28
I left the garrison in a daze, my mind filled with all that Frere had just told me. At the edge of the yard I was accosted by Bone, who emerged from the trees and grabbed my arm, demanding to know why I had left Frere alone and in the open. I pulled myself free of him and pushed him in the chest, causing him to stagger backwards, lose his balance and fall. He cursed me and scrambled back to his feet. He retrieved the rifle he had dropped and pointed it at me. He jabbed me in the stomach with it and I pushed back even harder. I told him that Frere had no intentions of going anywhere. He turned in a full circle and peered into the trees behind him.
I saw that something other than Frere was on his mind. I asked him what was wrong and he told me that another of his men had been attacked earlier that morning, wounded in the leg by an arrow he believed to be tipped with poison.
There had been reports of unknown men approaching the garrison yard during the night. Fires had been started in the surrounding trees to burn off the undergrowth. I knew he was over-reacting to the situation and told him so. I asked him where the wounded man was and he indicated the garrison house. I told him to send the man to Cornelius, but he said the man was too scared even to venture outdoors. Then let him die here, I told him, unwilling to indulge this fantasy of attack any longer.
I left him and followed the path to the compound. Behind me, I heard him running and calling to Frere.
Upon reaching my room, I rested. The walk had exhausted me. In places the blackened ground still smouldered and I had been forced to make detours. I was determined to go in search of Nash and demand to know why, having been told the same story by Frere, he still insisted on sending him to trial for murder.
But despite my resolve, my exhaustion was greater than I realized and I fell asleep where I sat, surrounded by the last of my charts.
When I woke it was evening. I had slept for six hours.
I went outside. The deformed boy lay asleep on my step. I prodded him with my foot, and when he did not respond I kicked him harder. I told him to fetch Nash to me, but he made no attempt to rise. He rubbed his eyes and looked up at me. I saw that he was naked. He had shaved his head, and someone – he was unlikely to have done this himself – had followed the curved hump of his spine in a line of white thumbprints, extending this over his twisted shoulders and along each arm. I kicked him again and repeated the order before returning indoors.
Nash came an hour later. He entered without announcing himself and cleared a space at my desk. He seemed intoxicated. He told me immediately that he had come as a courtesy to me, and that, regardless of what I had been told, what I now understood or believed to be the truth of the matter, he would not discuss with me any of the events Frere had related. The girl had been killed and Frere had willingly confessed to shooting her.
But my outrage at this was uncontainable and I listed reason after reason why Frere should not now be facing trial.
He listened to all this without speaking, unmoved by my protests and pleas. At one point he rose, took the bottle of brandy from beside my bed and drank from it.
When I finally fell silent, he pulled his chair closer to me and handed me the bottle.
‘He killed the girl,’ he said. His words were slurred. He was unshaven, with a small cut above one eye which shone wetly each time he ran his hand across it. ‘It’s all that matters.’
‘But surely, the circumstances—’
‘Tell me, if you’re so concerned for the wretched child, what was her name, what was she called?’
‘What does it matter what she was called?’
‘Precisely.’ He retrieved the bottle. ‘Did he tell you that she was the feather-gatherer’s youngest daughter? No? Seven years old.’
‘Hammad’s lie. The man—’
‘And that, having come across Frere barely conscious, barely alive, on the bank of the river, the man was attempting to help him when Frere pulled out his pistol and fired at him without warning, missing him but striking the girl, who was unloading the canoe beside him.’
‘Even you can’t convince yourself of that.’
‘It’s the story the feather-gatherer tells.’
‘Rehearsed by Hammad, who wants his show trial. What about the testimony of the others present?’
‘What others? According to him, he, Frere and the girl were alone.’ He raised both his hands. He knew every protest I would make.
‘The burned body, then.’
‘She fell into the fire when Frere shot her. Her father was fighting with Frere to prevent him from re-loading and firing again. Hammad’s agent found the grieving man two days later at one of their usual rendezvous to trade the birds and feathers.’
‘And the man’s story was worth more to Hammad than his cargo?’
‘Incalculably more.’
‘Where is he now, the feather-gatherer?’
‘Presumably being measured up for a suit at Hammad’s expense ready for his visit to Stanleyville.’
‘And after that?’
Nash shrugged. ‘Ask Hammad.’ He drank again from the bottle. ‘If it is any consolation to you, Frere denies none of it.’
