Just the Memory of Love

by Peter Rimmer

  The conversation continued in a monologue, retelling the small but desperately important details of daily life in the bush. The elephant that had killed Hannes had gone off downriver with the small transient herd. The river was rising from good rains up in the northern region, which Will knew to be the Angolan catchment area. In honour of the baas coming home they had shot six guinea fowl and two Egyptian geese that morning as the sun rose and mist was still curling up from the river to tangle with the fever trees leaning out from the banks of the great river.

  “How did you know I was coming home?” asked Will.

  “Onepenny had a dream, so we knew.”

  It was always the same, a dream, a vision, whichever word they chose.

  The birds were already plucked and hung in a row out of reach of the heron. The bar was stocked and as they climbed the stairs to the deck to look out over the great expanse of the African bush, Fourpence was bashing a block of ice into drink-size pieces and putting them in the ice bucket.

  “Food in two hours,” said Fourpence, putting down the bucket of ice.

  “You’d better stay the night,” said Will to Laurie.

  “I think I’d better. Nothing due to land until Wednesday. Fact is, Will, I’ve been thinking. You can’t run this show on your own. What I think you need is a partner. Me, in fact. Don’t want to go back to England anymore and the airline is a dead end. Flying, that would have been different. You going to stay in Africa?”

  “Not much option even if I wanted one, which I don’t. We seem to have washed up together at the far end of the empire while everyone else is going home… I don’t want to kill animals anymore, Laurie, or birds or anything. The bush we take for granted is dwindling so fast it won’t be here in fifty years. Too many people encroaching on the land. Brother Hilary does a fine job with his medicine with the purest of intentions but the balance of nature will then succumb to man. Kariba Dam downstream, bush clearing by the new farmers, hunting for money. Better we shoot the game with cameras or man will only have the memory of a lion, a rhinoceros, an elephant. You look out over that bush or the big river on the other side of the deck and imagine it without the game, without the grunt of hippo, the pungent smell downwind of the buffalo, the call of the predator birds. Take out the wildlife and you have nothing and my soul and your soul would die with the animals. You think man was really meant to live alone with his own species in a five-hundred-home block of flats with the sound of man permanently beating out his brains?

  “I don’t know much about cameras,” went on Will, “but I am going to learn and anyone who wants to come to our camp can bring a camera. Sure, we’ll walk them in the bush and protect them with our guns but the only shots will be fired to protect. I saw a darkroom in London where they developed films and showed me tricks that enhance the photographs. Maybe people will buy the photographs. Imagine getting a fish eagle on film at the moment he takes a fish out of the water while in full flight. Seen those birds sit motionless for hours watching the flowing water, for a fish to swim closer to the riverbank where he can see into the water. Hours of patience for the bird and hours of patience for the photographer. Lions mounting a kill. A cornered honey badger grabbing the balls of a buffalo. That’s what I want to photograph. Not take out fat tourists with a drinking problem so they can stand on a dead elephant. Hannes was beginning to understand all this won’t last unless we do something. If you want to join a photographic safari operation, Laurie, we can talk a deal. The trackers are great men and I respect each one of them but I have things to talk about other than the bush. Why Hannes let me join his operation. A man’s thoughts are important to him but sometimes he wants to share them and my Lozi and their English are not good enough for that kind of conversation. Maybe why Hilary is marrying his Mary. I don’t know. Life is complicated. Maybe some of the people bringing their cameras will be young women. We are not the types to be celibate. The rich clients brought whores some of the time, or girlfriends or whatever they liked to call them. Never wives. Never brought their wives, why, Laurie? I’d like to show all this to my wife… Pour yourself a drink. Excuse me just a while.”

  Down away by the river where he walked the tears were pricking at the back of his eyes. Dancing Ledge and the girl were a lifetime away.

