The Hunters. Kat Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ looked up at me, wide-eyed. ‘But she promised.’

      ‘When I’m older and I have my own house,’ I said, ‘you can live with me and we’ll get a dog.’

      ‘Are you going to move out soon?’

      ‘Why? Do you want me to go?’

      ‘No. I hated it when you went to school. But I do want a dog.’

      I tried to hide my grin.

      ‘Anyway,’ she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. ‘I won’t be able to live with you because you’ll have a wife and a family.’

      ‘I’ll never love another girl as much as I love you.’

      She sighed. ‘Liar.’

      Just before dawn the next day the train stopped for the passengers to stretch their legs. The light was silvery, just clear enough to see by, and jugs of hot water were produced for the men to shave. The grass by the side of the tracks was still wet with dew, the air so cold it burned my throat. We huddled together, scarves wrapped around our faces so that only our eyes were showing.

      ‘Only six more hours,’ my father told us. ‘You know, if we stayed on all the way to Lake Victoria we’d have travelled more than five hundred and eighty miles. How about that for engineering? We built this line through swamps, forests, mountains, plains, deserts, you name it. They didn’t think we could do it, but we did. And before the bloody Germans, too.’

      Sometimes I wondered why my father disliked the Germans so much. Maybe, I thought, it was in solidarity with my mother, whose only brother had been killed by them in the War, whereas my father had stayed at home with flat feet. My mother never talked about her brother. I couldn’t remember him, but I’d seen a photograph of him in her locket. I thought he looked like her, and like me.

      We climbed back aboard and as the train wound its way along the track the sun came out and coloured the landscape outside our window in blushing oranges and coppers and scarlets. Now that we could see better, we realised we were covered in dust from where the desert had blown through the mosquito screen. My mother took out a handkerchief and rubbed at her face, but said nothing, and the window stayed open.

      A few hours after sunrise, the air was already shimmering with heat. Maud and I sat with our faces turned towards the view and I felt my stomach knotting with relief and excitement. Overnight, the scenery had turned dramatic – plains stretching endlessly away from us, matched by a colossal, empty sky. Looking upwards I saw it carried on blankly forever, miles and miles of bright blue and nothing else.

      The plains, on the other hand, were warm with life. Giraffes clustered around trees, nibbling at the upper branches, and swooping long necks down to nuzzle at their babies, already taller than my father. Fifty or more zebra marched in a long snaking line towards a nearby pond, where a herd of wildebeest were bathing, the mud darkening their spindly legs. One of them raised his head and stared at the train. He had the gentle eyes of a cow, but a horse’s long face.

      ‘Look, Theo,’ Maud said, pointing.

      I saw a flash of white, brown and black – four gazelles running and leaping abreast of each other to rejoin their herd.

      ‘They’re so sweet,’ she said, clapping her hands.

      I pressed my face against the screen – Dar es Salaam had been exotic, but this new Kenya was the Africa I’d dreamed of, the Africa of H. Rider Haggard, and I was impatient to finish the train journey, to start living in this incredible landscape.

      Eventually we saw a city on the horizon. It got closer and closer, the buildings on the outskirts made of daub and wattle, or yellow stone, then sturdier brick buildings, then the train pulled into Nairobi, and we piled out with our luggage onto the wide platform, with the station clock swinging from the canopy above us, showing twelve thirty in the afternoon.

      ‘Well,’ my father said. ‘Are we ready for our new lives?’

      In the hotel lobby I saw a framed photograph of the town in 1904 – rows of identical huts along a dirt track and The Norfolk, newly opened. Nairobi had grown since then, but the hotel still looked the same: a long, low building with a mock-Tudor front, surrounding perfectly manicured gardens and a turquoise pool in a courtyard area. Inside, the roof was supported by rows of gleaming white columns and criss-crossing white beams. It was the grandest building I’d been in. I didn’t wonder that Roosevelt had chosen it for his hunting trip.

      Our interconnecting rooms were homely, decorated in soft greys and caramel browns and furnished with sleek sofas and lacquered dressers. Chrome and frosted-glass desk lamps provided soft pools of light, and slatted doors to the garden kept the heat out. My father tipped the bellboy another penny and closed the door behind him.

      ‘What do we think?’ he asked my mother.

      She lay down on the bed in their room. ‘A soft mattress at last,’ she said. ‘Maud, come and unpin my hair.’

      My sister knelt by the side of the bed removing hairpins one by one until her hair fell in a fiery mane across the pillow. Maud had inherited red hair from our mother, but hers was a dark mahogany colour, not the pure copper that gleamed before us now.

      I met my mother’s eye. ‘Can we go for a swim?’ I asked. She shrugged, but gripped my wrist as I turned to collect my bathing shorts.

      ‘Look after your sister,’ she said.

      Maud and I changed and took our towels downstairs. Out of our room, I was painfully conscious of the bruising on my left thigh that showed just below the bottom of my shorts. My mother had been responsible for that, after I’d made too much noise outside her hotel room one afternoon in Dar. She’d had a headache but I’d forgotten, and the fact that I’d brought the beating on myself only made me want to hide the evidence even more, so when we reached the garden path I sped up. By the time I reached the pool I was running. I dropped my towel and sprang forwards, feeling my muscles uncoil after days of cramped conditions, and hitting the water with a smack.

      I let myself sink to the bottom, holding my breath until I thought I was going to pass out, then clawed my way back to the surface. Maud was sitting cross-legged by the side of the pool. I could tell she’d been watching for my bubbles.

      ‘One day you’re going to go too far,’ she said.

      We stayed for an hour, racing each other, doing handstands underwater, then drying off in the sun. It was early afternoon when we went back into the hotel and the lobby was deserted. The receptionist was talking to someone in the office – we could hear his voice floating out but not the words. We walked through the room, trailing our fingers over the deep armchairs arranged in groups around it. Our footsteps rang differently across the wooden floors, Maud’s slapping as she ran ahead, mine padding softly behind her. I’d been in a grand hotel in Edinburgh before, but that had been stuffy, smaller and darker and filled with elderly people asleep in uncomfortable leather chairs. The Norfolk was nothing like that.

      ‘We should put some clothes on,’ Maud said when we’d done a full circuit. ‘Someone might see us.’

      ‘Mm-hmm.’

      ‘Are you coming?’

      ‘Later,’ I said. I heard her skidding off, but I was already looking at the covered terrace outside the hotel. СКАЧАТЬ