by Peter Rimmer
The drums began on the Friday morning before dawn. They had started at the paramount chief’s winter palace at Lealui, eleven miles from Mongu. The drums had spread the message down the floodplains to evacuate the low ground. The beat of the drums was persistent and ominous.
Shelley woke and shivered, listening to the ancient sound of Africa. A lion roared, disturbed by the drums. Hyena were keening from three different parts of the night. A small sickle moon, low down in the east, threw no light across the low plains that spread away from the slow-flowing persistency of the river. The river and tree frogs were noisier than usual. The drums continued, permeating the night. The smell of the waiting crocodile skins was overpowering.
Without waking Laurie, Shelley climbed out from under their mosquito net and threw more wood on the dying fire, sending a shower of sparks up into the fever trees that lined their bank of the Zambezi River. The tinder-dry wood caught and burst into flames, showing the sleeping trackers spread out on either side of the fire. Sixpence turned in his sleep while the drums went on beating into her brain.
Somewhere below her fear she heard the rich notes of music, playing in her mind to the beat of the drums. Going silently to the Land Rover she found her journal and her pen. Back in the firelight she wrote down the notes and relaxed. The words would come later. A thrashing downriver told her not all the crocodiles had died in the onslaught of gunfire. A family of hippo in the pool below their camp grunted, taking in air before sinking down onto the mud. A nightjar screeched, and the fire collapsed into itself, showering the underside of the fever tree’s branches. Sitting in the fire smoke, her head just clear, the journal and pen sat quietly next to her. For the first time in many years, Byron Langton was nowhere in her mind.
When the dawn came gently, first blushing the sky, then dimming the millions of stars, and lastly the sliver of moon, three pages at the back of the journal were covered in badly drawn lines. The notes were in between, recognisable. Shelley read back her music and smiled to herself. Cramped from sitting with her arms hugging her knees, she got up and walked down the bank to the river. Many animals were drinking the living water: a giraffe, legs splayed to reach the water; the small buck fearful of the new day.
As the sun pulled itself up from behind the trees across the floodplain, the drums were still beating.
It was a beautiful day.
Octavio Goncalves arrived at lunchtime in a five-ton Bedford truck. Within half an hour, two and a half thousand crocodile belly skins were loaded into the back of the truck.
“Don’t you want to check our numbers?” asked Laurie after the Portuguese transport owner had signed for the skins.
“No point. I received a phone call from Will’s brother. I have to think they are very different, those brothers. One dreams his life away in the bush. The other very concise. How you say? No frills. We are to take the skins now to Umtali Leather and Tanning. No putting them on the train at Livingstone. You wait in Umtali with skins till cured then go with them to Beira. In Beira you put cured skins on boat to Brindisi in Italy. You go from Beira on same cargo boat. In Beira you receive written instructions from the offices of Manica Trading, shipping agents. I told by Will’s brother, Manica Trading subsidiary of Union Castle Shipping Line which is a subsidiary of British and Commonwealth Shipping which Mr Byron Langton is director. Cash for your trackers paid to Barclays Bank DCO, Livingstone, when skins arrive Beira. Maybe one month time.”
Laurie looked at Shelley, half-apologetically.
“Shelley,” said Laurie, “you can fly out of Mongu?”
“Nonsense, I’m coming with you. Journey through Africa. Boat trip. Lover, just what we need. There’s enough room in front of the Bedford. If Mr Goncalves does not mind?”
“To make a journey with you will last in my mind forever.”
“You Latins have a very nice way of putting things.”
The truck and the Land Rover reached Will’s base camp at the same time. Within less than half an hour, Laurie and Shelley were ready to begin on the long dirt road to Livingstone and Will and Lindsay were packing the negatives of Will’s photography into his Land Rover together with his and Hannes Potgieter’s rifles in their cases alongside his photographic equipment. There was little else of movable value at base camp.
The drums still beat incessantly.
Laurie and Will shook hands formally, their eyes saying more than the handshake.
“Well, William,” said Shelley. “This has been quite a trip so far. See you in London.” She kissed him lightly on both cheeks. To Will’s surprise there was not a trace of alcohol on her breath. He looked from Laurie to Shelley and back again, smiling to both of them.
“One day, Shelley…” he said to her. “Octavio, you’d better get them out of here. We only have two days.”
“Yes, that’s what the paramount chief said. He not going away on big barge. Big row with resident. When resident use swear word first ever time to chief, chief get fright and give instruction his people leave floodplain now. Message came in Portuguese from Angola which I translate. The gorges up there have walls of water raging down, all flooding into Zambezi. Two days this place go downriver. Mongu safe on high ground. Lealui will be washed away.”
“You think the home will go?” asked Will.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Worst floods anyone ever remembers. Stay in the club tonight.”
From something so permanent in Will’s life, the base camp with its tame animals had become vulnerable and all the time the drums sent out the message, never missing a beat.
The Bedford five-tonner moved away in low gear and disappeared through the mopani trees.
“Funny,” said Will to Lindsay. “The sins of the big crocodile hunt will be washed away by the rivers. We’d better go.”
“Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not.”
