by Peter Rimmer
The eyes that stared at the farmers and their wives, farmers with good shoes and packets of cigarettes tucked into the specially large top pockets of their bush jackets, their wives in summer-weight print frocks, the children confident and well fed, saw nothing, the focus looking miles away over their heads, through the walls of the old colonial hotel into the past of failure.
Maybe somebody he knew would come and sit at any one of the three empty seats around his coffee table and buy him a cup of tea.
Six thousand miles away from Salisbury, Rhodesia, Byron Langton was speaking on the phone from London to the bullion manager at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich, giving him precise instructions to sell the two parcels of gold bullion held by the bank under nominee to Langton Merchant Bank and reinvest the proceeds into West German industrial shares with a spread of no more than five thousand pounds into any one share. Account number 2759464 contained one hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds sterling, the original ten thousand pounds investment representing the bonus allocated to Laurie Hall for his work in shooting the crocodiles. The price fetched for the gold bullion was seven hundred and twelve US dollars per ounce, up from the original price of thirty-five dollars.
Across the room in the Meikles Hotel’s lounge, a tall gangling Englishman who, by the rich colour of his skin had spent most of his life in the bush, was watching Laurie Hall. Anthony Scott was twenty-seven years old and the name Ant, by which he was known in the Rhodesian army, belied his height of six foot three inches. There was not an ounce of fat on any part of his body and his sandy hair had been bleached almost white by the African sun.
Laurie Hall had spent the three previous nights sleeping on a wooden bench in Cecil Square, the small park next to Meikles Hotel that had been named after the founder of Rhodesia, Cecil John Rhodes. The January temperature was hot and humid until the rain came down in tropical deluge. Every night, Laurie had pulled the flimsy raincoat most carefully over his tucked up body on the bench, his head on the canvas bag, all covered expertly by the plastic so neither wind nor rain could damage the last few of his possessions. If it had not been for the hunger tearing at his belly, he would have enjoyed the dry warmth inside his cocoon.
The jacarandas in Cecil Square had long shed their pale blue flowers but a host of doves called to the morning as the new sun rose and began to steam off the rainwater from the roads as well as Laurie’s raincoat which he hung over the back of the bench in the sun while he sat and looked at the day.
The years after landing in Cape Town from the Edinburgh Castle had not been good to Laurie Hall. He had drifted from job to job, drinking whatever he made, a man flushed with discontent. He had gone from a learner assistant on a tobacco farm in Rhodesia to an overseer on the roads, watching a gang of blacks dig the ditches in the blazing hot sun. Once he had panned for gold, finding three gold nuggets that kept him drunk for a week. Whenever possible he tried not to think of Shelley Lane and had long since stopped mentioning her name: no one who met the long-haired, bearded, usually penniless Laurie Hall believed the man could ever have met the famous singer, let alone been her lover. Everyone thought he was telling them lies.
He was thirty-seven years old and looked more like fifty, the only contradiction in his appearance the piercing blue eyes that could still count a herd of buck from a distance of two thousand metres. Thinking clearly of what to do to survive, he planned to raid the dustbins in the alley at the back of the hotel when the daylight went at six o’clock. Trying not to look conspicuous, he watched the surrounding tables changing many times.
In the old days, when he had flown down from Mongu on leave, he had lavishly tipped the waiters and particularly old Guru, the ancient waiter with the red sash and pepper-grey hair who remembered the better times and left the white man sitting in the chair for as long as he wished. When the table next door left their bread rolls uneaten, Guru in clearing the table made room for his tray by moving the plate onto Laurie’s table along with the leftover butter and a knife. Laurie’s hands shook while he buttered the rolls, trying not to cram the bread into his mouth while he hid the tears of gratitude.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” said Ant Scott, pulling out one of the empty chairs. Laurie looked up at the tall man and choked on the last of his roll. The eyes staring into the back of his head were dark green, the colour of the Atlantic Ocean in winter. Laurie waved at the vacant chair, trying to swallow the last of the bread and keep his holey shoes out of sight under the coffee table. Instinctively, his other hand touched the top of his squash bag to make sure it was there. This giant of a man, he had never seen before.
“Did you hear the news?” asked Ant Scott, sitting down in the chair, his long legs thrust out to the side of the coffee table. When he smiled, small crow’s feet appeared at the corners of both eyes, legacy of his years hunting in the bush.
“I don’t read the newspaper, or only sometimes,” the sometimes when he could find a paper left at the table or left in a dustbin without being fouled by the rubbish.
