drums and backed into the circle of television monitors. Kneeling among the silent screens, I waited for Sanger to lose his way in the wheelhouse and blunder over the ferry’s after-peak.

But his sharp ears, their acuity honed by years of myopia, had heard my laboured breath. Before I could move, he had left the wheelhouse. He stepped quickly on his small feet to the cluster of fuel drums, and waited there among the barred shadows.

I backed against the metal cabinets, my feet crushing a dusty cassette. I picked up the plastic sleeve, hoping in a muddled way that one of these absurd films could deflect a bullet so small as to be almost cosmetic.

Hearing me, Sanger lunged forward from the fuel drums. He stood only six feet from me, and behind the cracked sunglasses I could see his emaciated face, covered with insect bites and exposure sores. The small pistol was pointed at the rattling cassette in my hand, as he tried to remember, from whatever evidence, whether I was left- or right-handed.

The deck tipped slightly under out feet, shifting the cargo around us. I steadied myself as the metal cabinets scraped against each other, looking round for some means of escape. I saw that Noon had released and reapplied the handbrake of the Mercedes, pitching the heavy car against its guy ropes.

‘… the river as ecological stereotype, saved by Kagwa’s wise administration, has …’

Confused by his own voice emerging from the limousine’s speaker, Sanger turned his shoulder to me. Before he realized that I was beside him, I raised the cassette and struck the sunglasses from his face. I seized his shoulders in both hands, ran him forward across the deck and pitched him head-first into the water below.

As he drifted across the shadow-filled waves, arms raised in a struggle to remain afloat, Noon turned up the volume of the speaker, drowning his cries in fragments of his own monologue.

Later, when I had fished Sanger from the river with a boat-hook, I went forward and ransacked his canvas bag. Sanger lay on the deck beside the Mercedes, breathing in sudden gasps, his safari suit threaded with water-weed. His pallid face was stained with oil from the propeller shaft, as if his immersion in the Mallory had transformed him into one of those black-skinned natives celebrated in his bogus documentaries.

Noon crowded my elbows while I rooted in the canvas bag. She hopped about, tapping her teeth in relief, snapping her fingers at Sanger and uttering a stream of subvocal epithets. I hoped to find another pistol or, conceivably, a few cartridges that would fit the Lee-Enfield rifle. But among the mosquito creams and vitamin capsules were a half-empty flask of whisky, and a cassette with a label in Mr Pal’s handwriting: ‘Dr Mallory and native girl bathing naked.’

I placed the cassette in her hands.

‘They misjudged you, Noon …’

‘Mal?’

‘You’ve got us all under your thumb. God knows where you’re leading me …’

I admired her for the canny and self-contained way in which, despite her fear, she had distracted Sanger, and even for the touch of cruelty she had shown in turning up the volume as he floated helplessly in the river, ducking him in the sounds of his own voice.

I threw the bag at Sanger’s oily feet, and looked up into the late afternoon air, listening for Kagwa’s helicopter. Too exhausted to continue our voyage, I shut down the engine and moored the ferry against the western bank. Bands of cerise cloud crossed the sky to the east as the dusk advanced through the papyrus swamps. The light was softer, and the saffron air above the river was still warm and honeyed, but in the shadows of the tamarinds the deck of the
Salammbo
seemed suddenly chill. My fever had begun to shake me again, and a frozen sweat bathed my arms and chest.

I unscrewed the flask and drank a draught of the whisky, gasping as the spirit stung the sores on my lips and gums. I leaned against the Mercedes, trying to stiffen my unsteady legs. At my feet I saw Sanger’s broken sunglasses, cracked mirrors reflecting my emaciated body, the crooked captain of a crooked ship …

I bent down to reach the glasses, and fell across the deck, spilling the whisky on to myself. I held the black frames, and then hurled them over the rail into the water. I remembered slapping the glasses from Sanger’s face when I should first have knocked the pistol from his hand – but these opaque sunglasses symbolized that imaginary vision of the river which Sanger had tried to impose upon my own.

