But why had she not felt the same about the African that morning? Her anger now had certainly not been shown to him; just the opposite: she’d been terrified. And I wondered once more if the African was someone she’d known, or had seen before, in some traumatic circumstances, and who thus represented an intruder, a fearsome, God-like being whom she could not now face. Whereas these Hell’s Angels, in reality and in their numbers probably far more dangerous, seemed to her fair and easy game.
They built a fire beneath us in the early evening, a dangerous, unkempt fire built too close to the trees and the dry, brambly undergrowth immediately beyond. They grilled hamburgers here and sausages and ate crisps and drank more beer. And afterwards they chanted football songs and slogans and, circling the fire, their faces livid and drunken in the fading light, shouted obscenities across to the other group on the far side of the stream.
Clare, moving silently on her haunches, restlessly changing position on the branch above, peered down at them intently, with disgust. But she was not being critical of their words or their behaviour, I’m sure. This was not the reason for her frustrated contempt, which was more that of a predatory animal, concealed in the trees above a tempting meal it cannot for the moment procure. Eventually I forced Clare back with me to our tree-house.
I woke in the soft, moonlit darkness a few hours later, the light filtering in marble shafts through the leaves. Something was wrong, missing. A branch creaked in the silence somewhere high up in the trees quite near me. But there were other louder noises coming from the end of the lake now, shouts, laughter, a faint, dangerously excited roar on the air. I turned, looking up at Clare’s hammock. She was gone.
I followed her as fast as I could along the shadowed branches and walkways, for I was sure that she’d headed this way. But she had several minutes start on me and though I was well accustomed to the dark, I had never taken this way before at night. Nor had Clare. But she was smaller than I, and more supple and sure-footed, so that I was unable to catch her before she had reached the end of the line of trees. I found her at last, peering down into the glade, sitting astride the same branch we’d been on several hours before, looking down intently on the same campsite beneath.
But now there was real pandemonium beneath us. Some of the youths, half-naked and far gone in drink, were prancing with their girls round the fire, which had been built up since, with heavy old logs, so that it roared like an ox-roast in the night. But others, we saw, more sober in the company, were coming in and out of the circle of firelight, trying to interrupt the revellers, with something else on their mind. They were worried. Someone was missing. They shouted, sometimes grappling with the fire-dancers, asking for help.
‘You can’t fuckin’ leave Hank and the others out there,’ one of them said. ‘They may have all bloody drowned in the lake. We’ve got to help look for ’em. They’ve been gone bloody hours.’
‘Bugger off, will you?’ a lout replied. ‘What’s it to me? You’ve already got half a dozen blokes out there looking for Johnny. They’ll turn up.’
And they did. Five minutes later.
As we watched, like people in the dark gods of a theatre, looking down through the long clefts in the tree at the firelit glade beneath, a new group arrived in the circle of light. One of the youths here, just in his shirt and pants, was dripping wet, like a drowned but boisterous rat. And with him were half a dozen of his friends, equally rowdy, violent even, obviously the search party who had gone out to look for the stray. But the figure of real interest for all of us, both up in the tree and on the ground, was the man they had brought back with them, in the centre of the group, hands roughly tied behind his back, being threatened now with gleaming flick-knives.
It was the African, tall, stooped, a grave, inky figure in the dancing firelight.
‘You wouldn’t bloody believe it!’ one of the youths shouted. He was taller than the others with lank blond hair. He prodded the African viciously with his knife, so that he fell forward, wounded, writhing, onto the ground by the fire. ‘He bloody tried to kill Johnny here, this bloke did.’
The others, who had been dancing round the flames, stopped now, fascinated by this strange prize from the woods. They crowded round the African, who was trying to get to his feet, but without success, for each time he got to his knees someone kicked him down again.
‘I was just going along by the water there,’ the dripping youth who must have been Johnny said, ‘when I heard this tranny blazing away out of nowhere in the trees. I thought it was one of youse buggers with a bird. But then I saw it behind a shed, and there weren’t no one there. Well, I went to pick it up — and the next thing I were going down this bloody great well in the dark. I’d have bloody drowned if it hadn’t been for Hank and the others right then.’
‘Yeah,’ the tall blond youth called Hank confirmed. ‘We were just coming along the same way, heard the row in the bushes behind this shed, and then we saw this fuckin’ buck nigger standing over a great hole in the ground with Johnny screaming fit to bust in the water beneath him.’ He kicked the African again. ‘We were onto the bugger in a flash. Put up no end of a fight, he did. But we nailed him. Didn’t we? You runt!’ He kicked him again. ‘Well, we got Johnny out, tied our jeans together and heaved ’im out with them. And do you know what this darkie had gone and done? A real boy-scout job: he’d built a bloody man trap over this old well for us, lot of dry sticks and things, and put a tranny on top, so as we’d fall straight in. And old Johnny fell for it. He’d have fuckin’ drowned less we’d come along. What do you think of that?’
Hank looked round, addressing the assembled company, his face shining with drunken indignation in the light. ‘What do you make of that?’ he added, in a tone that suggested he spoke now more in sorrow than in anger. Then he suddenly picked the African up from the ground and shook him viciously by the neck, like a chicken. ‘We’re going to have you, mate,’ he said. ‘You can’t go round trying to kill British blokes like that, you know.’ Then he threw him to the ground again. A friend brought Hank a can of beer, and he tore the top off, drinking deeply.
‘I know what we’ll do with you, mate,’ Hank said at last, gasping with pleasure, his thirst quenched. ‘We’ll give you a taste of your own medicine. Tie him up properly, lads. Then we’ll lash him to a pole.’
‘What you going to do, Hank?’ someone shouted in excitement.
‘What these black buggers used to do to us: roast him alive! Tie him to a stake first. Then we’ll roast him alive, and eat him.’
Hank was joking, I thought. But the African didn’t think so. From what I could see of his face, squirming on the ground by the fire, it was clear that he believed Hank. The African was certainly frightened, in a way he’d never been that morning. By the fire — of course, that was it: here was another fire about to maim him again, at the very least. As for Clare, it was obvious from her pleasurable excitement beside me that she fully endorsed Hank’s plans for the man. A suitable demise for her enemy of the morning.
And I thought: an end to my enemy too? Without my touching him: perhaps Willy’s killer, and Laura’s as well — who had then come after Clare and me with the same evil beam in his eye … Yet I realised I hadn’t the slightest proof for any of this. But surely it wouldn’t matter anyway. Hank was only trying to frighten the man.
He wasn’t. They got a long beech branch from somewhere outside the clearing and dug a hole for it near the fire, pounding in sods of earth round its base with their boots. Then they tied the African to it with bits of twine and some cord from the guy ropes from their tents. They put a lot of dry brambles and sticks around his feet then, building the wood up round his legs, to his knees and then higher as the man struggled vainly, his face deformed all over now, appalled in the light from the fire a few yards away.