Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Faced with a big, curling wave, Matt paddled for it furiously. He found the front of his small craft lifting alarmingly in the air and himself sliding back into the sea, where he was tumbled over and over by the force of the wave, popping up at the end of the rope which was attached to his ankle at one end and the surfboard at the other.

  The initial laughter from the beach turned to silence as the seconds passed without a sign of the surfer. Matt had successfully held his breath for ninety seconds, the years of diving for crayfish preventing him from taking down a lungful of warm, salty sea-water.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” he said aloud. The surf was three hundred metres from the swells where he needed to be. Shaking the sea from his long hair and his beard, he began to swim, towing the board behind and diving through the breaking waves, until he reached the calmer sea where, after a lot of trouble, he finally climbed astride the board and waved to his friends on the shore, before turning to study the swells for the perfect wave that would rush him in to the white, far-distant sands.

  The ninth wave was perfect, and he pointed his board with the flow, paddling furiously without falling off, until he found the sea was taking him fast with the crest of the wave. With concentrated power, Matt lifted himself on to his knees, then, with a last desperate heave, up on one foot, where he hung for the longest half-second of his life, until he toppled into the mouth of the onrushing wave. It pushed him down and down and down, until he hit a rock which knocked him senseless.

  Onshore, Lorna waited in anguish, while Carel with powerful help pushed the ski-board into the sea. When they reached the surfboard, Matt had risen from the bottom of the sea, and was floating face down in the water. It took four men to heave him up into the boat and then they took it in turns to pump his chest and breathe air into his mouth. With the boat turned around and racing up and down the breakers to find the gaps, like a greyhound searching out a maze, they finally pulled him ashore, head down, and planted him on the sand, where they pumped again and again.

  “Daddy’s playing tricks,” said Peace, quite sure nothing was wrong.

  Slowly his breathing started again, water stopped flowing up from his lungs, and he choked. When they hauled him to his feet, he felt as weak as a kitten and his face was the colour of putty.

  “Should have tried that one a good few birthdays ago,” he gasped, weakly.

  “You got up on the board, daddy.”

  “Not for very long.”

  “The kite didn’t fly long last year.” She was very excited and thought it all part of the fun, despite the blood trickling down her father’s face from the gash that had opened when his head hit the rock. “What are you going to do next year?”

  He hated the idea but, for the first time, he knew he was growing old. Taking his wife’s hand and with his arm over his daughter’s shoulders, he walked up the beach, followed by the colony.

  “I owe you one, Carel,” he said.

  “We all owe you, man, a lot more than you owe us,” replied Carel van Tonder.

  “It’s good to have friends,” said Matt.

  Book Five

  1

  Raleen Urbach had taken to smoking dagga with a determination to self-destruct that bordered on madness. She had had enough of the real world and, if the weed did keep her ‘goofed’ all day, then it was the solution to her life. The struggle had killed her husband with a land mine, her children with an RPG7 rocket and taken away the love that had started to heal her wounds. She was not strong enough to fight any longer, and was content to sit under the wild fig tree and listen to Jonathan rambling on about Ding-dong Bell and the great business they were building for their future.

  After the fifth joint of the day, when the sun was only a metre above the wild banana trees that fringed the coastline, she would tell him about her children and how well they were doing in school. She talked to her husband, blasted to pieces on the Karoi road eight years earlier, as if he was sitting with them on the ground. They had both gone out of their minds to a friendlier world, unable to give them any more pain. Neither of them ate very much and most nights slept under the trees on sheets of old cardboard, curled up in individual balls under blankets, oblivious of each other as they were of anyone else. They had left the world to soar in the clouds of the drug-induced euphoria, and all the coaxing in the colony would not take them from the path of their own oblivion.

  Lorna cried for her friend and watched to see that she came to no physical harm. The talks they had enjoyed had blown away in the wind. They were strangers now. And as the weeks went by without the minstrel boy, the two addicts were left alone, watched carefully but left alone to live in the new world they had chosen. Jonathan was not even aware of the passing of his thirtieth birthday. His habit was fed by the small allowance that reached the post office in Port St Johns every month from the trust setup by his mother. He would have been better in the lead vehicle with his friend, destroyed by a single explosion.

  Every time the outside world reached into the colony, it destroyed their happiness, an insidious beast hovering behind the great white clouds to poison them. The world outside was bigger than all their tiny lives, wanting even the little they had, searching for their souls, the virus of man more deadly than a bomb. The two creatures under the tree outside the campsite entrance had only delayed the time of their burial. They were the living dead.

  Sophia’s school stabilised at sixty pupils, the word having reached Soweto that the small sanctuary on the Wild Coast was full. Charles helped with the teaching and found deep satisfaction in the yearning for knowledge he saw in the mostly forgotten children from the slums outside Johannesburg. The dawning excitement of understanding on a small black face when the meaning of the printed word became intelligible was all the reward he would ever ask. Passing on his knowledge was an experience of joy that he grew to cherish, and he used this as his excuse to stay washed up on the shores of nowhere, at the base of Africa, looking out on untold kilometres of open sea and the wilderness, on a shore containing not one monument to man’s so glorious past.

