Cloudburst Page 2

  ‘Yeah, I’m probably as fast as you.’

  He smiled and pushed his fingers through his fringe.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘I know you won your race.’

  ‘I can prove it if you like.’

  He turned to Mum and changed the subject. ‘What are we having for supper?’

  ‘I can. And I will,’ I said.

  A recycling truck had paused at the entrance to our street, with men in fluorescent clothes sorting plastic and cardboard and glass into its sides. What traffic there was had snarled up behind the truck. We passed a convertible Mini with its roof down. Its driver had close-cropped hair and a glossy, trimmed beard. Classical music soared from his car, a swirl of violins accompanied by the crashing of bottles from the recycling bins. The driver was craning his neck to see what was up beyond the truck as the tang of engine fumes swam hot in the air.

  ‘Fish and chips. How does that sound?’ asked Mum.

  ‘I’ll race you home, Mark. You’ll see,’ I said.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said, and to me: ‘But after this afternoon you must be all raced out.’

  ‘I’m not. To the lamp post outside the house.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I have the energy,’ said Mark. ‘In this heat.’

  ‘It’s not that hot,’ I said. ‘I think you’re scared.’

  ‘So I’m scared,’ he said.

  ‘If you won’t race, you must be frightened I’ll win. So in a way I’ve already won.’

  ‘You’ve won then. Congratulations.’

  Mark’s refusal to rise to the challenge just made things worse. Since he wouldn’t be goaded, I was embarrassed to hear myself begging instead. ‘Please?’

  Now turning me down would have been an unkindness, so he relented. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Oh all right. But go easy on me.’

  ‘No. You have to really race. Like it counts. Because it does!’

  ‘Sure.’ He handed Mum his school bag. She was already carrying mine, her phone in the crook of her neck.

  From ahead came another crash of bottles; from behind violins surged, full of engine revs.

  ‘To the lamp post,’ said Mark.

  ‘Yeah, the one outside the house.’

  This wasn’t our first race; we both knew where the finish line was.

  ‘Want a head start?’ Mark asked.

  ‘No.’

  He shrugged. ‘You say go then.’

  I looked up at him. He had our father’s sharp features, softened by Mum’s long eyelashes and wide mouth. The sun had brought out his freckles. His eyes were green, smiling yet somehow serious, giving me my due in the moment.

  I took a deep breath, a step back, shouted, ‘Go!’ and hurtled off.

  I really had improved. A growth spurt, or something new in my technique, had helped me win the sports-day race with ease, just as I would beat Mark now. I heard my feet pounding the pavement, felt my arms pumping me forward, was amazed by the sense of my own acceleration. My reflection flickered in the windows of parked cars. I was in the lead. I could hear Mark behind me, but as we rounded the postbox on the corner I was still holding him off. The pavement widened here. I took the middle line, ran for all I was worth, convinced I could beat him yet at the same time expecting him to surge past me.

  The lamp post was in sight, right outside our house. To get to it we had to cross the street. Approaching the pavement-dip, our footsteps hit the same rhythm, but his stride was longer. I could sense him coming up alongside me, hear him breathing hard, gaining with each step. We were flying. In that moment I both loved and hated him with all my heart.

  Somewhere behind us the man in the Mini had finally managed to swing around the recycling van. With his violins and his groomed beard and his convertible with the roof down in the sunshine, he must have felt freed, entitled to accelerate too. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t hear the engine pitch rise, or feel anything other than the straining of my own body at its newfound top speed. I knew nothing until I jinked off the pavement ahead of the crossing and heard an almighty screech, felt something huge and solid swerving behind me, saw the reflected light from metallic green paintwork bouncing off windscreens as the Mini careened sideways into the rear wheel-arch of a parked Ford Fiesta, ramming it into Mark.