‘… came a crooked camera, cruised a crooked river, caught a crocodile …’

Mulling over this jingle, I wandered back to the bullet-riddled wheelhouse. Mr Pal had moved himself across the floor, and now lay below the helm, his hands gripping the spokes as if trying to reverse the course of the
Salammbo
.

I bent down, seized his legs and pulled him from the helm. His hands clutched my ankles, but I kicked them away and began the task of starting the engine.

Dusk had fallen, twenty minutes later, when the ferry pulled away from the tamarind grove, and a sepia light lay over the river. Panels of dark air rose from the surface, as if sections of a dream were being screened from a sleeping mind. I steered between them; alcohol and fever guided my hands. The Mallory had spread outwards, as if making its last attempt to deceive me, dividing itself into a maze of channels between causeways of papyrus grass that formed blood-red palisades. The water had ceased to move, and I reduced the ferry’s speed to a walking pace. The shallow bow-waves moved across a surface of oiled silk. Their gentle motion soothed Mr Pal as he sank into the deep peace of the hepatic coma, rousing him to a murmured description of the last truth he had glimpsed at the doors of his own death.

‘… environmentally … paradise … may be seen as an excess of solutions in search of a problem … Professor, Nihal, Madhur …’

By evening, as the last ruby light slipped away through the mist, I found that we had entered a large lagoon. I stopped the engine, and let the
Salammbo
drift across a dark mirror that contained no reflections.

Noon was sitting in the Mercedes, too tired to tap her teeth. When I touched her shoulder she looked up at me with surprise, as if no longer remembering who I was. In the faint light reflected from the instrument panel her face was thin and drawn. She seemed to have grown younger, once again a child, and I realized that she was starving.

‘Noon … Let me sit with you. I’ll keep you warm. Tomorrow we’ll trap the birds.’

I was about to climb into the car, but the far-side passenger door had opened. In the darkness she slipped away from me, her feet limping across the deck as she retreated among the cases of film equipment. Faint with hunger, I swayed against the car. I finished the last of the whisky, and then walked forward, tripping over Sanger’s outstretched legs.

Behind me I heard voices across the lagoon. An engine sounded beyond the wheelhouse, as if the diesel had come to life on its own. A small wave tapped the hull plates, and the ferry rocked on the stationary water. I slipped on the oily deck, and tottered backwards into the mast.

A spotlight flared across the water, its harsh glare illuminating the
Salammbo
and its cargo. The beam picked out the chromium triton of the limousine’s radiator, and Noon’s blanched face as she crouched behind the fuel drums. Shielding my eyes, I saw that another vessel had crept alongside us and had coasted to a halt twenty feet from the starboard rail. Two figures stood below the open bridge, pointing the spotlight into my face.

I pushed myself from the mast and stepped unsteadily across the over-bright deck with its shadows swerving like hallucinations. Were these sudden visitors the members of a film crew who had come to help me in my seduction of Noon?

Then a woman’s voice called from the darkness.

‘Dr Mallory – you can take Sanger and the river. But we’ll take the child.’

24

I woke into a dream of fair women. I lay across a dusty mattress on an ornate bed whose gilded headpiece rose towards a painted ceiling. Beneath a sky of electric blue a group of nymphs swam around the fountain of a celestial swimming-pool. Their breasts played like porpoises among the waves, and the foam leapt between their welcoming thighs.

The cheap paint flaked from the ceiling, above which I could hear footsteps and a woman’s voice calling across the lagoon from the deck of this waterborne brothel. The frogs honked mournfully in reply, as the mosquitos circled the tiny cabin, dodging the fragments of plaster that each footstep released from the ceiling.

Rested after my long sleep, I lay in this fine rain of the bodies of beautiful women, each like a mature Noon, that fell upon my oil-smeared skin. The wooden shutters were latched across the small window, shielding me from the bright sunlight beyond the iron casement, but through the cracks in the rotting timbers I could see the spears of papyrus grass twenty feet away at the edge of the lagoon.

