‘Have you taken your pills?’
‘They make me sleepy.’
‘So? Sleep.’
He dry-swallowed two painkillers. Within fifteen minutes he was unconscious.
*
Tom slowly became aware that the car had stopped. First he felt the complete calm that follows the engine switch-off. The quiet was so all-encompassing that it actually started to push him back into sleep.
He heard distant voices and wondered why Ness was so far away when she should have been in the driver’s seat.
Then he heard another voice, high, sing-song, luring.
It was this that finally forced him to open his eyes groggily and look around.
The car was stopped on a nondescript stretch of straight Karoo dust road. As he looked to his left he could see only sheep and shimmer. He shifted his gaze to the right, where the driver’s door was open. It afforded him a good view of Ness standing about fifty yards away, one hand on her hip, the other shielding her eyes from the fierce sun.
That soothing sing-song voice rose again, but this time ended in a sharp, frustrated cry, and Ness bounded into action as an ostrich hammered past, not ten feet from her. With a start, Tom realized she wasn’t trying to avoid the bird, but was making a grab for it.
The last of his drug-induced cobwebs were brushed aside as he hauled himself out of the car. The ostrich had dodged Ness, but had stopped only a few yards past her, its head poking this way and that as if it were weighing up its options.
A hundred yards away, off the Honda’s left flank, was Harold Robbins. The boy was jogging towards Ness now, and Tom could see he was in the same clothes he’d worn when he came to the barn, and held a square plastic storage container in one hand. As he approached Ness, he dipped his hand into the container and held out something to the bird, his sing-song appeal coming again.
‘Leeemon! Heeeeeere, Leeeeeeeemon!’
Lemon scooted away a few paces and now Tom could see that the bird was definitely limping – much worse than before. No wonder it had let them get so close.
Harold reached forward but Lemon stalked off slowly, staying just out of reach. Tom noticed the boy didn’t try to make a hopeless grab at the narrow leash dangling from the bird’s head. That would surely have spooked Lemon into flight. Instead the child – with the apparent patience of a saint – merely sauntered over again, while Ness circled widely behind Lemon, like a sheepdog cutting off an escape route.
Tom didn’t know whether to help or just enjoy the odd spectacle of the skinny child and the woman trying to capture a racing ostrich in the middle of the desert. Then Lemon skittered sideways again and Tom trudged towards the action. Lemon had the look of a bird that was sick of running and was only protesting now for show.
Ness and Harold glanced at him as he made the third point of a rough triangle around Lemon.
‘Hello, baas,’ said Harold, conversationally.
‘Hi, Harold.’
‘We’re trying to catch Lemon,’ the boy added, somewhat redundantly, and once more pressed on towards the ostrich. The bird now realized that Ness and Tom were closing in behind it and did a confused, lopsided little dance on the spot. Tom wondered fleetingly whether it might bury its head in the sand, even though he’d heard that was a myth. Still, it would be cool to see.
But Lemon didn’t bury his head. Tom and Ness stood still about ten yards either side of his flanks, and Harold licked his lips and moved in. Lemon let him get just a single step too close this time: when he made a break for it, Harold grabbed the leash and shook the container at him. Lemon resisted for one last moment, then dug his beak hard into the grain.
Ness broke into spontaneous applause and Harold’s beam split his face with delight.
Ness and Tom approached, although Harold deflected them quietly. ‘He will kick you, madam!’
Now they were closer, Tom could see dried blood on the big bird’s left leg. The wound was up under the feathers and out of sight, but it must be large to have caused the amount of blood it obviously had.
Harold saw Tom staring and his smooth forehead creased in concern. ‘He is hurt, baas?’
‘Looks like it.’
Harold turned to Ness. ‘Will you hold Lemon, madam? I will catch his leg.’
Ness took the leash warily and, without a moment’s hesitation, Harold ducked under the bird’s chest and grabbed its scaly left foot with the giant dinosaur claws and pulled it up. Incapacitated, Lemon stood stock-still as Tom carefully moved in and parted the jet-black feathers.
There it was. The almost vertical gash was about four inches long, open and festering. At the bottom of the wound and between the rough quills, Tom could feel something hard under the skin.
Lemon hopped and staggered sideways and Harold cooed reassuringly to him as if the huge bird was a kitten. Tom found the place again. ‘There’s something stuck under the skin,’ he said, with disgust. ‘The whole thing’s infected.’
‘Can you take it out?’ Ness was looking at him with hope and expectation, and he realized, with a sinking feeling, that now he’d have to take the damn thing out. Now he’d have to perform makeshift surgery on a leftover dinosaur in the middle of a fucking desert, all because Ness had given him the best blow-job of his entire life.
That was what it came down to.
Tom shook his head in amazement. Sometimes life was so bizarre that it didn’t bear close examination for fear of insanity ensuing. ‘Sure,’ he said, sounding a lot more confident than he felt.
He pulled his Swiss Army knife from his pocket. It was nothing fancy and he couldn’t remember ever having unsheathed the blade, although the bottle-opener was a godsend.
Parting the feathers once again, Tom licked his lips and wondered about the best way to do this. He was uncomfortably aware that both Ness and Harold were gazing at him with identical expressions of confidence, and that the longer he delayed, the less confident they’d all become.
Fuck it.
‘Hold on tight!’
Feeling slightly sick, Tom dug the knife into the bird’s flesh, quickly continuing the existing gash to expose a lump of something, before a fresh supply of blood welled up and hid it from view. But Tom grabbed it quickly, wincing at the sudden pain in his hand, and took it out of the bird with a single movement. ‘Got it!’
Lemon – contrary to all logic – merely twitched and quivered, then dug his beak back into the grain that Ness was now holding.
