Rift (6 page)

In the gloom of the tent at first light, alone, Ella found notebook and torch in her pack and wrote,

Well, Charly, I’m here, where you are, and it’s just like you said, but also SO different! When we were in the helicopter coming here, Inspector Murothi asked the pilot to fly along the rock, and we followed it winding across the plain like the great big snake you described. I saw how steep and high it is, so I understand why everyone thinks Joe couldn’t climb over it. Where they found him it’s really just the rocks and dry plain spreading for miles – we flew over that too. There’s just one waterhole far out in the middle with herders and cattle milling around a bit of water in a kind of bowl of cracked mud. The pilot said it’ll fill up if the rains come next month, and it’s the only place that never completely dries because it’s fed by some underground source in the volcanic rock below, like the stream along Chomlaya. Then when we got to the camp and I saw all the trees round the camp, I knew why you said you’re puzzled why no one lives there – all that water in such a dry place! It is strange, isn’t it? The pilot also took us in a big loop over the Burukanda archaeology place – down quite low over the
tents and the diggings, and everyone waved at us, and I thought of you going there to email me. I’M SO GLAD I’VE GOT YOUR LETTERS AND EMAILS, CHARLY. I showed them to the inspector. He read them all and asked if he could keep them. But then he looked at me hard, like he knew I need to have them with me, and said he didn’t have to take them after all ‘but perhaps I can borrow them again later, for a short while, Miss Tanner.’ It’s odd when he calls me Miss Tanner so I said he didn’t need to and now he just says Ella, which is better. When he was reading your letters and emails he showed me where you talk about the ‘interesting boy from Burukanda who’s friends with some students’, and wanted to know if I thought that’s Silowa. It is, isn’t it? You’re friends with Silowa and Matt and Anna, and that’s why you’re in the photo with them. And maybe you’re with them now, but the trouble is we don’t know, we can’t work anything out, not even if Joe was with you at the beginning. He still doesn’t remember anything. And the photo is important, isn’t it? I don’t know why but I just feel that when I look at it. I told the inspector, and asked him what he thought of that bit in your email about elephants.

She read Charly’s email again.

Hi Elly. Here’s More Notes from Chomlaya! Third day, and we’ve started getting visitors! Miss S ‘disapproves’ and instructs us not to
‘encourage it’. Haven’t figured out yet what she’s so knotted up about. The visitors are all children, SO curious about what we’re doing here. They wander the plains with goats and cattle, v young, v inquisitive, v lively, v keen to show off their English (lucky for me)! There’s 4 local languages spoken just round here, 300 in the whole country! The national language is Kisewa, but because English is taught in schools, these children are pretty much fluent – and worth a library of information, I could fill notebooks and notebooks with their chatter! Most of them are from nomadic herder families. There’s 3 schools for the whole vast area, and they attend when they’re near, when their parents have scraped fees together, when they can be spared from looking after livestock. So by the time they’re 14 some have 1 or 2 years at school, others manage a year or 2 more. But they natter on IN ENGLISH about schools, exams, hopes, plans, AMBITIONS. Here’s a list: airline pilot, vet, ‘environmental’ scientist, ‘big shot farmer’, teacher, to have an enormous herd and get very rich, doctor, rally driver (they’ve seen the cars going through). They don’t have 2p between them, but they don’t know the meaning of narrow horizons or limited ambition! It’s awful to know the chances of even one of them realising
their hopes are so slim as to be almost invisible. They all want pen pals (that’s something I CAN DO with some of the students in the camp, and WILL DO when I return, let’s do it together, Elly – maybe get your school involved?)

Then one small girl told me her school is closed because of elephants, and I thought she was winding me up! Tomis heard, though, and explained that the elephants have shifted their usual migration route, creating havoc in plantations round several villages. Fences, noise, nothing’s turning them away, so they’ve called in an elephant-diversion-specialist to help sort it out.