Gripping the rails behind me, I pulled myself upright. The figurine of a naked dancer topped the brass column, and shed her skin of cheap gilt into my right hand. I wiped the metal flakes on to the mildewed mattress and gazed round the small cubicle, somewhere under the restaurant deck in the stern of the
Diana
.

As I opened the shutters, the hot sunlight flooded the cabin, warming my skin. My fever had subsided, and I felt strong but empty-headed, as if part of my brain had been siphoned away during the night by the women whose firm hands had seized me in the wheelhouse of the
Salammbo
.

A sluggish wave crossed the yellow surface of the lagoon, losing itself in the reeds and papyrus grass. For all the intense light, the water seemed inert, as if the Mallory had been infected with the same fever, and was waiting for me to revive before it could flow again. A few rails and coucals called to the air in a half-hearted way, but they too seemed defeated. Even the river, I reflected, was waterlogged.

Leaning through the window, my head against the metal grille, I saw a rubber dinghy approach the starboard gangway. Two of Mrs Warrender’s women stood shoulder to shoulder, each pushing on an oar as they rowed across the water. Behind them, in the stern, was a packing-case loaded with film equipment and television monitors. Three hundred yards away, the
Salammbo
sat abandoned in the centre of the lagoon. A slack anchor chain hung from its bows, and the forlorn craft seemed about to sink under the weight of the dusty limousine.

I stood up, steadying myself against the door. Already I felt exhausted, but it was time to collect Noon, borrow the inflatable and make our way back to the ferry. I brushed the flaking tempera from my arms. Above a cracked bidet, stained with all the forgotten pleasures of the Lake Kotto oil-workers, was a mirror smeared with lipstick. I looked at my heavy beard, a ragged but almost messianic bush that sprang forward from the exposure sores on my cheeks. My eyes were flecked with yellow motes and my thinning gums gave my drawn mouth a wolfish smile. I knew that I was still infected with an intermittent fly fever. A posse of armed gendarmerie was after my blood, I was infatuated with a teenage girl, and almost everyone I had recruited to my bizarre cause was either dead or dying. Yet I felt more determined than at any time since leaving Port-la-Nouvelle. I thought of the lunatic events of the previous evening, of Sanger’s attempt to kill me. But these had already taken their place in the continuum of strangeness which had enveloped my life since the birth of the Mallory.

I turned the rusty handle of the door, only to find that it had been latched from the companionway.

‘For God’s sake … Mrs Warrender!’ I drummed my fist against the tempera breasts above my head, dislodging a plaster nipple that burst on the floor among the empty lipsticks and faded film magazines. The pair of sturdy feet which patrolled the deck now came to a halt. The woman consulted Mrs Warrender, her voice like that of a keeper discussing an uncooperative beast in her charge.

I remembered the
Diana
running alongside the car ferry. One of the African women had stepped through the glaring spotlight. She had leaned into the Mercedes and put her arms around Noon’s feverish shoulders, taking the cassette from her like a headmistress putting an end to a dormitory prank. Once Noon and Sanger were safely aboard the
Diana
, the women had come for me as I knelt in the wheelhouse, my mouth pressed to Mr Pal’s, trying to breathe life into his lungs. Their strong hands had seized my arms, hustled me through the chairs and tables of the restaurant deck, and then bundled me down a companionway into the airless cabin with its reek of stale scent and damp plaster.

‘Mrs Warrender—!’

I was about to burst the rotting door from its hinges, but a hand turned the latch. In the corridor stood Fanny, the oldest of the African women, the broad-shouldered bouncer and bar-keep at the oil-riggers’ saloon. She gazed imposingly at me, as if I were an unruly customer who had failed to pay his bill.

‘You can go on the deck. Your time for fresh air.’

‘Thank God for that … now, where is Noon?’

‘The child? She is resting. With Professor Sanger – you leave them now.’

‘Listen to me – I want to see them. They need my help.’

‘Your help? No thank you, doctor. No more strange medicine from Dr Mal.’

