putting on his costume had suddenly stopped caring.
‘… don’t wait for me… go on up… I’ll have a word with the others,’ said Eric. The other Pinker Lloyd men were straggling across the field towards them, with Lothar in the lead. He was wearing advanced-looking outdoor clothes, as if he were going orienteering or the like. His outer garments were brightly coloured Gore-Tex and carried the suggestion that if he felt like it he might jog back to London when they’d finished for the afternoon. They all seemed pretty jolly. Shooting was very much in fashion in the City and this weekend brought bragging rights.
The beaters, who had gone out in advance, were waiting in the next field. The idea was to stand around near the copse and kill the pheasants which the beaters would drive up into the air. The pheasants were tame for the most part, and it was some work getting them to take off in order for them to be shot; so many of them would then be killed that there was no market for their meat. The majority of the pheasants were simply buried. A tractor would come and plough them under the earth. Roger felt it was hard to feel that that was anything other than a slightly revolting sign of excess, of waste. But the shooting itself was good fun.
The four Pinker Lloyd men had now caught up with Eric and the group was standing around talking animatedly about something. Eric was waving his arms about, telling a story. The bankers were either enjoying it or doing a good job of pretending to. Roger used the moment to stand and look around, the first time all day he had been entirely on his own. It wasn’t windy where he stood but the winds higher up must be strong, as the clouds were both big and quick-moving, and now they were white: no more rain. In the distance he could see a pattern of light and shade moving across the field, which had been set aside from agricultural use and was knee-deep in grass. The copse, which looked from a distance like a single big tree, was a tight clump of ten oaks and beeches, denuded by the winter. The atmosphere beneath the trees was dark and still. A rabbit stood sniffing at the exposed roots of one of the oaks and then lolloped off into the grassy field where Roger could see the beaters standing about half a mile away, waiting for the signal to begin driving the pheasants.
The Range Rovers had returned at the far side of the ploughed field, and were now being unpacked by a team of Eric’s people. What looked like two enormous hampers were being lifted out of the backs of the cars, and the last one was disgorging what looked like portable furniture. If the hampers contained food and drink, they would have enough to keep them eating and boozing well into the new year.
Eric was still talking. Roger found it hard to imagine what the story must involve – two hookers, three Ferraris, ten thousand in cash… no, ten hookers, twenty Ferraris, a hundred grand… He did not feel sorry to be missing out. Roger, in this break away from work, felt relaxed enough to have a thought about ethics: the thought occurred to him that it was hypocritical to like his host’s hospitality while also letting himself enjoy his dislike of the man. Well, tough. That was how he felt.
The rabbit, or a different rabbit, came back out of the grass and returned to the copse, where it continued sniffing around the roots of the same oak tree. Roger kept still; he could see its little nose twitching. There must be an interesting smell. The rabbit was moving its head one way and another, as if trying to get into just the right angle to sniff the leaf or nut or seed or pheasant turd or whatever it was. Then it walked over the root and began sniffing from the other side. Roger felt a surge of feeling that he for a moment could not recognise. The sensation was like a shiver. He realised that he was free. He was on his own and in the open air and he was still young enough, strong enough, to do anything he wanted with his life. He could just walk off now, get a lift to Eric’s house, pick up Arabella and the kids, drive back to London and announce that from now on they would all be living a different life, a simpler and economically smaller life, that they would go round the world for a year and then he would retrain as a teacher and they would move out of London, somewhere like this where you could walk and breathe and see the sky, and the kids would go to the local school and Arabella would look after them and they would pick out good-value cuts at the local butcher and he would drink tea from a mug while helping the kids with their homework. And every day he would go for a long walk, even when it was wet and windy, and he would come in smelling of the outside, the way the children sometimes smelled of the outdoors when they’d been playing on the Common, and then one day he would look at himself in the mirror and see a different man. These thoughts belonged to Roger but he also felt that they came from the air around him, from the fact that he was standing next to a copse in a field in Norfolk on his own, watching the grass sway and the clouds race, being ignored by a rabbit.
