calculator slowly fading behind her.
Anna was waiting by the gate of the nursery playground. 'They won't let me help.'
Were they going to make life difficult for Anna too? Liz's fist clenched on the gate as she dragged it open. 'Who won't, darling?'
'The big girls. They say they're looking after the link ones.'
'Well, let's see if we can't sort it out.' Dismayed by her own paranoia, she made to take Anna's arm as they headed for the nursery, then her fingers shrank back from the bruise.
There was nothing for Anna to do. The few children who were younger than her were being looked after by their older sisters, Vanessa and Thelma and Germaine and Kate. Kate, an eleven-year-old with large unrestrained breasts, was driving away anyone who tried to play with her baby brother Simon, and the other girls wouldn't let anyone touch their little sisters when they fell down or cried for mummy or wet themselves. 'They've been like that with us too,' Maggie confided to Liz. 'You'd think they'd prefer to go in the pool or look for boys or something.'
Perhaps they did want to, and that was why they kept picking on Anna, pushing in front of her at the slide, ignoring her when she tried to talk to them. Eventually Maggie let her help sort paints and building toys, but Liz knew how useless and frustrated she must feel; that was how she felt herself.
When the children were called in for lunch, Anna went out to the slide and Liz took refuge in the bar. Jimmy was polishing glasses. 'Isn't this your day off?' Liz said.
'Trish rang to say she'd be late.' He was already pulling a lager for Liz. 'I don't mind filling in,' he said. 'Better than being on my own.'
'Your girlfriend?'
'They fined her. Could have been worse. But the college principal had her in – said he'll have to let the schools know about it wherever she applies to teach. I don't know why he didn't just kick her out of college. It'd be a quicker way of ending her career.'
'Perhaps by the time she starts teaching it won't matter so much.'
'Sure, they'll all be smoking in the staffroom.' 'I meant she might find somewhere with a liberal head teacher.'
'They'd have to be pretty damn liberal. And there's the governors too.' He glanced toward the windows. 'Here we are, Anna,' he called. 'Come and cheer me up.'
Liz didn't want the child to stray, but all the same, couldn't she have even a moment to herself? Anna was stepping in through the open windows. 'Why don't you make the most of the playground while the other children aren't there?' Liz said. 'I don't want to. Someone's watching me.' 'Who?' Liz shoved her chair back. 'Where?' 'I know he's there, but you won't be able to see him.' 'Oh, Anna, if you start that again…' Well, what would she do? There were marks to show what she'd already done. 'Can't you just play by yourself for a while and let me have a rest?'
'Hang on a moment,' Jimmy said, as Anna trudged morosely toward the windows. 'Here's Trish now. I'll give you a game of something if you like, Anna. Is it all right if I take her along to the Space Invaders?'
It sounded fine to Liz. Now that she thought about it, he was just about the only person here whom she felt like trusting with Anna. Plump denimed Trish took his place behind the bar, and gave Liz another lager as. he and Anna headed for the seaward end of the village. Thank God there was someone to take Anna off her hands for a while! She only hoped they didn't meet anyone she knew. She wished she had dressed the child in long sleeves. Someone was bound to wonder about the marks on the child's arms.
Thirty-one
As soon as the train stopped, the jungle began to close in. It towered over the railway line and the makeshift station, a platform without a signboard. Perhaps it had never had one, or perhaps the board was being put to use in a village somewhere. In the distance the jungle was being cleared for a road, and Alan could see the yellow machines lumbering about, caterpillar treads churning the earth; he could even hear the faint scream of giant saws over the noise of the crowd on the train. But the jungle felt even closer than the crowd: a dark, relentlessly green profusion that glistened in the steamy sunlight and overhung the railway, its unrelieved luxuriance matting the landscape all the way to the horizon, where it swallowed or was swallowed by the low thick clouds. The jungle surrounded him, it blotted out everything familiar; he felt as if it had overgrown his mind. He was trapped by the jungle and the dawdling train, in a crowd of people who spoke languages he didn't understand. It was no good telling himself that Isaac understood them. Isaac had no more idea than he had if anyone had followed them from Port Harcourt.
He would rather have been in the jeep, jouncing over the potholed roads. At least then they would have been alone, except for the occasional battered flashy car that roared like a mad beast through the jungle.
He and Isaac had driven from village to village, following every stage of Marlowe's route that Isaac knew or could deduce. In one village they'd had to spend all day participating in a funeral ceremony where the corpse lay in state on a shaky four-poster bed; in another they'd waited overnight to consult the chief, whose only emblem of chieftainship had seemed to be a battered portable radio.
They had learned nothing anywhere. Marlowe had had to visit all these places, Isaac kept saying; eventually they would find what he had found. But Marlowe hadn't found a man with his face sewn up. Alan tried not to think about what else might be waiting.
Now it seemed that Marlowe had taken the train to places where there were no roads, and so they'd caught this ageing train, whose carriages announced they'd been Made In Sheffield. Even though they had reservations, they had to bribe their way aboard the train, and bribe their way into this carriage packed with people and livestock. The carriage smelled of cheese and goats and chickens and sweat, a mass of smells that gathered in Alan's throat and thickened in his stomach. He was facing a fat man who held a goat between his knees, his own legs were shoved against Isaac's by a basket of live chickens, which the enormous woman next to him was using as a shelf for her breasts. The enormous woman kept grinning at him like a shark; the fat man had eyelids so heavy that Alan could never be sure if he was watching or asleep. The woman couldn't be a Leopard Man, but what about the man? Alan found, not for the first time even in this heat, that he was shivering. He tried to think of Liz and Anna, to cling to some memory that promised him a future, but all he could see in his mind was the face with the sewn-up mouth and eyes, inching towards him along the flashlight beam.
The train was making restless noises. A line of men was urinating over the edge of the rickety platform, since there were never any toilets. Now the men shook themselves off and ambled back towards their seats. Salesmen were still tramping the aisles of the carriages, shouting over the excited chatter of the crowd, the squawking of chickens and bleating of goats. Singers stood in the aisles, beggars grumbled past them; a leper thrust a fingerless hand at Alan for alms. He was almost used to sights like that by now and they hardly bothered him. It was the men who looked normal who made him uneasy.
The train was groaning forward now. As it jerked suddenly, two men on the seat facing him leaned forward, coming at him and Isaac in a single movement. Alan managed not to flinch back, except inside himself, but Isaac must have sensed his fear. 'Be calm, be calm,' he murmured. 'Nobody here is any'hing to worry about.'
'How can you tell just by looking at them?' Alan muttered. 'They must have gone unnoticed in Port Har-court, whoever they were.'
'Exactly. None of the people here could have.'
Alan had to accept that; Isaac should know. 'And it is my sincere belief that nobody has followed us,' Isaac said.
'Not even the police?'
'Especially not.'
There was just a hint of sharpness in Isaac's voice. The man with the sewn-up face had died before their eyes in minutes; they'd had no time to help or to get help. Alan had backed away until he'd felt the rubbery darkness looming behind him. He'd felt like rubber himself, perished rubber. 'We mustn't go on,' he'd babbled, closing his eyes as though that could blot out the sight of the sewn-up face, the sewn lips that had sunken inwards because the jaw couldn't drop, even in death. 'I'll stay here in Africa. Anna will be safe then.'
Isaac had led him out of the dark, out of the warehouse and back to Isaac's home. It wasn't until they were
