The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (7 page)

10

Unaware of its coming end, the Mallory continued to flow below me. I stood on the earth rampart which Captain Kagwa’s men had constructed beside the airstrip, and looked down at the channel of brown water that emerged from the forest and swept towards the lake. Now seventy yards wide, the river had settled into a sedate middle-age, its course littered with the half-submerged trunks of the palms and forest birches whose roots it had undermined. Their foliage still thriving, the trees lay at all angles in the warm stream, a roosting place for hundreds of painted snipe and oystercatchers.

Behind the tractor, the soldiers sweated in the sun, moving the last of the oak piles into position behind the rampart. Now that the river was about to be extinguished, I felt pleasantly drunk – the combined effects of the sun, the whisky I had been drinking since breakfast, and the disapproving eyes of the coracle girl who had restlessly watched the preparations from midstream.

From the roof of the police barracks Captain Kagwa kept an eye on our progress through his binoculars. A hundred yards upstream from the rampart, Mrs Warrender and her women stood on the bank, watching with their expressionless faces, like a party of Norns. I was only sad that my underwater tryst with Nora Warrender would not now take place.

On the opposite bank Mr Pal and Sanger waited behind their cine-camera, while Miss Matsuoka darted around the tractor, tape recorder slung over the shoulder of her flying suit, pushing her microphone into the faces of the bad-tempered soldiers.

For once I was happy to let Sanger record these final hours of the Mallory. I had worked for three weeks with Kagwa’s men, planning a final assault on this ever-growing river, recruiting three elements of nature against the fourth. Earth, air and fire would be brought to bear together – the mass of soil and gravel which we had excavated from the shoulder of the airstrip would be driven forward by the tractor and dropped across the river at its narrowest point, forming a huge rampart fortified by the oak piles. Through breaches in the banks the dammed water would pour into the waste ground beside the runway, and soon evaporate in the hot air. Lastly, I had transported a hundred gallons of diesel fuel from the drilling project, to be tipped into the stream and ignited, scorching the last moisture from the bed of the channel. The river would die here, where I had first loosed it upon the unsuspecting light.

‘Dr Mallory – the river is ready for you …’ Miss Matsuoka called to me from her vantage point beside the oak piles. She danced among the heavy logs, ready to skip out of their way when they began to roll. She beckoned me on, but then held up her hand, as usual finding it impossible to satisfy herself.

The tractor waited below me. The sergeant had backed the last of the earth into the rampart. Covered with dust and sweat, he hung from his controls, watching for my signal. Downstream, two of his men waited to release the water through their sluicegates. On either side of the rampart the logs lay in place, about to tumble forward.

The smoke from the tractor billowed into my face, forcing me to choke. Already queasy from the effects of the whisky, 1 waved fumes away, tripped over a plastic carton half-buried in the rubble and sat down heavily. Cock of my dunghill, I gazed at the river for the last time, and raised Captain Kagwa’s flare pistol above my head.

Through the smoke I saw a small fir tree drift below the rampart. Partly hidden within the foliage was the girl in the coracle. Paddling fiercely, she was trying to undo the soldiers’ work, freeing the river of all obstacles so that it might flow with its greatest strength. She swerved to and fro, sweeping the water on its way, and steered herself to the foot of the earth wall. Small fists clenched around her paddle, she looked up at me, willing me to do my worst.

Above the rumble of the tractor I heard the higher note of an aircraft engine. Fifty feet above the forest canopy a helicopter of the provincial gendarmerie was approaching the airstrip. Once owned by a French oil consortium, its shabby paintwork still carried the company’s livery on the dented plates of its hull, over which were superimposed the gendarmerie insignia. At the controls a fair-haired European pilot peered through his windshield, surprised to see the bizarre tableau below him.

As a million dead leaves swirled into the air I tried to wave the helicopter away. My feet slipped in the soft earth, sending a shower of pebbles into the water around the girl. She winced and pinched herself, then paddled more furiously, hunting down each dilatory eddy and speeding it on its way.

Deafened by the helicopter’s engine, and happy to misinterpret my signal, the tractor driver released his clutch and propelled the vehicle into the rampart, sinking the huge blade into the earth shoulder. I slid down the shifting slope, as the soil and beer cans spilled around my waist, shouting to the girl in the coracle and urging her to move out of danger. Confused by the noise and the cascade of gravel, the three soldiers holding back the oak piles began to loosen the halyards of their derrick and tip the giant logs into the water.

