The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (24 page)

It crossed the pool and made a slow circuit of the deserted beaches and the collapsed west wall of the barrage. As it hovered above the ferry, little more than fifty yards away, Captain Kagwa sat by the open passenger door. He had abandoned his flak jacket, now that his war against Harare was over and, with it, his dream of being the Governor-General of this northern province. But his expression was as set and determined as I had ever known. He stared hard at the ferry, and then pointed to where Noon and I stood beside his Mercedes.

He signalled to the French pilot to descend, and the machine revolved twice and approached the barrage beside the
Salammbo
.

Captain Kagwa dismounted beneath the rotating blades. Head lowered, he strode through the down-draught towards the ferry. When he saw Sanger crouching against the wheelhouse he loosened the flap of his holster, but I knew from his tight mouth that he was not concerned with the film-maker. He nodded to him, and then set off down the slope of the barrage. Twice he slipped in the broken earth, stumbling to his knees, but he picked himself up and reached the narrow beach beside my raft.

I sat Noon against the passenger door and raised the rifle, drawing back the bolt on the empty breech. This time, however, Kagwa would not be impressed by the bluff. I felt calm, but empty-headed, as if a large part of my mind had already left. In a confused way I imagined that I might start the engine of the Mercedes and drive into the safety of the foothills to the east of the river. But I was too exhausted even to walk around the car.

Kagwa had left the beach and was striding up the slope to the landing-stage. His eyes noted the old truck tyres and the dead rats, the moss-covered shell of Noon’s skiff between the wooden piers. His hand was on the revolver in his holster, freeing the heavy weapon.

‘Noon … stay here as long as you can. He won’t shoot you in the car …’

I pushed her away from me, but she had seized my wrist and drummed with her hand at my breastbone, her teeth clicking some primitive curse. For all her fear, her eyes were fixed on Kagwa with the same hate she had first displayed at the airstrip. I looked down and realized that her fist was clenched around a silver peg, some toggle from the limousine’s dashboard. She pressed it into my hand, urging me on with a rictus of her wounded mouth, as if she wanted me to attack Kagwa with this miniature weapon.

Then, as she passed it into my fingers, I saw the copper cartridge with its steel bullet. She had hidden this third round throughout our months together, saving it for a last emergency. When I hesitated, she took my hand and held it fiercely against her chest, so that I could feel the bullet and her breast between my fingers. She forced my nails into her nipple, trying to give me courage.

I raised the open breech and slid the cartridge into the barrel. I drove the bolt forward, cocking the firing-pin, and snapped down the bolt. As Noon sat beside me, pressing her hands against my diaphragm, I levelled the rifle at Kagwa.

Ignoring me, the Captain climbed the beach to within twenty feet of the Mercedes. He was breathing heavily through his strong mouth as he took the revolver from his holster, his eyes examining the damage to the limousine’s fenders and bodywork, the bullet holes in the windshield, the dents and dirt that now covered its black paintwork.

When he raised his revolver towards me, I steadied the rifle and shot him through the head.

Soon lost in the noise of the helicopter’s engine, the report of the rifle shot rolled among the hills, hunting the valleys among the abandoned mine shafts.

Kagwa lay dying among the dead rats and truck tyres on the oily beach, his legs stirring as the blood ran from his head to join the Mallory. The helicopter pilot sat forward over his controls, one hand on the carbine between the seats. When I raised the rifle he eased forward his throttles and took off into the morning sun.

From the wheelhouse of the
Salammbo
I watched the machine following the stream of dark water that ran southwards along the grave of the river. The engine at last faded into the dusty haze, and I could hear only Sanger fidgeting with the lens of his broken camera.

‘Mallory – was Kagwa here?’

‘He’s gone now.’

‘I felt his feet on the ground. Those were the feet of an angry man.’

‘I know. But I explained our problems to him.’

‘And you changed his mind?’

‘In a sense.’

‘You’re not usually very persuasive, Mallory. And the helicopter?’

‘It won’t be back. Don’t worry.’

‘That’s good. Now we can go on.’

I looked down at Sanger, huddled like a beggar with his broken camera. He must have known that Kagwa lay dead on the beach beside the Mercedes.

‘You’re ready to go back to Port-la-Nouvelle?’

