The Drowning Lesson (20 page)

My father once showed me grainy newsprint photos of ex-Nazis. ‘Look what resolve can do,' he'd said of the hunters who'd tracked them down, but I'd stared at the pictures of the old men in the dock. It was hard to imagine the white-haired, stooped figures capable of such cruelty.

The sunlit patch of ground outside Josiah's hut is the same as it was back in December. The goat backs away, eyes wild and hoofs scrabbling, just as before. I still feel I'm trespassing. Apart from the grave this could be the day we arrived but underneath the surface everything is different. He was invisible to the journalists, but has the real Josiah been invisible to us as well? If he is a criminal, this house would be a good place to hide. He might have been here a long time or maybe his arrival coincided with ours, deliberately coincided. How would Elisabeth fit in? Innocent sister? Collaborator?

When Adam returns from the bush, he falls asleep on the bed for an hour. I find my purse in the
wardrobe, slide out five hundred
pula
and stuff them into my pocket. I take the car keys from his jacket. The jeep I used is still being repaired. I am walking out of the door when he stirs. ‘I'm taking Elisabeth to see a doctor. I'll need the car for a while. The children are in their room – they'll want supper later.'

He rolls on his back, eyebrows raised. His face is still streaked with sweat and dust. ‘Can't we help Elisabeth ourselves?'

‘She says it's private.'

He nods, accepting this.

Elisabeth is waiting by Adam's car. She is wearing her green woollen hat pulled low, a long mauve scarf covers half her face. Her eyes are watchful. As we get into the car, she murmurs, ‘Mochudi.'

At the end of the drive the journalists gather around the jeep, knocking on the window and shouting questions. They have become more aggressive through boredom, or perhaps they think we're hiding something. Elisabeth shrinks back in her seat.

As we near Gaborone, the verges are cluttered with stalls: fruit is for sale under broken awnings. Children are everywhere, walking along the edge of the road, dawdling by the fences, trailing after adults, some barefoot. One or two toddlers trip and straggle behind on their own and my heart clenches in panic. By a junction, something white moves at the edge of my vision: a sheet or blanket spread out against a
fence. I stop the car by the side of the road and run, panting, to inspect: close up, it's finely striped with red. Sam's blanket was white.

Driving through Gaborone, my hands grip the wheel as if I'm holding onto a boat in rough water. I haven't faced traffic for a while. At the crossroads a tall policeman in white gloves leaps and gesticulates with ferocious energy amid traffic that shoots and swirls around him. When Kabo drove us from the airport, we must have come a different way: the tall buildings with gleaming windows that I'd noticed then have vanished. The streets are crowded: people are walking or dawdling, pushing bikes and prams, talking, eating and dancing. At one intersection, two youths stagger and collide, throwing punches; there are bottles at their feet. The backdrop is a line of fences strewn with rubbish and, behind, concrete houses and huts made of tin. It seems like a different town from the one I saw when we first arrived.

After forty minutes, the first houses of Mochudi appear, dotted along the highway. Elisabeth indicates right: the roads twist and turn, the disjointed settlement thickening down a slope into a tight-knit jumble of streets lined with concrete huts.

She cranes through the windows, then holds up her hand. Pulling the scarf more closely round her face, she points to a wooden door in a white wall. The words ‘Tuck Shop' are painted in thick red
letters above a hatch; paint has dribbled from one arm of the T, bleeding a crimson trail down the wall. Elisabeth shrinks further into the seat. I park under a shady tree and she closes her eyes; perhaps she will sleep. I cross the narrow street, knock and wait by the door; the sun scorches off the whitewash. After a few moments, a child with a frilly pink collar and stiff plaits peers through the hatch; a bolt slides back and the door opens into a small earthen yard surrounded by sheds. She points to a bench and stands, stomach out, against a wall, watching me fixedly; a bone-thin dog with swollen teats walks slowly towards me, then half sits, half falls against a step to lie panting on her side. An old woman waits on the bench too, her twisted hands bunched on a stick; her corneas are white. Flies rise from dark puddles at our feet.