The rabbit heard the others coming before he did. It raised its head, twitched its nose, and then with three hops was gone in the long grass. Then Roger heard the voices coming up the hill.
‘… had her… every which way… so I said… which way… is every which way?’
16
Freddy Kamo grew up in a two-room shack on the outskirts of the Senegalese town of Linguere. The shack had electricity, sometimes, but not running water. For water, the Kamos would have to take a jug to the well, a hundred metres away. The floor of the shack was made of packed earth and each room had a single bare electric bulb; the beds, thanks to a gift from a relative, had mosquito nets, the family’s sole luxury.
Freddy was the only son of Shime and Patrick Kamo. Both Shime and Patrick were Wolof, members of the largest tribal group in Senegal; they were believing but undevout Muslims; Patrick had done well at the lycee and could both speak and read French. He married at the age of fourteen and at the same age left school to begin work, first for his father-in-law delivering gas canisters, and then, when he was eighteen, in the police force. Patrick took a second wife, Adede, when Freddy was four, and had three more children with her, and then Shime died in childbirth, along with a baby who would have grown up to be their second son. Freddy held no resentment towards his stepmother, who was kind to him, impeccably so, but she was very wrapped up in her own daughters, and in the years after Shime’s death he grew very close to his father.
Patrick Kamo was two people: a stern and unforgiving man at his work, and a soft, gentle, anxious parent. He was sometimes taken aback by how much he loved Freddy, but did his best to hide it from everyone except the boy himself. He worried about his son, a lot, especially as Freddy seemed to be such a dreamer, such a drifter, lacking the hardness the world demands. He was slow in his lessons and disliked school. All he ever wanted to do was play football. He was admittedly very good at football – or at least that’s what he was, right from the start, at about the age of five. As he got older, things changed. Football became the only thing Freddy ever spoke or thought about, and it became clear that he wasn’t merely good at football, but something else altogether. Patrick realised that Freddy was touched with something a long way beyond mere talent.
Today, Freddy was seventeen, and even people with no interest in football, even people who had never been to a proper football match, even people who actively disliked the game, could see something special about Freddy Kamo with a ball at his feet. This wasn’t because Freddy looked at his ease with the ball; on the contrary. Even at the best of times Freddy looked awkward, clumsy, and as if he were about to trip over, with the gangly, jangling awkwardness of a teenage boy who has recently had a big growth spurt and hasn’t yet got used to the new disposition of his own limbs. He knocked things over and spilled things. He splashed Coke on himself and bumped into doorways.
With a football at Freddy’s feet, it was much, much worse. On a football field, he just looked wrong. Shorts made his skinny legs look not only long and awkward, but also as if they were a telescopic implement with one segment too many, like an overextended radio aerial. His upper body, in a football jersey, was slope-shouldered and narrow-chested. His head was large, which made everything else look even more out of proportion than it already was. When he ran with the ball he looked as if he would at any moment step on it and fall over, or stumble as he tried to catch up with it, or trip over his own feet, or let it get away from him, or bounce it off his shin or knee or ankle. His arms flailed sideways as he ran so that he looked like a windmilling, falling, catastrophically ill- coordinated kid, or an octopus, or a vaudeville routine. But then, as he ran with the ball, and if the spectators kept looking, after about five seconds they might notice something, which was that the ball did not get away from him. The ball looked as if it was always about to be out of his reach – but it never did get out of his reach. He did not trip or stumble or miskick, even though he always seemed on the verge of doing so. By now, in a football match, at least one defender would have lunged at the ball, usually at the point when it was furthest out of Freddy’s reach, but he would somehow, magically, have got to the ball just before them, as if his telescopic legs had extended themselves, and he would have slalomed past the now immobile defender, awkwardly, but easily too. Then another opponent would appear in front of him and he would do the same thing, always about to trip and fall and flail and
