Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“Natalie,” she said quietly after a moment, “I’m sorry if you think I’m an ogre. Of course I’m grateful for what Richard—and Russell—did for us, for the dig, for the gorge. I understand very well your feelings. I can see what a quandary it must be for you. I understand all that, believe me.” She helped herself to more water. “And you know, I think—I hope—that I am not a stubborn person.” She half smiled. “Remember what happened with the whiskey flask?”

She ran a finger around the rim of her glass tumbler. “So I’m trying not to be stubborn on this matter, either. Really, I’m not.” She pushed her plate from her. “I also know that when contentious matters are argued over too much, people—and that includes me—can be driven into a corner, into a cul-de-sac, making change, and therefore agreement, even more impossible. So, I will just say three things, and then we can move on.”

She raised a thumb. “First, I repeat my thinking that the situation has changed. We couldn’t anticipate when Richard’s body was first found how the Maasai would respond. They have responded cleverly, from their point of view, and have in effect outmaneuvered and outthought us. I think that you should withdraw your evidence, but if you can’t or won’t, so be it.”

She raised her forefinger. “Two, we must proceed with our digging, as if nothing were happening. Nothing is to be gained from calling a halt at this stage.”

Her middle finger went up. “Three, we shall make yet another approach to the elders of the Maasai, the loibone , to see if they can be prevailed upon to change their minds. I’m not hopeful it will work, but you never know. Maybe they have their elders who are not stubborn too.”

She looked around the table. “I think we all know where Natalie and I stand. But we haven’t heard from you, Kees, or Jonas, or Arnold. This is not something we can put to a vote, but do any of you want to say something? Or you, Christopher?”

No one did.

Naiva noiselessly removed the plates from the table. A buffalo called out somewhere in the distance. Smoke from the fire drifted into the dining tent, casting fuzzy shadows. The crackle and spit of the logs filled the silence that remained.

Natalie lay in bed in the dark. She had so looked forward to her late-night smoke and whiskey when she had been in Nairobi, but tonight, after her tussle with Eleanor, she was too much on edge and she longed for the oblivion of sleep. Dinner had been finished quickly, after Eleanor’s little speech, and Natalie had returned to her tent and undressed in no time. She’d hardly slept in Nairobi so she was tired enough but, even so, sleep wouldn’t come.

Before her arrival at the gorge, she’d been nervous, unsure whether she would be up to the mark academically speaking. Oh, for that sort of problem now. Nothing could have prepared her for the conundrum she was now facing—and facing, very largely, alone. The irony was that she hadn’t, actually, done anything. She had been sitting quietly, smoking, enjoying the night, hardly moving, totally silent, staring into the darkness, when she had seen Ndekei. She had been as passive, as unproactive as it was possible to be. And yet her total inaction was the cause of all the trouble.

She turned on her side. She smelled the canvas of the bed, the detergent the sheets had been washed in. She recalled her first nights at college in Cambridge, the first strange bed she had ever slept in. God, she had been innocent. She recalled Dom’s smell. That had always troubled her in a minor way. The reason she always noticed Dom’s smell was that she was never with him long enough to take it for granted. She supposed that happily married couples—or at least those who managed to stay married for any length of time, or just lived together, as more and more people were doing—stopped noticing each other’s smell.

Jack had his own smell too, of course. He smelled ever so slightly of his airplane, the leather seats, kerosene or Avgas, whatever airplane fuel was called.

Lying in bed, in her pajamas, she put her hand on her chest where she had inadvertently left her shirt button undone. She hadn’t really shown too much of herself, not at all. But the very fact of the button being undone made her think of the first time she had unbuttoned her shirt for Dominic. She had been embarrassed then but excited too, the first real thrill of sexual anticipation she had known. With Dominic she had peeled off her shirt, then her bra, to let her breasts hang free, loose, the first time she had known that physical freedom in the presence of a man, in front of a man. Dominic had groaned and buried his face in her flesh, kissing and licking and sucking her nipples. That was when she had discovered how sensitive her nipples were—how, when Dominic had bitten them between his lips, she had chewed in air and wrapped herself around him. There were tears in her eyes, spittle at the corners of her mouth, from their kissing. Dominic had licked her nipples again. She had never expected she could feel so wet.

When Jack had looked at her undone button, the feelings she’d had couldn’t be compared with that day in her rooms at Cambridge, with Dominic. But, along with her embarrassment, there had been excitement too. An excitement she hadn’t known in months.

She dragged her mind away from Dominic and Jack. Eleanor had said tonight that they must dig on, as if the situation were normal. Yes. Yes, please—but was that practicable, given what was hanging over them all now?

She heard a noise outside the tent. Footsteps. Did she have a visitor? From the footfall, she sensed it might be Christopher. She held her breath.

The footsteps went away.

In Nairobi, she had thought about Christopher even less than she had thought about Dominic.

That told her something.

“Look, vultures.” Jack stood over Natalie as she crouched in the gorge, teasing the rock with a small pickax.

She stopped what she was doing, sat back on her haunches, and looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun with her gloved hand.

“Must be a buffalo that’s got into trouble,” said Jack softly, handing her a water bottle. “Like to go see?”

She gulped at the water and then shook her head. “I don’t want to witness any more crimes, Jack.” She smiled grimly, handed back the bottle, and wiped her forehead with her glove. “Besides, I’m in the middle of something.” She pointed with her pickax. “I think I may have some sort of jaw.”

Jack was immediately attentive. He put the bottle away and knelt down beside her.

It was already a week since their return from Nairobi. Life was normal, more or less. They spent their mornings digging, their afternoons following up with note-taking, reading, or drawing, and their evenings discussing their discoveries, or the lack of them, over dinner.

Neither Christopher nor Jack had visited her in her tent. Part of her hoped that Jack would stop by, but he seemed content with their normal exchanges during work and at meals, and left her alone in the evenings to be by herself—as he had done that evening in Nairobi, behavior that everyone else had criticized him for. But not her. He didn’t crowd her and she liked that.

Leaning forward, Jack whistled. “Yes, that looks like the line of a jawbone. It looks hominid too. Careful how you go … you should get to the teeth soon. If there are any left.”

She craned forward again.

“Clever of you to spot the sweep of that jaw, Natalie. You seem to have an eye.”

“Years of doing jigsaws as a girl,” she replied. “It gives you a taste for patterns.”

“Hmm. Maybe. But, look, you need better tools than the ones you’ve got. You’ll never be a crack paleontologist with shoddy tools—you need some wire brushes. This jigsaw is no toy.” He stood up. He had leant his shotgun against the wall of the gorge and he reached for it. “There’s a troop of baboons not far away, so the Land Rover’s all locked up. I’ll have to go and get the key from Daniel. I’ll be as quick as I can. Okay?”