After a while, the door of a hut opens and an older girl, tightly wrapped in brilliant orange and blue, beckons me into the darkness. I indicate the old woman who was there before me, but the girl beckons again.

A small man sitting by a window is just visible in the gloom. The room smells musty and faintly of herbs. A woven rug stretches in front of him; to the side is a small patch of ash and burn marks scored on the concrete. The girl indicates a seat next to him; close up, his face is broad, the thin yellow skin finely
wrinkled. His slanted eyes flare with recognition. I'd forgotten that my image has been on television and in newspapers for weeks. I'd planned to start by asking if he knew Josiah, then pick up clues from there, but now he knows who I am, he might be evasive and, if guilty, vanish. I could inform the police but the door is shut now and the girl leans against it.

Playing for time, I pile
pula
on the floor in front of him; the girl gathers the notes carefully and slips them into an iron box next to his seat. He lifts his chin questioningly at me.

‘Josiah …' I begin, then stop, at a loss.

He nods and, without turning his head, speaks in rapid Setswana to the girl by the door; as he talks I look around. There are plastic pots cramming wooden shelves that line the walls, little bottles, ceramic dishes and small cardboard boxes with faded labels in red and orange. A necklace of dried pods dangles from the top shelf, exactly like the one Alice made with Teko. The doctor is watching me; he nods, then points to a snakeskin pinned to the smoky wall. Though the edges are dried and curling inwards, the bars of bright coral shine as they did when I saw the living animal slither into the grass. There is a moment of utter silence.

The girl begins to speak to me. ‘This doctor knows of you and your son. He says Josiah came with the
pods and with the skin of that snake and other skins. He needed a charm, made with your things.' Then she adds quietly, almost as if it were self-evident, ‘A special charm, so that your son would be found.'

If what she says is true, I've got it wrong. Very wrong. Josiah has been helping us all along. It must have been Josiah who skinned the snake, the frog and the lizards. Josiah who slipped the pods from the kudu horns. He would have borrowed money from his brother, then made his way here. After the doctor had made the charm, he would have journeyed home, waiting patiently for a bus, possibly all night.

Why didn't he tell the police? I know the answer to that, though: Esther told me months ago. Everyone is frightened of the power of these doctors. Josiah wouldn't dare say a word. If the police visited the doctor, what vengeance might he fear?

‘How would it work then, this charm? Is it a medicine? Who would take it?' I am ready to believe. Despite a lifetime of evidence-based practice, I want to believe it's possible a charm might bring Sam back. I would trade everything I own and all my knowledge of medicine, if only it were possible.

The girl translates my question to the doctor, and he replies to her at length. She turns to me. ‘No one takes this charm. It's not for the body. The doctor takes the pods and cuts the skin of the snake. He makes a powder together.' She demonstrates a
grinding action, her fist in her palm. ‘Then he made a fire with the powder. The smoke goes up.' She lifts her bunched hand high into the air and opens it suddenly, spreading her short fingers wide. Up and out, the movement implied, out into the room, the village, the miles and miles of bush around, molecules drifting across the spaces of Africa. I close my eyes, drifting with them in the warm air.

The sun shines in my face.

I kick my legs hard, my arms pull though the water.

My father calls to me above the noise of splashing, he tells me I can do it.

My body moves forwards towards the boat.

The doctor stands up. My eyes snap open. He holds a small bag made of leopard-skin; he demonstrates that I am to stretch out my hands. When I cup my palms he tips the contents of the bag into them, a heap of tiny bones.

They are cold in my hands: mouse vertebrae? Snake? There are yellow shards of horn and a domino buried in the mixture. The girl tells me I am to whisper my wish to them.

‘Help me find Sam,' I murmur into my hands.

Then as he mimes opening his hands, I do the same, scattering the bones on the mat in front of him. Watching them closely, he moves them a little
with a stick. Then, glancing back from time to time, as if their pattern spelt out a recipe, he gathers powder from different pots and mixes them in a stone dish. He pours liquid from a small bottle onto the powder. Purple flames leap and dance, and when they die down, he tips the powder into a small pot.

