‘Oh my God! You found it.’
Shepard shrugged.
‘I called in a few markers. Turned up while they were clearing out Ol Tukai prior to the move. They found it in a sealed case in the bottom of a filing cabinet that had been put into storage when Barbara Bazyn moved the security division to Kajiado. God knows how long it’s been sitting there. It’s a mess, but when you consider what it’s been through, it’s hardly surprising.’
Gaby studied the battered diary.
‘So, you came back,’ she whispered. ‘You kept your promise to T.P.’
‘What’s T.P. got to with it?’
‘He loved her. He helped her go into the Chaga to find Langrishe. He gave her the diary, made her promise to get it back to him whatever happened. Shepard, you knew them, what were they like?’
‘Insane.’
‘T.P. said that too.’
‘Obsessed. Intense. Too close to each other to be lovers.’
‘T.P. said no one loved the right way round.’
‘T.P. was right. But the diary proves nothing.’
‘Maybe not. But it gives me a weapon. Everywhere I go in this country I walk in her shadow, and I want to know why, and how, and who. And when I’ve done that, I want to exorcise her ghost so it won’t overshadow me any more.’ Gaby slipped the diary from its bag, weighed it in her hand. ‘Thank you Shepard. I owe you. And I’ll repay you, some day. What you deserve, I promise.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ Shepard said, shooing her up the loading ramp of the Antonov. ‘Now get out of here!’ He ran to the safety of the Mahindra.
She was fastening her seat belt as the plane turned into its take-off run. He was waving at the wrong window, as those who wave to aeroplanes always do. The engine noise rose to a scream. The little jet dipped its nose, shuddered down the dirt strip and threw itself into the air. The tops of the acacias and the control centre and the iridescent vees of the microlytes and the tanker truck and the dusty white Mahindra were falling away and now Tsavo West was just a few lost Lego bricks on the huge burning plain and the Chaga a dark disc curving imperceptibly out of sight.
He is like that, she thought. Most of the men she had passed through her life had been pieces of artifice. Shepard was landscape. He went out into the things around him. He curved imperceptibly out of sight. He was not a product of himself, a man become his own image. He blended into his background, became part of it, drew strength from red earth and heat and empty spaces.
The Antonov levelled off. Gaby looked out of the window. She loved to look out of airplane windows. Flying never ceased to astound her. Today a miracle happened. A sign. The clouds around the mountain moved, and grew thin, and broke, and dissolved away and there, shining in the afternoon sun, great, high and unbelievably white in the sun, and everything that Hemingway had said, but so much more, were the snows of Kilimanjaro.
Then the Antonov banked and she could see them no more. Gaby pulled the zip-lock bag containing the diary out from under her seat. From the second plastic bag she took her packet of Camels, lit one and settled back to read.
The Liberty print was stained and blotched, the binding boards black with mould. The glue had dissolved, the book was held together by its stitching. It looked like the log of a voyage to hell.
To every book its inscription. I have written my name in black ink inside the cloth cover but the syllables are harsh and clashing in this land of whispered sibilants and strong consonants. How much better the name Langrishe gave me: Moon; generous, looping consonants, vowels like two eyes, two souls looking out of the paper. One half of T.P.’s final gift to me: the journal, cloth-bound and intimate in Liberty print. I treasure it, hug it to me, companion and confessor. T.P.’s other gift to me I treated less kindly: black dragonfly wings shredded by the impact, struts snapped like the bones of birds. Already the Chaga is at work on it, converting the organic plastics into dripping stalactites of black slime. It is over an hour since I lost the beat of the helicopter in the undersong of the Chaga: my crash-landing must have looked sufficiently convincing for it to abandon the hunt. Forgive me T.P., but you would understand: skimming across the tree tops toward terminum with an Italian Mangusta behind me, expecting to be smashed at any second into nothingness by a thermal imaging Stinger missile, one’s options are somewhat limited. Sorry about the microlyte, T.P. But I will be good to the diary, I promise.
Gaby resented this woman she did not know for her intimacy with T.P. Costello. There was another set of footprints, another smear of woman-musk on her Kenya. If she found Shepard’s name in these dirty pages crammed tight, tight with frenzied black ink, she would feed the fucking thing to a shredder.
I told Shepard I wanted to lay your ghost, Gaby thought, but now I am the unseen shadow, arriving off the night-flight, following you through the streets of Nairobi, meeting with you T.P. Costello, Mrs Kivebulaya, Dr Peter Langrishe at the Irish Ambassador’s party. I come with you to Ol Tukai, I fly with you over the Chaga; I watch you come together and fuck in an Arab bed in a banda on the coast, I feel your jealousies and obsessions that take him in search of these mythical Chaga-builders that he loves more than you; and you, in pursuit of him. I am there when you pitch your tent in the ruins of the old Ol Tukai game lodge, I hear with you the voices coming out of the deep Chaga that you imagine to be Langrishe’s, calling you.
I am beginning to wonder if my supplies will be sufficient. I had originally provisioned for twenty days. It may take that long just to reach the lower slopes of the mountain. The riotous Chaga-life confounds my senses of time and distance: I cannot judge how far, how fast I have come. I was so certain then; now my stupidity at thinking I can find one man – who, if I am honest with myself, which I rarely am, may not even be alive – in five thousand square kilometres of, literally, another world, astounds me. The sense of isolation is colossal.
I saw a vervet monkey today, nervous eyes in the shimmering canopy. A webbed sail of ribs, like some remnant of the time of the dinosaurs, grew from its back. I did not take it for a good omen.
Two thirds down the second cigarette, Gaby decided she did not like this woman. Everything was too much with her: her descriptions, her feelings, her opinions, her experiences, her loving. She was like one of those dreadful Irish woman writers you see on late night talk shows who are terrifyingly articulate and think they have invented sex and no one else can possibly have any feeling or passion of true emotion in their lives. She is dark Gaby thought. Dark side of the moon.
The Wa-chagga may be the last proud people in the New Africa with my dearly beloved leather jacket I must look like a fetish figure from a sword’n’sorcery fantasy.
Gaby frowned and read again the lines at the bottom of the page and the top of the next. A third time, and they still did not make sense.
… the last proud people in the New Africa with my dearly beloved leather jacket I must look like a fetish figure…
She held the diary up to the reading lamp. There. So close to the spine you would only notice if you were looking. Two pages had been removed. The cut was very clean and straight. A surgical elision. Wide awake, Gaby fanned the pages against the light. Faults in the lie of the leaves indicated where other sections had been cut away. Towards the end there seemed fewer pages left than removed.
The Sibirsk pilot bing-bonged. Weelson, Nairobi in five. Cyrillic No Smoking/Fasten Seat-belts lit up. The Antonov banked sharply. The who-slashed-it of the missing paper would wait. Right now, Gaby McAslan had to worry about what T.P. Costello was going to say to her.
25
T.P. did not say anything when he met her at Wilson airfield. He did not say anything when they got into the SkyNet Landcruiser, or as he drove into Nairobi. He did not say anything as they turned into Tom M’boya Street, or when he pulled in outside the SkyNet offices. It was when he switched off the car and gave the keys to Gaby that he spoke.
