inventing a snappy one liner about it being harder to get sugar through the eye of the needle than a camel into heaven. The formula escaped me and anyway I didn’t think Mutton had the necessary cultural referents.
I said to Share, “You sure this sheikh snoozer knows the way here?”
“Doubt it,” she said.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “What if he gets lost?”
“His chauffeur will know the way. You don’t think he drives himself, do you?”
“Buggered if I know,” I said. “What sort of ride has he got?” “I don’t know. A Roller, something like that.”
I could feel the sugar starting to take effect. I took the needle out, disconnected it from the plastic tubing. You wouldn’t want a needle-stick injury from a camel, God knows what you might contract.
“Get rid of this, would you, Woz?” He took the bloody needle from me, left me the tubing, and with his usual furtive manner emptied the needle into a small plastic bottle, which he wrapped up in a sheet torn from his newspaper. Worried about infection himself, fair enough. He went over to the camel. Mutton leaned down in the saddle, and they put their heads together and murmured. Mutt placed something carefully in one pocket, maybe a rabbit’s foot for luck. I noticed then that Nile’s cud chewing was becoming more determined, a trifle manic, the tempo was increasing.
“Come on, gentlemen, enough farting about.”
We walked her back to the paddock. She was starting to shift her weight around on her feet as she swayed beside us. Keen for a canter.
The air began to vibrate like a sewing machine on speed.
§
The chopper came in low over the trees. You’d think the pilot was doing an evade the way he swung the crate around, tilting it. I looked for the police markings—sorry to disappoint, officers, no funny plants growing here, just a routine veterinary procedure on an ordinary, everyday camel. But the chopper was a private machine and it was about to land.
“The fucking sheikh,” Share shouted above the noise. The downdraft from the landing chopper hurled dust and grass and all manner of crap at us. Nile Fever took off like a shot, Mutton clinging on for dear life. The animal wanted out, but it was a galloper not a jumper, it wasn’t going to attempt the fence, although the brute slammed against it once or twice, knocking a post free of the ground and leaving a bright red streak of blood from the small open wound in its neck. Within a minute it had done a complete circuit of the paddock, rolling and bucking like a ship at sea. As the noise from the chopper abated I could hear Mutton yelling at the beast. His precise words were unclear, but their intent wasn’t: Mutton was trying to rein the beast in with no reins at his disposal other than foul words. Plainly, the single string had snapped instantly. Nothing connected the rider to the animal’s head. Mutton was a steerage passenger on a ship of fools of the desert.
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