AK Page 20

  “Okay.”

  After the dances there was a simple meal, every mouthful, even the wines, grown in Nagala. Ten minutes before the minister was due to leave Paul spoke to him again.

  “There’s something I’d like you to see.”

  As they walked toward the edge of the ridge Paul glanced back.

  “You don’t bother with a bodyguard?”

  “Still thinking like a Warrior, Paul? No, I’ve given them up. Ah!”

  The sigh of happiness came as the path turned and the view opened below them, mile after mile of brown bush mottled with flat-topped trees, hazy with heat, yearning for the rains. Barely visible below the farther hills the line of the West Trunk Highway snaked beside the old railway. Half a mile away five elephants loitered beneath a stand of tamarisks.

  “You seem to have got on top of the poachers, Paul.”

  “The DDA have really got their act together. We’ve rounded up the last three gangs practically before they got started. Do you remember this place?”

  “Of course—it was the day the war ended. There was a fallen thunder tree there.”

  “No. There. You were only nine, weren’t you? Sizes and distances are bound to look smaller.”

  “I suppose so … Ah, that explains … I had an odd feeling that somehow we’d got the monument in the wrong place. I felt the camp must have been farther from the ridge—you remember how the men shot deer and we feasted and talked and sang all night.”

  “You fell asleep, Francis.”

  “But I was there. That was what mattered. It matters still—oh, if only I could tell these children how much!”

  They walked back. The minister shook hands with everyone. His helicopter rose and clattered away. Guests and children filed off to their cars and buses. Caterers cleared. Paul thanked his own staff and sent them off, congratulated his excited daughters on their singing, stood for a little with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, then suggested she drive the children home. He could do with the walk.

  When he was alone he strolled back to the edge of the ridge to watch what the elephants were up to. It was nine years now since Michael had imported the first small herd from Zimbabwe, four since poachers had managed to kill one. In a few years they might start to need culling. Oh, if Michael could have been standing in this place at this moment, warden of the National Park. That had always been his dream, but he’d never truly recovered from what had been done to him in the pumping hall, and he’d always been too busy with bigger things. In the end he had let the work kill him. That, too, had been part of the price Nagala had paid. So now Paul was living the dream instead. Never in your life can you achieve every detail of what you desire—and so many other dreams had come true.

  He turned and walked back toward the monument, smiling as it came in view. Francis was really too clever—he’d known there was something wrong, but then the explanation about childhood and distances had satisfied him. Anyway if Paul had told him the truth he would have understood.

  Paul gazed at the monstrous slab. Twelve tons, and beneath that a couple of tons of concrete foundation, and beneath that a foot or so of earth compacted to the hardness of concrete by the weight above it, and under that one old gun, an AK-47, airborne model, with a slanting gouge across the receiver cover. Plugged, greased, and wrapped. If in a hundred years somebody were to dig down and find it and assemble it, cock it, and pull the trigger, it would still fire.

  Not much chance of that. Lie in peace, old friend. Don’t need you any more.

  Twenty Years On Perhaps: B

  With tired but still elastic steps the man climbed toward the ridge. A boy laboured panting behind him—he’d need a rest at the top, the man thought, but there was an all-night march before them if they were going to reach the river by dawn, and if they didn’t it would mean a waterless day in the bush. The mines were laid. The train would pass any minute now. A strike like this, so far into territory the government kept saying was now totally under their control, would bring out the helicopters tomorrow with their heat sensors and their monstrous firepower, and no movement would be safe. The boy wasn’t much of a Warrior, though he was fifteen—Francis at nine had been more use—but if the man carried both guns he should make it. With the war going so badly you didn’t want to lose even a boy like this.

  It was the worst he could remember. There had been other times, of course, when everything had seemed lost, but then the balance had shifted—often for no reason anyone could tell you—until the war seemed almost won. There had been cease-fires, international peace conferences, provisional governments, reconstruction agencies starting to pour money in … but then another coup, or a fresh rebel leader setting up in the mountains with mysterious funds to buy weapons, or an economic collapse and famine and food riots and emergency powers hardening into fresh repression … twenty years …

  But never as bad as this before. The world was bored with Nagala’s endless war. Didn’t want to know about the torture camps and the mass graves. One lot of powers paid for the helicopters and tanks and rocket launchers only in order to stop another lot having a say about what happened in this part of Africa, and the second lot dished out a few old weapons to the resistance, just to keep the pot stirred, but no one wept or felt any more for the people, the suffering helpless people. Nobody outside Nagala, nobody inside.

