9781787335097 by Smakprov Media AB

i BLOOD

Imps were waiting for Helen and Kit when they stepped out of the jungle. They had been there all afternoon, squatting beneath the bridge at the boundary between the village and the forest. Beneath the trees, daylight was filtered to a soupy dimness; beyond the stream, sun burned into the rising red ground. The children whooped at the sight of Helen’s white bonnet, and ran behind and in front, laughing as Kit trod uncertainly across the bridge of logs and laboured up the slope to the village.

– He’len! He’len! shouted the children with the mud of the stream glittering on their ankles; strapped into the sling, Helen raised her right hand, and let it fall, as if in recognition.

– Good day, imps, said Kit, the words of the foreign language still clumsy in his mouth. – How do you fare?

– He’len! He’len! shouted the imps. – Toif! Toif!

Kit crouched down, panting, halfway through the climb, and Helen clucked and gurned while the imps took turns, peering into the baby’s mouth with expressions of concentration and counting her teeth.

At the top of the hill, three of the boys skittered off among the palms and vanished into the dark hollows beneath the raised houses. Only the girl and her small

brother kept up with Kit, so close on either side that their shoulders brushed against his shorts. Kit looked down at the girl, and her smiling, upward tilted face. A green ribbon tied up her black hair. He knew that she longed to carry Helen; he also recognised that at the age of nine or ten she had years more experience than him in the care of infants. But, at the thought of surrendering Helen, a barrier of anxiety loomed in his mind; however much he liked the girl, he could not give his baby daughter into her arms.

– Now we go to eat, he said, and the children smiled again and widened their eyes. – Thank you, imps.

He walked on to the house, elevated like the others on its platform of logs, and ducked into the shadowed gap beneath. The space was filled by a squat metal container, six feet high, with a door on one side. Its matt grey surface was at odds with the gloss and green of the tropical vegetation that trailed over and around it. From deep within, it gave out a low, barely audible hum.

Kit was rinsed with sweat. He opened the door of the Koolroom and stepped inside. The processed air was bracingly chilled and dry. He set Helen down on the bed, and pulled the damp T-shirt over his head. Then he removed Helen’s bonnet and her one-piece cotton suit, long-armed and long-sleeved to ward off the sun, and wet from being pressed against him in the sling. He slid her small body across the quilt so that she lay beneath the buffeting jet of air from the ceiling. The paper nappy bulged between her legs. Lara could be heard behind the partition, rattling among the medical supplies.

‘We’re back,’ he called, as he towelled the wetness of his chest and belly.

‘Welcome home, team,’ said Lara loudly. There were sounds of glass and metal being shuffled impatiently.

‘What are you looking for in there?’

‘Anti-parasitics.’

‘D’you need a hand?’

‘They’re in here somewhere.’

A pile of pharmaceutical boxes had already been heaped up by Lara beside the bed. Kit considered the purpose of these preparations and what they meant for him and Helen. There was a pause in the sounds on the other side of the partition, as if Lara was thinking too. She said, ‘So what did you two get up to this afternoon?’

‘We went into the forest. Not far, but far enough. We found that kind of tree house that they built in there, just found it by chance. I climbed with her a bit of the way up. D’you know, it’s the first time I really listened to the jungle? At first, you’re so struck with how it looks. I never noticed until today how loud it all is.’

‘It is. It’s amazing.’ Lara resumed her clatter on the far side of the partition, pushing or pulling something heavy along the floor.

‘The children were waiting for us when we came out. They counted her teeth again.’

‘They love her teeth,’ Lara said distractedly.

‘They know the word “teeth” now. I taught them, and they remembered it. Toif! Toif!’

Lara made no reply.

‘She loves it in the forest. There was a bird we could hear, although we couldn’t see it. It could have been some kind of monkey, but I think it was a bird. She was pointing up towards the noise, and smiling. And it’s cooler there,

under the canopy. Humid, though, so it feels hot. The hardest part is that walk back up the hill.’

