by MP Miles
“I didn’t see anything. I needed somewhere to camp the night and this guy came out.”
Ralph pointed to the black man, Mr Club Man, the Backpacker Killer of Gwanda.
The white man warmed to his theme.
“You know we aren’t the problem. Some people want to shoot poachers on sight or to ban small farmers from ‘slashing and burning’ wildlife habitats. But you should look to yourselves first.”
He poked Ralph with a red and white finger in the chest.
“Think of the demands you make on the developing world just so you can have a teak deck outside in the garden for your little drinks parties.”
He pulled Ralph’s rucksack away from him and threw it to the other man. He talked to him in Shona or Ndebele, or something. The man put down the club, pulled open the top and tipped the few contents onto the ground. He kicked them around with his foot and silently shook his head.
The white man nodded towards the black man with the club.
“If they found these local guys something better to do, something that would feed them, buy medicine for their wives and schoolbooks for their kids, then they wouldn’t have to sell me rhino horn,” he said.
He walked over and pushed everything back into Ralph’s rucksack, picked it up and gave it to him.
“But it’ll have to be something good. A kilogram of horn in Vietnam or China has twice the value of a kilogram of gold.”
The two men got into the Toyota. The white man who had done all the talking smiled at Ralph.
“You’re lucky. We don’t need to kill you. If we were selling cocaine it would be different. We earn more money selling horn than drug dealing and without any of the risk. No one goes to jail for poaching rhino.”
They left the way Ralph had walked, back to the Bulawayo road.
Ralph sat on his rucksack, watching them leave, now too late in the day to go anywhere else. He could walk down to the river and find cover there to hide in but he didn’t think they would be back. He looked in the door of the building. He had been right about the noise, on both counts. Flies covered the corpses of six rhinoceros and sat in the blood that had come from their horns, cut off by an electric saw.
Ralph walked for four days from Gwanda to a camping ground in Bulawayo. He didn’t have a tent and slept fitfully through thunderstorms until, dispirited, he sheltered in the laundry room and sat on top of the spin dryers to keep off the floor and away from snakes. He still had two weeks’ walking to Victoria Falls.
*
Lombard and Roux met in a church neither had ever visited late morning in the middle of the week. They had arrived separately, with different alibis for their staff at the office. An elderly lady arranged flowers and smiled at them. They smiled back and waited patiently until she left clucking like an old hen.
“How’s Rots getting on?”
Roux leafed through a prayer book, his head down.
“With some difficulty to be honest, Professor. He’s playing a waiting game, expecting the boy to return here for his flight home.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, it’s one boy and Africa is a big place.”
Lombard straightened in the pew. He felt cold. Unlike Roux he went to church infrequently and when he did they always made him shiver.
“There’s something you aren’t telling me,” he said. “Come on, Nick. Talk to me.”
Roux looked at him.
“It’s more a problem of motivation.”
“The boy’s?”
“Angel’s.”
Roux had finished with the prayer book.
“I need to give Rots more background, explain the importance of the mission. The money thing, the inheritance, is a little…” he hesitated, “a little weak.”
Lombard stared at him.
“Absolutely no way.”
“But Rots has clearance.”
“Not for this. He wasn’t born here and he has dual nationality. His clearance is not Top Secret.”
Both were aware that South Africa’s nuclear deterrent, the ace in its hand, had always been an elaborate sham, a beautifully complicated fiction. The research and collaboration with Pakistani scientists, the novel enrichment process at Pelindaba, the infrastructure and test holes dug deep in the Kalahari Desert, the made-up trade with Israel in hydrogen isotopes to initiate and boost a reaction, none of it completely true. The atomic bomb casings left on show at The Circle to be conveniently photographed but which would always be just empty shells, the smuggled long-range Canadian mortars or technically complex French and Israeli missiles to deliver a weapon that had never been completed, all existed for show. Even a fortuitous and unplanned image on a US satellite over the Southern Ocean near the South African Prince Edward Islands that experts claimed to be a double flash associated with a nuclear test. All of it an imaginary deception, a pretence, an invented stick, not to beat domestic insurgents but to bribe foreign governments for the support that white South Africa would need to survive the change that all knew would inevitably come.
“I needn’t tell Rots everything,” said Roux. “Just give him something.”
“We can’t trust him with any of it, Nick. He’s too smart.”
“Can I talk to Angel about the Zac character?”
“No. What reason could you give for a suspected British agent to be involved?”
Roux looked around gloomily.
“Do you have any more information on Zac?” Lombard asked.
Roux sighed.
“No. Nothing. He vanished.”
Lombard spoke in a whisper.
“If the British find out from grainy enlargements that the new facilities at Rooi-Els and Overberg are fake…”
Lombard, unable to finish, became lost in thought. It didn’t matter. Roux already knew that if anyone found out about their charade then South Africa’s bargaining power would evaporate, and the consequences could be devastating.
“A few rolls of film taken by a kid walking along the beach may well be all that stands between an orderly transition to majority rule with a new black government restrained by powerful foreign influence or the final bloody confrontation between black and white that many South Africans are secretly hoping for.”