‘No! We’ve come too far now. You must find the source, Mallory. Then my film will be complete.’

‘Sanger, you’ll never make this film …’

‘It’s already made – all we are doing is performing it for anyone who cares to watch.’

‘All right. We’ll go when I’m ready. I want to care for Noon. You stay here while I bring her to the ship.’

‘Of course. I can help her. There’s a cassette in the wheelhouse. You can describe it to her …’

But when I returned to the Mercedes I found that Noon had gone.

33

‘Noon …! There’s a film for you …’

Standing beside Sanger in the stern of the raft, I shouted towards the beach of blue shingle that lay behind a breakwater of fallen boulders. As I searched the empty shore I noticed once again that no echo of my voice returned from the steep granite cliffs, as if the dying river had so shrunk into itself that it had withdrawn from even the smallest response to the living.

‘Noon …! Professor Sanger has a film …’

‘Doctor …?’ Huddled in the bows, Sanger pointed his camera to left and right, trying to sense the direction of my eyes. ‘Is she here? Three o’clock?’

‘We’ve lost her – she can hide behind the air.’

‘Our bearing? Three o’clock or nine o’clock?’

‘Midnight … for God’s sake, Sanger, there’s no time here.’

For two days we had sailed up the draining channel. Although we were only ten miles from the barrage beside the former Bonneville airbase, we had entered a remote mountain world, a landscape of sheer volcanic walls that faced each other across the gorges like fossilized giants. Their fluted surfaces were stained and streaked with red ores, so that the Mallory seemed to be flowing along the gutter of a vast natural abattoir. The damp air was without taste or texture, no longer touched by the spoor of birds and fish, or the scent of the flowering plants that had crowded the lower course of the river. The last heathers and old man’s beard had given way to ferns, and these in turn to sedges and groundsel.

In this realm after death, we were making our passage up the leaking cadaver of the Mallory. The low sky, the ceiling of mist a few hundred feet above our heads, and the sombre beaches together formed a zone outside time or memory.

The stream tugged at the raft, urging it to change its course and join this last expedition to the desert below. Shipping the oar, I throttled up the engine and steered towards the centre of the channel. Within minutes of sighting Noon that morning, our first glimpse of the girl since leaving the barrage, a submerged boulder had punctured the starboard pontoon, splitting the cheap weld that formed its keel. Dead in the water, the craft began to founder. As Sanger clung to his camera, I jumped down into the cold stream and dragged the raft on to a nearby sand-bar. There I laboriously unwound the wire securing the pontoon to the wooden frame, and rotated the cumbersome cylinder so that the open weld was uppermost.

We had lost at least an hour, but I was sure that Noon was only a quarter of a mile ahead. Although we were handicapped by the raft and its overheating engine, she never eluded us. At times, when I struggled with the motor, she seemed even to hold back, her silver shell moored in midstream against the punt pole. She stood in the stern, chin resting against her small fists as they clasped the top of the handle. When we came into view she would lean wearily against the pole and slide away, losing herself behind the rock falls that filled the floor of the gorge. Either she wished to stay in my sight, luring me to whatever mystery lay at the source of the Mallory, or she was even more ill than I guessed and needed to spur herself on with the spectacle of Sanger fumbling like a demented photographer with his broken camera.

From the ashen pallor of her face and arms, I knew that Noon was still gripped by the fly fever. When she rinsed her mouth she would leave threads of blood in the water that clung to the bows of the raft like fading pennants. In my confused way I wanted to save both Noon and the river, and was sure that I could do so once I reached the Mallory’s source.

‘Doctor! The river divides …!’

Sanger gesticulated with his camera, pointing to the western bank. In some uncanny way his ears had sensed that a long arm of still water lay between the shingle beach and a giant’s causeway of boulders that ran along the centre of the gorge.

After scanning the main channel for any trace of Noon, I steered the raft into the arm of quieter water. I cruised quietly along the inner face of the causeway, peering into the small caverns and caves where Noon might be hiding. Eighty yards ahead, the causeway sank into the shallows, leaving a narrow exit between the submerged boulders.

The rush of water disguised the soft putter of the outboard as I steered the raft among the rocks. When we swung outwards into the faster water, Noon was squatting in her steel shell only twenty feet from us. She had berthed her craft behind a shoulder of the causeway, where she waited for us to appear, watching the main channel with her back to us.