‘Touch the powder to your face,' the girl says, handing me the pot, touching her eyelids.

‘What will it do?'

‘It is a powerful charm, from roots and leaves. It will to help you see your son,' she replies.

The doctor's hand is cool as he clasps mine; his eyes are remote, as if his thoughts have already turned to the next patient, the blind old woman on the bench outside.

‘Josiah is in prison,' I tell him quickly. ‘The police think he's hiding something from them.'

His eyes meet mine. They close and open once. Then he turns away.

On the journey home, Elisabeth unwinds her scarf. Her hands relax on her lap. We don't talk much as the miles go by but I tell her I've found out that Josiah has been very kind to us and her face softens. Once home, she disappears into the kitchen, pulling off her green hat. In the bedroom, I push the little pot of powder deep into the side pocket of my
suitcase. I say nothing to Adam. He might be scathing if I told him what had happened; he might want to throw the powder away.

After supper he lets the dogs out; from the window I watch his torch bobbing up and down in the darkness as he follows them round the perimeter fence. There is, after all, nothing of importance to say. No clues sprang out today; despite what I'd like to believe no real steps have been taken that have brought Sam nearer. That night I lie next to Adam, wondering how I will convince Goodwill of Josiah's innocence without revealing the old man's secrets.

The next morning, I wake to the sound of the hoe falling on soil: Josiah is back in the garden, digging.

Later he comes to the door of his hut at my knock. He refuses money, though I tell him it's for the medicine. He takes my hand and smiles.

Behind him is the empty room. Now I know he isn't hiding anything; in any case he has nothing to hide – he owns almost nothing. I want to go in, ask his forgiveness, sit down with him, find out what he did when he was younger, and why he loved Sam. He made a journey, paid money and went to prison for our son. Did he remind him of a boy he knew? His own son?

Ka a leboga
. It's all I can say, but he nods and smiles again, then releases my hand and turns back into his hut.

Goodwill doesn't come that day or the day after. After a while it feels we have gone backwards rather than forwards: Sam seems further away than ever.

‘I'm worried about Alice,' Adam says at breakfast. The girls have left the table; in the sitting room, Alice has pushed Zoë aside and is sitting so near to the television screen that the blue light plays over her face.

I'm worried about her too. She is silent and seems fearful. She doesn't play or even read. The books on the table have hardly been touched since Simon was here.

‘She needs to go home.' His eyes are wary: he's expecting an argument. ‘So does Zoë. It's been two months – time for them to get back to some kind of normality.'

All the fragile leads we'd thought we had have snapped. Teko has disappeared without a trace. Simon and Josiah should never have been pursued. Our story is still in the news, a knot of journalists still camping outside the gates. Elisabeth tells me that Chief Momotsi continues to search. Adam walks out into the bush every day, but for the girls, time is hanging, motionless.

‘She's unhappy enough to be careless,' he says. ‘She sits in the heat without a hat. I've seen her walk in the grass over there with no shoes on.' He nods towards the side of the garden where it grows tall and spindly under the trees, and snakes could be hiding. ‘It's as though she doesn't mind what happens to her, almost as though she's seeking harm.'

‘She's grieving, Adam. Don't make it worse than it is. She forgets to take care.'

‘I'll stay here, of course, and carry on searching,' he continues, as if I haven't spoken. ‘The Met are sending a task force next week and the private detective arrives in a few days.'

‘A task force?'

‘I told you yesterday. Goodwill has agreed to work with them as there have been no positive leads.'

‘How are we going to pay for a private detective?'

‘I've re-mortgaged the house. Emma, we had this discussion two days ago.'

If we did, I can't remember it – or perhaps I didn't hear. When Adam talks, the words often jumble together; sometimes I watch his lips moving and hear the sounds as if at a distance.

Zoë jumps with a little cry of alarm when I pass her on my way to the quiet of our bedroom. She startles at everything now. In our room the bougainvillaea around the window frames the garden like a wreath. A blade of certainty slides between my ribs:
Sam is surely dead, or hidden so determinedly that he is irrecoverable. Why hope?

