The Drowning Lesson (11 page)

We passed through a small village a few kilometres down the dirt road. Men were already sitting in the rim of shade by their huts, the children gathered at the fences, staring, as we drove past. The children were thin, the roofs ragged, with gaping holes in the thatch. The yards around the huts were bone dry and mostly empty. Kabo had been right about the drought and the poverty. The lucky feeling thinned; this was
a different Botswana from the prosperous capital, a darker, sadder place. Once the car was on tarmac we went faster, the dried verges glittering with rubbish; a dead donkey lay at the side of the road, its neck stretched out at an awkward angle.

The sun was high by the time we drove through the metal gates of Mokolodi Nature Reserve. Two smiling rangers appeared as we drew up, but when Teko saw their battered, open-sided truck, and realized she would have to sit in it, she shook her head and backed away, holding Sam. The outdoor restaurant was cool and empty, apart from a young waitress by the counter wiping glasses. I put Sam into his seat on the table; he was awake now and gazing around. I bought Teko a drink and sandwiches and gave her Sam's baby bag with his bottle of water and my mobile, scribbling Adam's number on a paper napkin. The waitress drew near Sam, shyly twiddling her fingers and smiling at him. We left, promising we would only be gone an hour or so. Adam took a photo of Teko and Sam on his phone and showed her. She touched her neck uncertainly and didn't smile.

The truck lurched rapidly from side to side on the track. It would have been difficult to have kept Sam safe. Scrabbling for my hat by my feet, I caught a bunched movement of brown muscled skin and a flash of horns between the trees as a kudu bolted from the track. The dark eyes of a giraffe by the trees
turned to follow us. After half an hour of heat and bumping and glimpses of grazing impala, the driver stopped the car, pointing to rippled dinner-plate-sized prints in the dust. ‘Rhino,' he announced.

Climbing down with his gun, he motioned for us to follow. The cicadas scattered to either side of our feet as we walked after him in the scorching heat. Twenty minutes further on, he stopped to kick apart a pile of damp dung. The broken clods were alive with scuttling green beetles. We were near. He pointed to large grey boulders beyond the sparse foliage. Closer, they became two rhinos under a thorn tree, a mother and calf. The animals moved together, ears flicking, their breath peaceful in the hot air as they watched us with deep-lidded eyes.

In the car going home, we were all quiet; Sam fed hungrily.

‘What's the point of all this fuss about animals?' Alice's sudden question made me jump.

‘To preserve them, Ally.' I swapped Sam to my other breast and she looked away, a revolted expression on her face. ‘To stop them being poached.'

‘Why?'

‘So they don't become extinct.'

‘What difference will it make to anything if there are no rhinos?' Her face was pink under her cotton hat.

‘We have to look after wild animals. Rhinos were here thousands of years before us.' I put my arm round her awkwardly, Sam still on my lap. ‘They have as much right to be here as we do.'

‘But rhinos aren't like people.' She pulled away. ‘They're not important.'

Sam started crying, his fists punching the air. The naevus seemed to pulse in the heat. The surface was wet with milk and sweat. I wiped it as I sat him on my knee to wind him. ‘There are millions more people than rhino, Ally. Fewer people wouldn't matter. Fewer people would be good. No one would notice. There's only a few hundred rhino left. Losing even one would matter.'

‘Why?'

‘Wouldn't you want your children to see them?'

‘No.'

Adam met my gaze in the mirror and winked, but I felt worried as I twisted to strap Sam into his seat. Alice's response seemed unusual. Was she finding it difficult to order all the different images we had seen, the vast diamond-trading centre, the magnificent animals, the thin barefoot children and the tattered roofs? How does this hierarchy work, she might be wondering. Who should come first?

‘She's entitled to her point of view,' Adam said that night, as he came out of the shower, wrapping a towel
around his waist. ‘It would be difficult to see how animals fit in when there's so much poverty.'

‘I agree, but she ought to realize that rhino are worth preserving.'

‘How about fewer oughts?' He leant over me on the bed, his wet hair dripping on my face.

I pushed him away. ‘Don't be such a hypocrite. You're totally driven by oughts.'

‘And you're not?' He bent lower and kissed me. I shook my head, laughing, giving up the attempt to keep dry – the air was as warm as an oven.

He was right, though: I was driven by oughts. The word had run through my head at medical school like a chant, muted yet continuous, underlying everything …

I ought to study.

I ought not to go to the pub, stay up late, drink, smoke, have sex.

I ought to come top, be first, win prizes.

I ought to send him good news, make him smile, keep him safe.

I studied, I came first, I won all the prizes. Winning became addictive. If the costs seemed high, the pay-off was higher, and always in my head the picture of my father on the poolside, smiling. Even after he died, he watched me. Even now I had to make him smile.