Kit’s eyes settled on the photograph attached by a magnet to the inside of the Koolroom’s metallic door: Helen in the white hospital gown, moments old, with spikes of wet hair and eyes still puffy with the journey from water to air.

On the bed, she executed a sequence of kicks and punches which slapped the dry surface of the quilt.

Toh! she shouted. Moy yoy yoy!

Kit smiled at himself: transported by the beauty of her image, he had forgotten that the actual Helen was lying in front of him. He raised the lid of the box by the bed and took out the rectangular changing mat. Beside it, he placed the wipes, the cream and a crisp new nappy. He pulled Helen gently towards him by her ankles, arrayed her on the cushion, tore the old nappy on each side of her hips, and tugged it free. There was nothing dark this time; the plumpness was all liquid. But a livid rash filled the fold between her buttocks, and reached the top of her thighs. Kit’s heart flexed with the thought of how uncomfortable this must be. He stroked delicately with the wipes, and smeared the rash with coral-coloured cream.

Lara stepped out from behind the partition, brandishing two pharmaceutical boxes, the size and shape of cigarette cartons. ‘Found them!’ she said, leaning forward and waving them in front of Helen. She put her arm around Kit’s shoulder and placed a kiss on the side of his head. Lara was as tall as Kit; with her emergence into the cramped sleeping space, the walls of the container seemed to contract around the small double bed and cot. Kit kissed her on the lips,

and she stood back to give him room to dress the rash and fasten the adhesive tabs of the new nappy. A stock of them, scores of tight plastic packets, ferried for days upriver, formed a squat mound next to the Koolroom, covered by a weighted tarpaulin.

‘Her poor skin,’ said Kit. ‘See how sore she is.’ He put the top back on the tube of ointment, resealed the wipes, and restored them to their box. Then he folded up the soiled nappy, a dense brick of paper and urine, and dropped it into the burn bucket by the door.

‘You missed a bit there,’ said Lara. She was right: the nappy rash had spread beyond the continent of rawness surrounding Helen’s loins and established a new colony, a small but angry island of red in the middle of the baby’s left buttock.

After dinner they sat upstairs on the verandah with their legs dangling over the platform. Kit ate tinned peaches from a plastic bowl. Lara inhaled on a small joint, its tip the last source of light visible in the village. The cooking fires had flickered and faltered, and the meal-time murmur from the other houses was dying away. Even in the deep of night the village was never silent, for there were always muffled coughs, indistinct and unknowable groans, relays of barking from wakeful dogs, the voluntaries of untimely cockerels and the plash of pissing from the platforms. The Koolroom, where Helen slept, emitted a profound throbbing hum close to the outer threshold of hearing; the faint white noise of the baby monitor was more intrusive. Without being conscious of it, Kit and Lara spoke almost in whispers.

‘When will you be back?’ he asked.

‘It’ll take a week. Eight, nine days max. If the people we need to talk to aren’t there – if someone is out hunting, say, who we need to see to complete the surveys. Or some dire medical situation, that kind of thing. Which won’t happen, by the way, because they have a midwife there and she is really good.’

The sound from the monitor altered suddenly in texture, suggesting movement in the Koolroom below. Kit and Lara both stopped speaking and angled their heads. But the rustling faded back into hiss.

She put her arm around his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she said. It was an endearment that she only ever used when she was mildly stoned. ‘You’ll be OK , right?’

‘It’s your work,’ he said, and squeezed her in return. ‘It’s why we’re here. But it’s a long way.’

‘It’s the next village.’

‘It’s two days’ walk.’

‘A day and a half. At the very most.’

‘You have a daughter.’

‘And she will be with her father, who loves her and will look after her as well as anyone in the world.’

Kit thought: she speaks so honestly. It would have been obvious to say ‘better than anyone’, just as it would have been simple to pretend that the work would be done in six days, rather than a week. But Lara never flattered or exaggerated to ease the passage of an awkward moment. She would leave tomorrow, and she would come back again, as quickly as her work allowed. He and Helen had all they needed. The time would pass quickly.