Unsure what to answer, I followed her large and purposeful buttocks up the companionway. Although a handsome woman, whom I had often admired from the windows of the clinic at Port-la-Nouvelle, she now belonged to another, remote order of womanhood.

We stepped on to the open deck, and the sunlight soon shortened the focus of my eyes. The ancient timbers of the
Diana
had been scrubbed to a lime-like whiteness. The blanched planks formed a marquetry of bones, as if the skeletons of all the oil-riggers who had lain in the cubicles below the restaurant had been placed side by side, a brothel-ship built from the ribs and skulls of its patrons. The once derelict barge had been transformed by Nora Warrender and her companions. Every inch of ornamental paintwork had been scraped and scoured, the grime from its hundreds of decorative scrolls reamed out like dirt from all the ears in a boys’ reformatory. The
Diana
gleamed like old ivory, emitting an eerie sepulchral light, as if the vessel was a funeral gallery being prepared for a waterborne cremation. Above the dance floor the women had roped a canvas awning between the funnel housing and the wooden roof of the restaurant, and even this canopy had the look of a flayed human skin stretched out to dry, its balls and tassels forming a frieze of pizzles and scrota.

At the edge of the dance floor, shielded by the awning, stood a group of animal cages that I had last seen in the breeding station at Port-la-Nouvelle. A pair of macaques and several marmosets clambered across the bars, intrigued to see me and obviously eager to welcome a sympathetic spirit to their disciplined realm.

The two women, Louise and Poupee, who had rowed the inflatable from the
Salammbo
, now moored alongside, and began to lift the electrical units on to the deck. I stepped forward, about to offer my help, but Fanny pushed me away, huffing at the very idea of my assistance, as if more than my token presence on this ship of bones was an intrusion.

Under the awning in the stern of the
Diana
sat a fourth young woman, recruited since my departure from Port-la-Nouvelle. On the table beside her stood a collection of ornamental lanterns, whose casements of coloured glass she buffed with a leather cloth. Was this female self-support group planning to reopen the
Diana
for business? Curious about this brisk housekeeping in the old brothel-boat, I crossed the dance floor to the semicircular bar behind the funnel. Through an open hatchway I could see into the engine-room, where the elderly gasoline engine had been restored and polished like the most proudly owned kitchen appliance.

Could I commandeer the ship? Peering into the small bridgehouse I had a sudden image of myself at the trimly centred wheel, captain of an all-woman crew. I stepped forward to the bridgehouse, about to test the pliant wheel, but Fanny caught my arm.

‘Doctor, you stay on the dance floor. Or you go below.’

‘Dance floor? Look here …!’ I tried to free my elbow from her strong grip, slipped and fell to the deck at her feet. She pushed my head away with her heavy thigh and then lifted me on to my shaky knees. Steadying myself against her muscular arms, I looked down at my gasping chest that pumped like a leaking ventilator at the humid air. Far from being able to commandeer their vessel, I was at these women’s mercy.

‘Where you belong, Dr Mal!’

‘On the dance floor? Right … what’s happened to Mrs Warrender?’

‘She’s here … out hunting. She wants to talk to you later.’

‘Good. But first I ought to see Sanger and Noon.’

‘The child? Well …’ Fanny turned towards Louise and Poupée. who were dusting the screens of the television sets. I saw no recognition in the young widows’ eyes that I existed, but Fanny gestured me to the companionway. ‘You can see the child and Professor Sanger. Just for a few minutes. I don’t want you making them sick, doctor.’

It was only then, as I carried out my brief examination of Sanger and Noon, that I realized once again to what physical extreme we had been carried by our voyage in the
Salammbo
. Sanger lay on the semen-stained mattress in the cubicle beyond my own, a pair of woman’s sunglasses clasped in both hands, eyes fixed on the naked figures who swam across the unseen electric sky above his head. Resting there in his ragged clothes, he resembled an elderly vagrant who had returned to the abandoned nightclub where he had spent the dreams of his youth. His irregular heartbeat, the rash of impetigo that covered his chest, and the wasted arms and legs jutting like poles from the torso of a scarecrow, together reminded me how much I had neglected both him and Mr Pal.

