The closer the expedition had drawn, however, the more he’d recognised the essential contradiction of his private mission. He’d loved Gaille for her gentleness and compassion; she would have wanted him to mourn her and then move on, not waste his life on vengeance. But when anger was all you had left of someone you loved, it was hard to let it go.
A gibbous moon had risen low behind him, its light bright enough to stretch shadows on the pale sand. He frowned at it, as though it was trying to tell him something. He gave a little laugh when he realised what. With the moon up, he surely had enough light to walk by. He opened the flap of the tent, woke Thierry to tell him his intent. He paid him and his brother off and said goodbye to Lucia, then he hoisted his dive-bag to his shoulders, picked up his overnight case, and set off south along the beach.
FIFTEEN
I
Rebecca was too tired to do anything but undress and collapse into bed. She dozed off, only to be woken by a shutter banging on the breeze and the sound of singing. Most likely Therese and the others just playing the radio, but it got to her all the same. Whenever someone beloved died along this coast, the Malagasy would dance and drink until dawn, sometimes for nights on end. She couldn’t help but think that these songs were for Adam and Emilia.
As a child, not understanding death, Rebecca had been enchanted by the distant music of these wakes, not least because they left the fishermen too exhausted to go out the following day, and so her father, an ardent carnivore, would use it as an excuse to butcher some meat. He’d always insisted you had to be prepared to kill what you ate, however, so Rebecca had long feared that her turn would come. That hadn’t made it easy when the time finally arrived. The chickens were her friends; she’d personified them and given them names. He’d folded his arms implacably, however, so she’d chased them halfheartedly around the clearing. One chicken hadn’t fled as fast as the others. She’d held it upside down until it had gone to sleep, then laid its neck upon the chopping block, picked up the axe. That was when it started to wake.
People talk about free will. If it exists at all, it’s in such moments, when you choose your path. Rebecca had suffered nightmares for weeks afterwards; the moment of impact; the chicken running, its head held on by a flap of skin, blood spurting in gouts. Yet she’d been glad she’d gone through with it. The courage to inflict pain was invaluable in this world. Emilia had lacked that toughness. She’d turned vegetarian rather than kill, except for fish, of course. Fish were easy. You just threw them on to the beach where they thrashed around helplessly until – Eleven years. How could you have stayed away eleven years?
– I’m here now.
– It’s too late. You know it’s too late.
– Don’t say that, Emilia!
Rebecca put a hand to her mouth to stop herself crying out. Her ache wouldn’t wait any longer; she needed to go home. She dressed and wrote a note for Therese, set off. Eden was just twenty minutes away along the track, but it was spooky and treacherous by night, so she went along the beach instead. The dunes glowed like snow. The sand here was sacred. The locals used it for divination and scattered it around their houses for protection against witchcraft. She kicked off her sandals, let her feet sink into the dry cold talc. Pale shore crabs sensed her approach and rose to flee, their moon-shadows instantly giving them away. Then they hunkered down and disappeared again, their colouring a perfect match for the sand. How could you keep out memories in a place like this? How could you remain detached? Her father had once sailed her and Emilia south to a beach with darker sand and correspondingly darker crabs. He’d released a bowl of these albinos, so luminous suddenly, so visible to predators, their deaths now assured. Rebecca had known intellectually about the survival of the fittest before then, but for the first time she’d understood it in her gut, had appreciated the full savagery and elegance of natural selection.
She drew closer to Eden. Now even the trees were familiar, the frown-lines of seaweed on the beach. Memories thronged, crushing as crowds. Adam hoisting her on to his shoulders, bellowing and charging into the surf. The tingle of sand on her palm as she’d patted the walls of castles, then the tide sapping the walls. Waging jellyfish wars with the local Malagasy boys. Scouring shallows and rock-pools for molluscs and shellfish. The way Adam had turned grey and old after Yvette’s death, as though an organ had failed. And, yes, that brutal first time she’d caught him staring at her with his face all twisted and sour, and she’d realised with heart-stopping clarity that her beloved father, the giant of her childhood, the Great Man Himself, hated her.
II
Davit found Claudia washing shirts in a large tub, squeezing them out before hanging them on a line stretched between two cabins, while a wizened Malagasy woman on the porch watched her closely, as if hoping to find fault.
‘Work, work, work,’ said Davit.
‘Work, work, work,’ agreed Claudia, wiping suds from her nose with the heel of her hand.
He nodded at the old woman, not wanting to cause trouble. ‘May I borrow Claudia, please?’ he asked. ‘Only I’ve a problem in my cabin.’ Claudia translated for him; the woman nodded sourly. They walked off together down a darkened path towards the beach.
‘What problem?’ she asked.
‘No problem,’ he assured her. ‘I just wanted to get you alone.’ She smiled with such guileless pleasure that he couldn’t help but smile too. ‘But I do have a question. A favour.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes?’
He told her about the pirogue with the Western Union sail, how he and Boris wanted to know where it had gone. She assured him she’d ask around later, for she still had a shift to do in one of the local bars. He looked at her in astonishment. ‘You’ve still got another shift to do?’
‘Yes.’
‘Work, work, work,’ he said sadly, because he was beginning to realise it was true.
‘Work, work, work,’ she agreed. Their gazes met for a moment; he touched her hand. She gestured back along the path to the high mound of clothes that still awaited her, then she nodded goodnight and went to wash them.
III
Eden. What else would you call the garden paradise of Adam and Yvette? Rebecca had always found her father’s sense of humour suspect. The reserve comprised some fifty hectares of spiny forest, including eight kilometres of coastline, but its heart was this natural clearing in the forest, accessible by a short drive from the coastal track. It was dark and empty and smaller than she remembered, but otherwise unchanged.
To her right was the lodge, a large and sturdy one-storey building of whitewashed stone that housed her father’s office, the clinic, the dining area and a few other rooms. Her father’s old Jeep was parked in front of the veranda, along with the track-bike he’d used to reach places even the Jeep couldn’t go. Ahead of her, chairs and tables surrounded the outside cooking area, while a clothesline doubled as a badminton net. And, to her left, the generator annexe and cabins raised on stilts to keep them dry during the occasional fierce rains. Adam had built pretty much all of it himself, with modest help from the local villagers (the world’s least reliable workforce: they’d drop tools in a heartbeat whenever the fish started running). Her father had loved such work, fitting stones together like jigsaw pieces, learning the different properties of the local woods, the hard cassave for houses and masts, the