  He wasn’t killed instantly. When I realised what had happened and turned back to see the driver of the Mini climbing out of the passenger door, and Mum running as fast as she could up the pavement, shedding school bags as she came, Mark was still conscious, though pinned between the crushed Ford and a garden wall. I reached him first. He looked confused. His free arm struggled weakly as he fought for breath. It was as if I wasn’t there. His eyes blinked straight through me and then his head slumped sideways against his shoulder, and Mum was screaming, and the Mini driver, to his credit, was tugging in vain at the Ford’s back bumper. He was wearing pointy shoes with no grip. The last thing I remember is seeing him slip and sit down in the blood pooling beside the car.

  5.

  ‘It was nothing,’ I said eventually, head still down beneath Dad’s gaze and the beating sun.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Amelia. ‘Just because it was lucky doesn’t mean it wasn’t helpful.’

  It was a relief to turn and roll my eyes at her.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Mum. ‘Without passports and cash, we’d really be stuck.’

  ‘True,’ Dad agreed. He sounded more thoughtful than relieved.

  ‘So let’s not hang around.’ Mum was in brisk mode now. ‘Forget taxis and hotels. You guys wait back in the cool of the terminal. I’m going to find a pilot with a plane.’

  Mum is nothing if not resourceful. Within half an hour she returned to where we were sitting on our luggage; that was one way of protecting it, I thought. She was accompanied by a smart young guy who had one of those freshly clipped lines by way of a parting in his hair. His jeans had a knife-edge crease in them. Who irons their jeans? This guy, it seemed, and he also wore a row of pens in the top pocket of his shirt, alongside a pair of those aviator sunglasses issued to pilots at birth.

  He put the aviators on as Mum introduced him. His name was Joseph Kahora. The hand he extended for me to shake was surprisingly cool. He shook Amelia’s too; she held on to it just long enough to make the moment awkward for everyone but herself.

  ‘Joseph says he can have us back in Kinshasa in two hours,’ said Mum, looking at him.

  ‘Of course.’ He shrugged. ‘Two hours tops.’ His accent sounded French; it came out ‘tups’.

  ‘But the weather,’ said Dad. ‘We don’t want you to take a risk.’

  ‘What weather?’

  ‘The storm.’

  ‘No storm today.’

  ‘There was a storm.’

  ‘If there was one, it’s gone.’

  Dad looked sceptical.

  Amelia turned to him. ‘This pilot looks like he cares about himself, with his ironing and neat hair and everything. If he was endangering us, he’d be endangering himself too. That wouldn’t make sense.’ She said this at normal volume, though Joseph was right beside her, listening.

  He just nodded and smiled.

  Dad generally gets his way. You don’t get to ‘retire’ at forty from investment banking by being a pushover. But as I’ve said, Mum also worked in the City back in the day, and Amelia makes her own special kind of concrete sense. Together they weren’t pushing back; they were a brick wall.

  So Joseph flew us to Kinshasa. His plane had six seats, two propellers and incredibly flimsy doors. The cracks around them let in daylight and wind, but this didn’t seem to bother Mum; she was just pleased to have solved the problem of making it to the summit in good time. The run in to N’Djili was clear, not a cloud in the sky, and Joseph was an excellent pilot: the plane didn’t even bounce when it hit the tarmac, just settled gently as if landing on a lake.

  6.

  The hotel was flashier than I expected. For starters, it had a pool. Al
so an armed guard on the door, with his gun slung super-casually over his shoulder. The big surprise though was that Xander had already arrived from Nigeria. To sweeten the offer of bringing me on the trip – mostly she just didn’t want to leave me at home to ride my bike, watch YouTube and stare at the ceiling, though after a long first year at boarding school that’s all I wanted to do – Mum had suggested back at Easter that I could bring a friend. She thought I’d pick Amelia, and of course I wanted her to come, but when I mentioned the trip to Xander at school he took it as an invitation too. Xander’s dad is Nigerian and they live there. I’d told him about the safari and he was really up for that. So keen, in fact, that he had got his dad to put him on a plane from Lagos a day early. He was on a lounger by the pool, baggy shirt undone, hat on backwards, drinking Coke with an umbrella in it, when we turned up.

