And that was the last thing Justin saw as the lights went out: snowflakes of light falling down his screen. A blackness descended over him, and he felt himself being punched and suffocated at the same time. Human arms clamped his own arms to his sides, a ball of coarse cloth was stuffed into his mouth. His legs were seized in a rugger tackle and crumpled under him and he decided he was having a heart attack. His theory was confirmed when a second blow crushed his stomach and knocked the last of the wind out of him, because when he tried to yell nothing happened, he had no voice or breath and the ball of cloth was gagging him.
He felt knees on his chest. Something was being tightened round his neck, he thought a noose, and he assumed he was going to be hanged. He had a clear vision of Bluhm nailed to a tree. He smelled male body lotion and had a memory of Woodrow’s body odour and he remembered sniffing Woodrow’s love letter to see if it smelled of the same stuff. For a rare moment there was no Tessa in his memory. He was lying on the floor on his left side and whatever had crushed his stomach crushed his groin with another awful blow. He was hooded but nobody had hanged him yet, and he was still lying on his side. The gag was making him vomit, but he couldn’t get the vomit out of his mouth so it was going down his throat. Hands rolled him onto his back and his arms were stretched out, knuckles in the carpet, palms upwards. They’re going to crucify me like Arnold. But they weren’t crucifying him, or not yet; they were holding his hands down and twisting them at the same time, and the pain was worse than he thought pain could be: in his arms, his chest and all over his legs and groin. Please, he thought. Not my right hand or how will I ever write to Ham? And they must have heard his prayer because the pain ceased and he heard a male voice, north German, maybe Berlin and quite cultured. It was giving an order to turn the swine back on his side and tie his hands behind him, and the order was being obeyed.
“Mr Quayle. Do you hear me?”
The same voice but now in English. Justin didn’t answer. But this was not a lack of civility, it was because he had managed to spew out his cloth gag at last and was vomiting again and the vomit was creeping round his neck inside the hood. The sound of the television set faded.
“That’s enough, Mr Quayle. You stop now, OK? Or you get what your wife got. You hear me? You want some more punishment, Mr Quayle?”
With the second Quayle came another horrendous kick in the groin.
“Maybe you gone deaf a bit. We leave you a little note, OK? On your bed. When you wake up, you read this little note and you remember. Then you go back to England, hear me? You don’t ask no more bad questions. You go home, you be a good boy. Next time we kill you like Bluhm. That’s a very long process. You hear me?” Another kick to the groin rammed the lesson home. He heard the door close.
He lay alone, in his own darkness and his own vomit, on his left side with his knees drawn to his chin and his hands tied back to back behind him and the inside of his skull on fire from the electric pains that were tearing through his body. He lay in a black agony taking a rollcall of his shattered troops—feet, shins, knees, groin, belly, heart, hands—and confirmed that they were all present, if not correct. He stirred in his bonds and had a sensation of rolling into burning charcoal. He lay still again and a terrible pleasure began to wake in him, spreading in a victorious glow of self-knowledge. They did this to me but I have remained who I am. I am tempered. I am able. Inside myself there’s an untouched man. If they came back now, and did everything to me again, they would never reach the untouched man. I’ve passed the exam I’ve been shirking all my life. I’m a graduate of pain.
Then either the pain eased or nature came to his aid, because he dozed, keeping his mouth tight shut and breathing with his nose through the stinking, sodden black night of his hood. The television set was still on, he could hear it. And if his sense of orientation hadn’t gone astray he was looking at it. But the hood must be double-lined because he couldn’t see so much as a flicker of it, and when, at huge cost to his hands, he rolled onto his back, he saw no hint of ceiling lights above him, although they had been lit as he wandered into the room, and he had no memory of hearing them switched off as his torturers departed. He rolled onto his side and panicked for a while, waiting for the strong part of himself to fight its way back to the top again. Work it out, man. Use your stupid head, it’s the only thing they left intact. Why did they leave it intact? Because they wanted no scandal. Which is to say, whoever sent them wanted no scandal. “Next time we kill you like Bluhm”—but not this time, however much they might have wished it. So I scream. Is that what I do? I roll around on the floor, kick furniture about, kick the party walls, kick the television set and generally go on behaving like a maniac until somebody decides that we are not two passionate lovers lost in the outer reaches of sadomasochism, but one bound and beaten Englishman with his head in a bag?
The trained diplomat painstakingly sketched out the consequences of such a discovery. The hotel calls the police. The police take a statement from me and call the local British Consulate, in this case Hanover, if we still have one there. Enter the Duty Consul, furious to be called away from his dinner to inspect yet another bloody Distressed British Subject, and his knee-jerk response is to check my passport—which passport scarcely matters. If it’s Atkinson’s, we have a problem because it’s forged. One phone call to London establishes. If it’s Quayle’s, we have a different problem, but the likely upshot will be much the same: the first plane back to London without the option, an unwholesome Welcome Home Committee waiting to receive me at the airport.
