The Art of Unpacking Your Life (9 page)

Julian sat up. ‘Okay, get Mum now. One, two, three. Charge!'

The black-backed jackal on the track turned to look back at them. A switched-on fox, more barrister than scavenger. The group was huddled under the dark tan, fleece blankets when Ben made this first spot, exposed as a barely perceptible nod in Gus's direction. It was a rare close-up, Gus translated with unwavering enthusiasm that perversely Sara couldn't help wanting to deflate. The jackal was uncannily similar to a domestic dog. Even its howls were canine, Gus explained. He had told them he was a trained zoologist and Sara was grudgingly impressed. Overqualified for driving zoological voyeurs round the reserve, Gus and his observations became instantly more interesting. It made her look harder. She wanted to recognise what Gus could automatically see. She had been gripped by Channel 4's
Inside Nature's Giants
. She wasn't passionate about animals, it was the steep learning curve that the series represented for her. She prided herself on her inexhaustible knowledge on every subject from
Mad Men
to Dawkins' view of reality.

She couldn't help being quietly triumphant when she made the second spot.

‘Look, Gus.' She leaned forward, tipping her hat back. The cord hung close to her neck. ‘Thirty degrees. A warthog mother and her babies.'

‘Good spot,' Luke said.

The warthog was leading an immaculate line of four little warthogs in a gentle trot parallel with the vehicle. Julian, Lizzie and Luke went for their cameras. Lizzie
shrieked, ‘They are gorgeous, look at them.' She immediately squeezed her head and shoulders down between her legs and started to churn through the contents of her bag. Matt and Dan were both obliged to inch away from her towards the edge of the vehicle.

‘God, they hold their tails up like they do in
The Lion King
.'

Julian laughed, ‘Sara, please tell me you aren't planning to base your entire safari on a comparison with Disney.'

‘Popular culture, Julian dear boy, listen and learn,' she smiled. ‘Now, Gus, sing for your supper. Feed me some interesting warthog facts.'

Despite this preposterously early start, Sara was glad to be here. It was a distraction. Julian's speech last night potently reminded her of how serious her situation was. She was deeply ashamed her close friends were toasting her success. What would they think of her if they knew the truth? Their supposedly brilliant friend had been blinded by her dogged determination to win this case. Nothing new there. Only this time, she had been seduced by her client into making a fundamental and fatal mistake.

In the dining room at the Bailey, where the humour was generally post-coital and non-confrontational, she could hear the dig: women get too close to their clients. Only Sara never acted like a woman. She didn't have that excuse. She had to stop thinking about it. It was over. She would have to live with a guilty itch. No more.

Gus grinned easily. ‘They are holding their tails up so the ones behind can follow them through long grass.'

‘Keeping going, Gus,' she insisted thankfully. He was exactly the type of person who could never second-guess what was plaguing her.

Gus blushed slightly, then faced the group and sat on the steering wheel. ‘Okay. They move around in matriarchal groups called sounders: a mother and her young. Young males move away until they are adults. Then they rejoin sounders, but only ones with oestrus females.'

‘What the hell does oestrus mean?' Sara cut in. ‘Queen's English please.'

‘On heat,' stated Luke.

‘Thank you, lovely Luke,' said Sara hastily. ‘Stupid me.'

‘Got it,' Lizzie sat up clutching her species checklist. ‘Anyone got a pen?'

Dan immediately bent down and delved into his canvas bag and produced a sketching pencil. ‘Here you go, lovely.'

Gus said, ‘They feed on their knees, which are actually their wrists.'

‘Sara, I'm wondering if your insatiable desire for encyclopaedic knowledge of the feeding habits of the warthog is ever going to be satisfied?' asked Julian. ‘Are we going to track the black rhino this morning?'

‘Patience, Julian,' soothed Dan. ‘Enjoy the moment.'

‘When are we stopping for a coffee?' Lizzie mumbled. ‘I've got a stonking headache.'

‘I wouldn't mind a water,' added Luke. ‘I'm feeling a little dehydrated.'

‘Luke, it's down to that punishing regime of yours,' Julian interjected. ‘Walking into rhino is the ultimate safari experience.'

‘I'm looking forward to it,' insisted Luke.

‘They don't do that in the Kruger. It isn't considered safe.' Sara knew that Matt was simply echoing Katherine.