Adam follows me into the bedroom; I nod without turning my head.

‘I'll get your tickets for a week's time,' he says. I can't tell if he is relieved or sad. ‘Does that give you long enough?'

I email the girls' school, my work and Megan – she and I email once a week; whenever her name appears in the inbox my heart lifts just a little. Adam organizes our tickets. We don't speculate on how long it will be before he comes back to England.

I text Goodwill to let him know we're leaving. We debate if we should buy the police something, but in the end decide it might look like bribery.

The house takes on the look of a ghost house, the rooms emptying of most of our stuff. I move slowly, a victim sorting debris in the smoky remains of a bomb. My hair fades as grey thickens in the blonde and my face is thinner. I haven't put on makeup since Sam was taken. I wear whatever comes to hand.

As the last week draws to an end, Goodwill and Kopano come out to the house. Goodwill tells me they will continue working on the case. He stands at the window; as we talk, his eyes rest on Josiah, who is carrying logs to the house in a wheelbarrow.

‘Did you ever find out where he was?' I am curious to see whether he knows the truth.

‘A bus driver helped account for all his movements.'

‘And the money?'

‘Josiah told us he needed medicine. He is an old man. It is natural.' A little shrug.

‘So you let him go?'

‘We spoke at length to the owner of the house; he was prepared to vouch for Josiah's character, having known him for many years.' Goodwill nods emphatically as he watches me.

His expression remains carefully bland. There is something more that he's not telling me. Did the doctor use his power to make Goodwill let Josiah go or was it coincidence? If the doctor had power it was good power, an innocent man was freed.

‘The skinned reptiles that Kopano took away, did they help?'

‘The men who took your son might have seen the animals in the cages and returned later for their skins. They have a certain value. If we'd found the skins, they could have given us a lead.' He sighs. ‘But we never did.'

One of the skins is on a wall in a dark hut in a back-street in Mochudi, I could tell him, and the others are atoms in the air. They haven't realized that Elisabeth is Josiah's sister. Though Josiah is innocent, it's worrying they missed all the clues.

‘What's the latest news about Teko?'

He stretches his neck, as if the collar is too tight. ‘We do not think she is responsible, as you know.' He looks down, his next words sound automatic. ‘Nevertheless she remains our primary witness and we are looking for her everywhere.'

There is nothing more to say. I sense his anxiety to be gone; it is strange that I hardly know this man yet he holds my son's life in his hands.

‘Do you have children, Goodwill?'

‘Four boys.' He nods, pride deepening his voice.

‘How old?'

‘Twenty-five. Twenty. Eighteen.' He pauses. His smile is sudden and genuine. ‘Two weeks.' His hands sketch a rounded shape, the size of a bag of sugar.

There is a small suitcase under our bed into which everything of Sam's has been packed. I tip folded babygros, towels embroidered with ducks and nappies into a bag, then hand it to Goodwill before I can change my mind. ‘For your son.' So you remember mine, I add silently.

Goodwill has mauve marks beneath his eyes. The baby must be disturbing his nights. He nods quickly without smiling; I can't tell if the gift pleases him, or if he is reluctant to take cast-offs from a baby who has disappeared. He walks heavily out of the room without saying goodbye.

Kopano smiles and shakes my hand; his is dry and
light. An athlete's hand. For a moment I wish I'd found out more about these men, though I doubt we would have been friends. I was never sure how much I could trust them.

The next day Adam drives me to the clinic to say goodbye to Esther. As we sit in the crowded waiting room, Adam sleeps, his head swaying and nodding on his chest. The last time I was in this building, men were closing in around our house, creeping into the garden and watching through the windows. I am unable to sit still. Out on the porch a group of three girls sit on the steps, two perched above a third. The two girls are laughing, nudging their friend from behind. She gets up abruptly and walks away, her right foot dragging a little. My heart comes up into my throat.

