The Claw

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 on the edge of Port Harcourt that Isaac had put in an anonymous call to the police, in a dialect that wasn't his. He'd done that for Alan, to make sure their search wasn't hindered. 'You mustn't give up,' he'd told Alan. 'You must fight their influence or it will destroy you. It will never wear off of its own accord.' That had been Alan's secret hope, so secret he hadn't admitted it to himself: that the influence would leave him in time, that he would be able to go home, himself again – but Isaac must know what was best, however unwelcome it was. Alan had been too stunned by Ogunbe's death in the warehouse to do anything but follow Isaac. He hadn't realized how shaken Isaac was until they were nearly home and Isaac had stumbled to a tree and held on, shaking and retching, getting it over with so that his wife and daughters wouldn't see.

Looking back and watching the jungle swallow up the station, Alan remembered the first time he'd ridden a roller coaster, that moment when he'd realized that he couldn't get off, that he had to ride the nightmare all the way. This train ride felt like that – except that the station wouldn't have saved him from the nightmare. He looked away from the jungle as it thickened around him, trees shutting out the horizon and most of the sky. He looked at the goat which was gazing up at him with large moist scared eyes

– but not for long; the sight reminded him too much of? Joseph, of what Joseph had done. Thinking of Liz and? Anna couldn't wipe out those memories; the memories? merged in ways he didn't dare to face. He could only think? of the days he'd spent at Isaac's home, the last time he had? felt at all peaceful.

He'd stayed while Isaac pored over maps, planning their route. The house was bright and spotless, and the gentle waves and the yachts on the lagoon had soothed him. Isaac's pretty wife and their two bright-eyed teenage daughters had looked after him, though Isaac had told them nothing. It showed how deeply Isaac trusted him or believed he would be cured that he'd let him in the same house as his daughters. Yet all this had only filled him with grief that he couldn't go home, go back to his home that had once been like this. He'd yearned to phone Liz, but what could he have said? He could only gaze at the lagoon

– that at least had spared him the agony of thinking.? One evening he'd been sitting on a garden chair, brooding, watching the water grow dark, when the younger daughter had taken his hand to lead him in to dinner, and all at once he'd started sobbing, wordlessly and uncontrollably. He couldn't tell how long the child had stayed with him, squeezing his hand, but eventually Isaac's wife had been gripping his shoulders too, and the two girls had held his hands while he wept there in the sudden night. That time had given him back some sense of worth. Someone had cared for him, even as he was now.

'It is a waste of time worrying over what is behind us,' Isaac said, over the uproar of the train and its passengers, bringing Alan back to himself with a lurch, to the inexorable journey into the engulfing jungle. 'If anyone had meant to harm us they would have done so in the warehouse.'

That seemed reasonable. Ogunbe had already been reluctant to talk to them; perhaps he'd asked the advice of someone who'd known his father – someone who'd sewn him up to silence him and as a warning to them. 'I'll be ail right,' Alan said, remembering the children clinging to his hands, Isaac's wife gripping his shoulders as if by doing so she could literally hold him together.

'You're willing to go on?'

'Yes, we must.' Alan couldn't see any way to turn back now, but in any case, he was regaining strength. Remembering Isaac's family, he'd realized something else, too: in a sense, Isaac was risking his own home and family in order to help. If Isaac was prepared to go on, how could Alan hesitate? He'd come so far from home that he had nothing to lose and his own family to gain. He'd go wherever Isaac led; he wouldn't be turned back by horrors, even by the face in the flashlight beam, the hands recoiling in agony as they groped to pick out the stitches…

'Perhaps this'U be the lead we're looking for,' he said, as much to encourage Isaac as himself. He could hardly believe they'd find whoever had given the claw to Marlowe; they'd need some other break. But as the train groaned onward into the jungle, twilight closing about him like steam, he was growing more determined; he would face whatever he had to face. If Isaac could on his behalf, then he must too. Yet it wasn't long before he was remembering that journey as the last chance he'd had to turn back.