I showed him that bit, Charly, Ella carried on writing, because I keep wondering if you’ve been hurt by animals. We see the vultures in the sky all over, and the animal bones lying in the grass. And Pirian, the nurse in the hospital, said a boy was crushed by an elephant. I can’t stop thinking things like that. But the inspector said it isn’t likely because we’d find you. Then he got this expression on his face, and looked quickly at Joe too, and sort of hesitated. I think he wished he hadn’t started saying that, he meant we’d find your bodies, or maybe your skeletons, so then I wished I hadn’t asked, and he said there’s no point in wondering about everything that could happen, everyone’s got to keep
searching with the helicopters, and we’ve just got to work out where you’ve gone. That’s why Joe’s coming back to Chomlaya, to try and help him remember. It makes him feel really scared that he can’t, he looks as if he’s hearing things in his head all the time. When we were walking in to the camp I saw he wanted to avoid that teacher – the one you write about. Now I’ve met her, I see what you mean.

She remembered: rows of tents like the grid of some gigantic board game; people arrayed like pieces on the board. A handful out in front; knots of others, wary. One or two who offered smiles; not many, most were blank, giving nothing. She remembered the way Miss Strutton marched to overtake the sergeant and reach the inspector first. How she launched into instructions about tents – Joe go to the one he shared with Matt, and Ella to Charly’s. Ella hadn’t expected this teacher to be small and pretty, or to smile a lot at the inspector, encouragingly, like this was just a friendly visit! She’d kept saying things like, ‘I think you’ll agree that using
those
tents is by far the most convenient arrangement for everyone. It’s really
quite
unnecessary to go to the trouble of putting up
new
tents at this point in time –’

Charly’s tent! Spend a night in it – all empty! Just the thought filled Ella with such desolation that she’d struggled to hold back the tears.

I could see the inspector didn’t like Miss Strutton’s idea. Or her smiles! It all made him angry. He just pretended he didn’t hear her. But he stayed very polite and didn’t once shout like I half expected him to, when she kept on and on.

So now, we’ve got a new tent each, Charly. Joe in his and me in mine, both of us right next to the inspector’s (but I don’t think any of us slept much tonight). I looked outside just now, and saw a torch moving about in Joe’s, and there’s been a lamp on in the inspector’s all night. He’s probably reading the interviews again and again – he says funny things like ‘we must find the angle of light that will illuminate what we have not seen before’ but I know what he means. He says he’s going to talk to everyone here again, while the army’s searches go on. Often I can hear Sergeant Kaonga’s voice in the inspector’s tent, too, but I don’t think anything’s happening, there hasn’t been any helicopter noise for a bit, though I heard them a while ago. There’s two other policemen here as well, keeping contact by radio with the helicopters.

CHARLY, WHERE ARE YOU? HAVEN’T YOU LEFT ME ANY CLUE WHERE YOU’VE GONE? ISN’T THERE ANYTHING TO HELP US?

For a very long while, she sat looking at the last sentences, trying to push back the surge of hopelessness.
Make a plan.
Make a list of things to do as soon as it’s properly light, she told
herself. So I don’t just wander about and wait, like in the hospital.

In Charly’s second letter was her sketch of the rock and the camp and a place over to one side marked with a little stick figure sitting down, and labelled, CHARLY’S PLACE. Below that:

There’s this place I go to write up my notes – I really wish you were here to see it, Elly. It’s out of the camp, a beach by the stream – fig and tamarind trees lean over it so it’s always cool. There’s always rustling and scuffling – at first it made me nervous, but then I realised it’s just small animals – two tiny antelopes – dik diks – living nearby (Bambis!), frogs and lizards camouflaged so completely you almost never spot them (though I saw a massive green monitor lizard, a metre long or more, I thought it was a crocodile!) – and of course the birds. Even the names are magic – laughing dove, emerald cuckoo, hornbills, sunbirds, hoopoes, golden weavers, purple grenadiers, turacos. High on the rocks are hawk eagles, falcons, red kites, clouds and clouds of swifts and swallows and an eagle owl with a very spooky call, troops of baboons (babies riding their backs) and hundreds of monkeys.