  By the time Josephine arrived in Africa four years later with her fact-finding mission that had long made up its mind, Will was a dedicated conservationist. The photographic safari operation barely brought in enough money to pay the wages, the food and maintain the two Land Rovers, but not one animal had been shot as a trophy. It appeared to Will that if the people of the world wanted to see wild animals to take a photograph, they went to a zoo or the more easily accessible Kruger National Park in South Africa. In the park they could see everything in air-conditioned comfort.

  The darkroom had materialised from a shed that Will had draped on the inside with wartime blackout curtaining that his mother had sent him from Dorset, heavy enough to keep out the strongest sunlight. In the summer months, during the rains, the heat made the shed uninhabitable and the liquids that developed the photographs were stored upstairs of the deck, under the thick-thatched roof. Winter nights saw Will bringing his harvest of photographs to light and some made him smile from the pure joy of nature.

  Laurie Hall had dedicated his days to hard drinking and was the life and soul of the party when the occasional tourist arrived to be shown one of the last places on earth not invaded by man. The pending visit of Josephine to her brother at the end of the Labour Party fact-finding tour of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had kept his attention for three weeks. The letter had been in the mail for Will at the post office in Mongu. When the day arrived, Laurie was sober and drove the Landy to his old airport where the Beechcraft Baron deposited Josephine. The twin-engined aircraft had made three runs to chase a herd of blue wildebeest off the landing strip.

  To Will’s surprise, the president of the club met Josephine on the grass runway and the shadow of the winds of change brushed once more over Mongu.

  Josephine Langton was more important politically than her brother understood. The power of the feminist movement was being felt as much in Westminster as the Civil Rights Movement in America and the demise of colonialism around the world. The women of the Western world were reaching out for the power they would take from democracy.

  More of this crossed Will’s mind. At first he asked, what the hell was the president doing on the airfield?

  “The man’s looking after his next job,” said Laurie.

  “What job?” said Will, not understanding.

  “He doesn’t know. They’re going to toss us all out of Africa.”

  Josephine was tired and pleased to see her brother and begged off a visit to the presidency or the club and climbed in next to him in the front seat with something close to discourtesy.

  “Get me out of here, Will,” she said quietly, giving him a kiss on the cheek.

  “This is Laurie Hall,” said Will.

  “Hi, Laurie…” The car lurched away from the official reception. “The fawning protestations of the Colonial Service in its death throes makes me sick.”

  By the time the Land Rover reached the road, the blue wildebeest were back grazing on the runway and the pilot of the Beechcraft Baron and three passengers were being driven to the club by the new airport manager.

  Will introduced his sister to the three trackers and then they went upstairs to the deck, Fourpence following with the ice bucket.

  “If it helps your sensitivity, sis, I’ve tried using their Lozi names but they just ignore me. For them a name, however trivial, given by a white man is an accolade.”

  “I think I want to keep away from politics for a few days.”

  “If you talked, I would not understand. Tell me about Mum and Dad.”

  “First give me a drink.”

  Laurie Hall listened to brother and sister talk about their family and home. Sometimes they tried to bring him into the conversation b
ut mostly he sat next to them on his bar stool, alone. The group captain was going a bit dotty and Laurie gathered that that was from dropping bombs in the war. Great-Aunt Eve had died and left her money to Uncle Cliff, whoever he was. Uncle Cliff with money had promptly left the Labour Party to Josephine’s disgust and set himself up with a young mistress. Great-Aunt Eve had been surprisingly rich, which nobody in the family knew about. All those years in Chelsea had left her nothing to do but search out antiques on a meagre family private income but the old girl had had a good eye and had quietly bought and sold and put the money into property.