I run down the steps, missing the bottom one and turning my ankle painfully. I begin to half run, half hobble after her. The girls on the stairs notice and call to her. She turns but it's not Teko: it's not a girl at all; I was fooled by her size. A thin-faced woman of fifty faces me, lips pursed, her hands on her hips. Perhaps she thinks I've joined in to torment her. I stammer out an apology and she turns away.

The silent gaze of the two girls follows me back inside. We are shown into Esther's room in an
interval between patients. The nurse who was away on maternity leave has returned; she walks noisily round the little room that was mine for a while; her glasses flash through the gap where the door hinges to the wall. Esther is uneasy; there seems little to talk about although she tells me that Baruti has not yet been found. A gulf has opened up between us. I want to tell her that I'm the same person she knew two months back, although we both know I'm not.

We leave two days later, four a.m. on a Tuesday. The car is packed, the girls have been woken and dressed, and now are sleeping in the back seat.

Elisabeth stands by the door, Josiah is next to her. He pushes his shoulders back, standing as straight as he did when we arrived. How could I have known then how difficult it would be to leave them? I put my arms round Elisabeth and hold her close; she smiles and pats my shoulder. I shake Josiah's hand and he nods, looking away. We've given them presents already, money, my coat to Elisabeth. There is so much and nothing to say. The final moments pass so quickly they convey only a sense of emptiness.

As we walk down the steps, they go back into the house and the front door shuts behind them. Later Josiah will be in the garden; Elisabeth will strip the girls' beds and wash the floors. She'll cook Adam's supper. Later still Josiah will let the dogs into the
garden; he's grown fond of them. I've seen him talking to them by the cages in the afternoon in a low sing-song voice.

The car slides out of the drive and the house disappears behind us. Soon I will be thousands of miles away; I am leaving, knowing nothing more than when Sam was first taken. I have failed him completely but, behind me, both girls are sleeping, trusting they will be carried from this place of tragedy back to their lives.

Kabo is waiting at the airport; in the place where we first met him, it's obvious that these last months have changed him. His jacket hangs on him now, and his hair is greying. He helps us unload our bags, and carries Zoë to the departure lounge. Alice follows slowly. Kabo and Adam talk quietly together, planning to run down the research as quickly as possible.

Three policemen in the lounge stand against the wall. They recognize us and nod politely. A group of journalists clusters by the bar, cameras around their necks: absorbed in their stories, they don't notice us.

Zoë pulls my hand: she needs the toilet. Inside there's a queue and she begins to whimper. We stand behind a wild-haired girl, who holds the hand of a sobbing boy. She releases his hand, and scoops her hair into a scrunchie, revealing a long, willowy neck.
Teko's neck. Teko in the act of stealing another child? The girl spins round at my touch. The acned face is unfamiliar. She stares at me questioningly, a pink bubble of gum protruding from her mouth, glances down at the crying boy, then back at me; she thinks I am drawing her attention to the child. She smiles and, bending, hoists him onto her hip, sucks in her gum and kisses him, bouncing him on her hip. The boy stops crying; not stolen then. I continue to wait in line with Zoë, who has watched this little drama silently.

As the call comes to board, Kabo hugs the children, then me; he pushes his glasses up and walks away quickly. I watch his back view recede and my throat constricts.

Adam kisses my cheek and bends to the children. Serious and silent, Zoe lays her head on his shoulder. Alice stays stiff in his arms; when he tells her how much he loves her, her eyes squeeze shut.

We board the plane, find our seats, and the girls sit down on either side of me, Zoë at the window. On take-off Gaborone grows smaller, then the great brown spaces of bush recede beneath. If he's alive, Sam is somewhere in that wilderness; I have to fight the urge to jump up and shout that I need to go back, my son has been left behind. Beside me, Alice groans. She is rigid, hands clasping the arms of the seat, sweat
on her forehead. I put my hand over her clenched one. ‘Ally, sweetheart. It's okay. We're up.'

She looks at me. Her eyes are expressionless.

‘I know who took him,' she whispers. ‘I helped.'