  I introduced Xander to Amelia. It’s always weird when two people you know in entirely different ways meet, with you in the middle, and Xander, who’s normally completely unrufflable at school (he slept through a fire alarm in our first week) seemed instantly twitchy in front of Amelia. She’d changed out of her travelling clothes into a swimsuit as soon as she clocked the pool, and chucked her towel onto the lounger next to Xander’s now, eager to get in the water.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Amelia,’ Xander said so stiffly I laughed out loud. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’ He immediately started doing up his shirt buttons with jittery fingers.

  ‘How many of those have you drunk?’ asked Amelia, twisting her long black hair into a bun to fit beneath her swimming cap.

  ‘It’s Coke.’

  ‘Yes, fully caffeinated and rammed with sugar,’ she replied. ‘You look wired.’

  ‘Three,’ he admitted, his face set to Who-are-you-anyway?

  ‘That’ll be why. Who’s coming for a swim?’

  Without waiting for a reply, she dived straight in, did four lengths of butterfly very quickly indeed – she’s on the county swim squad – and stood up in the shallows to announce, ‘It’s approaching blood temperature in here, at least thirty-five degrees.’

  ‘You’ll get used to her,’ I told Xander. ‘Did you see the guy with the rifle out front?’

  ‘I didn’t notice him,’ he said. ‘But … you’ll get used to it. I told you: Africa’s different.’

  ‘Yeah. We’ve already been robbed, sort of.’

  ‘Don’t stereotype.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Well, that’s either astonishingly bad luck or you were asking for it.’

  I fought the urge to tell him how I’d hit the motorcyclist with the golf ball. I’m not ten any more and I’ve learned that a person’s achievements sound more impressive if retold by someone else. It’d come out in time.

  ‘Just bad luck, I suppose,’ I said instead.

  Mum and Dad came through the lobby. He was wearing a light blue suit, open-necked shirt and brown brogues. She also looked smart; I noticed she’d put on lipstick.

  They knew Xander already because he’d come to stay with us for the February and May half-terms. Mum and Dad like him, mostly because he has this way of making everyone – adults included – think he’s interested in them; it has something to do with asking questions and actually listening to the answers. Anyway, back home in England he’d done a job of showing an interest in the whole conservation thing and now he asked them how they thought the land lay, ‘Looking ahead to the vote.’

  Mum beamed at him when he said that. ‘Well, we’re off out lobbying this afternoon. The vote’s still weeks away, but we need to get a groundswell of opinion among people in the right camp, and that means meeting with as many influencers as possible, right away.’ That explained the lipstick.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘It’ll be tricky: there are lots of people with a vested interest in exploiting the DRC’s natural resources. Between now and the summit, we have to get as many of the good guys as possible onside.’

  I nodded, but couldn’t help yawning.

  ‘And this evening your uncle’s arriving to have dinner with us,’ Mum said to me.

  Dad pursed his lips. He and his brother don’t exactly get on.

  ‘Make yourselves comfortable here until then. Use the pool, feel free to order snacks on the room number, possibly catch up on some sleep,’ she went on hopefully.

  ‘Just keep out of trouble,’ said Dad. Perhaps surprised by the harshness in his own voice, he added, ‘Wish I could spend the day swimming instead of beating my head against a closed door.’ It sounded like he meant it.

  They set off. I realised I was hungry, and ordered a club sandwich and chips. For a joke I got Xander another Coke. Amelia ate salad with something local called makemba. ‘It’s a kind of plantain dish,’ she explained. I must have looked what I felt: none the wiser. ‘Cross between a potato and banana, idiot.’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘It is,’ she insisted. But she’s a terrible liar, and couldn’t stop herself adding, ‘in small quantities.’

  At this point a movement caught my eye and I looked up at the hotel roofline to see another armed security guard taking a stroll. I went to check the rear entrance of the hotel, and sure enough that was guarded too. These guys were obviously supposed to make the guests feel safe, but the idea that we needed protecting in the hotel at all was a bit unnerving.

  On my way back to the pool I found a stray tennis ball. It seemed there was a court here as well. Xander and I played catch in the pool while Amelia did laps. Xander’s also pretty good at roofs. It got a bit competitive, with each of us chucking the ball harder and harder at the other, until finally I let rip properly, glancing it off the surface just in front him at maximum speed. He missed the catch and the ball took out a tray of drinks on a poolside table, very loudly indeed.

