Morality for Beautiful Girls

CHAPTER TWO A BOY IN THE NIGHT

THEY WERE camped in the Okavango, outside Maun, under a covering of towering mopani trees. To the north, barely half a mile away, the lake stretched out, a ribbon of blue in the brown and green of the bush. The savannah grass here was thick and rich, and there was good cover for the animals. If you wanted to see elephant, you had to be watchful, as the lushness of the vegetation made it difficult to make out even their bulky grey shapes as they moved slowly through their forage.

The camp, which was a semipermanent collection of five or six large tents pitched in a semicircle, belonged to a man they knew as Rra Pula, Mr Rain, owing to the belief, empirically verified on many an occasion, that his presence brought much-needed rain. Rra Pula was happy to allow this belief to be perpetuated. Rain was good luck; hence the cry Pula! Pula! Pula! when good fortune was being celebrated or invoked. He was a thin-faced man with the leathery, sun-speckled skin of the white person who has spent all his life under an African sun. The freckles and sun-spots had now become one, which had made him brown all over, like a pale biscuit put into the oven.

“He is slowly becoming like us,” one of his men said as they sat round the fire one night. “One day he will wake up and he will be a Motswana, same colour as us.”

“You cannot make a Motswana just by changing his skin,” said another. “A Motswana is a Motswana inside. A Zulu is the same as us outside, but inside he is always a Zulu. You can’t make a Zulu into a Motswana either. They are different.”

There was silence round the fire as they mulled over this issue.

“There are a lot of things that make you what you are,” said one of the trackers at last. “But the most important thing is your mother’s womb. That is where you get the milk that makes you a Motswana or a Zulu. Motswana milk, Motswana child. Zulu milk, Zulu child.”

“You do not get milk in the womb,” said one of the younger men. “It is not like that.”

The older man glared at him. “Then what do you eat for the first nine months, Mr Clever, Mr BSc? Are you saying that you eat the mother’s blood? Is that what you are saying?”

The younger man shook his head. “I am not sure what you eat,” he said. “But you do not get milk until you are born. I am certain of that.”

The older man looked scornful. “You know nothing. You have no children, have you? What do you know about it? A man with no children talking about children as if he had many. I have five children. Five.”

He held up the fingers of one hand. “Five children,” he repeated. “And all five were made by their mother’s milk.”

They fell silent. At the other fire, on chairs rather than logs, were sitting Rra Pula and his two clients. The sound of their voices, unintelligible mumbling, had drifted across to the men, but now they were silent. Suddenly Rra Pula stood up.

“There’s something out there,” he said. “A jackal maybe. Sometimes they come quite close to the fire. The other animals keep their distance.”

One of the clients, a middle-aged man wearing a widebrimmed slouch hat, stood up and stared into the darkness.

“Would a leopard come in this close?” he asked.

“Never,” said Rra Pula. “Very shy creatures.”

A woman sitting on a canvas folding stool now turned her head sharply.

“There’s definitely something there,” she said. “Listen.”

Rra Pula put down the mug he had been holding and called across to his men.

“Simon! Motopi! One of you bring me a torch. Double quick!”

The younger man stood up and walked quickly over to the equipment tent. As he walked across to give it to his employer, he too heard the noise and he switched on the powerful light, sweeping its beam through the circle of darkness around the camp. They saw the shapes of the bushes and small trees, all curiously flat and one-dimensional in the probing beam of light.

“Won’t that scare it away?” asked the woman.

“Might do,” said Rra Pula. “But we don’t want any surprises, do we?”

The light swung round and briefly moved up to illuminate the leaves of a thorn tree. Then it dropped to the base of the tree, and that is where they saw it.

“It’s a child,” said the man in the slouch hat. “A child? Out here?”

The child was on all fours. Caught in the beam of light, he was like an animal in the headlights of a car, frozen in indecision.

“Motopi!” called Rra Pula. “Fetch that child. Bring him here.”

The man with the torch moved quickly through the grass, keeping the beam of light on the small figure. When he reached him, the child suddenly moved sharply back into the darkness, but something appeared to slow him down, and he stumbled and fell. The man reached forward, dropping the torch as he did so. There was a sharp sound as it hit a rock and the light went out. But the man had the child by then, and had lifted him up, kicking and wriggling.

“Don’t fight me, little one,” he said in Setswana. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The child kicked out and his foot caught the man in his stomach.

“Don’t do that!” He shook the child, and, holding him with one hand, slapped him hard across the shoulder.

“There! That’s what you’ll get if you try to kick your uncle! And there’ll be more if you don’t watch out!”

The child, surprised by the blow, stopped resisting, and went limp.

“And here’s another thing,” muttered the man, as he walked over towards Rra Pula’s fire. “You smell.”

He put the boy down on the ground, beside the table where the Tilley lamp stood; but he still held on to the child’s wrist, in case he should try to run away or even to kick one of the white people.

“So this is our little jackal,” said Rra Pula, looking down at the boy.

“He’s naked,” said the woman. “He hasn’t got a scrap of clothing.”