‘Hold on – not yet …!’ I waved to them with the flare pistol, but their faces were confused by the whirling dust and the noise of the helicopter. Trying to include the circling craft in her composition, Miss Matsuoka stood with her back to the straining logs, eyes fixed to the viewfinder of her camera.

The earth slipped below my feet, a soft, swift avalanche into the peppered surface of the water. I found myself sitting in the muddy shallows at the foot of the rampart, as a cascade of earth, gravel and garbage poured around me. Huge logs were tumbling into the current only a dozen feet away, and I caught a last glimpse of Miss Matsuoka stumbling among them, face stunned and hair dishevelled, the flying suit torn from one shoulder. Twisting between them was the plastic coracle. The child flailed with her paddle through the clouds of earth and spray. The helicopter had overflown the airstrip, the pilot unnerved by the sight of part of the runway shoulder disappearing beneath his landing rails. Miss Matsuoka had vanished and an empty silver sleeve floated on the brown foam.

The ledge on which I sat sank beneath me. An intact section of the rampart fell foward into the river, and the wave of displaced water swept me off my feet. Carried into the yellow depths, I saw one of the oak logs rolling above my head like the wheel of a truck. I felt myself drawn down, and my feet touched the wall of a funnel within the gravel-bed, that cavern from which the stream had first emerged and which my body would fill, setting the Mallory free at last to run its course.

11

Around me I could hear the voices of women, muffled as they made their beds in rooms always somewhere beyond my sight. Softened by the thick drapes that hung from the doors of the veranda, the low sing-song murmur moved between them as they worked. In my mind the liquid clicks of their dialect merged with the sounds of the river tapping at the terrace below the veranda, so that the brown waves seemed to draw the endless chatter from the hidden rooms of the breeding station and were in turn teased on their way by the voices of these invisible women playing among their beds.

For three weeks I had rested on the veranda, sitting in the high steel cot which the nuns at Port-la-Nouvelle had purchased for their ageing priest, and on whose hard Victorian springs the poor man had died. For days I listened to the women, but never caught what they were saying. The large house had been converted into a maze of bedrooms in which the women murmured all day like the contented inmates of a seraglio, falling silent only when they entered the veranda.

Every day they bathed naked in the river below the terrace, but it was clear that they did not regard me as a wounded pasha being lovingly restored to health. Three pairs of strong hands changed my sheets and dressings with the same briskness they used when pounding cassava in the kitchen yard. But for Mrs Warrender, I was sure that Fanny and Louise and Poupée would have wheeled the cot on to the terrace and tipped their unwelcome guest into the nearest whirlpool. However, I was content to watch these handsome women bathing in the river, and put up with their ill-humour, only puzzled why Nora Warrender had accepted me at the breeding station.

I had been rescued from the tumbling logs by two of Kagwa’s soldiers, and pulled half-drowned on to the river bank. The following day the body of Miss Matsuoka was washed ashore on the beach below the tobacco warehouse, although it was a week later that I learned of her death. With a fractured vertebra in my neck, a bruised liver and spleen, I had been left in my trailer at the clinic, but rapidly slipped into shock before being moved to a disused cell at the police barracks. For three days Kagwa had gazed at me with expressions that ranged from boredom to concern, as the reflection of Sanger’s video played on the ceiling above his head. At last he decided to send me by truck to the provincial capital, a journey over sabotaged bridges and cratered roads that would have ruptured my spleen and killed me within hours.

Then, as I was being lifted over the tail-gate of one of the trucks, I was rescued by Nora Warrender. She and her three women trundled me back to the breeding station on the same wooden cart which I had forbidden them to use as a water-carrier. From then on a diet of cassava, the sight of soft arms and hard hands, and the sounds and smell of the river set me on the mend.

Above all, it was the river, which had once tried to take my life, that now revived me. In the weeks that I spent on the veranda I watched it flow past the grounds of the breeding station. It was now an immense brown current two hundred yards wide, filling the entire valley beside the airstrip, which the waters had swept away since the fiasco of my attempt to smother them. Ten feet deep at its centre, the river emerged from a wide rent in the forest two miles to the north of Port-la-Nouvelle. Through the canyon of red earth which the current had cut between the trees, I could see its upper reaches winding across the open savanna as it emerged from the Chad and Sudan borderlands. At night I watched its silver back through the darkness, crossing the horizon like the traffic stream of a continental highway.