Lombard got up to leave. Roux would stay alone and pretend to pray for thirty minutes. He wouldn’t have to pretend.
*
Angel sat miserably in his temporary office on Skinner Street, thinking, looking at his maps.
“Where are you, Ralphy boy?” he asked himself.
Gloomily he looked at the phone. He didn’t relish the idea of calling Zelda again. Her hasty termination of their short-lived love affair still left a sour taste. He’d be abrupt, solely business. He dejectedly dialled her number.
“Angel. Honey,” she purred.
“The flights to London. Tell me about their route.”
“Well, they’re all quicker than SAA. As you know we can’t overfly Africa. The others are quicker because they’re shorter. They go a great circle route.”
“What’s that?”
“A great circle route is the shortest distance between two points on a curved surface. The earth is a sphere, an oblate sphere squashed at both ends, but maps must depict the earth as flat. You need something called a gnomonic projection to show a great circle route as a straight line on a map, but that distorts the shape of the land so it all looks weird. On an ordinary small-scale map that covers all of Africa and Europe, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points. The actual shortest distance would appear on a normal map as a curved line. Between Joburg and London it would bend out a little in the middle, either west towards the Congo or east towards East Africa, somewhere around The Horn, and then curve back in. A great circle route. There’s not much in the Congo, or anywhere in central Africa other than Kenya,
which is why all the flights from Johannesburg to Europe, except SAA, stop both ways at Nairobi to fuel.”
A chill went over Angel.
“And there’s something else about his ticket you should know, Angel.”
He wasn’t interested. Her voice, as always, was irritatingly seductive. He couldn’t listen to her.
“The airline won’t…”
Angel interrupted her angrily, still resentful and brooding on her behaviour.
“Forget it. Just say that last bit about Nairobi again.”
Angel suddenly worried about Ralph’s flight home. He’d assumed he would leave for London from Johannesburg, the departure point stated on his ticket, guessing he wouldn’t have enough money to buy a new one. He now wondered if Ralph’s plan had changed, if he had decided to join the same flight but at its refuelling stop in Nairobi. Angel shook his head and put the phone down abruptly on Zelda. Ralph was heading for Kenya.
*
At Victoria Falls, the ‘Smoke that Thunders’, the hotel of the same name still had an air of colonialism, Ralph guessed because of its distance from Harare. He had expected it to be pockmarked from machine-gun bullets, scarred from revolutionary war. Instead, English-speaking girls in bikinis lounged by the pool and drank South African Lion and Castle beer. Africans dressed in white served tea. No African kids splashed cheerfully in the water. A war for independence might never have happened.
Ralph sat on a sunbed near the pool and unlaced his boots. He stretched out on his back and sighed, the first time he had lain flat but off the floor since leaving Elanza. He smiled to himself as he remembered her. Ralph had walked over a thousand kilometres from Naboomspruit to Victoria Falls in just over a month but Elanza hadn’t appeared in his adolescent thoughts until now. He had left her feeling guilty, afraid he’d used her. He wondered now if it had been the other way around. Either way he was grateful to her. She had been interested in his walk along the coast from Cape Town and he had enjoyed telling her about it. He would have liked to have told her of Zimbabwe, to discuss his plans and consider her opinion. He was hungry for more adventure. Apart from his aching feet his young body was toughening rather than wearing out, and he hoped she would have encouraged him to continue.
A pink-faced man shouted at him across the hotel garden.
“Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.”
“I’m sorry?” said Ralph.
“Dr Livingstone said it about the Falls.”
He introduced himself chirpily.
“Roger Graham. The water spray has corroded the bridge. They won’t do anything about it.”
“It’s not safe,” said his wife.
“Need a lift?” asked Mr Graham. “Come with us if you like – plenty of room.”
His wife smiled and held a small handbag in front of her as if in church.
Ralph looked at his feet. His boots had hard plastic soles with lumps chipped out of them, one starting to peel away at the front. Ralph had found a thick black rubber band by the roadside and slipped it over the toe to prevent it separating completely. The fabric of the boot was a nylon material, light but hot and unbreathable. At the ankle the nylon had stretched into a mesh, patterning Ralph’s skin underneath with a tattoo of dark brown spots.
Inside, his feet were pale and crinkly as though they had been sitting in water for too long. Blisters covered the insides of his toes where they rubbed against each other, and the nail of a big toe was completely loose, blood seeping around the tape he had used to hold it on. A rot had started between the smaller toes, deeply cracking the skin, the flesh tender and red underneath. They itched, and when he rubbed between them a clear slime would coat his finger and his hand would smell like an autumn garden rubbish heap with some poor summer hedgerow animal curled up dead inside.
“Thank you,” said Ralph gratefully.
Wreathed in mist, the iron bridge trembled but held as Ralph crossed. The pink-faced man and his prim wife in a proud purple Range Rover led him deeper into Africa, heading away from Johannesburg, away from his flight home.
*
Angel visited Elanza in a private hospital in Sandton. She had become very thin and struggled daily with a medication that made her feel sick.
“You look good.”
“I look like shit. The doctor says I’m officially wasting. I’ve lost six per cent of my BMI in six months.”
“You should listen to the doctor. He is inkomati.”
