Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (24 page)

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m at the airport now, and I’m not feeling very good. I’ll be on the plane soon, so I just wanted to say how much I love you, in case, well, you know, this is
it
– because I just have a feeling it might be.’

I clicked my mobile phone shut. It was a shame, I thought to myself, that the last time Dee would ever hear my voice would be via the medium of BT’s 1571 answering service, but at least I had told her how I felt. It was important to express oneself, and many others who’d perished had not got the chance to. Feeling reassured, but not remotely calmed, by this, I felt nervously for the small plastic bottle of pills in my jacket pocket for the three hundredth time in the last hour, and headed back across Nairobi airport’s departure lounge towards Zed, the photographer from
Jack
magazine.

‘I think I might head back,’ I told him.

‘What? To the toilet? Again?’ said Zed.

‘No, I mean
back
back. Through customs.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Well, you know, I’m not sure how confident I am about doing this. I thought I might try to hire a car, go back that way instead.’

‘Are you serious? You know how big Africa is, right?’

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I had established a considerable pedigree as a bad traveller. Nonetheless, my trip to Kenya in the summer of 2002 was a new frontier even for someone as chronically poor at going on holiday as me: a work trip that I had ended up on by accident.

All the details were correct: I’d got the right plane, ended up in the right destination, met the appropriate people, and had not at any point in the process been mistaken for a different, globetrotting-adept Tom Cox, but that I was there at all surprised nobody as much as me.

I’d not so much been sent to Nairobi as bludgeoned there with flattery by an editor called James Brown, best known for founding the men’s magazine
Loaded
in the early 1990s. Brown had just launched his new publication,
Jack
– a kind of
Loaded
for grown-ups, with the emphasis more on great outdoors adventure than nudity – and had telephoned me to offer me work after reading my first book.

‘It’s bloody brilliant!’ he’d enthused. ‘You could be our star feature writer.’ I’d heard about Brown before, and witnessed fellow writers’ and photographers’ impersonations of him. They always seemed to make his voice more high-pitched than it really was, and you could see why: because of his zest for life. When you thought back to something he’d told you, there was a tendency to furnish it with an extra squeak.

Soon, I would get used to the capriciousness of Brown’s enthusiasm. He was the kind of man who would phone you one day, out of the blue, and shout, ‘I want you to go and learn falconry. It’s going to be fucking wicked!’ and then forget all about it the following morning. After I’d come back from Kenya – by plane – everyone I’d told about how I’d almost fled from the airport and driven a hire car back through Africa and Europe had thought I was barking mad, apart from Brown. ‘Oh, bloody hell, why didn’t you do it?’ he’d said. ‘It would have been fucking brilliant! A proper gonzo adventure! We could have run it as a serial!’ A few months later, he would send me to participate in an erotic drawing class for another
Jack
feature, then, after seeing my rude, rudimentary sketches, call me, virtually foaming at the mouth, from his mobile phone, explaining that he was about to recommend that his friend, the well-known art dealer Jay Jopling, exhibit them in his gallery, White Cube.

‘Yeah, right,’ I said. ‘
Of course
you are.’ But he insisted they were ‘fucking brilliant’ and ‘like the work of a child savant’. I heard nothing else for a week, then cautiously mentioned the subject to him again.

‘Oh yeah, them,’ he’d said, and immediately changed the subject to his latest wild idea: something to do with releasing a lion into Trafalgar Square, as I remember.

However, in July 2002, all I knew was that Brown had a refreshingly unguarded passion for his job like that of nobody I’d ever worked for. Previously, if I’d kept a newspaper or magazine editor on the phone for more than four minutes, I’d worried that I was taking up far too much of the time of someone much more important than me. But Brown kept
me
on the phone for three quarters of an hour, talking about the Safari Rally, in which cars whizzed through the Kenyan countryside past lions and giraffes, and about his vision for
Jack
. ‘Do you like cars?’ he asked. ‘Of course you do!’ he continued before I had chance to admit that my interest in them didn’t really get much more involved than enjoying early 70s cinema car chases featuring Ford Mustangs and Dodge Challengers. ‘Everyone likes cars!’ Somewhere in the midst of this dust storm of commissioning zeal, Brown had also mentioned that I would probably get the chance to meet a cheetah. At which point, I became quite a lot more interested.

There was just one hitch. Four years earlier, I had been on a plane that had been struck by lightning over the English Channel on the way back from Pisa. I am told by more experienced flyers that this happens relatively frequently and is generally not a great cause for concern, but I wouldn’t have believed it at the time. When the lightning hit, a large blue flash had whizzed around the inside of the plane, many of the passengers had screamed, and there was speculation afterwards that the plane had dropped in the region of a thousand feet before righting itself. Back on terra firma, I made a decision: I had cheated aeronautical death, and I would not give it the chance to get its own back at a later date.