‘We'll be fine,' Luke insisted.

‘They have too many vehicles, which mean the rhino get harassed and become a lot more aggressive than here,' said Gus.

His streaked blond chunk of hair flopped forward. It wouldn't look amiss in Chelsea, Sara thought wryly.

‘Here we have a strict policy of not worrying the animals.'

Sara's pale green eyes gleamed. ‘Gus, don't panic. We're not suggesting you are recklessly endangering our lives.'

‘Look, I would never put a guest's life at risk, eh? We won't do it unless the conditions are absolutely right. Ben has to be happy. And you all comfortable, eh.'

‘Gus. We're not suggesting you're trying to lose one of us – though Matt implied it. It was his wife speaking via him. Like the devil through Damien in
The Omen
.'

‘Sara, stop it,' said Dan.

Gus started to laugh. It dissolved first as a snort and then a sneeze, which made him hastily reach for a white cotton ironed handkerchief that weirdly reminded Sara of her granddad, a miner for forty years in Seaham Colliery, County Durham. Every day, granddad William went to work in ‘The Nack' with a pristine white handkerchief pressed by Sara's nan into a square and tucked carefully in the pocket of his trousers. He had retired before they closed the pit in 1994. Sara's nan insisted that the closure killed him.

Matt laughed easily. ‘Sara, how could I forget how incorrigible you are?'

‘All of which I'll take as a compliment,' she said tapping Gus on his shoulder. ‘Let's go.'

Gus started up the vehicle, cracking along the narrow track over the bumps at a pace. Ben pointed towards a hillside far away to the left. ‘A troop of baboons on the move,' Gus yelled over the noise of the vehicle. They bent in a synchronised movement, down and over each other towards the left. Three dark baboons were loping horizontally across a bushy hillside.

‘A troop of baboons, eh?' Sara teased. ‘We get a literacy lesson thrown in.'

Gus interpreted her literally. ‘I have a great list of collective names of the animals. Shall I photocopy it for you, Sara?'

‘Please do, Gus,' Julian interjected. ‘Sara, learn it by tomorrow and enlighten us all.'

Ben murmured to Gus, creating a V-shape with his arms before flapping his fingers against his palms like he was playing castanets. She barely heard him speak, let alone made out actual words. Gus veered violently off the track straight into the rampant veld grasses, skirting a Camel Thorn tree. As they careered round it, Lizzie and Connie shrank to protect their arms from its three-inch thorns. The contents of Lizzie's bag slid forwards and then backwards two rows along the floor of the vehicle.

Still Connie was silent. Sara was worried about her after Julian's outrageous display this morning. She knew Connie wouldn't want to talk about it. She never did.

Gus shouted without slowing down. ‘The thorns grow on the side the animals feed on to protect the tree, eh?' He picked up the radio. ‘Gus to Gae, over. We have picked up black rhino tracks due east of Gosa.'

She shouted above the vehicle, ‘I hate to make a statement of the bleeding obvious, Gus, but you are driving straight into thick thorny bush.'

It was like standing up in court on the first day of Joanne Sutton's trial, even after the mind-numbing pre-trial review. A wobbliness deep in bottom of her womb: part fear, part excitement, neither quite upstaging the other.

Gus turned and gave her a quick grin. This time Sara got the distinct impression that he couldn't help being delighted that he had the upper hand. ‘Sara, the cat family use the road, so you can track them along it. Not the black rhino, they stick to this thick bush. We call it African acupuncture, eh?'

He careered down and up a deep hole round another Camel Thorn tree, while talking continuously. ‘Ben spotted a black rhino midden near that Camel Thorn. They are in this block.'

‘Block?' Luke asked.

‘Between where we saw an earlier track on the road. The roads are in right angled grids – it's easy to track.'

‘Rewind boys. What the hell is a midden?' Sara was put out she was unable to keep up with safari speak.

‘It's a giant toilet, which black rhino use to mark their territory. Black rhino dung is brownish in colour and has evidence of the twigs they have eaten in it. And they tend to kick over it.'

‘Perhaps more dung detail than strictly necessary,' Julian stated, before standing up in the vehicle, holding on to the roof bar. Not known for his physical prowess, he had to cling on while pretending not to, Sara noticed with amusement.

