KAPU LEWIS

Metamorphosis

Free. Lost. No compass.

Paul Allenby is lost in the left-hand corner of the map. The place where the roads and lanes end. The place with no names.

His steps closer to the map on the wall, the shop around him muffles, quiets even more. He imagines the first people to set eyes on this land were so hollowed out by its primordial expanse, they dared not use their tongues in its presence. Nature won, with ripping lions, stinging scorpions and humans undone.

Paul’s hand reaches for one of the rifles displayed under the map, wraps his fingers round the brushed matt skin like his father would, and a sick comfort seeps back into him.

His imagination shakes loose. He looks down at the rifle in his hand. He used to hate these things, has only ever held one once before. Clay pigeon shoot, auditor’s day out. Crouching in the dark Surrey bracken he unloaded the device as soon as nobody was about, felt safer with the cartridges buried in the ground. He’s not an adventurer or a killer like his father. He’s a numbers man.

Paul releases the rifle. He’s already calculated the probability of him ever needing to use this particular one is 5,431:1 based on the unlikely event of him getting caught in a political riot spilling from Whitehall to Covent Garden to Charing Cross Road and into this cosy side street known as Cecil Court.

Map Street, he calls it. With his two favourite shops, Harringtons and Vlieger’s arranged either side of an antique cinema. He’s avoiding Vlieger’s, though he delights in its lavender scent. The Dutch papeterie has installed narrow pathways between the stationery displays that he’s too wide to pass through without brushing marbled papers to the floor. To be accidentally stepped on, by him. It’s a shame because Vlieger’s coloured maps are beautiful. So Harringtons Safari Outfitters will do. He can often be found fawning over its wares with his sandwich-greased hands when the bank closes in the late afternoon.

He looks up again at the framed East African Map above the gun rack. Bondo, Maseno, Kisumu… he mouths the oval, nut-tasting words that hover above the barren grasslands.

Paul Allenby is glad he’s standing safe in this shop, a haven of British Empire and curios, a far cry from the scorched earth of the veld where there is nothing certain and nowhere to hide. At the age of forty-two, oversized navy suit waist 44 Marks & Spencer sale rack, he wouldn’t dream of returning to those the wilds represented by this map. He grew up there but left age nine for boarding school and never came back. Paul is an accountant who wears rubber-tread office shoes, home-polished with dubbin. London’s dangerous enough.

The clock on the wall chimes. Five-thirty. The world outside has turned soot brown, shot with headlights and phosphorus lamps. Time to be walking home, picking up a tin of Heinz Spaghetti. Or perhaps he’ll take the bus. It has been snowing and the pavements are slick. His limbs are heavy.

But his eyes slide back to the map. Stick on it. The minutes tick. He is unable to leave it. He tries but his head feels wrapped in the map, stuffed with the map, like the map has been shoved down his throat. He can taste the green stiff grass, the yellow sun-baked curvaceous land, the blue choked waterholes. Feel the contours lugubriously spaced that navigate his face. For miles. Three-dimensional paper-land made living flesh, scent of smoky campfires and civet.

‘I must’ve eaten something funny,’ Paul mutters.

Even so, he reaches up, straining the buttons on his polyester shirt, smelling the acrid scent of his armpits.

Paul strokes the parchment’s edge with his doughy finger and reads the description on the sale tag. Hand painted in 1922 the year his father took command of the British Army in Kenya and hell broke loose.

‘Don’t touch,’ a voice calls from the till.

‘What?’ He snatches his hand back.

‘Acid. Skin. Old paper and ink.’ the voice adds. ‘Ruins it, don’t you know?’

Paul examines his fingertips. They’re imprinted with brown savannah ink. Anxiety crawls up his throat. He looks back at the map. The price seems excessive, especially with the small tear on the fold line and the rust-coloured stain in the right-hand corner. What if he’s forced to buy it?