“What age is he?” asked one of the men. “He can’t be more than six or seven. At the most.”

Rra Pula now lifted up the lamp and held it closer to the child, playing the light over a skin which seemed criss-crossed with tiny scars and scratches, as if he had been dragged through a thorn bush. The stomach was drawn in, and the ribs showed; the tiny buttocks contracted and without flesh; and on one foot, stretching right across the arch, an open sore, white rimmed about a dark centre.

The boy looked up into the light and seemed to draw back from the inspection.

“Who are you?” asked Rra Pula in Setswana. “Where have you come from?”

The child stared at the light, but did not react to the question.

“Try in Kalanga,” Rra Pula said to Motopi. “Try Kalanga, then try Herero. He could be Herero. Or a Mosarwa. You can make yourself understood in these languages, Motopi. You see if you can get anything out of him.”

The man dropped to his haunches so as to be at the child’s level. He started in one language, enunciating the words carefully, and then, getting no reaction, moved to another. The boy remained mute.

“I do not think this child can speak,” he said. “I think that he does not know what I am saying.”

The woman moved forward and reached out to touch the child’s shoulder.

“You poor little thing,” she said. “You look as if …”

She gave a cry and withdrew her hand sharply. The boy had bitten her.

The man snatched at the child’s right arm and dragged him to his feet. Then, leaning forward, he struck him sharply across the face. “No,” he shouted. “Bad child!”

The woman, outraged, pushed the man away. “Don’t hit him,” she cried. “He’s frightened. Can’t you see? He didn’t mean to hurt me. I shouldn’t have tried to touch him.”

“You cannot have a child biting people, Mma,” said the man quietly. “We do not like that.”

The woman had wrapped a handkerchief around her hand, but a small blood stain had seeped through.

“I’ll get you some penicillin for that,” said Rra Pula. “A human bite can go bad.”

They looked down at the child, who had now lain down, as if preparing for sleep, but was looking up at them, watching them.

“The child has a very strange smell,” said Motopi. “Have you noticed that, Rra Pula?”

Rra Pula sniffed. “Yes,” he said. “Maybe it’s that wound. It’s suppurating.”

“No,” said Motopi. “I have a very good nose. I can smell that wound, but there is another smell too. It is a smell that you do not find on a child.”

“What’s that?” asked Rra Pula. “You recognise that smell?”

Motopi nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It is the smell of a lion. There is nothing else that has that smell. Only lion.”

For a moment nobody said anything. Then Rra Pula laughed.

“Some soap and water will sort all that out,” he said. “And something on that sore on his foot. Sulphur powder should dry it out.”

Motopi picked up the child, gingerly. The boy stared at him, and cowered, but did not resist.

“Wash him and then keep him in your tent,” said Rra Pula. “Don’t let him escape.”

The clients returned to their seats about the fire. The woman exchanged glances with the man, who lifted an eyebrow and shrugged.

“Where on earth has he come from?” she asked Rra Pula, as he poked at the fire with a charred stick.

“One of the local villages, I expect,” he said. “The nearest one is about twenty miles over that way. He’s probably a herd boy who got lost and wandered off into the bush. That happens from time to time.”

“But why has he got no clothes?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes the herd boys just wear a small apron. He probably lost his to a thorn bush. Perhaps he left it lying somewhere.”

He looked up at the woman. “These things happen a lot in Africa. There are plenty of children who go missing. They turn up. No harm comes to them. You aren’t worried about him, are you?”

The woman frowned. “Of course I am. Anything could have happened to him. What about the wild animals? He could have been taken by a lion. Anything could have happened to him.”

“Yes,” said Rra Pula. “It could. But it didn’t. We’ll take him tomorrow into Maun and leave him with the police down there. They can sort it out. They’ll work out where he’s come from and get him home.”

The woman seemed thoughtful. “Why did your man say that he smelled like a lion? Wasn’t that rather an odd thing to say?”

Rra Pula laughed. “People say all sorts of odd things up here. They see things differently. That man, Motopi, is a very good tracker. But he tends to talk about animals as if they were human beings. He says that they say things to him. He claims that he can smell an animal’s fear. That’s the way he talks. It just is.”

They sat in silence for a while, and then the woman announced that she was going to bed. They said good-night, and Rra Pula and the man sat by the fire for another half hour or so, saying very little, watching the logs slowly burn out and the sparks fly up into the sky. Inside his tent, Motopi lay still, stretched out across the entrance so that the child could not get out without disturbing him. But the child was not likely to do that; he had fallen asleep more or less immediately after being put into the tent. Now Motopi, on the verge of drifting off to sleep, watched him through one, heavy-lidded eye. The child, a light kaross thrown over him, was breathing deeply. He had eaten the piece of meat they had given him, ripping at it greedily, and had eagerly drunk the large cup of water which they had offered him, licking at the water as an animal might do at a drinking hole. There was still that strange smell, he thought, that musty-acrid smell which reminded him so strongly of the smell of a lion. But why, he wondered, would a child smell of a lion?