The Drowning Lesson (18 page)

The morning crawls by. It hurts to move, as though I've been mugged. Sam stares at me from the screen with the same hopeful solemnity; the words beneath his image are exactly the same as they were yesterday. My eyes burn so I close them. I know those words by heart.

Peo brings me tea; she places her hand on my head for a few seconds. The heat of her palm goes through to my scalp. Can she read the signs? Does she know what's happened? Do I? The violence and the tears, his and mine, echo in my mind, but exactly what took place is blurred, the events becoming black background already. The trauma of this morning expands the trauma of what was there already; the weight I am carrying is heavier and much darker.

Walking in the garden with the children before noon, I feel chilled, though my skin burns in the sun. Forgetting everything, I forgot sun block, though Peo has put some on the girls. At the gate, the crowd of waiting journalists seems to have swollen; there is
the curl of smoke from a bonfire, a drifting scent of cooking. Shouts and laughter; the air of a carnival. Adam would have walked through them this morning: did they try to talk to him? What would he have said? They see me: lights flash, my name is called. I should go down to them but I have no energy to make words. We walk slowly to the back of the house and sit on a rug near the pond. Zoë's head is in my lap; Alice lies completely still, closing her eyes.

After lunch, the children sleep on their beds; the house feels wretched. I choose the deep shade of the veranda. There are new images on the screen now, a small one of Adam, blurred as if walking fast, the backdrop the trees and our gate – taken this morning, then, and already beamed around the world. Scrolling down, it takes me a second to recognize myself addressing the television cameras yesterday; I look like my mother did in the days before she died. They missed the main story: there is nothing about Josiah. Although he was driven through their midst, the old man in ragged clothes had been invisible to them.

A lizard lies on the floor, motionless, a small splash of green paint on the wood; when my mobile rings, he vanishes without seming to move.

It's Megan. At last; I know she has bad news from the length of the pause after she says my name. There's a protocol for breaking bad news; it takes
longer and involves warnings. In the seconds before she speaks, the thought runs through my head that she's about to confess she has Sam, that he's been spirited out of Africa at her bidding but that she's changed her mind now and wants to hand him back. I'd forgive her, I'd forgive her everything if she gave Sam back to me.

Another beat of silence. ‘I'm so sorry for the wait. The housekeeper left and it's taken two days to track her down. It's not good. David passed away four months ago. Cancer. I knew he'd gone to hospital but I'd no idea … I wish he'd said …'

Passed away: passed where, exactly? As if dying is a gentle wafting from life into some better world, not the brutal tip into the void I've seen so often on the wards.

‘Emma, are you still there?'

‘Did he have a wife?'

‘She died a long time ago in a car crash on the road to Francistown.'

A car crash. Brief words, like ‘missing' or ‘stolen', containing a world of wreckage and suffering. ‘So does anyone know where we can find his orphanage?'

‘There's no one left to know.' Her voice is low. ‘When the nuns retired, only my parents and David were left. After Mum and Dad died, the mission closed. David got involved with the orphanage instead.'

‘The deputy manager at the hospital told Adam the same thing so he went to every orphanage in Molepolole. But no one knew Teko. I don't understand.'

‘This is Africa, Em.'

‘What does that mean?' A get-out clause? A reason bad things happen? A bad thing has happened, but that wasn't because of Africa; it was because of me.

‘Things come to an end very quickly when the money runs out. David would have used his own finances to keep the orphanage going. Now he's dead, there'd be nothing to pay staff or to feed children with. It would have been disbanded in days, the children sent to state-run orphanages anywhere in the country.'

‘What about his own children?'

‘He didn't have any.'

‘Your parents …'

‘I told you, Em. Both dead.'

It's vanished, then, the world Megan grew up in, with parents who never had time to talk to her, the long queues they tended amid the dust and the flies, the songs from a tin-roofed church, weaving up into the burning air through the pine trees, the orphanage that grew out of that; a world of effort and children and tragedy. All gone.

‘It's my fault. I know it is. If I hadn't contacted David in the first place this would never have
happened … I feel completely responsible.' Her voice fades miserably.

‘Teko could have come from any orphanage, nothing to do with you or David.' My suspicions about Megan were mad, I see that now. ‘We presumed it was from his orphanage but there's no proof of that now. We were told people can simply turn up for a job here with no introduction …' As I repeat Kabo's words, I see Teko as a random stranger who came upon us by chance; if so, there is little hope of tracking her down. She could be anywhere in the country now, anywhere in the world.

‘I could come out, if you like,' Megan offers. ‘I could look after the girls and free you both up?'

There is no both, not since this morning: but the drift had already begun, though it's difficult to pinpoint when that was: when Sam was taken or when he was born? Maybe it was when I fell pregnant, or further back still, when Adam accepted the post, keeping it secret from the family.

‘I'll look up flight times,' she continues. ‘Just say when.'

I hold the phone tightly, wanting to accept, knowing I mustn't. She is needed at home; our family is not the one she used to know; I'm not the same either. ‘I can't possibly let you come out, Megan, but thanks.'

Can she tell there are tears streaming down my
face? Tears of shame as well as loss. What have I ever given Megan that comes close to what she gives me? She wouldn't understand the question if I asked her: love isn't a balance to her, there's nothing to equalize.

‘Tell me if you change your mind. I'm thinking about you all the time,' she says. ‘Sam was on the front page of
The Times
today, Adam's picture was on the ten o'clock news. At work …'

There is a scream from outside. Alice's scream. Dropping my phone, I run down the steps and across the grass to where she is staring down into the leaves of a large cactus.

‘What is it, Ally? Are you hurt?'

