Ritual

Mossy licks his lips and looks at the boots, the wig. 'What? Does he have you go out there wearing it? You strap it on and go out and give them a little show, do you? Is that how it works?'

But Skinny's not looking at Mossy. 'No,' he says eventually. 'Not me.'

'Not you. Then who?'

Again Skinny is silent. Mossy thinks he's lost him, because he's got this distant look on his face. When at last he speaks his voice is sad, reflective. 'My brother.'

'Your brother?' Mossy sits up. 'You never said nothing about your brother. What? Is he here too?'

'Look at me.' Skinny raises a hand and waves it vaguely over his body. 'I am small. My brother, him is small, like me, smaller.' He glances at the cage in the wall, and Mossy gets a moment of creepiness, a feeling that something might suddenly put its face to the bars. 'But him,' he whispers, 'him is made bad. Bad here.' He runs his fingers down his face. 'And here.' He holds his hands to his back. 'Him just made bad. Like a baboon.'

Mossy wants to speak but there's a lump in his throat and he can't get the words out. The word 'baboon', said in such a low whisper, has sent shivers up and down his spine. He's thinking of the feeling he gets sometimes that there's someone else in the place, someone who comes and goes in the night. 'So is he here, your brother?' he manages eventually. 'Here? In this place?' He gestures at the cage. 'Is that where he sleeps?'

Skinny nods. He looks at the cage for a while, then he turns to the grille on the window, at the place that is bent up. Not big enough to let an adult through. But someone else. Someone the size of a child, maybe.

Eventually Mossy clears his throat, tries to shake himself back to reality. 'Things are different here, you know. This is England. The rules aren't the same. Not the way they are back home.'

'I know.'

'You need to realize. What you do, the things you've done, people ain't going to like it. Not a bit.'

'I know, I know,' Skinny says, and his voice is so resigned, so tired, it makes Mossy want to cry. 'And I know that after everyt'ing I do here I go'n' to have to run. Run until the world end.'

35

17 May

The sun crossed the valley slowly. Back at home Flea sat next to the open window under the wisteria, her mother's gardening jacket wrapped round her, and watched the shadows of the trees move across the top lawn. Even though there was still poison in her system — she could feel it in the back of her throat, the way every now and then she caught the world jerking sideways out of the corners of her eyes — her body felt clean and light, as if the drug had stripped away layers she didn't need, leaving her thoughts brightened and uncluttered.

For some reason she kept coming back to one part of the trip: what Dad and Kaiser had been saying in the hotel.

Is it strange to be back in Africa?

This is South Africa, not Nigeria. This isn't the place it happened.

That conversation, she knew, was a memory. Not an hallucination, but a memory she had levered up with the help of the ibogaine. But it had reminded her of another memory: something strange her father had said on the day he had introduced her to Kaiser, something that made her wonder if Dad had been more involved in whatever had happened in Nigeria than he'd ever let on.

It had happened years and years ago, when she and Thom were still little and Kaiser's house on the hill was new, untouched by his interminable tinkering and building, by the way he insisted on burrowing into the hillside like a termite. So she didn't understand why now all she could think about was her parents talking that day in the nineteen eighties as they came up the driveway in the family's Cortina.

'Don't you think it's a kick in the face of science?' David Marley was at the wheel, dressed in a corduroy jacket with a gypsyish spotted scarf tied at his neck. 'What they did to him in Africa? Calling him and the team immoral. I mean, since when has morality had a seat at the dinner table of science?'

Flea could see it all in vivid colour. She remembered sitting in the back seat with Thom, both of them wearing shorts and Start-rite sandals. She remembered looking out of the window at the way the valley plunged from Kaiser's house into nothing. She remembered the house, she even remembered her mother's pink polka-dot blouse. But she couldn't remember anyone saying exactly what had happened to Kaiser in Africa. As if they hadn't dared voice the words.

'Don't you think the university should be had up by the international community for sacking him?'

'Not really,' Jill Marley said. 'If you want my opinion what he did really was immoral. It was outrageous. Inhuman.'

'Inhuman?' David Marley swung the car angrily to a halt in front of the house. He switched the engine off and turned to his wife. 'How can you say that? How can you say that? Sometimes I think you're as bad as the rest of them.'

'Oh, darling,' Jill had said, with a shrug. 'I'm sure you don't mean that…'

So very typical of Mum, that little shrug — the casual way her shoulders went up. It was always the same: Dad wanting a fight, Mum soothing him, defusing the situation, catching him on his hindlegs so he had nowhere to go, with that little back-down, that little shrug.

There was a crunch of wheels on gravel outside. Back in the present Flea sat up, blinking. A car had pulled up to the front of the house. After a moment or two she got up and went to the window, her thoughts moving slowly, woodenly. She pulled back the curtain, thinking how grainy the material felt in her fingers. Thom was getting out of his battered black car. She stood, a little dreamily, thinking how odd, she'd forgotten he was coming. He'd been right when he said she'd forget.

He got out of the car and came round to the back, stopping briefly to look down the garden, and for a moment she was inside his head, seeing it through his eyes — the trees and the lake, the Bridge of Sighs, the way the terraces wound down and out of sight, disappearing into the tangle of fields. The way it was falling apart.

She went to the back door and opened it. It was warmer outside than in. The sun shone on the black roof of the car.

'Hi.'

'Hi.'

He was dressed a little clumsily, in a worn-out suit and tie, the toes of his shoes a little scuffed. She thought about the way he'd been sitting in her hallucination of the night in the hotel room, with their gear around them: the way Kaiser and her father had turned away from him so they could talk in private. Thom. Always the excluded one.

She took down the Ford Focus keys from the back of the door, still a bit disconnected from her body, as if it wasn't really her hand reaching out to the hook, and handed them to Thom.

'There's a full tank,' she began, then had to stop because there were tears in her eyes.

'Flea?'

She shook her head and put a hand on his arm, fixing her eyes on it, studying it, until she had the tears under control. 'Be careful,' she said, in a small voice. 'Please be careful.'

He put his arms round her, and even though he was slight, not muscular, she felt momentarily enclosed by something — protected. He smelled of soap, something ridiculously floral, like geranium, because he'd never know to wear something manly. 'Don't worry about me. I'm a big boy now.'

She wanted to say, No, you're not. You're still my little brother, but she didn't. She smiled and nodded, and when he'd gone she stood in the doorway for a long time, watching the evening sun moving across the terraces and thinking how different their lives could have been but for a sinkhole in a desert thousands of miles away.

During that afternoon in the custody suite there was a moment when Mabuza's anxiety crossed into something more profound. If Caffery had had to describe it he'd have said it was the only moment he truly saw Mabuza afraid. Maybe with all the things they were discussing he had a reason to be afraid, but he only went to that deeper level when the conversation turned to the subject of the Tokoloshe.