  Immediately the security guard on the roof had his gun trained on the pool area, and another one I hadn’t seen before sprang through a nearby gate, his drawn pistol aimed right at me. For a nanosecond I feared he might pull the trigger. As luck would have it, Dad, who’d only been gone fifteen minutes, strolled back through reception just in time to hear the crash. He had his hands on his hips and a thunderous look on his face. Here we go, I thought, and sank beneath the surface of the water again.

  7.

  In the aftermath of Mark’s death Dad didn’t blame me. He didn’t need to. As soon as I realised my brother was dead, I knew it was my fault. Mum spent whole nights trying to convince me otherwise. When I didn’t believe her, she even got a counsellor involved. Like the driver of the Mini, the counsellor had a beard, but his was more straggly. He kept a bowl of tangerines on his coffee table and offered me one when he saw me staring at them. That was kind of him; he was all kindness in fact, but none of it helped.

  Dad did his best too. The week after the funeral, he bought me a BMX, took me to the bike park and sat in the car while I practised. Everything about him said, ‘I am trying to forgive you.’ That was the problem. There’s no need to forgive someone who’s done nothing wrong.

  It turned out he hadn’t seen what caused the drinks explosion; he was just irritated because he’d left his wallet in his other clothes and had had to come back to retrieve it. But I didn’t know that from underwater. I looked up at the scissoring blue shapes above me, knowing I’d have to break through them eventually, and when I did I’d resigned myself to having to climb out of the pool and help the hotel maid clear up the mess.

  Ironically, seeing me do that, Dad put two and two together. He squared up to say something, but Amelia beat him to it.

  ‘That, by contrast, was a very unlucky shot,’ she said.

  ‘By contrast with what?’ asked Xander.

  ‘Earlier Jack stopped a thief on a motorbike with a golf ball. It was a lucky ricochet.’

  Reminded of this, Dad dropped his hands to his sides and explained that he’d left his wallet upstairs.

  ‘You’re not being very vigilant today, Mr Courtney,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s unlike you.
Maybe you’re getting old. Early-onset dementia is a thing.’

  Xander tilted his face into the water to laugh. Even Dad couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘I’ll catch you later,’ he said, pausing before delivering the truly bad news with a glint in his eye. ‘Your uncle Langdon called. As well as meeting him tonight you can expect to see your cousin again. Caleb’s out here for the summer on work experience at his father’s mining company apparently. Try to be nice, eh.’

  Caleb: ugh. Just as Dad finds his brother hard to take, my cousin and I have never really got on. He’s only fifteen, but that puts him two school years ahead of me, and when he condescends to speak to me at all he treats me like I’m a complete idiot. I tried to tell myself that he might have changed in the six or so months since I’d last seen him, but no, when he turned up that evening with Uncle Langdon, he barely said hello to me, just nodded and then started asking Mum and Dad how their lobbying that afternoon had gone. The way he asked (‘How has blah blah blah been going?’) was ridiculous; I could hear his father’s opinion – that Mum and Dad’s conservationism was a waste of time – lurking behind his apparently interested question. It made me feel defensive towards them. He’d filled out since I saw him last and his hair was different, short on top and shaved at the sides. Was he trying to look like a US Marine?

  Uncle Langdon wears Hawaiian shirts and loves the sound of his own voice. I think he thinks the combination makes him unexpected and witty. Sure enough, his big thing today was not-so-subtly undermining the efforts of the Courtney Conservation Foundation (he’s never forgiven Dad for putting the family name to such a venture) over drinks at the bar. He didn’t exactly say that what they were doing was a bad thing, just that it was unnecessary.

  ‘How can you think that?’ asked Mum. ‘The rainforest is disappearing at a rate of –’

  ‘Was disappearing,’ Uncle Langdon interrupted. ‘But responsible outfits like our own are already leading the way as far as conservation is concerned. By showing the locals how to mine sustainably, safely and profitably, we’re encouraging them to do the same.’