The trackers had followed the Bedford in the second Land Rover with all their possessions and the instruction to meet Will in Livingstone on the fifteenth of the following month at ten a.m. outside the offices of Barclays Bank. The bank draft was being sent by Byron in Will’s name.
The chief had left his instructions the previous day.
“My money I want in England. My three sons, my chief wife are going to England. We become English. Boys get expensive education.”
“You’re going to leave Africa?” asked Will in amazement, looking at the grey-haired African in old shorts and a shirt that had probably never been washed. The chief’s old Land Rover was covered in dust and dripped oil on the path from under the engine.
“Won’t I be rich in England?”
“Very rich, in fact.”
“Then I become British. You see. One day my sons speak just like you. Send boys to Stanmore. Buy house like Langton Manor. I remember all you say, Mr Langton. Without the protection of the British Empire, Barotseland no good. Best you go home too… I will visit your brother in his offices for my money. Thank you for address. Next time we will see each other in England.”
Will, still smiling at the thought of a Barotse chief living the life of an English country squire, got into the driving seat of the Land Rover and started the engine. He did not look back.
From the corner of the house, the Goliath heron watched the car drive off through the trees.
The Bedford truck ground its way along the twisting road through the mopani trees. The bush was tinder-dry and the elephant grass crushed by the heat of the sun, brown and broken.
The Land Rover, with the trackers, had turned up to the chief’s kraal. Laurie Hall had allocated the trackers one hundred skins. The ten thousand pounds sterling would enable them to buy so many cows they would not be able to count them. Each would take a series of wives; each new one very young; there would be many children to herd the cattle.
Sixpence, Fourpence and Onepenny were singing a song of their tribe, an old song of a warrior king. The chief would know from where they could buy their cattle. Even if the chief knew their bonus c
ame from the hunting of crocodile skins, he would still want their money, and it was right that they should go to their chief. Everything in the tribe went through the chief.
The road from Mongu to Livingstone was a little under four hundred miles. Rarely did their truck come out of second gear. The road had never been graded and when the ruts made by the wheels were too deep, a detour made a new road. When elephant pushed over the mopani trees, the trucks went round the fallen tree trunks.
For the first day they averaged nine miles an hour. It was hot and dusty in the cab and the smell of crocodile skins and the whirr of the tsetse fly never left them. Over their faces they tied handkerchiefs. It was too hot to drive with the windows up and they sweated in the heat. All along the road they saw game, mostly elephant. Twice they backed away from the elephant, driving carefully around through the bush. Laurie and Octavio watched for tree stumps that could cut their tyres. The tall, red anthills were easier to see. It was a journey Shelley knew she would enjoy better in retrospect.
They drove on through the dusk and well into the night, the big headlights picking their way through the tall mopani trees, the bush pitch-black the moment the lights moved on, the big engine roaring at the night. With the dusk, the tsetse had left the vehicle, the circling insects fooled by the moving truck into thinking it was game and food.
When Octavio pulled off the road into a clearing in the forest, they collected firewood by the light from the truck. They were all tired and hungry and alone in the world. The mess of tin foods mixed in a single pot over the fire tasted better to Shelley than any food she had eaten in London.
Within ten minutes of eating they were asleep around the fire, the flames showing the forest of trees and the one side of the truck. Both men slept with rifles by their sides and woke at regular intervals to feed the fire.
Never once before dawn did Shelley move or dream. When she woke the birds were calling.
“Bloody jumbo slept behind the truck all night,” said Laurie. “Grass is flat as a pancake. You hear anything?”
“They very silent, elephant, when they want,” said Octavio.
Within twenty minutes the truck was grinding down the road in the sweet cool of early morning.
“This is the most beautiful place on earth,” said Shelley Lane.
Neither man spoke but both of them were smiling.
They drove into Livingstone after lunch on the third day and then crossed the high bridge over the gorge with the spectacular Victoria Falls on their right, the water cascading over the lip, crashing down into the gorge and sending the spray hundreds of feet up into the blue sky.
“Wait for the big water,” said Octavio. “Then you see nothing but spray. Tomorrow morning before the sun comes up, the big water.”
They drove to the Victoria Falls Hotel in its colonial splendour looking back at the single span bridge and the cloud of spray flung skyward by the pounding thrust of the Zambezi River.
“I usually stay upriver at the camping site,” said Octavio.
“Not tonight, big man. This one’s on me. Best rooms. Tomorrow we carry on the big drive. Today we play. My throat can feel the taste of a cold beer. First beer, then bath, then playtime.”
“No one can afford this hotel,” said Octavio.
“I can,” said Shelley in a small voice walking on towards reception. “You two boys go out onto that splendid terrace and order me a very cold beer. Don’t pay. I’ll sign for it. And lover, don’t go away.”
The lecherous look from Shelley ended with her tongue licking right across the wideness of her mouth.
After their baths and a clean change of clothing they met under the msasa trees with the last of the sun reflecting richly in the spray from the Falls. A steam engine with a line of goods wagons rumbled over the railway section of the bridge. The night was warm.
