Perhaps he should make it work? Extricate himself from the airfield somehow and move over to America for a few months. Perhaps even consider working on Wall Street for a bit.
But that was a level of commitment he wasn’t ready for. An emotional risk that he, the risk-taker, wasn’t willing to assume. He poured himself some more whisky.
Sandy was history.
The neat spirit was having its effect. Feeling slightly woozy he glanced upwards at the ceiling again.
It was only ten o’clock on a Monday morning and already Benton’s week was not going well. He had spent an hour with Linda Stubbes, his head of Human Resources, and Jack Grote from Finance in New York about how to allocate expenditure on training between the different departments. As head of the London office it should have been easy for him to decree what should happen, but in the real world he didn’t have the power. He would have to negotiate between the different prima donnas who ran each group in London protected by their respective patrons in New York. He couldn’t wait to get back into the Times deal, real business with the prospect of a real fee.
As the two bankers left his office his personal assistant, Stella, came in. ‘There are two people to see you,’ she said. ‘Police. They say they are from Norfolk CID.’ Stella was generally discreet, but it was clear that these visitors had aroused her interest. Her eyebrows were raised in a silent demand for information.
Benton wasn’t going to tell her anything. ‘Norfolk, you say? Where are they?’
‘Downstairs in the lobby. They arrived fifteen minutes ago. I said you were in a meeting. They said they would wait.’
Benton knitted his brows. ‘Give me ten minutes and then send them up.’
‘All right,’ said Stella as she headed for his door. Then she paused. ‘Oh, yes, and there was a call from a Mr Moolman.’
‘Moolman?’ Benton said. ‘Do I know him? I’m sure I’ve heard the name before.’
‘He had a South African accent. Strong, very strong. He said he was calling to say how sorry he was to hear about Todd van Zyl’s accident. He said you needn’t call him back and he didn’t leave a number.’ She stared at her boss. ‘Benton? Are you all right? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’ Her boss didn’t answer, but stared at her with a mixture of shock and fear. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll, um, I’ll tell the police to wait a few more minutes.’ She left the room as quickly as she could, shutting the door behind her.
Two miles east of the City, on the executive floor of the Herald’s building at Madeira Quay, Edwin was listening to a grey-haired, hyperactive journalist called Jeff Hull. Jeff was a South African, a former employee of the Cape Daily Mail, who had recognized early on that it made sense to make friends with the boss’s son. Their relationship had been cemented during the takeover of the Herald, when Jeff had discovered some fascinating information about the Herald’s proprietor Lord Scotton and a visit he had made to a public lavatory in Piccadilly, that had persuaded Scotton to sell out to Zyl News rather than Evelyn Gill. Jeff had left Cape Town for London when Edwin took over the management of the Herald. Jeff thought of himself as a hard-nosed investigative journalist; some of his colleagues, and indeed his editor, saw him more as a ruthless muckraker. But whatever his editor’s opinion of him, he was untouchable. And he did have the ability to come up with sensational stories on a regular basis, some of which the Herald deemed fit to print.
‘That was quick,’ Edwin said. ‘What have you got?’
Jeff handed over a single sheet of paper. He bit his thumbnail as Edwin read it. ‘Do you really think this will do the job?’ Edwin asked doubtfully.
‘You bet,’ Jeff answered.
‘Let me get this straight. The superintendent’s brother was arrested for downloading child pornography from the internet, but no charges were ever brought?’
‘That’s right,’Jeff was grinning as he gnawed at his thumb.
‘Was the superintendent downloading porn?’
‘No.’
‘Do we even know the last time the superintendent saw his brother?’
‘No.’
‘So?’
‘So we have a headline with the words “policeman” and “paedophile” in it. That will go down nicely with the readers, and with the Norfolk Constabulary. There will be questions about whether the superintendent leaned on someone to have his brother’s charges dropped.’
‘Can we prove that he did that?’
Jeff grinned. ‘Can he prove that he didn’t? And if he did, why did he? Is he a member of the paedophile ring himself? He worked on the vice squad in the Met twenty years ago, I can go digging there. Plus I’ve got a mate that’s on the paedophile register. I’ll get him to apply for every temporary job in Norfolk that’s involved with children. Someone will give him a job. Then all hell will break loose. Plus, and this is the really important point,’ Jeff leaned forward, grinning, ‘our superintendent friend will know we’re digging. And if he’s got something to hide, and let’s face it, everyone has, he’ll want us to stop.’
‘I was hoping for something a bit more substantial than this.’
‘Believe me, there’s nothing the cops of today are more afraid of than a paedophile scandal. I’ll call him tonight. I’ll ask him to confirm that he is aware that his brother was arrested for downloading kiddie porn, and I’ll ask him a couple of innocuous questions about his time on the vice squad. And we just leave it at that. No need to be specific, no need to push it, no need even to print anything. Just so he knows who he’s dealing with. All he has to do is go a little softly, right?’
‘Right.’ Edwin thought a moment. There was a lot in what Jeff was saying. A veiled threat was probably more effective than out-and-out blackmail anyway. ‘OK, do it.’