I cut the engine, leaving the silent propeller to unravel in the water, and let the raft drift on to her. Careful not to alert Sanger, who was staring myopically at the stained cliffs, I leaned over the engine, ready to catch Noon’s arm. She was gazing at her pale fingers, marked like badly painted nail varnish with the blood from her mouth. Her shoulders trembled in the cool air, and her ribs pumped in a feverish shudder. From the pallor of her skin, so leached of pigment as to be a chalky white, I could almost believe that she had been rubbing herself with the cinders of a small fire.

The raft rode the last few feet of water between us. I was about to embrace Noon, but Sanger was trailing one hand in the current. Always suspicious that I would trick him again, he began to slap the water as if the river were a miscreant child.

‘Mallory … you’ve changed course! Don’t give up now!’

Noon turned towards me, startled by the silent rush of the raft and its bulbous pontoons. There was a flurry of the punt pole and the steel shell leapt across our bows, revolved like a surf board and sped into the open channel.

‘Doctor—! You’re moving south!’

‘Sanger, I had the child in my hands …’

The exhaust puttered flatly as I tried to restart the engine. The raft struck an anvil of submerged rock, and pitched Sanger between the pontoons. Drenched to the armpits, he gripped their plump flanks like a stunt rider suspended between two galloping horses, then slipped and was carried below the wooden frame. He screamed at me in rage, hands reaching through the bamboo grille to seize my ankles.

An hour later I at last beached the raft on a quiet beach, and persuaded Sanger to release the propeller shaft of the outboard motor to which he clung in the shallows. As I dragged him ashore Noon was again waiting calmly for us in midstream, her skiff moored against the punt pole.

Resting beside the raft, I stared dispassionately at Sanger. I had managed to light a small fire with pieces of decking and a few drops of fuel from the outboard’s tank, pulling on the engine until a spark from the magneto ignited the vapour. The effort had exhausted me, and I could barely stand on the rolling shingle. Sanger lay against the starboard pontoon, wisely reluctant to part himself from the craft. His hands clasped the broken camera to his chest, this Cyclopean third eye from which he regarded me warily.

Should I abandon him here? He too was infected by the fever and malaise that had poisoned everyone at the barrage. My own condition was little better, and I now needed him to help me row the raft once the fuel was exhausted. I tried to think only of Sanger’s needs, and reminded myself that he was my patient and that I was once again his physician. Nonetheless, I was reluctant to leave him, aware for the first time that I depended upon his presence, almost as if I at last accepted that I was appearing in a drama directed and overseen by him.

However, this logic would lead inevitably to his death, like those of Miss Matsuoka and Mr Pal. For his own sake, I would persuade Sanger to remain on this beach. Once I had found Noon, and revived the Mallory, I would return and collect him. Meanwhile I would leave him the last of my small stock of millet bread and strip the raft’s decking to its minimum in order to provide him with a fire.

At the barrage, planning this last leg of the journey in the wheelhouse of the
Salammbo
, I had not wanted to take Sanger with me. As I prepared the raft, he had come down from the ferry, tottering among the debris of the crumbling barrage, shouting and arguing with me. The last of the villagers had left, and he could smell disease as the allotments faded, transforming themselves once again into desert. He gazed sightlessly at the silence, well aware that this was a place where a crime had been committed. But even then Sanger had been prepared to place himself in my hands.

I remembered him sitting on the raft as I dragged it into the water above the barrage. The last ebb of Captain Kagwa’s life leaked down to the beach, flowing into the grooves left by the pontoons, a slipway of blood. Without speaking, I held Sanger’s shoulders from behind. He had taken this as a touching gesture of solidarity, but I was about to pull him on to the beach and leave him among the truck tyres and dead rats.

Then I saw Mrs Warrender and her women on the hillside above the pool. Bundles in hand, they stood beside the ore-conveyor, ready to make their way into the remote mountain valleys. On a rusting scoop beside them, two marmosets preened their tails, grimacing at the stench from the river below, only too eager to join the women in their modest paradise. Nora Warrender watched me while I stood behind Sanger, clearly assuming that I would leave him.