“There was a major terrorist attack on farms in the northeast border close to Mozambique. They came up out of the valley.”
“Who did?”
“The terrorists.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s my job. Can I buy you some tea or a drink?”
“A beer, please,” said Laurie too quickly. Ant raised his hand to Guru showing two fingers together and in less than a minute Laurie was looking at a brown bottle of Castle beer, the sides dripping with condensation, the glass next to it frosted from the refrigerator. Clattering the side of the glass, he poured half the beer, raising a white head in his haste.
“Cheers,” he said and brought his head down to the glass to drink, his arm already frozen with anticipation. “Hell, that’s good,” said Laurie putting down the empty glass still white from foam. The upturned bottle was steady for the second pour.
“When did you last have a beer?” asked Ant.
“Not for a while.” Laurie drank the second half of his bottle of beer and put back the empty glass on the table. “You have no idea how good that tasted.”
“Oh, I have, Mr Hall.”
“So I do know you after all?”
“Not from a bar of soap.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I asked Guru.”
“Why?”
“Your eyes look a great distance. You’ve spent many years in the bush. Can I buy you another beer?”
“As many as you like but I can’t reciprocate. What I have you see right here. You could say I’m on the bones of my arse. Guru knows. He looks after me.”
“I saw… Most bums they kick out of Meikles before the first cup of tea… You can ride a horse, I presume?”
“Yes I can.”
“And follow spoor in dry bush?”
“Usually. Leopard are difficult.”
“From a horse at a trot?”
“That I never tried.”
“You don’t want to know my name?”
“Not unless you want me to.” Laurie was looking over the man’s right shoulder, trying to attract Guru. The taste of alcohol had been delicious.
“Where are you going after here?”
“To the dustbins at the back of the hotel and then the bench to the right of the fountain in Cecil Square.”
“What happened, Mr Hall?”
“You really want to hear?”
“An educated man down to park benches must have a tale.”
“Are you a writer? Newspaperman?”
“I can’t spell. Left school when I was fifteen and roamed the bush for ten years. Then I joined the army. Had skills they wanted. Knew the bush. Like you. Suddenly the likes of us bums are in high demand.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re going to have a war on our hands. Sanctions haven’t worked to kick the whites out of Rhodesia so the communists have armed the blacks. Probably the Americans have sent in guns as well. Who knows?
Doesn’t matter, really. But the guns are real. The bush is difficult country to fight. The Shona tribe was never aggressive, Matabele, the remnant Zulu, yes. The Shona farmed and ran cattle and kept to his own business for centuries. He was never a hunter. The likes of you and me are hunters. Why we are going to win the war. I’m raising a group of men to hunt terrorists from horseback. Go where the Land Rovers can’t go. Follow the spoor. When I’ve heard your story maybe I’ll ask you to join us.”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“At the beginning. Right at the beginning. Two more beers, Guru,” he said to the black man now standing at his elbow.
When the man left, Laurie Hall was drunk, drinking on an empty stomach. With the force of long habit he stood up on his feet and bent slowly for the squash bag. Carefully, he walked out through the tables and chairs amid the hum of other people’s conversations.
Turning right out of the hotel front door onto the wet pavement he walked back into Cecil Square and found his lonely bench. With the dignity of the drunk, he slowly forced the raincoat out of the bag and over his body. When he slept, he dreamed he was back by the river, at Hannes Potgieter’s old base camp. Shelley Lane was there. He was happy in his dream.
It took Ant Scott a week to check up on the story told to him in Meikles Hotel. It then took him another week to find Laurie Hall. The man who had been known with favour by the head waiters from Quaglino’s to the Savoy Grill had finally lost his will to survive.
The alcohol on a three-days empty stomach had given Laurie the cramps and made him vomit even when there was nothing but bile to vomit. The pain from head to toe was excruciating. The few friends he had once had in Salisbury crossed the road when they saw him walking towards them on the same pavement. The only length of anything in his canvas squash bag was the plastic raincoat.
As the sun was greying the morning sky three days after drinking his last pint of beer, Laurie Hall jumped from his wooden seat in Cecil Square, the long raincoat looped over the bough of a jacaranda tree, the end tied round his neck. The plastic gave sufficiently to prevent the snapping of his neck but he hung from the tree, the holey soles of his shoes three inches from the ground, the mourning doves calling in the trees around. A young trooper from the British South African Police, the force started by Cecil John Rhodes, saw the body hanging from the tree.
Laurie Hall came round looking up at the young policeman.