‘Mallory …’ He pressed the diamante frame of the sunglasses into my shoulder, a kindly gift from Nora Warrender. It was all nonsense. Madness on that mad ship. We’ll go back to Lake Kotto?’

‘Yes, we’ll go back.’

‘And Mr Pal?’

‘He’s already left. You’ll join him soon, Sanger.’

‘Good … I miss Mr Pal …’

I unpicked his fingers from my hand. His fever had abated, but I felt unable to do anything for him, because I had ceased to think and act as a physician. During the voyage of the
Salammbo
we had moved into a realm where sickness and obsession, health and sanity had ceased to be opposites.

Even when I saw Noon, lying like an undernourished child with her bony forehead hidden by a small pillow, I could only think of her as the young woman she had become during our voyage from Port-la-Nouvelle. I held her stick-like wrist, searching for the uncertain pulse, trying to will her back to the car ferry abandoned in the centre of the lagoon. I needed to feel again the spring of the
Salammbo’s
decks beneath my heels, to see Noon in the bows swaying her adolescent thighs as she steered me between the sand-bars whose submerged forms, touched by the keel of the ferry, stirred my half-conscious dream of caressing them.

However, those dreams had reduced this once beautiful child to little more than a skeleton. As I wavered, my confidence ebbing in myself and our eccentric voyage, I became aware that Noon was watching me with her sharp eyes, the patient assessing the physician. She counted the sores on my face and arms, estimated the strength that remained in my chest and shoulders. I realized that she was asking herself if I was well enough to go on.

‘Doctor … time for your cabin. You must rest your mind.’

Fanny stood at the foot of the companionway, calling me from Noon’s cubicle. She returned to the deck when I closed the door behind me. I stood in the narrow corridor, with its musty planks smelling of coffin-wood, wondering how I could smuggle Noon from the vessel. Across the windows of the cubicles were the same metal grilles, placed there to prevent any paying customers from taking a short cut to their pleasures. Even if I could kick the rusty frames from the rotting timbers neither Noon nor I was strong enough to swim to the
Salammbo
.

Exhausted by the heat, and by the patient industry of the women above my head, I leaned against a padlocked door behind me. The latch jumped from its socket, pulling the hasp from the spongy wood. The chain and padlock fell to the deck, and the door opened on to another cubicle.

Under the same gaudy fresco lay another grimy mattress. I was about to lie on it, but the bed was already occupied. Barrels pointing towards the window, an armoury of weapons lay side by side – three French and American carbines, several Kalashnikov automatic rifles, and Noon’s ancient Lee-Enfield. All had been carefully cleaned, their bolts and firing pins wrapped in oily rags to protect them from the humid air. Beside the rifles lay an assortment of ammunition clips and lose cartridges, and pieces of canvas webbing of a type worn by Captain Kagwa’s soldiers and by Harare’s guerillas. Shoulder harnesses, ammunition belts, grenade pouches hung from the brass rails like so many trophies.

I stared down at this substantial arsenal, wondering how the women had amassed these weapons. None had been exposed to the damp soil or air of the river valley. I picked up the Lee-Enfield, my arms barely strong enough to raise the heavy stock, and unwrapped the rags around its breech. I guessed that the women had strayed into a former battleground during their journey from Lake Kotto.

As I worked the bolt, hoping to find a cartridge in the breech, the door opened behind me. Mrs Warrender stood with the padlock and chain in her hands. She was still dressed in the bath-robe she had worn at Port-la-Nouvelle, as if she had spent the intervening months idling about her dressing-table, and was waiting for me to join her in a nearby cabin. She had cut short her hair, almost to the shaven scalp of a concentration camp victim, exposing the pallor of her face and neck, that eerie whiteness of the
Diana
. It occurred to me that she too might be a prisoner.