The Day of Creation. J. G. Ballard

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СКАЧАТЬ my typewriter case, she assumed that I was embarking on a secondary career as a journalist, and informed me that she did not wish to recount her ordeal for the South African newspapers. I then produced the marmoset, which sprang into her arms and gave me what I took to be a useful reputation for the unexpected.

      A week later, when she visited the dispensary in Port-la-Nouvelle, I assumed that she wanted to make more of our acquaintance – before her husband’s death, Santos told me, she had been a good-looking woman. In fact she had merely wanted to try out a new variety of sleeping pill, but without intending to I had managed to take advantage of her. Our brief affair of a few days ended when I realized that she had not the slightest interest in me and had offered her body like a pacifier given to a difficult child.

      Watching her stumble among the beer bottles on the beach, face emptied of all emotion, I assumed that she had seen Harare’s men approach the breeding station and in a reflex of panic had gulped down the entire prescription of tranquillizers. She blundered between the gunmen, trying to support herself on the shoulders of the two guerillas in front of her, who carried their heavy suitcases like porters steering a drunken guest to a landing jetty. They shouted to her and pushed her away, but a third soldier put his arm around her waist and briefly fondled her buttocks.

      ‘Mrs Warrender …!’ I stood up, determined to help this distraught woman. Behind me, the twelve-year-old sprang to her feet and began to jabber in an agitated way, producing a stream of choked guttural noise in a primitive dialect. I seized the rifle barrel and tried to cuff her head, but she pulled the weapon from my hands and levelled it at my chest. Her fingers tightened within the trigger guard, and I heard the familiar hard snap of the firing pin.

      Sobered by the sound, and for once grateful for a defective cartridge case, I stared into the wavering barrel. The girl retreated up the beach, dragging her bandage over the sand, challenging me to strike her.

      Ignoring her, I stepped over the legs of the guerillas lounging by their radios. Santos and the injured Frenchman were being backed along the beach to the tobacco wharf, whose heavy teak pillars rose from the debris of cigarette packs like waiting execution posts.

      ‘Mrs Warrender …?’ I held her shoulders, but she shivered and shook me away like a sleeper refusing to be roused. ‘Have they taken your women? I’ll talk to Harare – he’ll let them go …’

      The air was silent. The guerillas had switched off their radios. Plumes of tarry smoke drifted from the gutted shells of the drilling towers, and threw shadows like uncertain pathways across the white surface of the lake. By some trick of the light, Harare seemed further away, as if he had decided to distance himself from whatever happened to his prisoners. The soldiers were pushing us towards the tobacco wharf. They jostled around us, cocking their rifles and hiding their eyes below the peaks of their forage caps. They seemed shifty and frightened, as if our deaths threatened their own sense of survival.

      The Japanese photographer ran towards us through the billows of smoke. Seeing her concerned eyes, I realized for the first time that these diseased and nervous men were about to shoot us.

       5

       Fame

      Signal flares were falling from the air, like discarded pieces of the sun. The nearest burned through its metal casing thirty yards from the beach where I stood with Mrs Warrender, its mushy pink light setting fire to an old newspaper. The spitting crackle was drowned by the noise of a twin-engined aircraft which had appeared above the forest canopy. It flew north-east across the lake, then banked and made a laboured circuit of Port-la-Nouvelle. The drone of its elderly engines shivered against the galvanized roofs of the warehouses, a vague murmur of pain. Looking up, I could see on the Dakota’s fuselage the faded livery of Air Centrafrique.

      Harare and his guerillas had gone, vanishing into the forest on the northern side of Lake Kotto. The radios and cassette players lay on the beach, thrown aside in their flight. One of the radios still played a dance tune broadcast from the government station in the capital. Beside it rested an open suitcase, Nora Warrender’s looted clothes spilling across the lid.

      She pushed my arm away and knelt on the sand. She began to smooth and straighten the garments, her neat hands folding a silk ball gown. Draping this handsome robe over her arm like a flag, she walked past me and began to climb the beach towards the jetty.

      ‘Nora … Mrs Warrender – I’ll drive you home. First let me give you something in the dispensary.’

      ‘I can walk back, Dr Mallory. Though I think you should take something. Poor man, everything you’ve worked for has gone to waste.’

      Her manner surprised me; a false calm that concealed a complete rejection of reality. She seemed unaware that we both had very nearly been shot by Harare’s men. I was still shaking with what I tried to believe was excitement, but was almost certainly pure terror.

      ‘Don’t pull my arm, doctor.’ Mrs Warrender eased me away with a weary smile. ‘Are you all right? Perhaps someone can help you back to the clinic. I suppose we’re safe for the next hour or so.’

      She pointed to the dirt road along the southern shore of Lake Kotto. A small convoy of government vehicles, a staff car and two trucks filled with soldiers, drove towards Port-la-Nouvelle. Clouds of dust rose from their wheels, but the vehicles moved at a leisurely pace that would give Harare and his men ample time to disperse. At the entrance to the town, by the open-air cinema, the convoy stopped and the officer in the staff car stood behind the windshield and fired another flare over the lake.

      Shielding her eyes, Mrs Warrender watched the transport plane drone overhead. The pilot had identified the landing strip and was aligning himself on to the grass runway. Mrs Warrender stared at the charred hulks of the drilling towers, which stood on the lake like gutted windmills.

      ‘A shame, doctor – you tried so hard. I imagine you’ll be leaving us soon?’

      ‘I think so – the only patients I have here spend their time trying to kill me. But you aren’t staying, Nora—?’

      ‘Don’t give up.’ She spoke sternly, as if summoning some wavering dream. ‘Even when you’ve left, think of Lake Kotto filled with water.’

      Without looking at me again, she crossed the road and set off towards the breeding station, the ball gown over her arm. The convoy of soldiers approached the police barracks, guns trained on the broken windows. Santos and the Frenchman ignored the vehicles and the shouting soldiers, and walked back to their offices, refusing my offers of help. I knew that they considered my medical practices to be slapdash and unhygienic. Shrugging off the pain in his swollen jaw, the Frenchman began to sweep away the glass in front of the Toyota showroom.

      The Dakota circled overhead, its flaps lowered for landing. I strode towards the clinic, deciding to seal the doors and shutters of the dispensary before an off-duty platoon of the government soldiers began to search for drugs. The two trucks rolled past, their wheels driving a storm of dust against the windows of the beer parlour. As they passed Mrs Warrender, the soldiers hooted at the silk gown draped over her arm, assuming that this was some elaborate nightdress that she was about to wear for her lover.

      I watched her moving with her small, determined steps along the verge, dismissing the young soldiers with a tired wave. I imagined lying beside Nora Warrender in her silk robe, watched perhaps by a stern-faced bridal jury of her servant women. Fanny and СКАЧАТЬ