Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [92]
“Good boy, Mambo,” I told him, not meaning it.
I slipped into the kitchen, where the smell of far-from-fresh crocodile meat was most powerful.
K was hunched over a pile on the floor. His shadow jerked and bulged, gray and enormous on the white wall behind him.
I said, “What are you doing?”
K picked up his bag. It was packed and zipped closed. He wouldn’t look at me.
“It’s the middle of the night,” I said.
“I’m leaving.” K turned around. “You can find your own way home,” he said. He looked murderous, his lips almost purple and his face indistinct.
I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms.
“Get your new friend to drive you home.”
“What’s going on?”
He said, “You know what you’ve done.”
I sighed.
“You’re godless,” K said. Then he added, “And do you know what absolutely terrifies me?” When I didn’t reply, he thrust his head out at me and raised his eyebrows. “Huh?”
“No,” I said.
“I haven’t read my Bible once on this trip,” he said. “Not once.” He breathed at me heavily.
I said nothing.
“I believed in you,” he said. “I trusted you.”
K sent his bag crashing out of the kitchen onto the veranda, where it hit the side of the cage and startled the lion.
K came up to where I was and stood above me. He spoke in such a low, angry voice that it sounded more like he was breathing the words than saying them. “I’ve destroyed all your tapes, your film. You have nothing about this trip. You have nothing to say about me.”
I ducked under his face, sank onto my haunches, and wrapped my arms around my knees. Mambo attacked the cage, trying to paw the duffel bag into life.
“Don’t worry. I don’t hit women,” K said.
I looked up. “I’m not scared.”
“You’re not worth it.”
There was a long silence.
“Evil,” said K, dropping down and pressing his mouth close to my face.
Then he got up and pulled some fishing line out of a reel that had been lying near the kitchen sink and bit through it, so that a small piece of gleaming green line snapped back on his lip. He put the reel into his fishing box and slapped the box shut. “You play with men. You know that? You play with men and you play with their feelings and you are going to destroy yourself. You’re going to destroy your family.”
I stared down at the floor. A line of ants was hurrying from the top of the kitchen table, in long, quivering formation, down the table’s leg and into a crack in the cement at my feet. Each ant carried a grain of white sugar in its jaws. K dropped his fishing box on top of the line and the ants swarmed in a frenzy of confusion. I lifted my feet until the orderly line had re-formed.
When K’s voice came again it was low, but very distinct. “This place is evil. I can feel the evil all around me. It’s like fingers around my neck. That’s how much I can feel evil . . . like fingers around my neck.”
I said, “I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
K laughed humorlessly. “Don’t try that with me.”
“Whatever it is, it’s likely to be worse than the truth.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“No,” I agreed.
“And you can’t write my story. I won’t let you write about this.”
“It’s not up to you what I do.”
“Yes it is!” Suddenly K imploded, his face fell in on itself, and his shoulders collapsed. “You fucked him, didn’t you? You fucked him!”
I stared at K. I said, “No.” But I knew that whatever I said it wouldn’t make any difference. K had gone into that place in his head that is beyond reason.
“Then if you didn’t fuck him, you . . . you . . . you did something else. I told you,” he hissed, “you have nothing