His legs were not bound. Until now he had been reluctant to separate them. He did so, and his groin and belly caught fire and his thighs and shins followed quickly afterwards. But he could definitely separate his legs, and he could tap his feet together again and hear his heels click. Emboldened by this discovery, he took the extreme step, rolled onto his stomach and let out an involuntary scream.
Then he bit his lips together so that he didn’t scream again.
But he stayed doggedly face down. Patiently, careful not to disturb his neighbours in the bedrooms either side, he began working on his bonds.
17
The plane was an elderly twin-engined Beechcraft on UN charter with a rawhide fifty-year-old captain from Johannesburg and a burly African co-pilot with side whiskers, and one white cardboard lunch box on each of its nine torn seats. The airport was Wilson, next to Tessa’s grave, and as the plane sweated and waited on the runway Ghita strained to catch sight of her burial mound through the window and wondered how much longer she would have to wait for her headstone. But all she saw was silver-backed grass and a red-robed tribesman with a staff standing on one leg over his goats, and a herd of gazelles twitching and grazing under blue-black cloud stacks. She had wedged her travel bag under her seat but the bag was too big and she had to splay her churchy shoes to make space for it. It was terribly hot in the plane and the captain had already warned the passengers that there could be no air-conditioning until the plane took off. In the zip compartment she had stowed her briefing notes and her credentials as the British High Commission’s delegate from EADEC. In the main compartment, her pyjamas and a change of clothes. I’m doing this for Justin. I’m following in Tessa’s footsteps. I have no need to feel ashamed of my inexperience or duplicity.
The back of the fuselage was stuffed with sacks of precious miraa, a permitted, mildly narcotic plant adored by northern tribesmen. Its woody scent was gradually filling the plane. In front of her sat four case-hardened aid workers, two men, two women. Maybe the miraa was theirs. She envied their gritty, carefree air, their threadbare clothes and unwashed dedication. And realised with a pinch of self-reproach that they were her age. She wished she could break the habits of learned humility, of drawing her heels together whenever she shook hands with her betters, a practice instilled in her by nuns. She peeked inside her box and identified two plantain sandwiches, an apple, a bar of chocolate and a box of passion-fruit juice. She had barely slept and she was f
amished, but her sense of decorum forbade her to eat a sandwich before take-off. Last night her phone had rung non-stop from the moment she returned to her flat as her friends one by one vented their outrage and disbelief at the news that Arnold was a wanted man. Her position in the High Commission required her to play the elder stateswoman to them all. At midnight, though she was dead tired, she attempted to take a step from which she could not retreat; one that, if it had succeeded, would have rescued her from the no-man’s land where she had been hiding like a recluse for the last three weeks. She had delved in the old brass pot where she kept odds and ends and extracted from it a slip of paper she had secreted there. This is where you ring us, Ghita, if you decide you want to talk to us again. If we’re not there, leave a message and one of us will always get back to you within the hour, I promise. An aggressive male African voice answered her and she hoped she had the wrong number.
“I’d like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please.”
“What’s your name?”
“I want to speak to Rob or Lesley. Is either of them there?”
“Who are you? Give me your name and state your business immediately.”
“I’d like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please.”
As the phone was slammed down on her she accepted without drama that she was, as she had suspected, alone. Henceforth no Tessa, no Arnold, no wise Lesley from Scotland Yard could spare her the responsibility for her actions. Her parents, though she adored them, were not a solution. Her father the lawyer would listen to her testimony and declare that on the one hand this, but then again on the other hand that, and ask her what objective proof she had for these very serious allegations. Her mother the doctor would say you’re overheating, darling, come home and have a bit of R and R. With this thought uppermost in her bleary head she had opened up her laptop, which she did not doubt would also be cram-full of cries of pain and indignation about Arnold. But no sooner had she gone on-line than the screen popped and dwindled to nothing. She went through her procedures in vain. She phoned a couple of friends only to establish that their machines were unaffected.
“Wow, Ghita, maybe you’ve picked up one of these crazy viruses from the Philippines or wherever those cyber-freaks hang out!” one of her friends had cried enviously, as if Ghita had been singled out for special attention.
Maybe she had, she agreed, and slept badly from worrying about the e-mails she had lost, the ping-pong chats she’d had with Tessa that she had never printed out because she preferred rereading them on screen, they were more vivid that way, more Tessa.
The Beechcraft had still not taken off so Ghita, as was her habit, gave herself over to the larger questions of life, while studiously avoiding the largest of them all, which was what am I doing here and why? A couple of years ago in England in my Era Before Tessa, as she secretly called it—she had agonised about the injuries, real and imagined, that she endured every day for being Anglo-Indian. She saw herself as an unsavable hybrid, half black girl in search of God, half white woman superior to lesser breeds without the law. Waking and sleeping, she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man’s world, and how and where she should invest her ambitions and her humanity, and whether she should continue to study dance and music at the London college she was attending after Exeter, or, in the image of her adoptive parents, follow her other star and enter one of the professions.