12
July 28, 1988
Poor Doris! She got a phone call this afternoon. For her to have a phone call at the house, I knew it must be something pretty serious. I overheard her talking in Xhosa on the phone, then she screamed, a heart-rending wail. It was an awful sound, especially from Doris who is always so cheerful. She wouldn’t stop. I tried to comfort her but she wanted to finish the phone call. Then she just let the receiver drop and sobbed.
It was Thando. He was killed with three other boys by some unknown thugs last night. Some white men broke into their shack and shot them. Thando lives in a township outside Port Elizabeth; I think he works in one of the car factories there. He’s only seventeen. He’s Doris’s only son, only child. Finneas came in from the garden. He and I did what we could to comfort Doris but she was inconsolable, and why not? I would be if it were Todd.
Doris doesn’t know any of the details. Her son will be branded a criminal, of course. But I know him well: as Doris says, “He was a good boy.”
I told Finneas to take the Renault and drive Doris to P. E. tonight.
July 30
What a day! I went to the funeral. I thought, why not? Doris and I have been together for eighteen years, since just before Thando was born, and I’m damned if I won’t be allowed to support her just because of my color or her color. Zan offered to come with me, but with Doris away I said I’d prefer to have her stay at home with Caroline. I got the first flight of the morning to Port Elizabeth and took a taxi. The funeral was held in a soccer stadium in a township on the outskirts of Uitenhage, an auto-manufacturing town a few miles from P. E. itself. A cordon of police surrounded the township: young men in camouflage uniforms brandishing guns, some of them perched on “Hippos,” the nickname for those creepy armored cars they use.
I had to talk my way through the cordon; they didn’t seem to understand that a white woman, and an American at that, could be a friend of one of the victims. I pleaded, and in the end a sergeant gave in with a shrug that suggested that if I was that crazy I deserved what was coming to me.
Passing through that cordon was like passing into another country, a country run by blacks for blacks. A marshal directed me to where I should sit in the sports stadium. There must h
ave been 40,000 people there. The whole place was a riot of warmth and color and passion. I’ve never experienced an atmosphere like it. There were banners everywhere in the bright colors of the trade unions, the black and yellow of the UDF, and the black, green and gold of the ANC. I even glimpsed, briefly, the red flag and hammer and sickle of the Communist Party. The speakers sat on a raised platform, beside which were rows of seats for relatives. I could make out the plump figure of Doris, but there was no way she could see me. My idea of joining her to express my sympathy was clearly unrealistic.
Lying in the field in front of the speakers were four coffins, three in dark brown wood and one smaller white one. One of them was Thando. Another must have been a small child.
I asked the woman next to me if she knew what had happened. She said that they had been killed by the police.
“Didn’t it happen in the middle of the night?”
“That’s when they do these things,” she said. “Then no one sees. They don’t have to go through the bother of arrests and lawyers and courts, they just kill them,” and she put two fingers to her temple like a gun.
“But why them?”
“The policemen, they never liked Joshua. They think he is a troublemaker. The people say he knew he was going to die some time. But he was a brave comrade.”
“And Thando? Was he a troublemaker too?”
“No,” said the woman thoughtfully. “But he was also a brave comrade. And Joshua’s little brother, he never done anyone any harm.”
I thought of Thando, the shy trusting boy with his mother’s generosity of spirit. Neels and I offered to pay for his education at high school and on to university, but he didn’t want to go. He wanted to earn money, he said, good money in a car factory. I’m sure he wasn’t a troublemaker. I’m not convinced he was a “brave comrade” either. I guess he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wondered what impression the hero’s burial would make on Doris: whether it gave her comfort to have so many people joining her in her grief, or whether she would be happier alone with her son at the graveside. I didn’t know. The whole idea of losing Todd like that is too awful to contemplate.
And what about the child in the little white coffin? Just how much a threat to anyone could he be?
The funeral took hours, but I didn’t care. Very little time was spent on the actual funeral service, but there were speeches, shouting of slogans, preaching, the toyi-toyi dancing of the young men, and singing, beautiful singing. The whole crowd sang “Hambe kahle Umkhonto”, the song praising the Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrillas, the song that strikes fear into white South Africans’ hearts. At that moment, it lifted mine.
Then a group of young men raised the coffins on to their shoulders and carried them out of the stadium. I followed. Although there were very few white faces in the crowd, just some press men and photographers, I felt part of it, swept along by the heady mixture of grief, pride, passion and joy, opposing emotions that combined to create a kind of mass elation.
My seat was close to the front of the crowd as it left the stadium. I could see the men carrying the coffins, and in front of them a couple of small boys swooping back and forth on their bicycles. The police watched. They weren’t like riot police in other countries, dressed for protection. They had no shields or body armor, not even helmets. But they did have guns and batons and dogs. I stared into their faces: they looked like members of a street gang spoiling for a fight. I caught the eyes of a couple of them, who glanced away as if embarrassed to see a white woman.