Later, as I fed Sam, rustles of unfamiliar nightlife in the garden outside came in through the window.
The sky was full of different stars. I watched Sam as he drifted to sleep on my lap. The rhino would be finding their way to water, drinking in the dark, the female quietly on guard. It was comforting to think of the large animal standing calmly in the night, looking after her calf.

The boy stops the car at the top of our drive; the house is dark, the door wide open. Have other thieves come in our absence? There is nothing left to take; how could it matter?

The boy gets out of our car and runs off. A light goes on in the house. Kabo stands on the veranda.

Adam stumbles towards us. In the headlights his hair is plastered to his skull. A patch of scum is smeared on his sleeve. He smells of sweat and stagnant water. His face is wet against my cheek. He shakes his head, his thoughts following mine. No, Sam wasn't in the pond.

He lifts Zoë from the car. Alice slides out and runs up the steps into the house. Teko appears silently from the dark kitchen; Alice goes towards her, then turns to give me a deep, blank stare. She looks ill.

‘It's all right, Ally.'

Her eyes close. She knows I'm lying.

‘I'm going to drive Adam to Gaborone police station.' Kabo's cheeks are streaked with tears and dust,
the knees of his trousers caked with mud. He must have been crawling under bushes. He puts an arm around my shoulders. ‘The police haven't arrived, so we're going to them. Teko's coming too. They'll need to ask her what she saw.'

‘Has anyone talked to her yet?' I catch Adam's hand but he shrugs: he doesn't know. I turn to Kabo. ‘Has she said anything?'

Kabo shakes his head. ‘She's too shocked. The police will know what to do.'

Kabo speaks to her but Teko stares back at him. Her eyes shift to mine, then slide away. I want to scream at her but guilt fights with rage. If Teko should have been at Sam's side, so should I. I am his mother, she a stranger.

The men disappear out of the door – Kabo touches my arm as he passes. Teko slips past me and follows the men into the night. Elisabeth appears from the kitchen and guides the children from the room.

There is silence. The stub of candle on the windowsill that someone lit gutters in a pool of wax, then goes out.

I put my hand against the wall. There are two realities. I can switch between them, on and off. On: this is a normal Wednesday evening – the girls have gone to bed, and in the room further down, Sam sleeps in his cot, breathing quietly, his small chest rising and falling in the moonlight. Off: he is not here; he is
outside in the night somewhere, being held by someone I don't know. He is screaming because his ear is hurting. I don't know what they are doing to him.

I am not sure how I will survive from moment to moment.

On: he is here. Off: I am falling, tipping, turning into darkness.

Africa suited Adam: his rash had vanished; he even looked taller. One evening I was startled to the window by an unfamiliar noise. Adam, back from work and standing outside with Kabo, was doubled up, laughing a bellowing laugh I hadn't heard before. There were beer bottles on the veranda table. On the desk behind me, his papers had been left in spilling piles, the pens dumped in a mug. Something had loosened. I rested my forehead against the cool pane; my own life was coiling so tightly around me that I could hardly breathe. After the excitement of the first days, the world had contracted to the darkened house, the curtains always drawn to shut out the sun. Sam was fretful in the heat and the Internet failed frequently in the garage office. I slept badly: the house, cooling at night, seemed full of creaks and whispers.

How had I got it so wrong? The wide landscape had shrunk to the dimensions of a cage. There was nowhere to go. I was working, two review papers
were done, but for once I didn't feel triumphant. Adam seemed to be heading towards some other, secret, goal – I played with possibilities: results that he was keeping to himself? An affair? When I asked him outright why he was so happy, he laughed the new noisy laugh and told me it was because we were having sex again. In more sensible moments I knew he would never be unfaithful, that the heat and inactivity were distorting my vision. Megan would have restored my sanity, but she wasn't here. On my own, I couldn't get beyond the conviction that I was missing out.

In the hushed early hours of a Friday morning, half asleep and feeding Sam, I caught sight of Adam through the bedroom window: he was sitting on the veranda outside the sitting room. His stillness snagged my attention: his shoulders, outlined against the sky, had the austerity of a statue.

I settled Sam back in his cot, and walked out of the bedroom, along the corridor and through the sitting room to the veranda. ‘Adam?'

There was no answer. I walked behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. He reached his up to cover mine, sliding his warm fingers under the cuff of the old shirt I wore in bed. ‘Hello there.' His voice was slow and sleepy. ‘Why are you up? It's early.'

‘Why are you?' He had no book in front of him, no laptop, not even a cup of coffee.

‘Sit here and see.'

‘I ought to get going. The Internet works best first thing and Simon's coming early. He wants Alice to sit a mock maths exam before it's too hot.'