She points between the thick stalks as they crowd together. A dead snake lies twisted in the cobwebby depths of the plant. The jaws are open, the eyes swarming with ants. The long, sinuous body has been neatly skinned and is glistening with flies.

‘It's dead. It can't hurt you.' I tighten my arm round her. ‘It was a nasty kind of snake, darling. I asked Josiah to kill it.'

‘Look,' she whispers, still pointing. Half hidden under the bloodstained body of the snake are the two little lizards, also crawling with flies. They've been decapitated and skinned.

‘It's horrible, disgusting …'

‘A rat must have got them. Or a mongoose.' I hope
she believes me. ‘It would have been quick. A clean death.' Another euphemism.

‘You let them go. It's your fault.'

She runs back to the house, disappearing through the door.

The bodies are stuck to the leaves with dried blood; they feel crusty in my hands. Could they be useful evidence of some kind? In Josiah's toolshed by the compost heap, I balance them on a rafter for now, further away from any ants. The harsh creosote smell in the shed brings back my father, painting a fence against the winter.

I'd gone home as a student, on the cusp of giving up; I couldn't remember why I'd wanted to do medicine.

‘It's too hard, Dad. It's not interesting.'

He doesn't look at me, just carries on painting. He is wearing glasses. Is he getting old? Can he hear me?

‘I can't do it.' My voice gets louder.

Silence for a few minutes, maybe five; he paints very carefully, running the brush down each thin slip of wood, catching the drips before they fall.

‘It's all right, Emmie. You keep going.'

‘Why?'

‘That's the wrong question.'

‘Dad, I can't remember why I'm doing this.' I'm shouting now, starting to cry.

He moves his tin, and starts a new section. ‘The question isn't why, the question is how.'

‘What does that mean exactly?'

‘It means you work out how you're going to do it first. The reason will come to you. Some things don't bear too much why.'

He smiles up at me and then I remember exactly why. His smile. So now I have to work out how.

As I walk back to the house, the heat is fierce on my neck, the shadows short and black at my heels. I find the phone where I dropped it and text Megan to explain. Alice and Zoë are sitting at the kitchen table, watching while Elisabeth chops a pile of herbs. The air is fragrant with the woody lemon scent of wild thyme. Peo sweeps the floor, crooning a song.

‘I'm sorry you were frightened, Ally,' I whisper as I rinse my hands. ‘I've got rid of them now.'

For a moment she is quite still, staring at me as if I'm a stranger. She gets down and walks out. Zoë runs after her, asking questions; I hope Alice doesn't tell her what she saw.

I turn to Elisabeth. ‘Alice showed me the snake Josiah killed. It had been skinned, and so had the lizards. Why would anyone do that?'

Her hands stop moving.

‘Why, Elisabeth?'

‘Spells,' she says quietly, and resumes chopping, but her knife misses, cutting into the board.

Someone from the village then, someone who has crept very close; even Elisabeth is frightened. We should take up Kabo's offer of guard dogs: I send him a rapid text.

Peo is murmuring to Elisabeth, who tries to smile as she translates, but her mouth quivers. ‘Peo says all the people are looking from her village. Many men looking all the time.'

I stare out of the window at the arid landscape, as if expecting it to be crawling with men, spread out, searching with sticks through the undergrowth as they would in England. What do the villagers hope to find? If Sam had been left out there he wouldn't last a day. Why would they search the bush, unless they're looking for a body?

But the question isn't why.

I shower, change into clean clothes, brush my hair. There is a crunch of wheels on stone: the police are arriving later than usual.

Kopano walks round the back of the house. Goodwill comes into the sitting room to find me, his eyes darting over my thin sundress. Too exhausted to wash clothes, unwilling to burden Elisabeth further, I'm down to my flimsiest things. Adam has left a jacket on the chair. I shrug it on but it smells of his
sweat and I discard it again. Goodwill watches, missing nothing.

The question is how.

‘Where's Josiah?' I aim for a pleasant tone, conversational, even.

Goodwill moves to the window. His fingers tap on the sill as he looks outside, and he cranes his neck to see up into the sky, an expression of interest on his face, as if wondering whether it's going to rain. He is ignoring me. My heart thuds with anger or fear, I'm not sure which.

‘Why did you arrest him, Goodwill, apart from the fingerprints on the cages?'

‘Mma Babira from the clinic and Mrs Stukker in Gaborone were most co-operative,' he says, as though I haven't spoken. ‘There was nothing suspicious to find in either case.'

It takes me a moment to realize he is talking about Esther and Claire. I feel a stab of guilt that they have been disturbed.

‘The personnel in Mokolodi game park had heard of your situation. They were very sorry. All had been working at the time of the kidnapping. We made no arrests. We were quite wrong to suspect Mr Katse also,' Goodwill continues, shaking his head at me, as if I were the one who had thought Simon was guilty. He pulls out a handkerchief and coughs noisily into
it, then folds it carefully, stowing it in his pocket. It's as though Josiah has ceased to exist.

‘We have questioned Mr Katse at length. When he left your house, the day before your son disappeared, he went to pick up his wife and they drove overnight to Johannesburg to celebrate with relatives.'

‘Celebrate?'

‘His wife had already been elected. We have interviewed the relatives.' He nods now, his chin descending each time into stiff rolls of flesh.

‘Why did you want to question Simon? What was it you suspected him of?'

I move a little closer and he steps sideways, repositioning his weight on widespread legs; it's as if we're partners in a dance, moving around something so terrible it can't be named. Today Goodwill is wearing a red striped tie; the colour glows in the dark room. He has the power; I must be careful.