Under the women’s disapproving gaze, I had rallied myself, but now, only two days later, I was ready to abandon Sanger again, a blind man marooned on these cold beaches.

‘Sanger – you’re tired.’

‘No, Mallory. It’s possible that I’m stronger than you.’

‘I’ll build a fire. You’ll be safer here.’

‘No.’

‘Remember to move to higher ground. You’ll hear the water rushing towards you.’

‘Rushing water?’

‘Sanger, I’m going to make the river run again.’

‘I must be there, Mallory. It’s the climax of our film …’

‘Perhaps … but I have to find Noon.’

‘I should be with you, Mallory.’

He was holding tightly to the outboard with both hands, revealing the unexpected strength that had sustained him since our journey from Port-la-Nouvelle.

‘Mallory, I must go with you. For your sake.’

I tried to prise his fingers from the propeller, but left only a smear of blood on the blades. I reached down and lifted the camera lanyard from his neck. Sanger scrabbled at the air, kicking me with his small feet.

‘The camera, Mallory! We need that!’

‘Let’s get rid of it now! The damned thing’s been a snare.’

‘No – the film, it’s all that’s left …’

I was about to throw the broken black box into the river, but it seemed to cling to my hands. The pistol grip, contoured to my palm and fingers, sat as easily within my mind, offering a different perspective on our trivial quarrel. Before hurling it from my reach, I put it to my eye, curious to see the fictional space that had haunted my entire journey since Sanger’s arrival.

A hundred yards upstream there was a glimmer from the water. Through the viewfinder I saw Noon’s silver shell float past a rocky shoulder. Noon stood in the stern, supporting herself on the punt pole.

‘Noon – she’s here, Sanger! She needs us to follow her …’

I stared through the viewfinder. Was she playing up to the camera, even acting out some solitary death modelled on Sanger’s fictions, or was I imposing this climax upon her? I had hoped that I could draw her towards me with the promise of these dreams of herself, but it was I who had been ensnared, just as the Mallory had trapped me within its dream of a great river.

‘Doctor … we’re both too tired to argue with you.’ Sanger seized my foot, throwing me on to the shingle. He scrambled across the blue stones, lunging to left and right, seized the camera from my hands and struck me across the face.

Stunned by the blow, and too weak to defend myself, I lay back on the shingle, feeling the old wound to my scalp. The sutures of my skull were opening, letting the cool wind into the chambers of my brain. I stared up at the cloudless, cyanide sky, like the domed roof of some deep psychosis. It occurred to me that perhaps I could remain here, resting beside a small fire while Sanger sailed on …

‘Doctor?’ I felt his hands on my chest and forehead. ‘You’re in a poor state. I must have caught your head …’

‘It’s all right…’ I sat up and climbed to my knees. ‘I’ll take you with me.’

‘You need my help, doctor.’

‘I know – I can’t start the motor again.’

‘We’ll have to row. You’re strong enough.’

He guided me down to the water and leaned me against the raft. We pushed out into the stream, and then clambered aboard and sat beside the motor. Sanger settled himself, camera slung around his neck, massaging my thighs with his hands.

‘Come on, Mallory. You can paddle – the river is almost still. Don’t lose faith in your dream.’

‘Paddle?’ I began to push the water with one hand while Sanger worked away with the oar. Framed by the granite cliffs, Noon and her skiff slipped away into the mist. I watched her cross the partly submerged pillars of rock, her interrupted image reminding me of the stuttering light in the cabin of the
Diana
. I had been able to embrace Noon only through the flickering image of an antique seduction. To sustain me now I needed Sanger to tell me of some heroic voyage, against self-doubt and the fall of night, in search of a private myth, like those of Pizarro or Cortés.

‘Tell me, Sanger. About your film …?’

‘Which film, doctor? Paddle now. I’ve made many films.’

‘Your film about the Mallory. The one you started at Port-la-Nouvelle.’

Sanger turned to face me, the oar motionless in the water. He had lost his sunglasses, and his myopic eyes, like closed glass, seemed to see me for the first time. ‘You want to hear about the film? You wish me to describe it to you?’

‘Yes …’ The thought of this bogus documentary was strangely comforting. Already I could feel the commentary reassuring and encouraging me, in the soft sing-song of Mr Pal. ‘Tell me about the film, Sanger. Be my eyes …’