  Laurie watched Josephine as he drank and by halfway down the bottle of whisky, he found her highly attractive. He had drunk her pretty. Food was served at the table looking down on the river. The night was pitch-black, the moon hidden away from the world. They shot the pot out of financial necessity which somehow to Laurie made the whole thing a bit of a moral balls-up. If they didn’t shoot the game someone else would, and they both had hunting licences and the time to get rich in Africa was running out. The venison from a young impala ram was tender from two days of hanging in a tree. Going back to England at the age of twenty-eight without a pisspot full of money was not Laurie’s idea of fun, drunk or sober. He had come out like Will to avoid the army and stuck around for the reason he could think of nothing better to do and the booze and fags were cheap in Northern Rhodesia. Making money on safari had been the last idea and that had not worked because Will, over there still talking to his sister, was not interested in making money. Laurie then started on the red wine with the meat which always made him drunk.

  The others went off to bed and Laurie gave them a wave from the wrist and went back to the job of finishing the bottle of whisky. Loneliness had him by the throat and maudlin thoughts swirled around in his mind with the whisky. The thought that he had done absolutely nothing with his life came to sit with him on the bar. He looked at the demon and laughed out loud.

  “What’s there to do anyway, old cock? You make money so damn clever and then what, chum? Not worth the bloody effort… Shut up, Hall, you’re talking to yourself again… Your old man was a drunk so join the club. The old man was happy even if the old woman wasn’t.”

  Laurie lurched off his bar stool and staggered to the rail that went round the deck and stared out into the dark. He farted loudly and fanned at the smell behind and then he burped and went back to his drink at the bar.

  “Life’s a load of shit and then you die so why not have a drink in the middle?”

  Then his head came down slowly onto the bar and he was fast asleep, the whisky glass resting on the polished wood still held firmly in his right hand.

  His night dreams were better than his day.

  Tired beyond the ability to think, Josephine had swallowed her anti-malaria pill and got in under the mosquito net where she took off all her clothes and let the cool breeze from the river brush her nakedness. Her bedroom was at the far end of the deck, furthest away from the bar but under the same wide, thatched roof. The sides facing the bar and the rest of the deck were screened by river reeds, the one side not challenging her privacy open to the river breeze. The grunts and screeches from the African night orchestrated to a background of croaking frogs and singing cicadas played no fear to her from the dark: her young brother, the big-game hunter, was across the floor in his own screened bedroom and older sister was quite secure. She heard a wild dog bark from a long way off and then she slept deeply. Only once did she dream and briefly. In her dream there was a loud fart and Wolfgang Baumann was Hamlet, soliloquising from the ramparts of a thatched castle.

  The dawn chorus brought her awake. Someone was snoring from the far end of the deck and the brief memory of her dream vanished forever. She went back to sleep with the wild geese honking down below while the smell of woodsmoke drifted up from the outside cookhouse tended by Onepenny.

  Josephine woke again to the smell of coffee and sausage cooked over the open fire. The yellowing morning sun was slanting up at her room. For a moment she had no idea where she was. Putting on her clothes in the new daylight, she got out from under the net and stood at her private part of the rail looking down on the Zambezi River. Fish jumped and two pairs of hippo eyes watched her, the rest of their bodies submerged. She looked up and out over the bush as far as she could see to the horizon and the hills of the distant escarpment, bush fires hazing the view. The valley floor was flat, not even a hillock. For a moment her primeval soul spoke to her to stay forever in the valley close to the trees and the river.

  Will’s idea of an African breakfast was plentiful. Two eggs, sausage, two chops, tomatoes, fried potatoes, pumpkin and ample toast. The bread came from an oven cut into an old anthill and baked by Fourpence, the vegetables grown in the base camp garden well protected from monkeys and bush pig, the chops and sausage from the impala of the night before and the eggs out of the chicken run. There was tinned butter and marmalade and powder had made up the milk.

  “The shower is outside next to the loo, over there.” Will pointed at the river-reed enclosure under a large acacia tree with the full bucket of water already hauled up into the tree and the pipe attached to its closed bottom leading down to a tap above the shower rose. Granadilla grew around the reeds but the monkeys ate them green, the small vervet monkeys with the long tails and black faces.

  “Thanks, I’ll try it… Where’s Laurie?”