The word buy has him thinking about his heartburn pills back in the top drawer of his desk. He looks over his shoulder, but the voice’s owner is no longer behind the till. The door to the stock room is ajar, emits the sanitised glow of bleach-white strip lights.

Paul shoves his fingertips into his mouth, licks, scrubs at the abraded surface with his front teeth. It doesn’t taste like ink. This tastes organic, humetic. Crunched up shells of carapaces. Termites. It tastes how African soil tastes; long-ago remembered, too rich, dangerous, virile. The kind of thing he’d like to taste from the comfort of his armchair.

But his fingers move back to his mouth as he partakes again of that termite taste. With a flush of heat, he reaches up, brings down the map and walks to the till.

‘I’ll take it,’ he calls, feels rash, like a boy at the beginning of a forbidden adventure novel with hours of fresh-smelling pages to fill.

‘You should. It’s good,’ the voice chuckles from the stock room.

The voice sounds like it belongs to a pretty girl. Paul catches sight of his reflection in the mirror by the cash desk. He looks like a rectangular bag in his cheap blue suit.

Paul counts out the notes from the money clip hidden in his shoe. His entire monthly food budget, but still it’s not enough. His fingers hesitate, his mouth salivates at the thought of the map in his hands and the masculine scent of it.

He thinks of his father who is dead, dead, dead. And how there is now no one who can dictate what he can and can’t do. Paul gathers up the cash, folds it neatly back into its holder and hurries out of the shop with the map.

Paul leans against the front door and hugs the plastic bag to his chest. The collar of his shirt chafes against his damp neck. He eases his tie with a shaking forefinger, lets out a nervous laugh. Then three shuffles and he collapses into the Father chair: brutish, leather and box-like. In his childhood home it stood in the majesty of the Colonel’s library, facing the Karura Forest, the Muthiga, Muhugu, Mswaki and their glossy density.

In his tiny London flat it commands the matchbox-sized living room, the door to which he removed years ago, so he can get in and out without having to turn sideways. The seat has become the living room. There’s a mere twelve inches perimeter of carpet round its edge, a tufted moat that ripples against the walls of what he calls Map Land, besieged from 6pm to 8am daily by the intrepid explorer Paul Francis Allenby.

Map Land is private, even from Elizabeth, though she hasn’t been around for years. They talk on the phone sometimes, at Christmas when she invites him down and he politely declines. He is too wide for Elizabeth’s mock Tudor doorways, his nasal tubes too narrow for her mock Tudor walls. He snores at night, earning sneers and giggles from his niece. Elizabeth’s husband Richard, tanned, tall and sleek, can’t even remember his name.

Map Land is a sheer wooden cliff of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, honeycombed with burrows and small caves, housing a rare colony of scrolls, folded charts and cartographic documents. Organised by territory in a mirror of the world map pasted on the room’s four walls. A grey hospital crutch, left over from his failed knee operation, leans against the chair next to a hooked rod for the never-opened skylight above. Waiting. Impatient. Like the sulky accounting clerks where he works, waiting for instructions to fetch papers from the vaults at Lloyds, arms crossed, two pounds per request.

The crutch and rod look at him accusingly. Pick an adventure they seem to say. But Paul has been nervous of late, avoiding the upper shelves, worried the books might fall on his head.

Paul cranes his neck as far as the rolls of flesh will allow. He wants to get the children’s map of the Great African Rift with its jolly emerald ribbons of lush grassland bordering aching cobalt lakes. It sits on the top shelf along with his other more childish stuff and he’ll need to not only get up and manoeuvre around the Father chair but lift the crutch and rod as a pair, jostle them like chopsticks to pull the desired map down. He wants to compare it with the new one he has; is fairly sure they’ll overlap in the northwest corner. He wants to close his eyes and conjure a story of a hardy hero crossing the terrifying terrain, full of treasure hunting and spears and poisoned darts being shot at his head. Paul’s sorely tempted to disturb his exerted joints. But his lunch still sits deep in his stomach, weighed down by a tea of treacle pudding and custard all jiggled by his unaccustomed running.