He said, ‘She misses you when you go away.’

‘Strictly – she doesn’t, you know. The baby books make out like she does, but she won’t develop the capacity for that kind of identification for a while. If anything, she’d miss you, because you hold the bottle. But really, it’s the bottle she’s dependent on. I don’t mean to sound cold – of course, she’ll feel love and attachment when the time comes. But right now, this is the little creature she is. She’s a survival machine.’

‘If you say so, doc.’ He took the joint from her fingers, and held it. The thin end was wet with Lara’s saliva; the smoke was sweet and acrid. It would be easy to take a few drags; the ease that they brought would bring Lara and the world closer. But it was unthinkable that both of them should be stupefied with Helen in their care. He passed back the joint.

She said, ‘It’s going to be a whole lot easier when the rains start, and then we can take the river all the way. It’s already starting to rain upcountry. Ten days – maybe even in time for me when I come back – the river will fill up and we’ll be zipping down it by boat.’

‘I thought the rain made the tracks impassable?’

‘Those tracks are terrible at the best of times.’

‘I just don’t like the idea of having nowhere to go, by road. Of being trapped by land.’

‘You get over thinking like that. The rivers are the roads once the level rises – they’re the highway. But until the rains start, they’re closed.’

This was the pattern of so many of their conversations; they were like games of chess between players with radically different styles. Lara advanced her point of view with bold, factual statements. Kit responded obliquely,

without offering direct contradiction. He edged sideways then back, and found himself agreeing with what she said as if it had been his own thought. But he could not reach the state of agreement without going through that volley of opening moves. The pieces had to be set up; the game had to begin.

‘We’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Of course. I can give some more lessons to the imps. I’ll work on the Tongue. What else do I need to do?’

‘Just remember to check in with Kay by radio at nine and six. When the radio starts working again. Because I’ll be taking the satphone. You won’t be lonely, by the way. You’re going to have company from tomorrow.’

‘Is it tomorrow? You think he’ll really come.’

‘Most definitely.’ She relit the joint. ‘He got through on the phone when you two were out. He’s on his way back now.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘And I’m sure he’s looking forward to seeing you too.’

‘It’s not me he’s interested in,’ said Kit, and they smiled at one another. ‘What else did he say?’

‘He’s still convinced that something’s going down on the border, but sounds like he’s not found so much. Just the usual wild talk.’

‘So nothing to worry about then?’

‘Oh, he’s worried. He sounded paranoid. He has something to show us, but he couldn’t say what it was’ – she made quotation marks with her raised fingers – ‘ “on an open line”.’

Kit smiled without answering. Moments passed, and kept passing. The sound of the forest rose in his ears, the

treble of birds above the seething of the insects. Time going by in the jungle way, without ticking of clock.

Then Lara was speaking. ‘Kit,’ she said. ‘You’re doing it again. You’re drifting off – don’t drift off on me.’

The monitor rustled, and once again fell silent.

Lara and Kit’s house was built on hardwood columns and covered by a sloping roof of thatch. The floor was made from lengths of split bamboo, flattened out and held down with wooden nails to form a springy plane. At the centre was a square hearth, a deep box of fire-hardened wood containing ash and sand. Lara would have liked to use this as the villagers did, with logs constantly burning, the smoke creating a billowing, companionable fug. In consideration of Helen’s small lungs, she compromised with a small fire burning low in the hearth’s corner.

‘How can people sit round a fire when it’s thirty- six degrees?’ Kit asked.

‘It’s not about the heat,’ said Lara. ‘People say that a house is empty without a fire – it’s like living in some place with bare walls or a concrete floor. And they mean that it’s haunted too. The fire keeps out the spirits, not just the mosquitoes.’

‘Keeps out imps?’ The word for children, Kit had learned, in his early studies in the Tongue, was the same as a category of mischievous jungle fairies.

‘Worse than imps. The bad ones.’