  He had waxed philosophical at Sophia’s lack of interest in his person. It was given to some the magnetism to draw to them the opposite sex. It was the way of things, and nothing he could do would change her mind or cause her to look at him as a man, other than a person to talk to about the school and what they could do for the children. It was his destiny to wait and watch, to hope, to dream of a future day when all the understanding in his heart would be seen by her. Then he would live. There was happiness if he waited.

  Whenever the light was good enough, Matthew painted, and the world around him was re-recreated on the big canvases he slashed at with the brushes day after day. All the joy and harmony of the colony spoke from the paintings, surrounded by the beauty of their island in the sun. Lorna watched him with growing pride, and kept the physical world around him a perfect setting for his work. She herself painted for the tourists, but most of her waking life was spent keeping the home and creating the ongoing happiness for her children. There was much laughter in the rondavel, and the wonderful pleasure of each other’s company.

  When Matt had finished his work for the day, Sipho was hoisted on to his right shoulder and Robert on his left. With Peace skipping behind and running in front and Lorna at his side, Matt and his family walked down the beach for their evening stroll, the curling pipe in Matt’s mouth out of fire but unable to be lit, and the colony smiling at the happiness of their ritual walk to see how the day had been spent.

  Isidore Socrates Salvadori, the man from London, had been born plain Jack Kemp in lower Ashtead, a favourite commuter spot as it is near the railway station. His father had been a bank clerk, catching the seven-ten to Waterloo for forty-eight years. He retired on a Barclays DCO pension and lived another three weeks. Young Jack had watched his father’s daily journey to and from the city, and determined there must be a better way of life.

  The break in his life came during the war, after he was called
up in the army to fight for king and country against the Hun. His father had spent three years in the trenches, the likes of the Kemps being fodder for the cannons of the politicians. Old man Kemp’s death, so soon after his sixty-fifth birthday, had been brought on by forty-seven years of coughing, the result of mustard gas in his lungs. The Huns had got him in the end.

  Jack had been the skipper’s mascot. So long as the young voice of sergeant Jack Kemp came back through the intercom, the skipper knew they would be one of those to return to RAF Boscombe Down. It was a regular occurrence for the four engine bombers to return from Germany with a dead gunner in the turret, gunners being the prime target for the German night fighters.

  It was the skipper who introduced Jack to the world of art, and indirectly caused him to change his name by deed poll. Whoever could imagine a man with a great knowledge of the arts having the plebeian name of Jack Kemp! Darling, be serious! The public needs to know! At the age of twenty-four, Sergeant Jack Kemp died, giving way to the metamorphosis of Isidore Socrates Salvadori, a man steeped in literature and the arts. By the time Matthew Gray came along to sell the masters he had salvaged from the jungles of Zaire, Jack Kemp, the tail gunner, had long been forgotten.

  Duncan Grenville Fox had taught Isidore everything he knew about the appreciation of art, and had watched his pupil grow and pass him with the inborn pleasure of a creator. There was something deep in the genes from lower Ashtead that recognised good art, and knew how to present it to the public in a way that made the buyer feel good and satisfied with the great work of art about which he knew nothing at all.

  “Do you know, old boy, I paid ten thousand pounds for that! Marvellous, isn’t it? Isidore says it’ll be worth a fortune in twenty years’ time. Jolly good investment.” Looking at the two old men inspecting each of the Strover’s in proper detail, no one in the gallery could ever have imagined where the two had met.

  They had been going round together for an hour. “Do I have a blind spot or is this really good, Skipper?” asked Isidore, a deliberate rhetorical question.

  “It’ll last a lot longer than Campbell’s soup cans painted one on top of the other. Or junk stuck together from a council grant. Who is he?”

  “A recluse. The bloke Strover’s a front. Between you and me. You need the artist to sell a living painter.”

  “The one in the caftan looks the part.”

  “Would have made money on the stage,” speculated Isidore.

  “Where’s the background?”

  “There’s another rub. I dare not say.”

  “And Strover? Where is he from?”

  “Holland, Amsterdam. The home of the great painters.”

  “I have not seen so much joy and happiness in an exhibition in London. Not from a living artist. Time will tell, my friend. So you think the days of the art world pulling the legs of the rich are over?”

  “I do. It’s why the real painters – Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet – are selling to the Japanese for numbers neither of us would ever have imagined.”

  “Is he well known in his own country?” asked Duncan.

  “Very. But not as a painter.”

  “I will come back here over the next week. Then I will say, maybe; don’t let them out until then. Have you sold many?”

  “All but four, and those I am keeping for myself.”

  “You want to tell me the story?” Duncan prompted him. “That Polish restaurant in Hay Street? We have a lot more secrets from the public than a painter without a name… Do you know, I still dream about those burning cities we destroyed.”

  “So do I Skipper. But art like this does something to balance the horror.”

