The Hunters. Kat Gordon

Joan mentioned her in Nairobi.’

      ‘Not complimentary?’

      ‘Not very.’

      ‘Women never approve of other women.’

      My mother’s voice changed. ‘What’s that?’

      ‘Oh this? I picked it up today – MacDonald said every household needs one.’

      ‘I don’t want it indoors.’

      ‘It’s for the leopards.’

      ‘What if the children see it?’

      ‘They won’t know what to do with it.’

      ‘I don’t want it indoors.’

      ‘It’s for our own protection, my love.’

      ‘It’s asking for trouble,’ my mother said. ‘Hide it.’

      ‘As you wish.’ My father must have recognised the danger in my mother’s voice, as I did, because he changed the subject. I silently thanked him for whatever purchase had distracted my mother from deciding to end my new friendship, and went back to bed.

       Chapter Six

      Miss Graham, our tutor, was tall, with overlapping front teeth and eyebrows that met in the middle. She’d come out to Kenya with a family from Edinburgh, but they’d gone back and she’d stayed out for her painting.

      Maud adored her, but I got the impression that Miss Graham didn’t like me, and I didn’t warm to her either. Three weeks after she started she complained to my mother about ‘disturbing images’ I’d drawn on my exercise books. They were doodles I’d done without thinking, but my mother sided with Miss Graham, although all she did was look at me coldly and tell me if I wanted to be treated as an adult I had to act like one. I lingered after she’d left, scuffing my shoe against the dining table, reluctant to go back to the classroom. I might have escaped a beating this time, but her words still stung, and the thought of Miss Graham’s satisfied look made me rigid with anger.

      We woke every weekday for breakfast at eight. Lessons were between nine and twelve, then our mother joined us for a hot lunch. Afterwards, there were more lessons until two, when we had a bath. The totos ran the bath for each of us, which took nearly an hour: first they drew the water from the well – at least ten buckets per bath – then heated it in a cauldron kept in the kitchen hearth. Afterwards, they transferred it from cauldron to bath in ten more trips with the bucket. Sometimes they forgot to heat the water for long enough, and we had to sit in ice-cold water, our lips and fingers turning blue.

      In the afternoons, my mother napped, and we would row out onto the lake, or go for a walk, or watch Miss Graham painting. Her fingers were surprisingly delicate when they held a paintbrush. We were silent around her, unless she started the conversation.

      ‘I’ll be running out of blue soon,’ she always said, as she was choosing a colour for the sky. ‘Blue and brown, those are the colours I use most out here.’

      ‘What colours did you use most in Scotland?’ Maud asked once.

      ‘Green and grey.’

      ‘Did you ever go anywhere else? What colours are other countries?’

      ‘No, not me,’ Miss Graham said. She dipped her brush into the pot of cobalt. ‘But the family I was with before were in India for a while.’

      ‘What colour is India?’

      ‘Gold. And orange.’

      ‘What about America?’ I asked.

      ‘I don’t know America,’ she said brusquely.

      Two of the totos appeared with the laundry, laughing and whooping. They were younger than me, probably no more than twelve, and my mother must have ordered their kanzus in the wrong size because they were both tripping over their hems. One of them carried the washtub, the rub board and soap banging against its sides as he walked. The other carried a pile of clothes and bedding that was higher than him. When the first toto saw Miss Graham he stopped, and the second crashed into him, dropping most of my father’s shirts.

      Miss Graham rapped her easel with the handle of her paintbrush; it made a sound like a gun-crack, and the first toto flinched. ‘Shall I tell Bwana Miller that you throw his clothes on the ground?’

      The totos mumbled something.

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘They’re dirty anyway.’

      ‘You have to instil discipline,’ Miss Graham said. ‘The natives are awfully lazy.’ She turned back to them and made a flapping motion with her free hand. ‘Pesi pesi.’

      We’d been out in Africa long enough to know that meant ‘get on with it’.

      The totos crept past us and sat on the jetty, whispering to each other as they washed our laundry. Maud watched them with a confused look on her face. After a while I went back inside.

      If the totos were afraid of Miss Graham, they were even more afraid of my mother. A few times I’d been in the kitchen with them, bothering the cook, when someone had muttered ‘Bibi Miller’, and everyone had melted away.

      Joseph, the cook, was the only person who didn’t seem intimidated by her temper. He was a good-natured old man whose fingers were covered in calluses. Once I saw him use his bare hands to take a hot cast-iron dish from the oven and realised where the calluses came from. Two months after we moved in, when my voice began to change, becoming cracked and hoarse, Joseph made me a special hot drink that tasted bitter and grainy.

      ‘You a man now, Bwana,’ he said. ‘This drink make you into a good husband.’

      Joseph could cook anything, but he loved schnitzel and potatoes, which drove my father to despair. For my fifteenth birthday, Joseph made me apple strudel with ice-cream. The pastry was light and flaky, the apples were soft and tasted of burnt sugar and cinnamon. It was the best cake I’d ever had.

      After a while my mother had a word with Joseph and he grudgingly started cooking food we were more used to. He could cook anything: meringues, custard flans, layer cake, soups, breads, scones, pies. It had felt strange sitting down to schnitzel and potatoes in the middle of Africa, but no stranger than kidney pie and rice pudding.

      Abdullah, the head boy, was gentle in everything. He had big brown eyes and a slight stammer that made him shy to speak. Every evening he put down a prayer mat on the grass and prayed for exactly seven minutes. Unlike the other servants who were all Kikuyus, Ramsay told us, head boys were normally Somalis because they were nobler and stricter. My father liked Abdullah a lot, because he approved of my father’s beard that he was trying to grow. My mother liked him because he was a genius at running the house, and Maud liked him because he helped her nurse injured birds she found in the garden. When Miss Graham was on leave, it was Abdullah who looked after us. Soon after we moved in, Maud fell out of a tree we were exploring, and ended up with a small gash on her shin. Abdullah washed the wound, then left us sitting by the well while he hunted through the grass near the woods.

      ‘What’s he looking for?’ Maud asked.

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How’s your leg?’

      ‘Bleeding.’

      ‘Do you think you’ll bleed to death?’

      ‘Don’t – you’re not funny.’

      Abdullah made his way back to us with something in between his thumb and forefinger. ‘This is for you,’ he said, as he reached the well.

      ‘What is it?’ Maud asked.

      ‘Safari ant.’ He showed us the ant, which was squirming in his grip. It was a deep cherry-red colour, and almost twice the size of his thumbnail, with long, pincer-like jaws protruding from either side