The house was old and solid, its inner surfaces seasoned with a sooty patina. It had been the home of a childless widow who had died the previous year. Its position, on a rise on the edge of the village, secure from floods and

predators, suggested that she had been a woman of rank; the loan of it, Kit knew, was a mark of the esteem that Lara had earned in the months before his arrival. Nailed high up on the central pillar was a shrine, an open-fronted box containing carved forms of men and beasts, and ribbons of yellowed animal skin. Above it, in the topmost reaches of the eaves, almost unrecognisable behind the dried grass that curled out of their noses and eyes, was a cluster of skulls. They were the war trophies of the widow’s ancestors. They appeared not to have been disturbed since the house was built, and had about them an air of serene antiquity. Most of the houses contained such relics. Once a month, the face of an ancient lady, the widow’s sister or niece, would appear at the top of the notched log which served as a staircase connecting platform and ground; wordlessly, she would enter the house, nod to Lara and Kit, and stand before the pillar, intoning a low song, before nodding and leaving again. Far from being disturbed by the skulls, Kit found he was comforted by their presence. On the day they moved in, it was Lara who pulled a face as she looked up.

‘It’s what they represent,’ he tried to explain. ‘This place, this environment – so extreme and fragile. The sun dries everything up, then the water comes and washes it all away. Mothers die in childbirth. Kids die of simple illnesses. Parasites, snake bites, failed crops. But then you see these artefacts, which are older than anyone here, older than the parents, probably, of the oldest person here – and you understand that this is an ancient place, and that life goes on, despite everything.’

‘Honey, they’re trophies of war,’ said Lara. ‘They’re

symbols of continuity like any other captured loot. So they look quaint now, all dried out and grizzly in the eaves. When they were fresh they wouldn’t have been so pretty, mounted on a spike with the flies buzzing in and out. It’s the kind of continuity that says, “We defeated you – we continue. But you lost – so we chop your head off, and eat your heart. No continuity for you.” ’

‘They didn’t eat their hearts.’

‘Most certainly they did.’

Kit shook his head and smiled. ‘But think about when Helen is grown up,’ he said, ‘and we can tell her that when she was a baby she lived in a house with severed heads on the ceiling.’

‘She certainly is a privileged little girl,’ Lara had said, and pulled another face.

Tonight, the heads were all but invisible in the glow of the camping lamp. Kit lay beneath the mosquito net, his head supported by an elbow. He was leafing through the dense ring- bound file, a block of tatty sheets dense with Lara’s handwriting. In a few months, alone and unguided, she had recorded the rudiments of the local language, the Tongue.

Lara was arranging cartons of pharmaceuticals and polythene-encased documents on the floor.

‘When I say this,’ Kit asked through the mesh of the mosquito net, ‘have I got it right? Thank you, imps. Now we go to eat.’ The interior of the house was covered on four sides, and once within it they no longer felt the need to whisper.

Lara smiled. ‘You’ve got it right.’

‘Because whenever I say it, I feel as if they’re laughing at me.’

Lara was trying to stifle laughter of her own, as she sucked on the spliff.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘It’s because – because, you speak like a woman!’

‘What?’

‘ Now we go to eat . That’s the woman’s form. A man says – something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know! I mean I recognize it when I hear it, but it doesn’t stick with me, because I don’t need it.’

‘Is it the pronunciation?’

‘It’s intonation, but it’s also a completely different verb, another word altogether.’

‘You mean I talk like a woman?’

‘Yes, you do. But a married woman, and a mother. Don’t worry – you don’t talk like a virgin. That’s a different register.’

Kit sat up beneath the net. ‘And you’ve known this all along?’

Lara nodded, her mouth pursed with restrained laughter.

‘So you let me make a fool of myself. Why didn’t you say something?’

‘Don’t get mad,’ Lara said, no longer smiling now. ‘I just – you worked so hard at it, and I hadn’t known how hard you’d been working, and I was touched by how much you’d done, all the progress you’d made. We came here, and you had nothing, and then one day, you were talking,

really communicating, and it felt like that was the important thing, not the exact words you were using.’