Which explains how one morning she found herself, almost on an impulse, sitting an examination for Her Majesty’s Foreign Service which, unsurprisingly since she had never given a thought to politics, she duly failed, but with the advice that she should reapply in two years’ time. And somehow the very decision to sit the exam, though unsuccessful, released the reasoning behind it, which was that she was more at ease with herself joining the System than staying apart from it and achieving little beyond the partial gratification of her artistic impulses.
And it was at this point, visiting her parents in Tanzania, that she decided, again on impulse, to apply for local employment by the British High Commission, and to look for advancement once she was accepted. And if she had not done this she would never have met Tessa. She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to—even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life’s beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites—but, above all, an inherited belief, derived from both her parents and entrenched by Tessa, that the System itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. Which brought her back to the largest question of them all. She had loved Tessa, she had loved Bluhm, she loved Justin still and, if she was truthful, a little more than was proper or comfortable or whatever the word was. And the fact that she was working for the System did not oblige her to accept the System’s lies, as she had heard them only yesterday from Woodrow’s mouth. On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the System back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth. Which explained to Ghita’s total satisfaction what she was doing here and why. “Better to be inside the System and fighting it,” her father—an iconoclast in other ways—would say, “than outside the System, howling at it.”
And Tessa, which was the wonderful thing, had said exactly the same.
The Beechcraft shook itself like an old dog and lurched forward, bumping laboriously into the air. Through her tiny window Ghita saw all Africa spread itself below her: slum cities, herds of running zebra, the flower farms of Lake Naivasha, the Aberdares, Mount Kenya faintly painted on the far horizon. And joining them like a sea, the endless tracts of misted brown bush scribbled over with pocks of green. The plane entered rain cloud, a brown dusk filled the cabin. Scorching sunlight replaced it, and was accompanied by an almighty explosion from somewhere out to Ghita’s left. Without warning the plane rolled on its side. Lunch boxes, rucksacks and Ghita’s travel bag skeltered across the gangway to a chorus of alarm bells and sirens and a flashing of red lights. Nobody spoke except for one old African man, who let out a peal of laughter and bellowed, “We love you, Lord, and don’t you go forgettin’ that,” to the relief and nervous merriment of the other passengers. The plane had still not righted itself. The engine note dropped to a murmur. The African co-pilot with side whiskers had found a handbook and was consulting a checklist while Ghita tried to read it over his shoulder. The rawhide captain turned in his seat to address his craven passengers. His sloped, leathern mouth matched the angle of the plane’s wings.
“As you may have noticed, ladies and gentlemen, one engine has cracked up,” he said drily. “Which means we’re going to have to go back to Wilson and pick up another of these things.”
And I’m not afraid, Ghita noted, pleased with herself. Until Tessa died, things like this happened to other people. Now they’re happening to me, and I can handle them.
Four hours later, she was standing on the tarmac at Lokichoggio.
“You Ghita?” an Australian girl yelled over the roar of engines and other people’s shouted greetings. “I’m Judith. Hi!”
She was tall and red-cheeked and happy and wore a man’s curly brown trilby and a T-shirt proclaiming the United Tea Services of Ceylon. They embraced, spontaneous friends in a wild roaring place. White UN cargo planes were taking off and landing, white lorries shunted and thundered and the sun was a furnace and the heat of it leaped up at her from the runway and the fumes of aircraft fuel shimmered in her eyes and dazzled her. With Judith to guide her, she squeezed herself into the back of a jeep amid sacks of mail to sit beside a sweating Chinese man in a dog collar and a black suit. Jeeps hurtled past them in the opposite direction, pursued by a convoy of white lorries headed for the cargo planes.
“She was a real nice lady!” Judith shouted from the passenger seat in front of her. “Very dedicated!” She was evidently talking about Tessa. “Why would anybody want to arrest Arnold? They’re just plain stupid
! Arnold wouldn’t squash a fly. You’re booked three nights, right? Only we got a bunch of nutritionists coming in from Uganda!”
Judith is here to feed the living not the dead, thought Ghita as the jeep clattered through a gateway and joined a strip of hard road. They drove past a camp-followers’ shanty town of bars, stalls and a facetious notice saying Piccadilly This Way. Tranquil brown hills rose ahead of them. Ghita said she’d love to walk up there. Judith said if she did she’d never come back.
“Animals?”
“People.”
They approached the camp. On a patch of red dust beside the main gates, children were playing basketball with a white food bag nailed to a wooden post. Judith led Ghita to reception to collect her pass. Signing the book, Ghita leafed casually back, only to have it fall open at the page she was pretending not to look for:
Tessa Abbott, PO Box, Nairobi, Tukul 28.
A. Bluhm, Médecins de l’Univers, Tukul 29.
And the same date.
“The press boys had a ball,” Judith was saying enthusiastically. “Reuben charged them fifty US a shot, cash. Eight hundred bucks total, that’s eight hundred sets of drawing books and colouring crayons. Reuben reckons that’ll produce two Dinka van Goghs, two Dinka Rembrandts and one Dinka Andy Warhol.”