A half-hour on Kai turns off the highway on to a dirt road. They traverse a metal bridge high over a slow, wide river and pass through a town. From there they continue east down a long, straight dirt track. Here the landscape is different again, even less cultivated. There are scatterings of black boulders that seem to absorb the sunlight, so starkly black in the dazzling day that Adrian finds it hard to focus upon them. A short series of hills juts out of the flat landscape to cast a shadow over the surrounding earth.
They stop to stretch their legs, the men set off in opposite directions to urinate — Abbas follows Kai. The air is sweet and heavy. Adrian’s clothes and skin are covered in a layer of dust. He shakes his head and dust falls from his cropped hair. The ground at his feet is cracked, and when he relieves his bladder the liquid sends up a small spurt of dust and a white butterfly. From the ice box in the boot Kai fetches cold drinks and the three drink them standing by the car. A man steps out of nowhere and exchanges greetings with Kai. His eyes flick over Adrian with interest, though it is to Kai he addresses his words. From what Adrian can guess, from the nods, the gestures, he is asking where they are going. Kai offers him the empty drink bottle and the man reaches out to accept it gravely. Again and again his eyes slip back towards Adrian. In time he moves on. To where? From where? Adrian cannot imagine. For on either side of them the road reaches out for miles.
It is one o’clock when they turn off the road down a descending and increasingly narrow and uneven track. The track is so overgrown that light is scarce. After ten minutes Kai pulls over and applies the handbrake. ‘We’ll walk from here.’ So they gather their things and set off, Kai in the lead, the cooler from the boot on his shoulder.
‘Have I been here before?’ asks Abass.
‘No, we used to come here before you were born.’
‘How come you never brought me?’
‘It was never possible,’ says Kai, shifting the weight of the cooler, waving off Adrian’s offer of help. ‘There was a lot of fighting around here.’ He turns to Adrian and points somewhere up into the trees ahead of them. ‘There’s a dam up there, a big hydroelectric project.’
‘Are we going to see the dam?’ Abass asks.
‘Not this time.’
Abass runs up behind Kai and butts the small of Kai’s back with his head. Kai catches hold of Abass and swings him around with his free arm. They walk, play-fighting as they go, Abass, head lowered like a small ram. Kai, catching him, swinging him, never breaking his stride.
The call of birds, footsteps on dry leaves, an occasional insect, nothing else. Sweat trickles down Adrian’s back. How hot it is even in the shade! As he walks on Adrian hears a rushing in the air, a white noise. Ahead of them he can see light, muted by the leaves, transforming in the distance into pure, pale, shimmering brilliance. They are by a river. He can see the reflection of the sun upon water. Beneath his feet the way turns to rocks, and he picks his route over and between them. They follow the curve of the river. The noise fills Adrian’s head. Kai turns and calls to him; Adrian can see Kai’s mouth open and close, but hears nothing. He cups his ears. Kai points and Adrian stumbles towards him, his gaze following Kai’s finger.
It is the height of a three-storey building. To Adrian the breadth is as impressive as the depth, for it is some fifty yards wide. Powerful, determined, inexorable, the water is like a great herd of animals, plunging from a cliff of rock into the silent pool.
They picnic on the rocks and then swim. Adrian feels the glow of the cool water enter him. The river is faster moving than it looks and they give in to the current, floating downstream on their backs and ending up in an eddy by the riverbank. They dry off in the sunlight. Adrian’s skin feels clean and smells sweet and faintly brackish. Abass plays with the empty beer bottles in a rock pool, half filling them with water and watching them bob on the surface. Two boys appear with home-made fishing rods and come over to stare at Adrian. After a few minutes Kai tells them to go away. They obey, wordlessly and without apparent resentment, and join Abass at his rock pool. Later, when Adrian goes to relieve himself behind a bush, they will follow him and at his insistence depart, repeating his words between themselves, Buggeroff, buggeroff.
Adrian watches Abass sitting hunched over his knees, absorbed in the tiny underwater world of the rock pool, feels a surge of tenderness for him and says, ‘He’s a lucky kid.’ Immediately he feels foolish, the absurdity of envying anybody here their luck, though somehow he does.
But Kai merely replies, ‘Yes, I know. I was just like him.’
‘In what way?’
‘We used to come here a lot. Actually, probably it was less than half a dozen times, but then, in a kid’s life, that’s a tradition, right? Six years, as much as you can remember. This one time we’d come after the rains, you should see how much water there is then. I tried to swim under the waterfall. I thought I’d find a secret cave. I nearly drowned. My mother gave me such a whipping.’
Adrian thinks of his own childhood. He would never have dared do such a thing. Not for the danger to himself, but for fear of disappointing his mother. He stands up.
‘Come on!’ he says. And plunges into the water.
It is after four when Kai says, ‘We’d better be going. It’s not a good idea to drive too much into the dark. There are some crazy drivers.’
They pack up and head back to the car. Kai reverses up the track. Old Faithful’s engine whines, the tyres spin on the gravel, but Kai doesn’t stop until he finds a place to execute a tight three-point turn. They pass through and over the same series of towns and bridges, this time with the sun on the other side of the road. The earth is redder now, the light softer. It fills Adrian with well-being, now after a week of illness, a week spent recovering, he feels ready to get back to work.
An hour and a half into the journey they make a detour into a town to find petrol. There is a queue, the petrol pump is hand-operated and slow. So while Kai waits, Adrian allows Abass to lead him towards a stall selling cassettes, where four speakers relay music so loudly it is distorted. Unperturbed, the boy peruses cassettes. Adrian moves away from the noise to a distance where he can still keep an eye on Abass. Around him are stalls displaying trainers, plastic kerosene containers, hats. On the far side of the square a taxi pulls over, the driver takes his fare from the passenger and opens the boot, releasing three handsome, deep-brown goats. The ground is dusty and strewn with paper, like a fairground at the end of the evening.
He recalls his father in the nursing home towards the end. Adrian had taken Kate with him on the visit and they had stopped at a funfair on the way. The lights, the cool October air, the noise. By contrast the atmosphere inside the nursing home: overheated, static, hushed. They had stayed for an hour, during which Adrian had been unable to work out truly whether his father remembered any of the events Adrian described or even knew who he was. At the end of the visit he had turned at the door to say goodbye and the old man had raised his hand, fingers closed around his palm, and held up a wavering thumb. At first Adrian hadn’t understood. And then he had seen it, the thumbs-up sign. It had once been their joke. There was a country somewhere in the world where the thumbs-up was the equivalent of the V sign. Where was that? Thailand? Iran? He’d read about it and told his father. Later his father had performed the gesture — emphatically — behind the back of a priggish waiter. By then the disease had already begun to strip his brain of cells, though none of them knew it yet. Adrian giggled into his Coke glass.