‘Sure,’ he said, seeming to be glad of an excuse for activity. ‘We’ll make you a bed.’
He hopped into the estate car again and hauled all their equipment to one side. In the cleared space he constructed a mattress from the back seats of both cars, and made a thick pillow out of coats and sweaters.
‘The Ritz,’ he said, ‘is at your service.’
I tried a smile and caught sight of it in the driving mirror.
Ghastly. I had a four day beard and sunken pinkish eyes and looked as grey and red as a sunburned ghost.
With more gentleness than I would have thought either of them had in their natures, they helped me out of the car and carried more than supported me over to the station wagon. Bent double, creaking in every muscle, and feeling that my lumbar vertebrae were breaking, I completed the journey, and once lying on the makeshift bed began the luxuriously painful process of straightening myself out. Evan took the groundsheet off my car and spread it over the roof of the station wagon, as much to shut out the heat as for shade.
I wrote again. ‘Stay here, Evan’, because I thought they might start my car with a jump lead, and drive off for help. He looked doubtful, so I added with a fair amount of desperation, ‘Please don’t leave me.’
‘Christ,’ he said, when he read that. ‘Christ, mate, we won’t leave you.’ He was clearly emotionally upset, which surprised me. He didn’t even like me, and in the Special had heaped on the discomfort without mercy.
I drank some more beer, mouthful by separate mouthful. My throat still beat a raging case of tonsilitis out of sight, but the lubrication was slowly taking effect. I could move my tongue better, and it was beginning to feel less like a swollen lump of liver.
Evan and Conrad sat in the front seats of the estate car and began discussing where to go. They had no accommodation reserved at Skukuza, which it appeared was still the nearest camp, and it was two hours drive to the beds booked at Satara.
Satara and the beds won, which seemed good enough for me.
Evan said, ‘We might as well get going, then. It’s too bloody hot here. I’ve had enough of it. We’ll find a patch of decent shade along the road, and stop for lunch. It’s after two, already, and I’m hungry.’
That was a lot more like the Evan I knew and detested. With an inward smile I had another go with the pen.
‘Remember how to get back here.’
‘Someone else can fetch the car,’ said Evan impatiently. ‘Later.’
I shook my head. ‘We must come back.’
‘Why?’
‘To catch Danilo Cavesey.’
They looked from the pad to my face. Then Evan merely said, ‘How?’
I wrote down how. They read it. The air of excited intensity reawoke in Evan, and rapid professional calculations furrowed Conrad’s forehead, for what I was asking them to do was much to their liking. Then a separate, secondary thought struck both of them, and they looked at me doubtfully.
‘You can’t mean it, dear boy,’ Conrad said.
I nodded.
‘What about the person who helped him?’ Evan asked. ‘What are you going to do about him?’
‘He’s dead, now.’
‘Dead?’ He looked incredulous. ‘You don’t mean... Clifford Wenkins?’
I nodded. I was tired. I wrote ‘Tell you when I can talk.’
They agreed to that. They shut the doors of my car, climbed into the front seats of the station wagon, turned it, and set off along the dirt road which had for so long for me been just a reflection in a three-by-six inch looking glass.
Conrad drove, and Evan made a map. They seemed to have found me by the merest chance, as I had been a mile up a side branch of an equally unkempt road leading to a now dry water hole. The water hole road joined into another, which led finally back to the roads used by visitors. Evan said he could find the way straight back to my car: it was easy. They had searched, he added, every side road they could find between Skukuza and Numbi, and that had been yesterday. Today, they had tried the dry sparse land to the south of the Sabie river, and they had found me on the fifth no-entry they had explored.
After five or six miles we came to a small group of trees throwing some dappled shade: Conrad at once pulled in and stopped the car, and Evan without more ado started burrowing into the red box. They had brought more sandwiches, more fruit, more beer.
I thought I would postpone sandwiches and fruit. Beer was doing wonders. I drank some more.
The other two munched away as if the whole picnic were routine. They opened the windows wide, reckoning that any sensible animal would be sleeping in this heat, not looking out for unwary humans.
No cars passed. Every sensible human, too, was busy at siesta in the air-conditioned camps. Evan, of course, was impervious to heat, and Conrad had to lump it.
I wrote again. ‘What made you start looking for me?’
Evan spoke round bits of ham sandwich. ‘We kept wanting the things of Conrad’s which were in your car. It became most annoying not to have them. So yesterday morning we telephoned the Iguana to tell you how selfish you had been to take them away with you.’
‘They said you weren’t there,’ Conrad said. ‘They said they understood you were going to the Kruger Park for several days.’
‘We couldn’t understand it,’ Evan nodded. ‘In view of your note.’
‘What note?’ I tried automatically to say the words, but my throat still wouldn’t have it. I wrote them instead.
‘The note you left,’ Evan said impatiently. ‘Saying you had gone back to Johannesburg.’
‘I left no note.’
He stopped chewing and sat with his mouth full as if in suspended animation. Then he took up chewing again, and said, ‘No. That’s right. You couldn’t have.’
‘We thought you had, anyway,’ Conrad said. ‘It was just a piece of paper, written in capital letters, saying, “Gone back to Johannesburg. Link.” Bloody rude and ungrateful, dear boy, we thought it. Packing all your gear and buzzing off at the crack of dawn without even bothering to say good-bye.’
‘Sorry.’
Conrad laughed. ‘After that we tried to reach Clifford Wenkins, because we thought he might know where you were, but all we got at his number was some hysterical woman saying he’d been drowned in the Wemmer Pan.’
‘We tried one or two other people,’ Evan went on. ‘The van Hurens, and so on.’
‘Danilo?’ I wrote.
‘No.’ Evan shook his head. ‘Didn’t think of him. Wouldn’t know where he’s staying, for a start.’ He ate a mouthful, reflecting. ‘We thought it a bit unhelpful of you to go off without letting anyone know where you could be found, and then we thought perhaps you’d been damn bloody careless and got lost in the park, and never got back to Johannesburg at all. So after a bit of argy-bargy we persuaded the reception office at Satara to check what time you went out of the Numbi gate on Friday morning, and the gate keeper said that according to their records you hadn’t gone out at all.’
‘We telephoned Haagner, dear boy,’ Conrad said, ‘and explained the situation, but he didn’t seem to be much worried. He said people often talked their way out of Numbi without papers, even though one was supposed to produce receipts to show one had paid for staying in camps. Mr Lincoln would only have to say, Haagner said, that Evan and Conrad were still in the park, and had paid for him. The Numbi men would check with Skukuza, and then let Mr Lincoln go. He also said you couldn’t be lost in the park. You were too sensible, he said, and only fools got lost. People who drove miles down no-entry roads and then had their cars break down.’