‘But it does matter, in fact?’

‘That was something else I didn’t realize,’ she said. ‘That it made such a difference in practice.’

‘They must think I’m a freak.’

‘But, honey – you’re unusual to them anyway, right?’ She was standing over him and looking down through the net. ‘We both are. Our roles here – we’ve got to accept that we’re freaks. Freaks, but decent, sympathetic, helpful freaks. Unthreatening, non-judgmental, consistent freaks. Isn’t that the beauty of our position? We can live with these people, these remarkable people, we can observe their lives, their society, we can help them, and we can even fit in to a certain extent, get included in things that people from the outside never see. But we’re still apart, and that’s fine by us. We can take it on our own terms, without being bound by all the rules and conventions.’

‘That’s all very nice, in theory,’ said Kit. ‘But I’m the one being laughed at. It must be a bit confusing for everyone – no? – me talking as if I’m gay.’

‘That’s the thing – you don’t. I asked about that, and it’s really interesting: gay men and women use other registers altogether. So you do sound like a woman, but a straight woman – respectable. A good wife and mom.’

The words unlocked the laughter Lara had been holding in. Her features crumpled in a pink mask of tears. She sank on to her knees, then sat down on the bamboo.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually, when she had stopped hooting. ‘It’s not that funny.’

‘You’re stoned,’ said Kit, but his annoyance had passed. ‘It’s just – you’ve got to tell me these things. You’ve done the study – I have to rely on you.’

‘Oh man, it took me long enough for my own purposes. I haven’t got time to go over it all again for the male language.’

‘I rely on you for everything here,’ Kit said, from inside the net. ‘Even the words I speak.’

‘Oh, baby,’ she said, and laughed again.

Lara objected on principle to the artificiality of infant formula, but from the beginning she had also ruled out breast feeding. ‘The milk is hers,’ she said. ‘My tits are my own.’ Kit did not feel in a position to question this; he kept to himself the observation that the alternative, repeatedly pumping her breasts, seemed several times more troublesome. Before going to sleep in the Koolroom, he fed Helen with the milk that Lara had expressed that afternoon. He woke twice again in the night to feed her. The first time, she drank hungrily, belched, and slumped immediately on his shoulder. The second bottle went down with difficulty. After a few minutes of sucking, Helen’s mouth would grow slack, and the teat would slither out from between her gums, provoking angry cries. It took Kit most of an hour to coax her back to sleep. He paced up and down the narrow space between the bed and partition, counting his steps, and murmuring songs and rhymes into Helen’s ear until her head slackened and her breathing slowed.

Lara had finished her packing late, and slept in the house above to avoid disturbing them with the bustle of the early start. But soon after dawn, she opened the container

door and slipped behind the partition to retrieve the vials of vaccine which she transferred to an insulated pouch. Helen woke, gasped, cried briefly, gasped again, then fetched up a happy shouting. Kit lifted her out of the cot, pushed on her bonnet, and carried her outside to see Lara off.

Paulus, the young health worker, was there with the two village men who would travel with them. Overseeing their departure was Obson, the village militia man. He wore a dusty camouflage jacket over a green T- shirt bearing the face of Mochtar Mohamad, the new prime minister; his old bolt-action rifle was slung over his shoulder. Paulus and the two men were dividing up the packets of food and drugs that they would carry along the trail, sealing them in waterproof plastic, and squeezing them into rucksacks.

– Good morning, Mr Obson, said Kit, in the words he had learned from Lara’s file.

‘Good morning, Mister Kristian,’ said Obson in English. ‘Good morning, Miss He’len.’

Bouwh, said Helen in a tone of earnestness. Then, with quiet sarcasm: Bauwh.

The two porters put down their bags and peered at Helen as she kicked and gesticulated. Kit was fairly sure that they were father and son. The younger man had short dense hair that glistened as if dressed with oil. His skin was deep black, and the tattoos trailed from beneath his T-shirt and shorts, up his neck and down along his arms and calves. The people of this place were celebrated for these tattoos, the charcoal patterns on aubergine skin thrillingly obscure and mysterious, like shadows in darkness.