“What?”
“It’s an African saying. Siswati. It means a cow. It’s used for anything that’s constantly producing something, like a cow always giving milk. Or a river that never dries up. In your case, a doctor that always gives good advice.”
“That’s crazy. You’re making that up. How can a word for a farm animal mean so much?”
“I know. Who said Africans were simple, hey?”
He puzzled her with his silly Afrikaans accent, how he knew stupid African expressions.
“Where’s Ralph?” she asked.
“He’s not coming back. He’s going on to Nairobi. He’s going to join his flight home there.”
“How?” said Elanza. “He’s no money.”
“Walking on foot I guess. Or hitch-hiking.”
“Find him, Angel. Guard over him and keep him safe.”
Ten
The Grahams had a Range Rover that steamed and grumbled its way through the Zambian miombo towards Lusaka.
Around the Zambezi at Victoria Falls the country had been sparse thin grasses and occasional scrub with tall cathedral mopane trees. Mrs Graham told Ralph that the shape of the mopane tree’s leaves meant they were often called the Butterfly Tree. They would turn brilliant shades of red and yellow as they dried like flames in a brown garden bonfire.
Further north into Zambia the mopane had been replaced by the miombo, a mosaic of clumps of mostly Brachystegia trees with much more ground cover, prone to grass fires in the dry season. In the miombo, the natural vegetation of most of Zambia, the baobab trees protected themselves from the frequent bush fires with an almost cork-like fire-resistant bark.
The Range Rover ran on strip roads like a freight train. Strip roads were common in Zambia and Zimbabwe, a unique solution in the 1930s for opening the countries of Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Two tarmac strips, one for each wheel with bare earth in the middle, reduced the cost of road building by nearly forty per cent. It required cooperation when meeting vehicles coming the other way as both had to move off the road and use only one strip. The slow speed of the manoeuvre enabled first-hand traffic information to be relayed through the driver’s window, a very sociable way to drive.
“A lot of warthog in the road a few kilometres up,” said a passing motorist in an old van.
He wasn’t comparing nature notes. Warthog were a serious motoring hazard. Reluctant to move and believing they could take on an approaching vehicle, they would stand immobile. They never won but it often resulted in a damaged and leaking radiator a hundred kilometres from anywhere. Warthog had very hard heads.
“They’ve no fuel at the Shell,” said Mr Graham.
Navigation was by petrol station in Zambia.
“Hope you’re okay. Watch out for a monster pothole about two k before the BP.”
“See you Wednesday at the bazaar, Mary,” said Mrs Graham to the lady in the van, a pale headscarf keeping the dust out of her hair.
The Grahams were old colonial Brits still living a privileged life in the leafy suburbs of Lusaka, with house staff inside and gardeners for the gladioli collection under the acacia trees. In the war, Flight Sergeant Graham had flown a Lancaster bomber from poorly lit fields in East Anglia through the dark to Germany. Against the odds he always came back, his face as grey as the dawn. He now lived in the bright sharp light of Africa and ran a business supplying and servicing fire e
xtinguishers to the mines and businesses of the Copperbelt.
On the crumbling Great North Road, Ralph learnt, mostly from Mrs Graham, of an Africa that few would recognise – of tea parties and polo, of the problems with staff, of the bad or simple (or both) second sons of lords and earls who had been no good for the Church or the Army and were sent to Africa out of the way.
“Oh, you must go to Shiwa. Such a beautiful house,” she told him as the Range Rover stumbled off the edge of the broken tarmac strip.
“A mansion, my dear,” said her husband. “Built by one of the Gore-Brownes. Sir Stewart.”
He looked at Ralph as though he could clarify things completely.
“His father used to be governor of New Zealand. But I expect Ralph knows them.”
“Of course. Your family probably knows them.”
Mrs Graham looked at Ralph as if she’d committed an embarrassing faux pas, like calling the Queen ‘Ma’am’ so that it rhymed with ‘ham’.
“They were Surrey people, I believe. From Weybridge.”
Ralph nodded. He didn’t know anyone in Weybridge. He didn’t like to say that he or, as far as he knew, anyone in his family had ever met any sort of knight, or any governor of the dominions or anywhere else. His family were small-town shopkeepers, treasurers of the carnival committee, on the board of commissioners for small local charities. They had always been busy, respected and indispensable; strong, reliable and enduring pillars of their little community. His mother when first married, and without a hint of unnecessary pride, had worked part-time at a small local factory, gossiping and stitching the hides of the dead, wet Dorset cows into ladies’ gloves. Ralph’s father, unlike Sir Stewart, had never been to Harrow School or taken up car racing at Brooklands for want of something to do. He had finished his education aged fourteen and cheerfully filled accumulator cells with acid at a motor garage and later enthusiastically sold electrical goods and children’s toys.
If Ralph’s father had ever met the Gore-Brownes, or people like them, it would only have been when summoned at eight in the evening to visit, immediately please, in a three-wheeled car with a fabric roof that never properly sealed out rain or cold draughts, to change a battery in their radio set. Or when trying to get money from them for a television that they’d bought from him nine months previously but had ‘quite forgotten’ to send a cheque for.
