Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

How she missed those moments, that change of pace.

She had snatched her hand away from Russell without thinking twice. His gesture had been … flattering, but she didn’t want flattery. She wanted to be less angry and … she wanted … she wanted what she couldn’t have. She wanted Dominic and her father back in her life. She couldn’t have Dominic, she couldn’t have her mother, but was her father lost to her forever?

Getting her father back would help her loosen up.

Russell was right about that.

She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, turned, and extinguished the hurricane lamp. There was so much light from the moon, she didn’t need it. The moon was almost a perfect circle, a silver-white disc that made the sky around it appear blue.

Barks and screams from the trees broke into the silence. She saw the light in Russell’s tent go out.

She looked up at the moon again, letting the whiskey pass her lips and trickle down her throat. There it was again, that sensuous feeling. That was the one shortcoming of life in the bush, which otherwise for her was near perfect. There was no … sensuality in Kihara. Dominic had awakened that side in her—and oh, how surprising and wonderful that awakening had been. A fire ran along her skin even now, just thinking about some of the times they had first made love. Sex with Dominic had been quite different from the sex described in this new book by that Russian author, Vladimir someone, about a young girl called Lolita, which had been published only after a change in the law.

She ran her tongue around her lips, feeling the fire of the whiskey fade. She must put Dominic behind her.

A wisp of cloud drifted in front of the gleaming silver disc of the moon and immediately vanished. A movement caught her eye, a figure in white. It was Mutevu Ndekei, the camp cook. He walked—or rather he shuffled—carefully, his silhouette passing by the dim glow of the campfire, clearly trying to make as little noise as possible. But she would know that shuffle anywhere.

She smiled. He was doing what Russell North had done, visiting someone in their tent, no doubt one of the women who helped out as cleaners or assistant cooks, or ironers of the khaki shirts that had to be washed every day.

Mutevu disappeared. She wondered with another inward smile whether he would have more success with whoever he was visiting than Russell had had with her. She crushed out her cigarette and poured what remained of the whiskey back into the flask.

Once she was in bed, sleep wouldn’t come. As usual. She had slept well the first night because she had been exhausted after the long journey, but then her usual sleep pattern—or nonsleep pattern—had reasserted itself. Tonight, as well as the usual barriers to oblivion, there was the added distress about Odnate.

What a waste. Why was life so untidy? Why could people not see where their best interests lay? Where did her best interests lie? Was she always going to be a scientist? And just a scientist? She had never dwelled on having children—Dominic had two and, he said, that was quite enough. But Odnate had been … cute. To lose a son: how Odnate’s mother must be feeling tonight. And here Natalie was, worrying about getting to sleep.

The noises off—the baboons and chimpanzees and the occasional hyena—accompanied her thoughts like a Greek chorus, keeping a respectful silence one minute, generous in their vocal support the next. Somehow, amid the theater of the night, she drifted off to sleep.

She was awake at dawn. That was nothing new. In Cambridge, she was used to getting up when the rest of the college was still asleep, walking by the river with only the mist for company, watching a milky sunrise over the roofs of this college or that, the yellow-white light striking the ornate stone fretwork of King’s College Chapel, where Dominic had given his recital.

She lay on her bed, listening to the African day getting going, the unceasing, seemingly urgent gossip of the nightjars and lapwings, the early morning coughs and complaints of the baboons, the deeper snort of a water buffalo.

She raised her hand and touched the roof of her tent. It was warm, the sun already baking the canvas. She looked at her watch: just before six. She swung her feet out of bed but looked down before she let them rest on the floor. You never knew when you might get a visit from a snake or something equally unpleasant. But the floor was disfigured by nothing more dangerous than dust.

She stepped across to the front of her tent, untied the opening, and looked out. The sun was already fiercely bright but the heat hadn’t built up yet. There was a faint smell of dung in the air. A herd of something herbivorous had passed by the gorge during the night.

Natalie got dressed. She didn’t wash or clean her teeth but she did run a brush through her hair. Lacing up her boots, she stepped outside, and tied the tent flaps closed behind her. She made her way to the refectory. She wasn’t sure what time the kitchen staff started, but she knew how to turn on the gas and where the water bottles were stored. She could make her own coffee.

As she passed the fire, she paused to kick soil-sand over a log ember that still glowed red. As she did this, and looked up, she saw a monkey running out from one of the tents along the top right arm of the T. It was carrying something, something black but shiny. It looked to Natalie like a camera.

No! Whose tent had the monkey been in? They were a perennial problem, these monkeys, and a camera was a valuable object, in both a financial and a scientific sense. She knew that Arnold, Jonas, and Richard occupied the tents in that arm of the camp. One of them was obviously up early and had left his tent flaps open, something they were all warned against, something that invited trouble.

She set off toward the tent which she had seen the monkey leave. There was no point in giving chase—the creature had already slipped through a diminutive gap in the thorn fence and disappeared, taking the camera with it.

The tent was four along, last but one in the row. Sure enough, as she approached, she could see that the flaps were open, swaying idly in the light breeze. Keeping the tents closed up against the animals of the Serengeti, especially at night, when the camp was quiet, was such a basic piece of bushcraft that Natalie, as she neared the tent, was immediately apprehensive. Whose tent was this? Who had made this basic mistake? And why?

She stood in front of the tent, close up.

Now she noticed that the tapes used to close up the tent were in fact still tied in knots. The flaps hadn’t been left open, they had been cut—sliced, slashed. Entaillé —involuntarily the word came to her in French.

Natalie’s throat began to sweat.

She called out softly, “Hello? Hello?”

No answer.

She called out again.

Silence, but for the sound of the breeze. A warthog or a hyena made a grunting sound in the distance.

The back of her neck was sweating now.

She stepped forward and bent down. She pulled back the flap and at the same time took half a step further forward.

It was dark inside the tent and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

What she first noticed, before her eyes had accommodated fully to the gloom, was a buzzing sound.

Flies.

And then she saw them, a small black cloud, buzzing back and forth above the bed. There must have been hundreds of them, thousands, zigzagging, circling, hovering.

It took her another moment to register that, this side of the cloud, was a body, a torso: arms, legs wearing undershorts, an abdomen with hair over the chest. It was very still, utterly motionless.

Flies were moving in on her now, bombarding her cheeks and chin.