The older man might have been any age between forty and eighty. His hair, which was longer and bristled up on

his head, was completely white. He looked – and Kit shrank in shame from the thought which, he suspected, encoded racist notions on his part – like the photographic negative of a dark-haired white man. His skin too was intensely dark, but some change had occurred with ageing, a mottling and lightening, or a slow change in the composition of the ink, making the figures of the tattoos clearer and less enigmatic: fish, snakes, birds, spears, shields.

The men were talking with animation as they peered at Helen. Kit could follow little of what they said, but knew that it was to do with her teeth.

‘For our people,’ said Obson, ‘child’s teeth is like a fortune telling in your country.’

‘Like this,’ said Paulus. He pointed to his open hand and sketched lines across it with a finger.

‘Like palm reading? You mean they can read her future in her teeth?’

‘Why not?’ said Paulus.

‘It is against Islam,’ said Obson gravely, ‘but they like it.’ He flapped his hand at the father and son. ‘I am not so good at the reading, but they know well.’

‘So – tooth-reading. Now it makes sense.’ Kit took satisfaction in having uncovered this ethnographic titbit for himself, without having it pointed out to him by Lara. ‘And what is Helen’s future?’

Obson put the question to the village men, who peered in at her mouth, and engaged in a lively dialogue. Two teeth, tiny but scintillatingly white, emerged from the gums of Helen’s lower jaw. The older man appeared to be describing them, as a dentist might describe the condition of a patient’s mouth to an annotating assistant. He frowned

and corrected himself as he struggled for the appropriate words. Kit looked at the limbs of the men, which were slim, but flawlessly muscular and defined. Despite their animation, their heads and hands remained still.

The tooth readers agreed on their assessment which was conveyed lengthily to Obson.

He frowned with concentration as they spoke, then turned to Kit. ‘They said she will go on a long journey.’

He waited for more, but Obson nodded conclusively.

Kit smiled. ‘That’s the kind of thing that fortune tellers in my country say too.’ In the Tongue, he added – Thank you for teaching me, Mr Obson.

The two porters looked at one another, then at Kit, and broke into guffaws. Paulus was trying not to laugh.

‘Is it wrong, Obson, what I said?’ Kit was careful to maintain his own smile. ‘Did I make a mistake?’

‘It is right, it is right,’ Obson said, with his eyes laughing and downcast. ‘It is because it is . . . cute, this way you say it.’

A moment passed and prolonged itself into a silence. It was broken by the appearance of Lara, who was climbing down the notched log from the platform of the house. Her body looked supple and powerful as it held itself against the log. Her hair was held in a high band.

‘Time to go, my darlings,’ she said, kissing the faces of Helen and Kit. ‘Look after one another, OK ?’

Kit nodded and stroked a globe of sweat from her cheek. He was never entirely comfortable exchanging physical intimacies in public – wasn’t there a taboo about such displays? But Lara was unselfconscious about them.

She surveyed the tightly packed bags on the red earth. ‘All OK , Paulus?’ she asked.

To the father and son, she addressed a series of formalsounding phrases, of which Kit understood only, – Let us travel. She lifted the pack on to her back, and as she leaned forward the convexity of her belly became visible, the residue of the pregnancy.

‘Goodbye, my loves,’ she said. ‘See you in a week.’ Then she, Paulus and the two men began to walk quickly towards the forest.

Obson raised his arm in farewell. Kit held up Helen’s hand and waved it towards her mother. But the child resisted, and began to grumble and arch her back.

‘Bye- bye!’ Kit said, on behalf of both of them. ‘Come back soon.’ And then he called out, – Travel in safety.

The father and son spluttered with laughter again, and repeated the words to one another in unmistakably mincing tones. Helen began to cry.

Court Hardy walked out of the jungle late the following afternoon.