He didn't relinquish my wrist. I sat on the chair next to his; the dew-damp edge of roughened plastic bit into the back of my thighs.

‘This is my favourite time of day.' He gestured to the faintly glowing sky. ‘The feeling of space before the heat narrows it down. The smell of the bush before it gets burnt away.'

‘I'm impressed you've noticed. You're normally too busy to see anything.'

He shrugged, smiling. ‘There's less to do here.'

What was it that seemed so different? His hair was longer, curling to the collar of his pyjamas. His skin looked less lined. Maybe it was just the relaxed way he was sitting, his long back curved against the seat.

‘You were always busy, especially when there was less to do.' In the quietness my voice sounded brittle. ‘Think of weekends.'

Weekends had been almost worse than weekdays: Adam had sorted emails and international calls. In the moments between, he'd rushed to squash, Zoë's ballet, Alice's Mandarin lessons.

He nodded. Adam never usually agreed.

‘Being here has allowed me off the merry-go-round,' he replied. ‘Different things seem important.'

‘What, for instance?' He might have escaped his normal routines but, despite help, I felt trapped. The girls were settling in but the walks I'd planned hadn't happened: the landscape was too vast, too barren, too hot. They followed Teko rather than me. I was free to study but I was jealous. I'd thought jealousy would disappear here but it was stronger than ever. Adam's work allowed him to escape, and explore beneath the skin of this country. It made it worse that I knew I was being ungrateful; that here, in Africa, I should be revelling in the peace and wilderness around us.

‘I saw a woman yesterday.' Adam gazed towards the gum trees at the lawn's edge, still folded in shade. ‘Coughing blood. Ulcers in her mouth and vulva. Her lymph nodes were the size of golf balls. She was dying of AIDS. There was nothing I could do to help her.'

‘People die in England too.' I felt irritated. ‘We didn't need to come here to feel helpless about death.' In the gynaecology ward at the Royal Free, there were women with inoperable ovarian cancers and disseminated uterine tumours. They wouldn't recover either.

‘It's not just about death. It's how they die.' He
turned to face me. ‘Most of my patients don't have electricity – they can't get a cold drink or clean sheets when they need them. It's like a furnace in a tin-roofed house, worse at night as heat comes back up from the ground. In the rainy season the palliative teams struggle to get to the villages.'

‘Palliative teams?' I had an image of the hospice in Barnet, with its hushed corridors and cheerful counsellors. ‘What about family?'

‘Dying people need access to pain relief and hygiene.' Adam sounded angry. ‘It's difficult to get that here. I'm raising this at the AIDS conference in Gaborone in a couple of months.' He pushed back his chair and got up. After a while he spoke more quietly. ‘But, yes, family is crucial. Everyone pitches in. Even without illness, babies are shared. Mothers give children to sisters who have none.'

‘Sounds ideal if you want to offload a child …' He was supposed to laugh, but his eyebrows drew together, and the moment of silence lengthened. ‘I'm joking, Adam.' Surely he could tell. ‘Though, emotions aside, you have to admit it has a certain logic.'

‘How can you put emotions aside? What do you think it would feel like to give a child away?'

The rim of the sun appeared behind the hills and the cicadas started. He stretched. ‘I must get dressed. Kabo will be here soon.'

Footsteps sounded in the sitting room, then the
door to the corridor shut quietly. If it was Elisabeth, she might have overheard my glib words about giving children away but, hurrying to look, it was only Teko, carrying a pile of clean bedding. Even if she'd heard me, she wouldn't have understood. Alice was by her side, staggering under an equal load.

‘You're up early, Ally. Let me help you.' I reached to take the sheets.

‘No!' Alice shouted, as she twisted away, clutching the linen. They walked together down the corridor, Teko leaning towards Alice so their heads were almost touching. I watched them as the little shock settled, listening to the rising sounds of insect and birds coming into the house through the open windows. Alice was asserting her independence, that's all. Sam began to cry. I turned away; another hot day was beginning. Later, from the garage, I heard Simon's car arrive and waved from the open doors as his lanky frame unfolded from the driver's seat. His face split in a wide grin as he looked towards me, returning the wave. Simon was Kabo's friend, a maths graduate, as intent on teaching the girls as if he were their university tutor. Even Zoë was learning more than she would have done back in Reception; she could count to a hundred already and was beginning to grasp simple addition. Simon bent over Elisabeth while they exchanged the rolling African greetings; Alice's excited tones and Zoë's high voice sounded in the background.
Then the front door slammed and it was quiet again, apart from the endless shrilling of the cicadas and the quiet hum of the electricity generator.