  Where was a man like Michael Kagomi, a woman like Madam Ga? Michael, gunned down outside his cheap hotel in London? Madam Ga, strangled in her own house by “burglars”? Or Francis Papp, disappeared into a government camp four years back when the last cease-fire broke down? Or Jilli, simply disappeared, long before that? The only certain unchanging presence was the war. My mother, the eater of people, hungry for ever. One day she will eat me.

  The path twisted to take the last steepness below the ridge. Afternoon lay like a great slab of dusty motionless heat over the bush. Insects shrilled and clicked but nothing else stirred. A mole cricket called.

  He rounded a corner and stopped. A child stood in the path, a boy about ten, naked except for a loincloth, staring at him. Thin, but not starving. Not a bush child either. No water nearer than the river.

  The man understood all this in the instant of seeing but for another half second didn’t move. Something about the child held him, the nakedness, the harmlessness, the clear gaze. Then his hand was flashing toward the AK where it lay folded beneath his shoulder blanket while his body flung itself sideways and down.

  The half second had been too long. The blast of rapid fire from a bush behind and to the left of the child caught him before either movement had properly started. The bullets hit him in the chest. He never heard the blast, barely felt the explosion of pain. The impact slammed him backward, flailing. As he fell his head crashed against a loose rock beside the path, but he was dead before that happened.

  A scream of fright remained after the gunfire ended. Feet slapped away down the path. The child stepped past the body and peered around the corner in time to see the boy who’d been following the man disappear down the path. He turned, held up one finger and pointed at the body, held up another and pointed down the hill, then moved his hands apart, palm down. Two, that’s all. He bent and picked up the dead man’s gun.

  A man’s voice called from the top of the ridge, softly “What’s up?” A boy, older than the child, eased himself from where he’d been lying under a bush, stood up, and answered. Two men appeared. All three came down the path and stared at the dead man.

  “Oh, my God!” said one of the men. “It’s Paul Kagomi!”

  Silence, apart from the click and creak of insects. “He shouldn’t have gone for his gun,” said the boy who’d fired the shots.

  “What the hell was he doing here without us knowing?” said the other man.

  No answer, but before any of them could speak a new noise, a deep, distant wump, barely more than a movement of air. They turned
and stared across the plain. One of them pointed. Twelve miles away, just beneath the hills, floated the trail of smoke from an old steam locomotive. At the point where it became sharpest and densest rose a cloud of different smoke, swirling, mottled brown and black, still expanding.

  “He got there first,” said one of the men.

  “And the choppers will be all over here tomorrow,” said the other. “We’ll have to get back to the river, at least. I’ll tell Nanda. Hide the body best you can, get it off the path, cover the blood marks.”

  “But it’s Paul Kagomi!” said the first man.

  “Can’t be helped. No chance of making it to the river with a body to carry. Don’t worry, Doso—not your fault. He shouldn’t have been here without clearing it through HO, and like you said he shouldn’t have gone for his gun.”

  While the man and the boy rolled the body off the path and under a bush the child used the metal stock of the gun to scrape up handfuls of earth which he scattered along the path to hide the blood stains. There weren’t a lot. The heart had stopped pumping at once. He finished and stood looking at the gun. It was really old, with a deep gouge across the receiver cover, but it must still be okay or the man wouldn’t have been carrying it. AKs never wore out. The folding stock wasn’t as handsome as a wooden one, but it was lighter, and it meant you could hide the gun better, tuck it in under a shoulder blanket, for instance.

  I hope Nanda will let me keep it, thought the child. It’s time I had a gun of my own.

  A Biography of Peter Dickinson

  Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf’s crazy twin, but he’s just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.

  He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn’t get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather’s sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.

  When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn’t have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.

  He’s led an ordinary kind of life—not much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.

  He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it’s a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter’s screams, not the boy’s.)

  And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine Punch and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.

  He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.

  Peter says he didn’t become a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can’t be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They’ve probably clipped one of its wings so that it can’t hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it’s still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he’d still be a writer.