The speed of the river’s growth had overwhelmed Lake Kotto, which was now an expanse of deep brown water thirty miles in length, teeming with the fish and small snakes that had emerged from the meanders of the Kotto River at its southern end, and furnished with its own micro-climate. Already the first clouds had formed above the lake, and there were hints of rain. An entire landscape was being remade. During my first week the women had walked the full length of the estate in order to fill their water pails from the slippery bank, but the river had soon shortened their journey. The strong brown tide, seething through the debris of toppled trees lying in midstream, quickly overran the brick wall beside the gates, then swept up the drive and demolished the fence of the kitchen garden. Within the second week, the water had crossed the weed-grown lawn to the steps of the terrace, as if to seek me out and remind me how much it had grown since my attempt to destroy it.

The stone veranda was now a jetty across which waves would often break, depositing dead rats, empty aftershave bottles and drenched copies of
Paris-Match
. The tide swirled around the house and in twenty-four hours swept away the brick cages of the breeding station. Led by Mrs Warrender, the women had moved the few remaining macaques and marmosets into the smaller cages in the surgery. They filled flour-bags with earth from the kitchen garden, and laid them in a makeshift wall across the drive.

As I could have told them, their oozing defence wall had soon been demolished. They laboured knee-deep in the mud, wallowing like the members of a female wrestling team, and I remembered their strong hands and felt almost proud of this great channel. I had left part of my blood in the river, and although we were enemies a special bond had formed between myself and this strange waterway.

The cot trembled against my back, the castors turning on the stone floor as the house shifted under the pressure of water. Within a few weeks, unless the river abated, it would be swept away, and already Nora Warrender had conceded to Captain Kagwa that she would have to evacuate the breeding station. Hidden tides rolled below the smooth surface of the river, taking their beat from a different pendulum whose swing was as wide as the horizon. A faint shudder moved through the walls, and I saw a broad swell sidle across the river. On its brown back it carried a police patrol launch which it swept sideways on to a narrow sand-bank in midstream. After a change of helmsman the crew pushed themselves free with a flurry of oars and boathooks. On its starboard bow a second patrol boat was trying to cross the channel in a cloud of diesel smoke, drifting towards a clump of drowned oaks fifty yards from the bank, where a party of soldiers were constructing a small jetty.

As if aware of all this military activity, the river had smoothed its surface and withdrawn into itself, into those secret deeps where part of me had drowned. I could feel the water still flowing through my veins and was aware of those changes, in the realms of time and the senses, that the Mallory had imposed. I knew that my obsession with the river had led to the death of the Japanese photographer, and that her body lay in the cemetery behind the deserted Catholic mission, beside the oil-company workers and the former manager of the Toyota garage. Yet in my mind she and I still swam through that bright, gravel-filled stream. I wanted to immerse myself in the great rivers of the world, to be drawn down into their deeps. Already I guessed that it was not the Mallory that I had wanted to kill, but myself, and that this river which I had created was in fact trying to save me …

‘You’re dreaming too much, doctor. See what you’ve been doing with all this water …’

Poupée, the youngest of the African women, who had once been a hostess on the
Diana
, strode across the veranda on flat heels, her handsome hip striking a corner of the cot and jarring my neck. Ignoring me, she stepped on to the terrace, the water streaming around her bare feet. She picked up a willow branch washed on to the flagstones and ambled along in a jaunty way, as if to throw it into the channel, but then lashed viciously at the water below the veranda.

A child’s head emerged into view, hands raised against this fusillade of blows. Poupée flailed at her shoulders, knocking away the paddle. She bent down and seized the side of the coracle and tried to overturn the craft, working herself into a fury at the girl.

All this anger unsettled me, and I tried to climb from the cot. I saw the girl every afternoon, paddling across the river to inspect a new sand-bank raised by a shift in the current, hanging on to the branch of a half-submerged tree as she kept an eye on my convalescence. She spent the morning near the military camp at the airstrip, watching Professor Sanger’s television monitors and scrounging for scraps from the company of bored field engineers brought in by Kagwa to build a pontoon bridge. The attempt had proved another fiasco – the river had doubled in width during the week which the engineers had taken to assemble the bridge. A single surge in the current swept away the metal pontoons and scattered them far across Lake Kotto.

Clearly pleased by this, the girl paddled swiftly to the breeding station. I had never spoken to her, but every day, while the women dozed after our afternoon meal, I would leave some of my food for the child on the veranda steps. However, she had not sped across the river to eat, but to make sure that I was aware of the engineers’ failure.