‘I’ll wait,’ he says to himself, swallowing a belch, along with embarrassment at himself. His lack of elegance, his smell, his physical unease. He reaches into the M&S plastic bag and pulls out the newest occupant of beloved Map Land. The Map unfurls. He almost calls it The Stolen Map because it sounds romantic, but stops short.

‘Bondo, Maseno, Kisumu, Mbita, Nyenga, Muhuru…’ Instead, he chants the words that stretch his mouth in out-of-practice directions, that sound like witchcraft to his arithmetic brain. He repeats them as his finger draws a line between each, skirting Lake Victoria’s Kenyan edge then heading inland and down. A memory, and more: an opportunity to imagine.

‘Migori, Kehancha, Ntimaru, Kenyangage…’

Paul closes his eyes and sees the sharp edge of Kenyangage Ranger Post. Its red tin roof cuts into the wobbling heat and The Mara beyond: yellow grass, grey dust, olng’osua, vultures. The place where the names end and he must navigate with nothing but a geographical legend of elevations and symbols.

He wraps the map’s cellulose skin around him like a warrior’s cloak: scale 1:1,000,000 – list of geographical colours bistre madder maurizius blue – heights engraved 200 fathoms to 13,124 British feet – symbols road track savannah waterhole salt-pan – latitude minus 1 degree 18’ 58’’ north longitude 34 degrees 46’ 42’’ east. 

Paul falls asleep in the Father chair to the smell of ink in his mouth and the sound of numbers between his thumb and forefinger. Or at least, he thinks he does.

‘Paul!’ a voice says.

Paul squeezes his eyelids tighter. His body crinkles like stiff paper.

At first, he thinks the voice is his father, Colonel Allenby. He shrinks into a corner of the chair which is now as large as he remembers it. When it held his young bendy body like the cradle he never had, while he read his favourite books in safe adventure; Quatermain, King Solomon’s Mines, Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tales. It is the only place to find quiet from his hungry sister and crying mother.

But he shouldn’t be in it. His father’s flat swift hand will see he remembers it.

You should be outside playing with cuts on your knees, mud under your fingernails. Not reading stories for girls.

But the flat swift hand doesn’t meet the side of his head. There is no repetitive strike that makes the brain ring.

‘Paul, the sun is setting,’ the voice says.

And that’s when Paul realises he must be somewhere else and his father is, thank God, now dead. He opens his eyes and weeps with relief.

He climbs out of the chair, places his stockinged feet on the baked earth spiked with Andropagon grass, the sharp pebbles bite into his paper-dry feet. He clutches the map in his hand and wonders if he has been talking in his sleep.

Something clicks and moves at the base of the parched grass. Paul steps back, knocks into the chair, tries to crawl back in, but the voice holds him.

‘It is never safe for a man here. But I am now your guide.’

Paul looks down at the hand that holds the map: the map that holds the hand, wraps his arm, traces his body, his face, eats him. The map is him.

The map feels the baked earth under Paul’s feet. Paul feels the smooth crispness of its skin, the wood fibre of its skeleton, its tongue of ink. His blood, his ink.

He won’t be able to go to the office or Elizabeth’s house or his father’s funeral if he stays like this. But his father is dead, dead, dead.

So he makes a choice.

The sun sets.

The scorpion clicks out of the parched grass, scuttles over the map and back into the dark. The map looks up into the stars.

Free. Lost. No Compass.

Kapu Lewis is an emerging Welsh writer and poet, working in the TV and film industry and studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, UK. She is interested in exploring mental health and Autism through prose and poetry.

Her work has been published by the indie press and in literary journals including Epoque Press, Erro Press, MIROnline, The Menteur, and Handwritten & Co, an Asian literary journal.

She can be followed on social media at:

Threads – @kapulewis
Twitter X – @kapulewis
Instagram – @kapulewis