THE LAST SAVANNA by Mike Bond

Author:Mike Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mandevilla Press

21

NAIROBI’S FIRST LIGHTS were winking on as the plane climbed through seven thousand feet and swung north towards the dark wall of Mount Kenya above its dregs of cindery cloud. The port engine drummed steadily at 6500, flashing back occasional spurts of flame, but it had better compression and was a little cooler than the starboard side. MacAdam began to let himself hope it wouldn’t blow, that they’d reach Marsabit and that the engine wouldn’t snap the new rod when they took off from Marsabit with his squad and their guns and desert rations for two weeks.

The eastern savanna shifted from charcoal to deep purple; to the west a feverish orange moon sank into the Kiambu hills. The end of night, MacAdam thought, when the lion slinks into camp and clamps his jaws on your neck and carries you off with no one knowing. In fear of this we’ve killed all lions and now stupid cattle and egocentric goats graze the tall savanna to stones. In fear of this we create marriage and the ownership of women, so Rebecca could never come to me.

Light raced across the savanna, pockets of brush standing out like the dark spots on a lion cub’s belly when it rolls in the grass for its mother to lick it. Nothing so lovely as a lioness’ love for her cubs, or the gazelle’s for her fawn that the lioness will kill to feed her cubs. Nothing so lovely as holding you, Rebecca, naked all night in the Blue Posts at Thika, with the bedbugs biting and the twin cascades crashing beyond the flimsy walls, or holding you for a moment in a Grevillia Grove cloakroom while the maid waited outside with your raincoat, or in a corridor somewhere, the black and white tiled floor like a chessboard on which we never learned the moves.

Outside the window the savanna grew tamed by light; against the plexiglass MacAdam saw himself as a man defeated by his self-deceptions, his squarish face and bold chin a parody of resolution; see, he taunted himself, how the faults and fissures grow, the stress of joyless time? He was the man who’d kept it all inside, where it had rotted, poisoned him. He’d become the man of stone he’d always tried to be, right from the day his mother had sat weeping into her hands on the sofa, “Your Daddy’s gone, my poor darling. Oh God, Jesus, Daddy’s gone…” And he’d been tough where she had not, hadn’t he? His mother’s tears, her print silk dress, the sofa fabric blue and gold, the patient parlor plants—they never went away, he could call them up at will. They came in the night, unbidden as the memory of Rebecca’s small strong white hands clenching his, of her soft taut voice— “Oh God, I love you, Ian! But I can’t go with you. I can’t, I can’t!” He shifted from his reflection and that made his ribs throb as if broken anew; he could not breathe against the pain, wanted to rip off the wide bandages imprisoning his chest.

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