Caught in the face by the flailing willow branch, the girl cried out. She abandoned her oar and paddled backwards with her hands, wiping the tears from her nose and eyes.

‘Poupée, leave her alone! She only wants food!’ When I reached the veranda the current had carried the child out into the channel. I took the oar from Poupée’s hands, but in her anger she tried to wrestle it away from me. Something about the girl, perhaps her tribe, or simply her delight in the river, touched a reflex of extreme hostility.

‘Come in, doctor. We can’t have you trying to drown yourself again.’

I felt Nora Warrender’s hands on my shoulder. She steered me away from the water, as if I were a senile patient at a private clinic, one of those so-called nursing homes that line the banks of the Thames and Long Island Sound and are in effect private prisons. She still wore the old dressing-gown, a badge of whatever outrage she had suffered – before leaving Port-la-Nouvelle, Santos had suggested that Mrs Warrender and her women had been beaten and probably raped by Harare’s guerillas.

However, my accident, or our imminent departure from Lake Kotto, had catalyzed a remarkable change in Nora Warrender. She was as stretched and vulnerable as ever, but she had woken from the muffled sleep of bereavement, her walking numbness, and now moved purposefully about the breeding station as she supervised the packing. And, though I found it hard to believe, she even seemed to show some interest in recruiting me into whatever half-formed scheme circled around her mind. Often in the early evening she would come on to the veranda with two tumblers of whisky, sit on the bed and talk to me in an eerily level way. I even had some vague idea of restarting our affair. At that time she had been unable to cope with my problems, my endless talk of remythologizing myself and making a new life somewhere else, as if somewhere else existed. Now, however, she took an intense pleasure in the river and its growth, and was clearly undismayed by the prospect of the breeding station, and all trace of her marriage, being washed away by its waves.

‘Do they need to be so hard on the child?’ I tossed the oar over the water towards the coracle. The girl’s eyes locked on to mine, her only concession to thanks. She retrieved the blade with a grimace, and then spun the coracle in an eddy and slipped away like a dodgem driver into the current.

Without thinking, I waved to her, a small show of sympathy. ‘Strange creature. Why do your women hate her so much?’

‘She’s always stealing food. Don’t feel too sorry for her. She tried to kill you.’

‘Hardly, Nora. She’s little more than a child.’

‘Is death less final when the trigger-finger belongs to a twelve-year-old?’

‘I like to think so.’

Mrs Warrender settled me against the pillow, ‘It’s a good thing you’re leaving, doctor. I’ll have a word with them – they connect her with the river, and feel she might even be some sort of partner of yours.’

‘Partner? She tried to shoot me.’

‘Perhaps she thinks you have special powers – I’m sure she can see that you’re half-way to the dream-time.’

‘She fired her rifle at my chest.’

‘Well, now she knows you have stamina. She comes from some mountain tribe to the north – probably she’s decided to marry you. At twelve or thirteen she’s practically an old maid.’

‘Not for much longer, the way your women go on – they’re trying to blind her.’

‘I’ll keep them away from her. They know she was with Harare.’

‘And they haven’t told Captain Kagwa?’

‘They would – but I’ve explained to them that she’s important to you.’

‘Is she?’

‘Of course – you don’t realize it, but she’s your little messenger. You have her flitting around everywhere. She keeps you informed.’

‘About what, for God’s sake?’

‘The river …
Your
river.’

I followed a large swell that crossed the brown stream, moving like the submerged carapace of an immense leisurely turtle. Already parts of the terrace were awash. ‘
My
river? As a matter of fact, it is my river. I still have the deeds.’

‘I hope Captain Kagwa recognizes them. At least it bears your name.’

‘The River Mallory – I paid a thousand dollars, more than Kagwa bargained for.’

‘He’s impressed – you’re a figure of potency. One day he’ll erect a shrine to you, like the De Lesseps statue at Port Said.’

‘Maybe … I’m sorry about the Japanese girl. It all got a little out of hand, like most things I touch. All the same, it’s the only real achievement I’ve managed to pull off here.’

‘Then why try to destroy the river?’

‘Destroy it? I was trying to divert the channel and save the drilling project.’

‘With that dam and all those drums of gasoline? I call that deliberate murder.’

I watched the water sluicing across the terrace, strangely soothed by the sight of the calm brown channel. ‘It provoked me – the stream springing from the ground, why there rather than a hundred feet away? All that water gushing about, it was too much. And then it wouldn’t stop growing. When Sanger named it after me … I had to scotch it.’

‘And now?’