The bigger animals come to drink at the western end of the rock 3 miles away, but we still have to keep a lookout. At
night we keep dim lights round the edge of the camp to discourage four-footed visitors. We’re circled by glittering eyes – antelope and zebra sneaking in for a closer look. The first night it was really unnerving! It’s the weirdest feeling, the way you turn a corner and there’s something wild. Dusk yesterday, a pregnant lioness walked across the grass in plain sight of the tents! She stopped, looked at us, we looked at her, then she just went on! Yesterday, our vehicle alarmed a rhino. He galloped at us, changed his mind, head-butted a tree and trotted away with tail up like a flag! There’s also our resident leopard – afternoons we’ve seen him slumped in a tree, flat on his stomach, legs dangling like a sleepy tabby. But then he crossed in front of us one night (the Land Rover was crawling along after dark – we’d got bogged down in sand on the way back from Burukanda, and had to be shunted out by passing herdsmen. They thought the whole thing was very funny!). The leopard was carrying a kill, and he just dropped it and melted away into the dark. We heard him hunting again last night – Likon picked out the rasping cough and made us stop and listen.

Altogether there’s something about this place that makes you feel so SMALL. Night’s sudden – one minute fiery horizons, next minute deep deep blackness going on forever, you
FEEL the size of the sky! Like it’s the beginning of time. We had a storm last night, air suffocating, then lightning like glass breaking, the clouds on fire. Water poured off Chomlaya and boulders smashed down. The camp was a mudbath in minutes. It was just a freak downpour – the rains are weeks away, but it felt as if it could wash us right off the earth!

Abruptly Ella stopped reading. The last words hammered in her head. She could not stand being alone any more. She listened for sounds in the camp. After a minute she located low voices, a swish of footsteps through the grass nearby. She unzipped the tent. Two girls were pouring water from a bucket carried between them, first into a plastic bowl outside the inspector’s tent, then Joe’s. There was one already left for her.

She took it into her tent, washed, found clean clothes, and suddenly the simple, ordinary tasks gave her a burst of optimism, as if Pirian’s words about hope and courage and Chomlaya being the place of life flew into the air around her and lifted her to a brighter place.

I will find you, Charly.

She took the bowl beyond the edge of the camp as she saw others doing, and poured the used water under a thirsty-looking bush. Then she stood looking back at the camp, at how it spread through the trees in the sweeping curve of Chomlaya’s
precipitous cliffs. On both sides they folded round the cluster of tents, in deep shadow at this hour, for the sun was not yet above the eastern shoulder of the rock. Everything under the trees rippled with green light, leaves and hanging vines rustling in the updraughts of air that constantly stroked the face of the crags. Everywhere, birds alighted daringly on guy ropes or swirled upwards in a glory of crimsons and yellows, purples and greens. Never had Ella heard such a chirruping and warbling, or moved among so many free, wild creatures, so untouchable yet so close; she held tight, in her mind, to Charly’s list of magical bird names, to Charly’s pleasure at this place, and again she heard her sister’s voice,
I wish you were here, Elly, so I could show you
. . .

I am here, Charly. You will.

Then the inspector’s voice sounded, calling her and Joe. They all three went together to join Sergeant Kaonga beneath the large white awning furnished with long trestle tables, into the clamour of plates thudding on wood and the hubbub of voices that echoed the moan of search helicopters buzzing on the far side of the rock.

Miss Strutton strode towards them. ‘Joe, join that table over there. Inspector, there is a place for you here.’

Ella felt the inspector straighten sharply. ‘Thank you, but Joe will stay with me.’

‘Inspector, it is inappropriate for Joe not to eat with the other students. He should rejoin the routine of the camp –’

‘The boy is here only to assist the police. Otherwise he would be in the hospital. He is not fully well yet, I am sorry to say this, Miss Strutton. It is better that he faces no expectations
except
the return of his memory. I hope
you
will see that it is
appropriate
for this boy to stay in my care. Your routines must go on without him.’