‘But his own story is entirely different.’
He acknowledged this in silence. ‘He killed the girl. He went in search of what he found. His journals tell the whole story.’
‘The journal Hammad brought to you.’
‘And others. The man was obsessed. Did he tell you that, had he not been exhausted and unwell, had he not been suffering and delirious, that he would in all likelihood have accepted the men’s offer to take part in what they were doing? Imagine that – he cannot deny, for all the extenuating circumstances, for all that did or didn’t happen, he cannot deny that he may have participated.’
‘And so his honesty will hang him.’
‘He was delirious. Who knows what he did or didn’t do?’ It was the last feeble echo of a broken argument.
‘You do,’ I said. ‘And I do.’
He shook his head.
‘And he does,’ I added.
But his work here was finished, and nothing I said would divert him in the slightest from the course he now followed.
‘I did what I was told to come here and do,’ he said eventually.
‘Of course you did.’
I could see that my words stung him, but that he no longer possessed the strength or the will to persist in trying to convince me that, of everyone at the Station, I alone insisted on following this different course.
‘I shall leave Stanleyville as soon as it is expedient for me to do so,’ he said, as though in response to another question.
‘Of course you will. Expedient. And Frere will be long dead before you even reach the sea.’
He rose at that, picked up the bottle and tipped it upside down so that what little remained of its contents splashed over the papers scattered at his feet.
* * *
I slept fitfully through that night. The colony of small apes returned and ran clattering over my roof until something scared them off two hours before dawn.
I made a small pile of my spoiled papers and took them outside to start a fire. The boy sat and watched me. I cared little for him any longer. I asked him where the old boatman was, and he said, simply, ‘Gone,’ nodding upriver as he spoke. He, on the other hand, would fulfil his blighted dream of travelling downriver to the growing cities there. He insisted on helping me gather up more papers and feeding them to the blaze. Those soaked in brandy burst into blue flames and floated above the dying fire. The boy took some pleasure in watching all this, and he rolled on the ground like a satisfied dog. He picked up the blackened papers and crushed them to dust in his hands. In the darkness, the white markings along his spine gave him the appearance of a serpent curving back and forth, attracted and repelled in equal measure by the blaze. I fed more to the flames than I had intended, but I was as mesmerized by them as the boy was, and once started I did not want the fire to die.
It was a clear, dry night, and the sky above me shone with the intensity of lacquer. The moon was gibbous and pale and it lay whole on the water, barely disturbed in its outline.
The compound was in darkness, but a succession of lights still showed along the far shore. It was said the Station there was now so inundated with trade that vessels were filled and unloaded through the night. They were distant, but it was possible to make out the figures of men passing among these lights. Klaxons and whistles sounded, faint and distorted over the expanse of moving water; there was no peace there.
The boy complained that the fire was burning low. I returned to my room, pulled the trunk from beneath my bed, and took from this the journals Frere had asked me to keep safe for him, those accounts of all our early wanderings together, of everything he had discovered and described. I took them all out to the boy and showed him how easily they burned if fed to the flames a page at a time. I could not bring myself to look at the writing, drawings and small paintings and maps they contained. But I knew that if I did not burn them, then someone else would, someone who had never known Frere, someone disgusted by the mention of his name.
I burned packet after packet of his precious photographs.
The boy looked more closely at the torn pages; he recognized the animals and birds, each of these identifications a small thrill for him. There were some pages he was reluctant to burn, and I stood over him to ensure that he concealed none of them and later took them away with him.
The bindings and covers of the journals burned more slowly, with a strong and acrid smell, and the boards themselves cracked and spat like burning bark. We were at least an hour in the task.
At some point before the fire died, Fletcher came out to us. He carried his pistol and wanted to know what I was doing. I told him to mind his own business. He looked from the blaze of consumed papers to the boy and said that he too had been unable to sleep. He said that earlier in the night he had seen Abbot feeding a fire of his own, tending it some distance from the compound in the hope that no-one would see him.
He left us after that.
The boy held his hands close to the dead fire. He rubbed the soot from the charred paper and boards onto his forehead and cheeks. He spat into his palms and moulded a handful of this mess into a small ball, which he smeared over his lips and teeth, and which he then sucked as though it were some sweet fruit.
Ensuring that nothing legible or identifiable remained, I left him and returned to my bed, the dawn’s first light already showing above the trees.