Helen and Kit were on the verandah of the house, where Helen was feeding. The girl with the green ribbon was there, crouched on the bamboo with her brother, watching the fast rhythmic movement of Helen’s mouth around the rubber nipple. The boy fidgeted, scratched, and flicked at columns of trundling ants. But the girl was still. Kit watched her face, as she watched Helen’s. From time to time, at some small alteration in the pattern of the child’s sucking, she pursed her lips. When Helen broke off from the bottle, her eyes widened; her head nodded gently to the vacuum clicks of the fluid passing through the eye of the teat. Only at the end, when Kit eased the sated Helen on to his shoulder and patted from her a climactic, baritone burp, did the little girl smile. He could feel her yearning to hold and nuzzle the soft, drowsing baby, so strong it was almost a physical force. His reluctance to hand her over was like a constraint around him, a girdle of confused and guilty anxiety about contagion, pollution, darkness and dirt. He was ashamed of these thoughts; he knew that they were irrational; but he also understood that they could not be overcome, and that all he could do,

for the time being, was to meet the girl’s tenderness with his own.

Her brother stirred and looked out from the verandah. A band of imps was approaching with shrill calls and whistles, accompanied by the strutting figure of Obson. Among them, staggering in long, exhausted steps, was Court.

Kit sat with Helen on his lap, looking down as he tottered to the bottom of the notched log followed by his small company of guides and bearers. Court’s thin, strawcoloured hair was glued to his scalp with sweat. His spectacles were grimed with droplets which had rolled down the glass and dried off, leaving fine salty tracks. His face was grey beneath several days of beard.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Kit, with an attempt at warmth. ‘You must be tired.’

Court gave an ironic smile. ‘Good day to you.’ He nodded beneath the platform of the house towards the Koolroom. ‘You haven’t got anything cold and fizzy in that big fridge of yours, have you?’

‘Come up.’

The tripod strapped to Court’s back wobbled as he ascended the log. His boots, which wore a sheath of drying mud, were too big for its notches; twice they slipped out, leaving him kicking the air and gripping the log between both arms. He was panting as he manoeuvred himself on to the platform.

‘Fuck me,’ said Court, wheezing. ‘Fuckadilla and Cunticula.’

Kit stood. From his arms Helen flapped hands towards the visitor. Bah, she said, declaratively.

‘Hello, little girl,’ said Court, still breathing heavily, as he wriggled out of his pack.

‘I’ll just put her down,’ said Kit. ‘Give me a moment. Help yourself to water. The stuff in the jar is from the well, and it’s clean.’ With a smile of his own he said, ‘I don’t have beer or champagne, I’m afraid.’

There was more grunting. By the time Kit had balanced the sleeping Helen in the hammock, Court was slumped on his elbow beside the ceramic jar, slurping water from the coconut shell that was attached to it by a cord.

‘Fuckaroo,’ he said eventually. ‘Thank you for that, my friend. Thank you.’ He placed a hand over his heart as if to reckon its beating. ‘My friend – you don’t, do you, have a cigarette?’

Kit removed from its place in the thatch the packet that Lara used to make up her joints, and handed it to him. ‘My thanks,’ said Court. ‘I ran out two days ago.’

He flicked a steel lighter, and sucked hungrily on the cigarette. After a few noisy exhalations, Kit said, ‘You had a tough trip? You must sleep here tonight, of course.’

‘I had a remarkable trip. And thank you. I would be very glad to stay here. I might even lie down now, if I may. Feeling a bit seedy.’

‘Make yourself comfortable. Take that mat in the corner.’

‘The mat,’ said Court in a level voice.

Kit knew that Court wanted to go below and to sleep in the Koolroom. He knew that if Lara had been here, she would have suggested it. But he would not be making the suggestion; and if Court asked, he would give an excuse.

Without standing up, Court crawled on to the mat. He lit another cigarette and smoked it, as he lay on his side.

9781787335097

In the Green Heart

In the Green Heart

Rich AR d l loyd P ARR y

J ONA THAN CA PE

i BLOOD