For the first time, Laurie Hall saw Shelley Lane in other than shorts and dirty jeans. Her black hair was swept back and the big mouth was covered in chocolate-brown lipstick overcovered with a trace of white. The white dress plunged at the back, showing off her perfect tan. Drop earrings sparkled in the last rays of the sun as she walked towards them on heels two inches from the ground. On her wrists were bangles and on the side of her hair, the left side, she had pinned the single flower of a red hibiscus, plucked from the pathway through the courtyard of the hotel.
A steel band was playing gentle music to the small groups of sundowners savouring the soft beginning of an African night. Every male on the wide terrace and under the trees watched Shelley Lane walk between the tables. There was a hush in the buzz of conversation.
“You ever pick up words, lover?” she said to Laurie as a red-fezzed waiter pulled back her chair and the two men rose from their seats. “Met a girl called Virginia Stepping, old friend of Byron’s I think, who was always saying ‘lover’. I like it. Better than honey or sweet or my best pet aversion, darling… I think they were lovers,” she said.
“Do you still love him?” asked Laurie quietly.
“Not as much as I did.”
The lights came up through the trees as the dusk settled quickly into night. The bandstand was splashed with light, the floodlights catching a reflection in the smiling teeth of the African band members. Their medley of African music moved into popular songs, a piano joining the sound. The buzz of conversation picked up with the increase in guests and the flow of alcohol. Shelley was thirty metres from the band, listening carefully to the music, ignoring Octavio’s question as to how a young woman could afford such rooms in the hotel. She thought he was trying to say thank you which even his Latin charm failed to bring across without embarrassment.
Slowly, wickedly, Shelley Lane began to chuckle. The man had no idea she sang for a living.
“That tune I know,” said Octavio, trying to cover up his gaucheness. He was more used to campfires and the bush.
“Do you really?” said Shelley, pinching Laurie to keep quiet. “Would you like me to sing it for you?”
“Can you sing?” asked the Portuguese.
“Just a little… As a matter of fact, I wrote that song which is why the bandleader has moved into a medley of my songs. Laurie, would you mind? Apart from drunken songs in a Land Rover I never sang to you and this will probably be the most beautiful setting I will ever sing in.”
Slowly, she waved her right hand to the band, and the music stopped. The manager of the hotel walked onto the bandstand from where he had been waiting.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Tonight we have an unusual pleasure to have with us as a guest in our hotel Miss Shelley Lane who will sing for you some of her famous songs. Please stand with me to welcome Miss Shelley Lane.”
No one moved from the terrace or the lawns for an hour as Shelley moved from ‘If You Want To Be Mine’ through to ‘This One Is For You’.
Stopping the clapping with raised hands, Shelley spoke into the microphone.
“Most singers sing other people’s songs. I don’t. Everything I sing I wrote myself. While staying with friends for three days up in Barotseland I wrote a new song, the theme of which I wrote out for a piano player. It’s to be the first song on an album I will make of African songs from my trip. No one, not even me, has heard this song before. I call it ‘Zambezi Night’.”
“Sorry, lover,” she said to Laurie back at the table where people were thrusting pieces of paper for her to sign. “That was business. Instead of trying to contact my bank in London, I made a deal with the manager. Tomorrow night I do a full cabaret in the dining room. We three get two nights on the house. He’ll get his money back from tomorrow’s cover charge… You like my song about your river?”
“Best of your songs.”
“Had to write the words upstairs. Why my bath was so long… Those musicians are brilliant… Laurie, don’t look at me like that. If you’re to be my manager you have to grow used to all this. It’s not all going to be easy. Fame, lover, has a lot of problems, signing autographs is only one of them.”
Four hundred miles upriver, Will Langton stood next to his Land Rover on the high ground where the road passed four hundred metres from where the riverbank had been. The raging torrent of floodwater now came to within fifty metres of the dirt road. Whole trees, a bloated cow, papyrus beds, rushed on down with the surging, oily water. The base camp had gone, the memory of Hannes Potgieter swept away forever.
They had all gone.
Lindsay had left that morning from the grass airstrip at Mongu, courtesy of the herd of wildebeest. The British resident had gone, courtesy of the new order. The Mongu Club was staying open for one more week, for whatever reason. The member in charge had handed over his police station to a Bemba sent from Lusaka to take control. The remaining members of the British community had left by road. The British Empire had finally ended in Barotseland.
Lindsay Healy had pleaded the best she could.
“Will, you’re just bloody crazy. You can’t stay in Africa. Place is coming apart. Like the Belgian Congo, they’ll be at each other’s throats in a week. Come to Sydney. We can get you a residence permit. No trouble. You want to photograph wildlife, go up to the Northern Territories. You don’t have your hunting concession here anymore. More likely you don’t have a house, judging by the sound of the river. Five miles away and we still heard that wall of water come downriver like an avalanche. We’ve got something going, Will, even if I did do the seducing.”
Will stood looking at the rushing water.
Even his virginity had gone. His belief in the girl from Dancing Ledge had shattered with the destruction of his celibacy. The reality of sex had been brief spurts of ecstasy. His hope for eternal happiness had finally found him coupling in a bed with a girl that wanted sex, a good time, his photographs, money, the next man; her craving had been insatiable.
