Kat Gordon - The Hunters

‘Will we see any animals from the train?’ Maud asked.

Maud had large brown eyes and olive skin; in Scotland they’d called her ‘the Spanish Sister’, because of her looks and her habit of carrying a bible around. I’d once heard my father tell a friend that Maud had never lied in her life.

‘We will,’ my father said.

There was a shrill blast of a whistle from the platform, and the train jerked forwards impatiently.

‘Finally,’ my mother said.

At first the scenery was of dusty bazaars and colourful buildings – pale pinks and greens and glowing whites with towers and domes and covered balconies – or wide roads lined with palm trees and sycamore figs and only a few cars in sight. The blare of shouting reached us through the open window, becoming muffled as we headed out of the centre and the houses turned European: well-spaced bungalows with large, tropically lush gardens. Then came the thatched huts and swampland, African children running alongside the tracks to wave at the train, and then we were out of the city completely. The view changed to brown scrubland and small streams and I turned away from the window, disappointed with what I’d seen of the country so far.

The journey was slow. We had to stop every time a buffalo wandered onto the track, and the train jolted badly. At Voi we stopped for an hour, this time to have dinner by the side of the track, under large hanging lamps and a cloud of buzzing insects. We started with soup then moved on to a rubbery-tasting fish.

‘It’s good to have some proper food again,’ my father said, spearing a large piece with his fork.

I swirled my own piece around its plate, leaving trails of slimy leeks in its wake.

‘What’s wrong?’ Maud asked me. ‘Do you miss Dar es Salaam?’

‘We were only there for a fortnight,’ my mother said. ‘You can’t be that fond of it already.’

In Tanganyika our supper had been dates, then spiced beef or fish curries cooked in coconut milk and served with rice on a metal platter, with hollows for each dish so we could mix the food if we wanted to. Sometimes, if we were still hungry afterwards, we’d buy food from the baba lishas – the feeding men – down by the harbour: grilled cassava with a chilli sauce, samosas, pineapple, custard apples, avocados and andazi, a sweet, deep-fried dough cake. Lucy’s parents had joined us on our second night for supper, bringing Lucy too, the first time we’d met. She sat with me and Maud and I tried to talk to her, but she was monosyllabic.

‘You made quite an impression,’ my mother said afterwards.

‘She didn’t like me.’

She gave me a funny look. ‘Your delusions never fail to amaze me, darling.’

My father pushed away his empty plate, and an Indian waiter in a starched white uniform swooped down and exchanged it for one piled with beef. My mother, who’d just laid down her knife and fork in the middle of her plate, hurriedly picked them up again and continued to pick at her fish.

A cat appeared in the doorway of the station master’s office, and sauntered along the platform in our direction.

‘Here, kitty,’ Maud said, holding out a morsel of fish.

The cat reached my mother and started to rub himself against her leg, purring and arching his back. My mother reached down and scratched his head, and I suddenly wondered what it would feel like to be him, to stroke my face against her long, smooth leg, and have her fingers gently massage the ticklish spot just behind my ears. I looked away from the two of them.

‘How much longer before we reach Nairobi?’ I asked.

‘Oh, sixteen hours or more,’ my father said.

‘Is it as far as Edinburgh to London?’ Maud asked.

‘Much further.’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘That’s why it took so long to build. That and the lions, of course.’

‘The lions?’

‘In Tsavo,’ my father said. ‘Slave trader caravans used to cross the river there, and two lions developed a taste for human flesh. They must have been eating the bodies of dead captives left by the wayside before we showed up.’

Maud put down her cutlery.

‘They ambushed the workers at night and dragged them off. After a while most of the workers ran away – we had a devil of a time trying to get them back. The lions ate more than a hundred men until Patterson found them and shot them.’ He shook his head. ‘He took them home as rugs. Beautiful specimens.’

When we returned to the carriage, the guards had made up our bunks with crisp sheets, soft pillows and blankets. Our parents were in the compartment next door, and I shared with Maud. I lay on my top bunk, unable to sleep. After an hour or so I jumped down and stood by the window.

‘What are you doing?’ Maud asked.

‘Surveying my kingdom.’

She got out of bed and stood next to me, wrapping her arms around herself. ‘Do you think there’ll be wild animals there? By our house, I mean.’

‘Of course there will be.’

‘I want to see an elephant. And a tiger.’

‘Tigers are in India, Spanish. Africa’s got lions, and hyenas. And leopards.’ I turned to face her, leaning back against the window. ‘You know they live in trees, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have to look up when you’re in a forest. Otherwise they could drop down behind you and bite you here,’ I put my hand to my throat, ‘and drag you back up and we’d never find you.’

‘They don’t eat humans,’ Maud said.

‘They eat everything.’

‘Stop trying to frighten me.’

‘It’s no fun if you don’t actually get frightened anyway.’

‘Mother says we can have a dog here.’

‘She won’t really let us.’

Maud looked up at me, wide-eyed. ‘But she promised.’

‘When I’m older and I have my own house,’ I said, ‘you can live with me and we’ll get a dog.’

‘Are you going to move out soon?’

‘Why? Do you want me to go?’

‘No. I hated it when you went to school. But I do want a dog.’

I tried to hide my grin.

‘Anyway,’ she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. ‘I won’t be able to live with you because you’ll have a wife and a family.’

‘I’ll never love another girl as much as I love you.’

She sighed. ‘Liar.’

Just before dawn the next day the train stopped for the passengers to stretch their legs. The light was silvery, just clear enough to see by, and jugs of hot water were produced for the men to shave. The grass by the side of the tracks was still wet with dew, the air so cold it burned my throat. We huddled together, scarves wrapped around our faces so that only our eyes were showing.

‘Only six more hours,’ my father told us. ‘You know, if we stayed on all the way to Lake Victoria we’d have travelled more than five hundred and eighty miles. How about that for engineering? We built this line through swamps, forests, mountains, plains, deserts, you name it. They didn’t think we could do it, but we did. And before the bloody Germans, too.’

Sometimes I wondered why my father disliked the Germans so much. Maybe, I thought, it was in solidarity with my mother, whose only brother had been killed by them in the War, whereas my father had stayed at home with flat feet. My mother never talked about her brother. I couldn’t remember him, but I’d seen a photograph of him in her locket. I thought he looked like her, and like me.

We climbed back aboard and as the train wound its way along the track the sun came out and coloured the landscape outside our window in blushing oranges and coppers and scarlets. Now that we could see better, we realised we were covered in dust from where the desert had blown through the mosquito screen. My mother took out a handkerchief and rubbed at her face, but said nothing, and the window stayed open.