‘I suppose we could hold hands and whistle Thus Spake Zarathustra,’ Gaby suggested.
She saw Shepard’s face crease to laugh, then he suddenly pressed a forefinger to her lips.
‘Shh. They’re here. Look.’
They came out of the darkness beneath the shade trees, the big lioness first, head held high, nostrils flared, mouth open, tasting the night. Then came two younger females, moving wide to cover the queen’s flanks. Behind them came the cubs. There were nine of them in two litters; some were noticeably larger and more capable than others. They followed the chief lioness in a loose Indian file, foraging two or three steps out of line to sniff a thorn bush or wildebeest turd. An old female with sagging jowls and loins brought up the rear.
The pride passed within ten feet of the front of the Mahindra. One of the cubs sat down, stuck its rear leg in the air and licked its crotch. The matriarch looked at the glowing horizon and the 4x4 with its spellbound passengers and moved on. The cubs followed. The lions vanished into the great darkness.
‘The rangers have been watching them,’ Shepard said. ‘They told me where to find them. They’ve lost two, one to hyenas, one that got pushed off the teat. But I think they’ll make it now.’
‘Shepard,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘Thank you. That was a real privilege.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ Shepard said. He started the car and drove back along the ancient wildebeest track beneath the huge bright stars of the southern hemisphere.
‘Tell me about your children,’ Gaby asked. ‘Your cubs.’
Their names were Fraser and Aaron. Fraser was thirteen, Aaron just turned eleven. Fraser was the one graced with charisma. The world would always come to his fingertips without him ever having to reach out to it. Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted, but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, Aaron was the one whose name the world would know. Fraser would make hearts, break hearts and be happy. Aaron’s happiness would always be bought, and so more highly valued. Facing Gaby’s jealousy of others who had a deeper and prior demand on him, from a life and relationship she could neither share nor erase, Shepard said that the boys had been the only good thing to have come out of his marriage.
‘We marry young,’ he said, ‘the people of the plains states. The winter people. Something deep in the psyche, a need for someone to shelter you from the big sky, a pair of nice warm feet to share your bed. She met me at a skate meet. I was in my soph year at Iowa State, majoring in biochemistry with minor biophysics. And speed-skating. She had sass: she came right up to me, congratulated me on my win and said I had the cutest thighs she’d ever seen. Also, I had the most visible underwear line she’d ever seen. Also, she’d been a fetishist for guys in tights ever since Christopher Reeve made her believe a man really could fly.
‘We got married next spring. It was too soon, we were too young. But how do you know that when you’re only twenty? You’re not even sure what you are, let alone what you want. But the world forces us to take all the big decisions before we have the wisdom to make them right. Education, career, relationships, what you are to do with the rest of your life: half your life’s big decisions are made before they allow you to do as trivial a thing as vote. You can raise a family but they won’t allow you to buy a drink in a bar.
‘We got married in the hot flush, wet-dream, can’t eat, tear-each-other’s-clothes-off stage of love. We never imagined it would change; when it did, we thought it was dying. That’s when we decided to have Fraser. Rather, that’s when Carling decided to have Fraser. No, that’s mean. We did a good thing for a bad reason, and of course it didn’t work out the way we’d planned, so we screwed up tighter inside ourselves, scared that all that was holding us together was the kid. We had just moved to UCSB to begin my PhD when Aaron was born. Carling had got bored with playing great earth-muffin by then and found a job in an architect’s office. All the money went straight into child care, but it was away from barf and Sesame Street. I had to work nights to get the hardware time, Carling was Ms Nine-to-Five, so I ended up running all over town in this hulk of a yellow Volvo we called The Pig, getting groceries, picking up from school, dropping off at daycare and trying to sleep, eat, read, vacuum and relax in between. Which I suppose is great for father-son bonding but not for a marriage. Certainly not a marriage. Four hours of overlap leaves a lot of leeway for infidelity. I’m getting mean again. And bitter.’
‘She cheated on you?’ A hail of meteorites kindled away to nothing in the sky above the Mara plain. You could see forever in that sky, Gaby thought. Outwards and inwards. And backwards, on these nights that were so still and warm and close you could hear the continent breathing.
‘With her boss in the architecture firm. All the clichés. That’s what rankled most. It was all the clichés. You imagine that your life partner, your lover, the mother of your children, should be able to surprise you, even in that. Not her. All the clichés. She kept the kids. She couldn’t keep the man, though. I said I wouldn’t get mean and bitter, but this still gives great and deeply petty pleasure. All the time she was cheating on me with him, he was cheating on her with a woman he met in a leather club. All the time Carling was standing in front of the judge saying how this man had the lifestyle that would mean the best possible future for her children, he was swinging from Miss Rawhide’s ceiling by his balls. I laughed to bust a gut when I heard that.’
‘Do you miss the boys?’
‘I miss them like I would miss my right arm. When they aren’t here I feel like I’m only partially complete. They come out twice a year, stay for a week at Easter, longer in late summer.’
‘Is this a warning?’
‘I suppose it is. Not so much of when they’re here as when they go.’
‘You’re presuming a lot about this relationship.’
‘When you get to be a divorced fortysomething twelve thousand miles from your kids, you learn not to play at relationships. It’s a quantum affair. On or off. Everything or nothing. No games, Gaby.’
‘I don’t play games, Shepard.’
‘You do.’
‘Not with you.’
‘Games players can’t stop.’
‘Shall we end it here then?’ Gaby asked, temper flaring like a sudden consuming savannah fire.
‘That’s what I mean, Gaby. Games. What do you want?’
‘I want you, Shepard.’
‘I want you too. I want this red-haired, green-eyed Celtic fury with her incomprehensible and barbarous accent and her freckled skin that is like a little girl’s and her body that is like the wisest, most sinful whore in hell’s and her too-quick temper and her pride and her ambition and her recklessness and her childishness and her selfishness and her generosity and her bravery and her exuberance.’
‘You men talk the biggest load of oul’ shite.’
‘But it’s guaranteed fresh shite every day.’
The table was laid for dinner back at the camp. The rangers stood by. Gaby ducked into the tent and emerged with a bundle of fabric.
‘Present for you. Quid pro quo. Old football tradition; swapping shirts.’ Shepard unfolded the bundle, frowned a moment at the print of the masturbating nun on the front and her confession, now washed almost illegible. He smiled, stood up, unbuttoned his shirt and removed it. Before he could slip on the T-shirt Gaby placed a hand on his chest and drew him, as if it were magnetized, into the tent on the right.
They did not do the Serbian thing that night, but what they did do was so very good and so very long that they almost forgot about the things behind them in the cold past, and the long fingers with which they touched their lives.