They veered through dense grass that was higher than the bonnet, circuiting Shepherd's Trees, the name Gus gave to the short sturdy evergreen with white bark and scant green leaves underneath where antelopes and other grazers had eaten. He pointed out a bushy shrub called a Raisin Bush with straight branches, apparently popular with the bushmen for making bows and arrows. They bounced back on to another road, where Gus stopped as abruptly as he had taken off. He consulted Ben.

‘Okay. Ben has picked up a male black rhino chasing a female rhino and a baby around in this block.'

‘Really?' said Julian instinctively curious. ‘How did he do that?'

‘From their tracks,' insisted Gus, who held his own with Julian to Sara's delight. ‘Ben's getting out here to do some more tracking on foot and see where he gets to. We can have some coffee, eh?'

‘Yes, please,' Lizzie groaned. ‘Alan, back me up.'

‘I would love a coffee too,' Luke smiled that bloody gorgeous smile.

Sara reflected Luke didn't feel the need to masticate his words into smart sound bites. He didn't shout, even when she howled at him in the bar last night. She blushed thinking about it now. She missed their drunken nights out together. She wondered whether she might suggest another bender with Luke when they were back in London. She missed what he represented in her life. A male friendship woven together with time and trust rather than a contact built like Meccano. Luke somehow managed to be a highly successful entrepreneur, navigating a high-powered global career, without being tainted by it. Out here, Sara was conscious of the harshness to her tone,
and the aggression and bite in her comments. The result of years of rubbing up against belligerent colleagues and clients.

She moved up beside Luke and linked arms with him. ‘Lovely Luke. I think that I gave you a horribly hard time last night.' She lowered her voice. ‘You know, about Emma and Connie. Forgive me.'

He slowly smiled with his lips closed. ‘I don't know what you are talking about, Sara Wilson.'

He was a really decent man.

‘I've missed you, Luke, a lot,' Sara squeezed his arm. ‘Can I get you a coffee?'

They stood close to the cotton clothed foldaway table, not quite as blue as the sky which opened up the landscape. Their dawn start was a semi-conscious dream for Sara. It was now full-blown morning and she was hungry and thirsty. Sara opened the white plastic screw top jars: coffee bags in one, tea bags in another and three with chocolate muffins, croissant and watermelon chunks. She unceremoniously grabbed two deep metal mugs, chucked a coffee bag into each one, some hot water from the leather-clad flask and took three brownies, before adding a mini-croissant as an afterthought. She passed two brownies and a coffee to Luke, who gave her his Colgate smile in return.

Despite the warmth she was feeling for Luke, Sara felt a certain coming down, as she sensed the others did. They were all tired, though their talk was still focused on the morning's ride and the project in hand: the black rhino.

Sara didn't listen to Matt's question, only Gus's answer. ‘Yes it's the Chinese. They use the rhino horn for alternative medicine.'

‘How much do the poachers get?' Sara instantly joined in, moving between the two of them.

‘One hundred thousand pounds sterling per horn.' Gus looked up from the coffee he was making for Lizzie. ‘They can afford helicopters, eh.'

‘Can't the government stop them?' she asked.

Gus shook his head emphatically. ‘They don't even try. A ranger shot a poacher up near here and he went to prison for manslaughter.'

‘You are joking?' Sara was outraged for the first time in a long while. It made her pause. She could hear the hoots of derision over the daily bottles of Chablis, invariably opened in her room in Chambers. ‘What do you want a moral compass for, Wilson? Psychopaths and barristers are the same: they leave their feelings at home.' Only she hadn't, had she?

‘Here, we wear these boots. Standard issue, eh?' Gus turned over a boot to show the deep, distinctive tread. ‘We know if anyone else's out here.'

Connie asked, ‘How many are there left?'

Gus raised his thick eyebrows. ‘There are four thousand rhino left, eh.'

‘It's terrible,' Connie said with emotion. ‘It's a crime against nature. My grandfather would turn in his grave.'

‘They've got to be stopped,' Gus agreed.

Lizzie took her coffee and wandered off to lie flat in the grass beside the track. She was completely invisible from the table. Matt and Luke, who noticed her position first, nudged each other and grabbed their cameras. It didn't take Luke long to climb on the roof of the vehicle to get an aerial shot. Sara walked slowly over to take a look at
her. Lizzie was asleep in dense grass, where there were probably snakes, spiders and every manner of itchy thing. She was even snoring. Luke took another photo.