  There were twelve tables in the restaurant, each of them in its own private alcove. The owner knew Duncan Fox and had responded positively to the phone call for a table. The Bernard Strover exhibition was in a hired gallery, as the canvases had been too large to exhibit in the small Bond Street gallery that had been home to Isidore for twenty-seven years. The vodka came from a freezer chest and was poured at their table into small, thin glasses. They drank slowly, savouring each drop of the delicious liquid, while Isidore told Duncan the story of Matthew Gray and how he was living on the Wild Coast of South Africa.

  The food was brought in seven courses, each a small portion, and the old friends enjoyed the victuals, the perfect service and the ambience of a truly civilised restaurant. The tablecloth was white and reached down to the floor, the tableware was solid silver from Mappin and Webb, the flowers from Covent Garden, the soft music Chopin, and the paintings on the walls had been carefully selected by Duncan for the owner over three decades. The light was soft, but sufficient to let them see what they were eating and to appreciate the ruby colour of the Polish red wine.

  “They even have a restaurant at Second Beach that produces excellent seafood. And the wine is good,” said Isidore. “If I told the world those paintings came from a homeland within the borders of South Africa, I would have the demonstrators from Trafalgar Square tearing down the canvases.”

  “He sounds the richest of men… What a wonderful quality of life. And it’s the politics that preserve the isolation. If it were politically acceptable, life in such a paradise at so low a cost would bring the hordes trying to be artists. And he can paint without interference. Wonderful way of life. They all go that way, of course. Through jealousy or imitation. Would probably paint nothing worthwhile in a normal setting. Gauguin. Same style of living. Life in a hut with the natives. Extraordinary to have so much money and give it up. And then find a talent to paint. You wonder what else he could do… Churchill could paint and lay bricks. Nobel prize for literature. So many gifts in one man… Is this Gray conceited?”

  “He certainly doesn’t think he can paint,” Isidore informed him. “His wife knows. And Charles Farquhar. We all hope nothing ever happens to stop him from working. Money comes and goes between men in history. Art lives forever. Good art. I think he will last.”

  “You mind if I smoke a cigar?”

  “I’ll have one with you, Duncan… We’ve had such a good life.”

  “It has been blessed. Except that bit at the beginning. I much prefer to create than knock things down. They want to put up a statue to Bomber Harris. I really don’t know… We had to do it, of course, or Gerry would have done it to us. For me, I prefer to forget. How are the wife and children?”

  “Not exactly children any more. Beth’s as well as can be expected… Six grandchildren.”

  “I still miss Marjorie,” mused Duncan. “The children and grandchildren are scattered all over the world. We British are breaking up. As always, the best leave this little island… You really wonder what it was all about.”

  Not far away, in a flat in Soho to which he had been called by his controller, Hector Fortescue-Smythe was listening to a litany of woes that was turning his life upside-down. The flat was above a Greek restaurant and the smell of rich food permeated the room, despite the windows being closed against the winter.

  “Afghanistan is a disaster,” repeated the Russian. “No one has ever won a war against fanatical guerrillas. The helicopter gunships don’t help. We are drowning ourselves like the Americans in Vietnam. Reagan is forcing us to spend vast amounts of money on an arms race, money we don’t have. Unlike the Americans, we can’t borrow it from the Japanese. All our foreign adventures are costing us money, and none of them is giving us anything material in return. Some of these people in Africa change sides, milking first us and then the Americans. Reagan talks of six hundred ships in his fleet and, if we are to compete with his Star Wars project, we go broke, and, if we don’t, the Americans control the skies. Control the world.

  “We are telling our Cuban friends that, if they are unable to finish the Angolan war this year or next, we will be unable to support them anymore. And we say the same to you and your friends in South Africa. You must topple the white pariah government and let Mandela out of jail, or you will have no support, no military strength, and you wi
ll be forced to deal with the Afrikaners. The South Africans must be forced into a conventional war to support Savimbi in southern Angola, in their effort to stop SWAPO taking over Namibia. They must be defeated on the battlefield. The talk in Moscow is of perestroika, restructuring. Gorbachev is trying to make an arms deal with the Americans.”

  “You can’t be telling me communism is not going to win? That we are not going to achieve our world government?”

  “The one thing about being on the inside, Hector, is being able to take precautions to protect yourself. Go back to Smythe-Wilberforce and run the business. You never know, I may need a job.” The man’s laugh was hollow and made the smell of stale food even worse. “The Soviet Union is broke, Hector. We make old machinery bring up oil, but even the flow of oil is decreasing and we don’t have the money to install modern machinery. The money goes to the arms race. Our industry is old, run into the ground to compete with the Americans. Even our scientists are lagging behind in the space race. Win fast in Africa, or make a deal, if you can’t topple the government by force.”

  “I’m glad my mother did not live to hear what you are saying. Surely, you are wrong,” almost pleaded Hector.

  “Believe me.”

  “Was it all for nothing? That I can’t believe.”

  “This was just a talk between old friends. Life is always full of surprises. I wish you luck, Hector. Tell Luke to look to the West for money. What is in the pipeline will come to him, but very little else. There will be one last battle in Angola. Make sure you win. The MIG 23s can out fly the South African Mirages. The Cuban pilots are good. If you can flush the South Africans out of Namibia, you may flush them out of Pretoria.”