Shepard.
‘You!’ she shrieked, throwing herself on him.
‘You look like a horse with that long hair and those tight lycra shorts,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I would dearly love to pull them down right now and bend you over the substitute’s bench.’
‘Been thinking about me while I was away?’
‘Nothing but.’
‘So what are you doing up here?’
‘Whisking you off on a date. You’ve got a change of clothes with you?’
‘Yes, casual and work. I not only look like a horse, I smell like a horse.’
‘You’ll smell worse where I’m taking you.’
She stepped back to give him the sideways quizzical look from under her hair she knew no man could resist.
‘You always this insistent?’
‘Always.’
She went to the changing rooms to pick up her bag. Oksana Telyanina was unlacing her boots.
‘You, him, yes?’ she asked, making a fiki-fiki gesture with her left forefinger penetrating circled right thumb and forefinger.
‘I haven’t even got to kiss him yet,’ Gaby said, changing her footwear.
‘He is very cute. Man like this, many woman want to baboon. You want to keep him, remember: Serbski Jeb.’ Oksana mimed pulling a knot tight around a compliant limb. Gaby threw her empty water bottle at her, went out and slung her sports bag into the back of the UNECTA Mahindra in which Shepard was waiting. Shepard placed his palm on her thigh and drove off.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked, not recognizing the trend of the streets.
‘Like I said, on a date,’ Shepard kept his hand firmly on her thigh all the way out of Nairobi, through Keekorok and Olorgesaile and the towns to the west.
‘This is some date,’ Gaby said as the metalled road gave way to red earth.
‘Something to celebrate,’ Shepard said.
‘You got the job.’
He punched a fist into the air.
‘Up, up and away with UNECTA-man! Permanent jet-lag. Permanent Montezuma’s Revenge. Can quote by heart any inflight magazine in the world. I’ll have to buy another suit. There’s a Indian tailor down by the City Market can make you anything in twenty-four hours. He might even run to all-enclosing blue suits.’
‘You’d know about that, speed-skater.’
‘Gaby, I can’t wait. I cannot wait for them to ask me to go somewhere and solve something. Sometimes you actually do get what you want in this life.’
‘I know,’ Gaby said. ‘Sometimes, karma takes a holiday and everyone gets what they want rather than what they deserve. The new East Africa Correspondent for SkyNet Satellite News greets the new UNECTAfrique Peripatetic Executive Director.’
They drove on into the huge west.
‘We’re going to the Mara,’ Gaby said.
‘There’re things I want you to see before they’re gone forever,’ Shepard said.
The red earth road became two tyre tracks on a green, watered plain speckled with many trees. The great wildebeest migration had come in the shadow of the rains to this land. They were like a brown river, meandering, breaking into tributaries and backwaters and loops so wide and lazy the migration seemed to stagnate into a swamp of grazing individuals. But they could not stop, any more than a river could refuse the gravity that drew it to the sea. The Mahindra pushed onward across the great plain. Gaby made Shepard stop on the top of a long ridge that commanded a wide green valley filled with animals. She took her visioncam from the sports bag and stood up in the back of the jeep, panning slowly across the panorama.
‘It won’t catch it,’ Shepard said.
‘I know,’ Gaby said in her football socks and shiny shorts and green and yellow shirt with McAslan: 9 on the back and the SkyNet globe on the front. ‘We never think that all the beauty will go too.’
‘Changed into another kind of beauty,’ Shepard said.
‘A terrible beauty, as Yeats said,’ Gaby said.
The camp had been made between two acacias near the bank of a seasonal tributary of the Mara river. There were two tents, a canvas shittery, a safari shower made from an oil drum and a nozzle, a fire, a table with two folding chairs and three Kalashnikov-armed game wardens with a battered Nissan Safari.
‘We’re in the tent on the right,’ Shepard said.
‘“We’re”?’ Gaby queried.
‘Well, you’re welcome to the one on the left, if you’d prefer. The guys won’t complain. Evening game drive is at five pm. Dinner after dark. If you need a shower, ask the guys. They’re discreet, which means you won’t actually catch them looking at you.’
One of the wardens came with them in the Mahindra as game spotter. The other two went in the other direction in the Nissan: ‘To shoot dinner,’ Shepard said. He drove the jeep himself, following the spotter’s directions to plunge headlong into seemingly impenetrable bush or down impossibly steep bluffs.
‘You love this, don’t you?’ Gaby shouted.
‘I was born eighty years too late,’ Shepard shouted back. ‘I wish I could have lived in the days of the Union Jack and tiffin at the Norfolk and whiskies at the Mount Kenya Safari Club where women weren’t allowed in. The days of Lord Aberdare and Baron Von Blixen and White Mischief, when there was just the land and the animals moving upon it, and the scattered tribes and their cattle.’
‘But you love the Chaga as well.’
‘That’s the dilemma. I love them both, but one will not let the other survive.’
The sun had set by the time they returned to the camp under the acacia trees. The night was as clear and infinitely deep as only African nights can be. The wardens had killed successfully, and set up a table by the camp fire. There was white linen, good crystal and Mozart on a boombox CD player.
‘You’ve put a lot of planning into this,’ Gaby said, showered and dressed in her office uniform of jodhpurs, boots and silk, which was as formal as she could be. ‘What would you have done if I’d said no?’
‘Kidnapped you,’ Shepard said, in the one creased linen suit she had seen on him that first day in Kajiado, which was as formal as he could be. He poured wine. The wardens brought antelope steaks. Afterwards, there was whisky. Gaby rolled the cut glass tumbler between her hands and asked, ‘Can I do that interview now?’
‘Here? Now? For SkyNet?’
‘No.’ She looked at him over the rim of the tumbler, which was another man-trick she had taught herself. ‘For me. I want to know who you are, Shepard. I want to know teeny-bop things: what star sign you are, what your favourite colour is, what you like to drink.’
‘Taurus. Green: the exact shade of your eyes. Three fingers of Wild Turkey with a little ice and a tablespoon of branch water.’
‘Favourite music.’
‘You’re listening to it.’
‘If you were an element, what would you be?’
He paused, momentarily taken aback by Gaby’s change of tack.
‘You mean hydrogen, helium, lithium?’
‘More primitive than that. Earth, air, fire, water.’
‘Earth.’
Yes, you are, Gaby McAslan thought, lighting a cigarette from a candle.
‘What colour are you?’
‘I’ve already told you that.’
‘You’ve told me your favourite colour. I’m asking you what colour you think you are yourself.’
He pondered a moment beneath the slow-turning stars.
‘A kind of faded terracotta; the exact shade my mother’s herb pots used to turn after two summers on the sunny side of the porch.’
Yes, you are telling me the truth, thought Gaby McAslan.
‘What season are you?’
‘This is a funny way to conduct an interview.’