  “Recovering. Laurie has a drinking problem. Fact is, Laurie has a problem full stop. Across Africa in lonely spots there are many Laurie Halls. There just isn’t enough for him to do here. He likes people, lots of people. Photography and the bush are all I need… Hilary, Mary and the kids will be here for lunch… Enjoy your breakfast and I’ll take you down the river. Laurie has a hut by the river downstream from the house. Snoring. His idea. Works. That or I’d have shot ’im. Well, not really.”

  “When are you coming back to England, Will?”

  “Not now. Probably never.”

  “What about a wife and kids?”

  “Can I ask you the same question? Poor Mother. Four children over twenty-six and no grandchildren. Poor old Randolph. He and Anna would have looked well with half a dozen. I mean, Hilary’s kids are not real grandchildren as much as she says they are in her letters. You haven’t seen Hilary for a very long time so don’t act shocked and don’t say anything. He catches tropical diseases like kids in England catch winter colds. Tough as old boots under the skeleton.”

  “Byron’s buying a national newspaper,” said Josephine.

  “You didn’t tell me that last night.”

  “And he’s up to something in Africa.”

  “Never been here in his life.”

  “You remember that black man at the manor who tried to rub you up the wrong way? He wanted to meet Byron. Said I had spoken a lot about him but I don’t think it was that. Paul said things about Byron’s business that even I did not know and when they got together, they were as thick as thieves for a couple of days. I hadn’t seen Paul again until this trip. There is somebody in England paying for party officials of the local black nationalist party to visit England to lobby the cause and what Paul said in Lusaka makes me think my twin is footing the bills. But why, Will?”

  “Why don’t you ask Byron when you get home? Eat your breakfast. You want more coffee, just yell for Onepenny.”

  Hilary arrived at lunchtime and the Goliath heron bit him in the back of his right leg making him howl and sending his three-year-old son into a tantrum of excitement.

  “Everyone attacks the missionary,” said Hilary, rubbing the red mark below the line of his shorts where the sharp beak had broken the skin. “First thing they do. That bird should be locked up. Mary, look out for that bird. It has an evil spirit. Every time I come here I forget the bird and every time it gets me. Is it a male or a female, Will?”

  “Does it make any difference?”

  “Not really. And my son rejoices at my suffering. Mary, this is my adopted-sister Jos
ephine, so why don’t you women go off and talk woman talk with the children so Will and I can have a glass of medicine? Where’s Laurie?”

  “Somebody mention booze?” said Laurie, coming up from his sleeping hut.

  “Certainly I did. How are you? You look terrible.”

  “So do you,” said Laurie with a smile. “The bird get you again?”

  “Yes he did.”

  They all laughed.

  Then Will asked, “Are you all happy to camp by the river tonight?”

  Within twenty minutes of the sun going down it was dark, and the firelight was reaching high into the fever trees on the banks of the river. Josephine had expected a twilight. They had camped a kilometre down the river with the intention of spending the night. The three trackers had made their own fire fifty metres away. Both fires were high up on a bank set back from the river under the trees where the sparse grass had long ago been grazed by the animals. There had been no rain for three months.

  The two children had gone to sleep on an old blanket next to their mother. Will had his back to the tree, next to his rifle. Laurie carried a gun as did each of the trackers. Dry firewood, hard burning mopani, was stacked next to the fires. A single white, ghostly mosquito net hung straight down, waiting for Josephine. The others had been bitten so many times they took no notice.

  Laurie was on his way to being drunk. Once the first ‘medicine’ found his blood there was no stopping him.

  The darkness wrapped around them. A log fell in the fire and showered the night with sparks.

  Will let the fire fade away to red coals and then showed his sister the stars. All the planets, constellations, the Milky Way, the layer of stars behind and the inky blackness of the void beyond.

  “There’s more, if our eyes could see,” said Will. “Not even the new scientists know where it ends, we really are a grain of sand in the universe… Is there a God up there, Hilary?”