  But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fiction–y kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children’s story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children’s book was made into a TV series.)

  Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriter—one draft to see what he’s got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all’s well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of process—easier in some ways, harder in others.

  The ideas come from all over the place—daydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he’s heard or read—a voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter’s mind and said, “Write me.” Then he’ll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.

  Peter has written all sorts of books—crime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won’t be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.

  Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer’s daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

  Here are Peter and his brother Richard as children in Africa, where many of Peter’s books take place. In fact, he used this photo as a pivotal clue in Perfect Gallows.

  The family came “home” in 1935 so that the boys could go to British boarding schools, but within a few months, when Peter was seven, their father died suddenly of a strangulated gut, leaving their mother with very little money. Their British relations were close knit and supportive, and in 1936 Peter was sent to Saint Ronan’s, a prep school in Worthing with a charismatic headmaster named Dick Harris. Pictured here are Peter (in the red jersey), age eight, with his mother, elder brother, Richard, and younger brother Hugh.

  This is a photo taken in 1936 during a family holiday at Stutton. The Fisons had been very good friends with Peter’s father and stayed close to his family after his death. They invited the Dickinsons to stay with them for several vacations at their house on one of the Suffolk inlets. They would spend most of the day in boats on a local pond or on the nearby beach. Here you can see the kids lined up on the beach from tallest to shortest. From left to right: Elizabeth Fison, Peter’s brother Richard, Peter, Gay Fison, and Peter’s youngest brother, David. Peter doesn’t remember why his brother Hugh is not in this picture. Perhaps he was taking the photo.

  Here’s a picture from 1937. One of Peter’s aunts had a home on the Sussex coast at Littlestone, and Peter’s family used to go there during school vacations. Peter remembers that they used to play a lot of games there, including a family version of hide-and-seek. Here you can see them taking a break for some ice cream. From left to right: Peter’s cousin Anthony Butterwick, Richard, Peter, and Hugh. David was too young then to play these sorts of games.

  When the German invasion of England looked imminent, St. Ronan’s was evacuated to Bicton Park, a great red-brick Georgian house in the idyllic setting of a large deer park in Devon. Peter’s novel Hindsight is based on his time here. The curriculum was mainly Latin, Greek, and math, with some French, history, and geography, and only one
English class a week. Peter was never asked to write a story, either while at St. Ronan’s or later.

  In 1941 Peter took the scholarship exam for Eton against the advice of Dick Harris, who thought he wasn’t up to it. But his math score saved him, even though he was the bottom scholar in a bad year, just as his father had been, and he was accepted. After an uncertain start at Eton, Peter enjoyed his time there. He turned out to be fairly good at the bizarre versions of soccer they played, and was elected to Pop, the equally bizarre society of school prefects chosen not by the authorities but by the students themselves.

  In 1948 Peter went to King’s College, Cambridge, on a closed exhibition (a minor sort of scholarship, exclusive to Etonians). He feels he wasted his time there and worked ineffectually, having taken little part in the many extracurricular activities on offer. After a year he switched from classics to English studies. He failed to get the hoped-for first in his finals, but the college gave him a bursary to study for a PhD. Halfway through this, he walked into the dean’s office. The dean looked up from the letter he was reading and asked, “Would you like a job on Punch?”

  Peter Dickinson at an editorial meeting at Punch in the early 1950s. (Photo credit: Picture Post, Bert Hardy)

  Peter and Mary Rose Barnard (1926–1988) were married at Bramdean, Hampshire, on April 26, 1953. She was the daughter of a naval officer who was senior enough to ride a white horse along with the other Lords of the Admiralty in the coronation procession for Queen Elizabeth. Peter and Mary set up house in an apartment in Pimlico, he continuing at Punch and she working in the display department of Heal’s furniture store.

  In 1955 Philippa Dickinson was born at Wingrave, near Aylesbury, Bucks; Polly arrived thirteen months later in a small house behind Harrods in London; John came five years after that; and James followed eighteen months after John in the terrace house in Notting Dale, London, where the family lived for the next twenty years. Here the family is pictured at the weekend cottage on a hill above Crondall, Hampshire, with a marvelous view northeastward over the village and across miles of countryside. This is the setting for The Devil’s Children, the third book in the Changes Trilogy.