Delayed cord clamping … increased blood volume … decreased anaemia.
I looked up from the paper in front of me through the open doors to the brown lawn and the hills in the distance. The outcomes of this research could be useful here: special-care baby units must be few and far between. It seemed a simple way to help a newborn baby thrive. I spent an hour processing the outline proposal for another trial, attached it to an email for Francesca and sent it. Nothing happened. I tried once more. There was a little clang as sending failed again. The Internet had gone down. I'd lost count of the times this had happened.

By now the heat was reaching inside the stone walls of the garage. I walked outside and up to the window of the house. Standing on tiptoe, I could see Simon and Alice through the window, sitting close together at the table. Alice was writing, Simon pointing to the page, talking and smiling. Zoë was lying on the floor, absorbed in stacking bricks into little piles. Sam lay on his rug next to her, watching her closely. Teko was nearby, ironing, her head tilted towards the girls. They didn't need me. I stepped back, not quite sure what to do. I walked quickly round the house, pulled a hat from the cupboard and hurried down the drive to the gate.

Once outside the grounds, the sense of distance vanished into a close world of grey and green, the smell of dust and animals was pungent. The silence dissolved into the humming of insects and the bleating of goats. I walked down the rutted track, relishing the air against my skin. Wire glinted behind some scrubby bushes, and, beyond that, a group of thatched huts framed by green, like a picture-book version of a medieval English country village in spring. I walked nearer, my feet crunching on grass. Close up, there were holes in the thatch and a pile of broken machinery; goats were bleating from a makeshift pen. A woman was sweeping the ground, her muscled arms were roped with veins; a boy leant against the door playing with a puppy on a string. The peace in the small yard seemed to beat in time with the rhythm of the broom.

The heat was fierce now. I turned back on the track and in a moment the huts vanished from view.

When I got home, Simon's car had gone. Across the lawn, the children were with Teko under the trees, Sam's seat pushed into the shade. Josiah was digging, and Zoë crouched next to his feet, a shoebox by her side. Alice and Teko were sitting on the rug; from here it looked as though they were laughing. I walked quickly towards them.

Zoë ran over to meet me. ‘Me and Josiah found a frog and a baby lizard,' she said. ‘Come and see.'

Teko scrambled to her feet as I neared. ‘It's fine, Teko, don't go,' I said, but she slipped past me. Alice got up, took Teko's hand and together they walked towards the house. Sam woke and began to cry. Before I could reach him, Josiah had hurried over and, dropping stiffly to his knees, began crooning at Sam in a quavering voice. Sam stopped crying, staring into the old face near his. As I approached, Josiah pushed himself up and touched his hat. I smiled my thanks and, holding Sam, let Zoë lead me to the box. Tense with excitement she lifted the lid. Inside a small green frog palpitated under a handful of grass. The lizard was in a corner halfway up the side, limbs splayed, motionless. I congratulated Zoë, though my mind was on Alice. She had seemed so close to Teko but it was as if I was watching at a distance, from the other side of a fence.

When Kabo dropped Adam off that evening, I told him about the problems I'd had with the Internet.

‘I'll get an engineer to call out, but it could take weeks,' he warned.

‘I can't wait weeks.' I passed him a cup of tea. ‘I'll go crazy.'

Through the window, Zoe was with Josiah and Adam under the gum trees, surrounded by a roll of chicken wire and pieces of wood. The sound of hammering came across the garden. Alice stood with Teko, who was cradling Sam.

‘You were quite right about Teko. She's been a godsend,' I told Kabo. ‘But I have more free time than I'd thought; there must be something useful I could do for a few hours a day. I'd like to help.'

‘There's the health centre in Kubung.' Kabo sipped his tea thoughtfully. ‘It's not grand, but they're often short-staffed. I'll ask.'

By the time I walked with him to his car, the sun had left the garden and the children had gone inside. Thin red clouds lay across the darkening sky but Kabo was gazing into the shadows under the trees. ‘What about those dogs?' he asked, opening his car door. ‘You said you'd consider it …'

‘We've got one – didn't I tell you?' I gestured towards the back of the house. ‘He belongs to Josiah.' I didn't tell him Josiah's dog was old and spent his days sleeping. He'd be able to bark if anyone came, and Elisabeth and Josiah were always around.

At bedtime, Zoë was drowsy. I moved aside Megan's hippo to kiss her face.

Alice was propped on an elbow, reading a wildlife encyclopedia, the page open at a picture of a rhino. ‘Teko says they're really dangerous,' she burst out. ‘She says she'd be glad if they all died.'

Teko couldn't possibly have said that. I smiled, although my heart sank. An image of the broken dolls came into my mind, and the box with the stolen
items. Why did Alice still need to lie? ‘They're only dangerous if they're frightened, Ally.' I kissed her. ‘Like everyone, I suppose.'