Cameras flashed. Not from press photographers, but from the police lines. One of them was pointing straight at me. The photographer saw me staring at him, and gave me the thumbs up.
I wanted to get out of there. The chants of the crowd were becoming more aggressive. Hippos shunted about, taking up better positions. I could see the boys on the crest of the hill ahead pedaling in circles in front of the police lines, wobbling unsteadily as they raised their arms in the black-power salute.
Suddenly a dog, a German shepherd, tore out of the police lines and launched itself into the air at one of the boys, bowling him off his bike. I didn’t see what the dog did to the boy once he was on the ground, but after a second of stunned silence, the crowd howled.
There was movement everywhere, shouts, screams, barks and then shots. Some in the crowd surged forward, some, myself included, scrambled back toward the stadium. More shots, and then the whole lot of us, thousands of people, were running, scattering. A young man with long dreadlocks saw my fear, and grabbed me by the arm. He dragged and pulled me through the crowd and up a side street. We ducked to left and right through the shacks of the township until we emerged on an open road behind the line of Hippos.
I slumped to the ground and gasped my thanks, gulping air into my lungs. The man didn’t seem tired at all. He smiled quickly and left me.
I’m writing this on the plane back to Cape Town. Neels will be worried about the photographs. He will say I shouldn’t have gone. He’ll remind me of my promise not to make trouble. But now Neels is closing the Mail down, who cares about me being seen at a black funeral? I sure as hell don’t.
August 1
Well, I’m feeling kind of mellow and I rather like it.
I was beginning to wonder about Zan’s social life. She disappears into Cape Town quite regularly to do God knows what, and she’s been to Jo’burg, but there’s no mention of a boyfriend, or indeed any other kind of friend. Then today she called me from Cape Town to ask if she could bring two people over to stay the night.
They arrived this afternoon. The man is called Bjorn, and he’s some kind of Scandinavian. He is over six feet tall, with a dark beard and calm blue eyes. Quite cute, really. And then there was his girlfriend Miranda who is almost as tall, with an Afro hairstyle and gorgeous golden-brown skin. They look like a pair of hippies straight out of the seventies, and make Zan look positively Establishment by comparison. After a minimum of small talk with me, they disappeared to Zan’s room.
I was out working in the garden. The window was open, and I could hear music, I think it was Dollar Brand, and then I smelled that familiar smell of my college days. Grass. Marijuana. Dagga, they call it here. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t too happy about having someone smoking dope in my house, but I didn’t want to come across as the heavy authority figure with Zan, especially in front of the first friends she has brought back to Hondehoek. I know Neels will be absolutely furious if he finds out and so I decided I really had to stop them, or Zan might think she could smoke dope any time she liked.
I went indoors, steeled myself outside her room, knocked and walked in. The sweet smell hit me. Zan and Miranda were sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, and Bjorn was lying back against the bed, holding a long joint, while Dollar Brand played his heart out on the piano.
Zan looked up at me guiltily. I paused, grasping for the right words that would be firm but not too dictatorial.
Then Bjorn spoke. “Hey, Martha,” he said quietly, and held the joint up to me. I looked at him as though he was crazy. He smiled a small smile, shrugged but didn’t retract the joint. There was something amazingly calm, almost wise about him.
What the fuck, I thought. Screw Neels. I took the joint.
It’s the first time I’ve smoked marijuana in over twenty years, and probably the last, but it was good to do just once more. I did tell Zan later that I didn’t expect to see dagga in my house again. She apologized with a smile.
I tell you what, though. If my sixteen-year-old son so much as tries to smoke a cigarette here he’s in big trouble. And he and his girlfriend are having separate rooms. I’m 100 percent certain about that.
August 2
Oh, God, Neels was right all along. This is a horrible, evil country and I wish I had never set foot in it. I have been stupid when I should have been careful. I hate this place.
Yesterday. Yesterday I was a different person.
Yesterday I went to a board meeting at the
Project. Finneas drove me, poor broken Finneas. If it had been Nimrod things might have been better. Despite his small size, Nimrod is quite capable of looking after his master. And his master’s wife.
After my experiences at Thando’s funeral I was enthusiastic about going to the Project and I actually felt safe as we drove through Guguletu. The meeting lasted a couple of hours and then we took our usual look around the school. It was about four o’clock when Finneas and I set off for home. We had barely gone a quarter of a mile when two bakkie pulled up, one in front and one behind us, and men leaped out with guns. They were black, but they didn’t look like locals, they were bigger and stronger and better dressed and they had an air of disciplined purpose. They definitely knew how to use the guns they were waving.
Finneas started sobbing and chattering and I was too stunned to know what to do. They dragged me out of the car and I began to scream. I can remember seeing three small boys standing by the roadside staring at me and then some foul-tasting cloth was shoved in my mouth. I tried to kick out but there was no point, these men were strong. Then they thrust a sack over my head, yanked my hands behind my back and bound them. I was lifted up and dumped on to hard metal. The rear of the bakkie. A sheet of some kind was thrown over me and someone heavy sat on me. Then they drove off.
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