It’s not that I didn’t know the statistics about how rare aeroplane crashes were; I just knew that I didn’t want to be in an aeroplane, thinking about having an aeroplane crash. To me, hearing the words ‘I’m afraid it’s terminal’ with a number after them from a kindly person redirecting you at an airport was barely less ominous than hearing them as a stand-alone sentence in a hospital.

I was aware that ultimately the greater control I felt I had when I was travelling in a car or a train or a boat was an illusion, but it was an illusion that I cherished. Besides that, flying contradicted a fundamental belief of mine that it was against the laws of nature for any human to rise more than twenty storeys above ground level. Not long before I spoke to Brown, I’d been up to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, and only just restrained myself from falling into a protective, terrified crawl in front of more insouciant sightseers. With this in mind, it is a tribute to his persuasive powers that during the course of our phone call he reduced my stance on flying from ‘Never again!’ to ‘Maybe again, if someone carries on being complimentary about my work and talking about leopards for long enough!’

‘Look at me,’ boasted Brown. ‘I’ve been up in fighter jets and skydived, and I’m all right. Take some valium. You’ll be
fine
.’

Following Brown’s advice, I did take some valium in the departure lounge at Heathrow. It calmed me down, but not enough to prevent me from leaving the first of two ‘last goodbye’ messages on the voicemail of Dee’s mobile phone shortly before take-off. I then took some more valium, just to be sure. I noticed just a slight lessening of the certainty that my limbs would shortly be spread across the Alps in small pieces, but mostly I just wanted to go for a wee a lot. I tried to watch a couple of rom-coms on the screen in front of me and reread the same page of my book forty times, never taking a word of it in, then finally settled on a form of entertainment I found far more riveting than either: the virtual flight map, on which passengers could watch the plane move in barely perceptible increments across Europe and Africa. For me, this was more viscerally stimulating than the most explosive Bruce Willis movie. For the next eleven hours my eyes never left it, with the exception of the moments when I rushed to the bathroom, at one point knocking over the curry of Zed,
Jack
’s photographer, in the process.

Having touched down in Nairobi and ventured out into its surrounding countryside, one of the first things to strike me was the special kind of dark it was subject to. It wasn’t exactly that it was darker than the dark you found in rural England, just that it was more businesslike about getting down to it. They say that in Kenya, in July, they simply don’t
do
dusk. ‘But how can that be?’ you think upon being first told this. ‘It’s not like part of the globe spins more quickly here than anywhere else, is it?’ But then you experience it for yourself, and you realise the sun plummets to earth there at a different rate. It’s like being part of a three-dimensional screen wipe. One moment the picture is there in front of your eyes: a heat haze, the dust cloud of a distant speeding car, a scattering of acacia trees, a couple of ostriches, the distant shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. The next moment, it’s eliminated by a blanket of black, the giant sleeping bag of the world abruptly zipped up in front of your face.

When you’re part of a top rally crew, it’s doubly important to pack up quickly when dark falls, since it won’t be long before the hyenas and lions come down from the hills. As Paul, the gruff Yorkshireman responsible for leading the Subaru team for the 2002 Safari Rally, told me, there were also the Maasai tribesmen to contend with, who had been known to pilfer parts of the cars as souvenirs. ‘You have to remember these people don’t understand modern life,’ he said. ‘They don’t have a mortgage or a pension plan.’ He pointed this out as if he viewed it as a shortcoming: something they needed to think about, if they were going to stop faffing about and get ahead in the world.

Not being part of a top rally crew myself, and being much more keen on observing hyenas and lions than rally, I couldn’t say I had a vested interest in getting tidied up quickly. Actually, I might have been tempted to slow the process down by hiding a front coilover or a couple of torsion mounts belonging to one of the cars, had I been a bit braver, or had the faintest idea what they were. As for the Maasai, I’d been wandering around the test course for the Subaru team for a couple of days, and I’d met quite a few of them. All had been extremely personable, and surprisingly knowledgable about Subaru’s stars. The most memorable included Jonathan and David, two twentysomethings with stretched earlobes and shukas who said that during the Safari they thought nothing of walking thirty miles to find out the results, and the patrician Father John, who enthused to me about the handbrake action of Subaru’s best-known driver, Tommi Makinen. These men were additionally notable for each pulling behind them cows bearing a remarkable resemblance to the jazz musician and raconteur George Melly.