“Shit,” he said, “I can’t even kill myself properly.” The policeman was scooping water from the fountain and forcing Laurie to swallow.
“What’s your name?” asked the trooper.
“What’s it to you?”
“Routine. It’s against the law to kill yourself. You’ll have to come to the charge office. Then we’ll have the police doctor look at you.”
“Do something wrong and everyone wants to know your business. Otherwise you can rot in hell.”
“Things are never so bad the next day.”
“You’re too young to know.”
Lady Fiona Langton had given Byron three children in exactly the right order, one boy and two girls. She was editor of Langton Publishers and the first volume of Heathcliff Mortimer’s Africa Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow had sold ten thousand copies in hardback, thanks mainly to good reviews in the Daily Garnet and its satellite publications in the provinces. Byron had purchased four provincial newspapers and one in Australia.
The day Ant Scott found Laurie Hall in a police cell, the marks of his attempted hanging still visible around his neck, Byron and his wife were visiting a country estate with a view to establishing a new dynasty now the cash flow in eighty per cent of his companies was positive.
The house outside East Horsley in the county of Surrey would be bought by a company in Lichtenstein which in turn would be owned by nominees of the Union Bank of Switzerland. The company would rent the estate to Langton Merchant Bank for a peppercorn rent with one wing of the old house used by the bank to house the accounts department of the entire Langton financial empire. With one stroke Byron would buy a two thousand-acre country estate with money that had never been subject to tax, the cost of the accounts department would drop forty per cent, the house servants and gardeners would be company employees and tax-deductible and any loss made by farming the estate largely as a shooting lodge for Langton clients would be tax-deductible from banking income. More importantly, the children would grow up the same way Fiona’s ancestors had grown up for five hundred years.
Largely, trading from African mineral exports had paid for the estate.
At a military camp thirty miles from Hilary Bains’s mission station, Sixpence, Fourpence and Onepenny were undergoing weapon training. The drill sergeant was a Russian as were the weapons.
The three trackers had bought as many cattle as their bonus money from the crocodile hunt would allow, their ancient farming methods that had worked for centuries never once suggesting they ask where the cows would find their food, in old Africa there was always grazing and plentiful water. A combination of foot and mouth disease and drought had left the trackers destitute two years before Laurie Hall found himself sleeping on a bench in Cecil Square.
The same skills they had taught Laurie Hall, the skills that had been taught to them by Hannes Potgieter, were needed by the Russians to push the last of the colonials out of Southern Africa.
When the time was right, each tracker would back a group of guerrilla fighters over the Zambezi River into Rhodesia and through the deep bush to the soft targets of white farms and mines, the ZIPRA soldiers of Joshua Nkomo doing the fighting before being led back by the trackers to the safety of Zambia.
For Sixpence, Fourpence and Onepenny it was another job like any other. Before the new job for which they were thankful, none of the three had ever heard of Russia, communism or Joshua Nkomo.
For three months Laurie Hall trained in a military camp outside Bulawayo before joining the Horse Scouts at their forward base in the Zambezi Valley. The camp was above the Victoria Falls almost on the Botswana border.
Mongu was over one hundred miles upriver but on the other side of the water. Each trooper in the Horse Scouts was responsible for his own horse. Every one of the animals was salted, having been bitten by the tsetse fly and found immune. The rains had been over for a month but the camp was hot and humid. Laurie’s new job was to patrol the riverbank on horseback, looking for hostile spoor and terrorist food and ammunition dumps brought across over the years by civilians in preparation for the second Chimurenga or war of liberation.
The overall troop was commanded by Ant Scott but the horsemen patrolled great distances in pairs. They were scouts, not to make contact with the terrorists unless attacked or they had to intervene.
The irony of having left England in the first place to avoid national service and two years in the British Army was not lost on Laurie Hall. His mind shut out the past and the future. Why the strange trail of life had led him into the valley to hunt down men gave him as little pleasure as trying to hang himself. He was alive and the instinct to stay alive was stronger than the one which wished to kill himself. And to stay alive he needed a job.
Ant Scott had paired off inexperienced young men with strength and older men with experience of the bush. The brawn of one would help the brains of the other, or so his theory went, and he sent his men out into the wilderness.
Mike Barrow was twenty-two years old, a virgin from lack of opportunity and the great-grandson of a pioneer who had helped raise the Union Jack at Fort Salisbury in 1889, pronouncing in the process that all the land of the Shona belonged to the Queen of England through the good offices of Cecil John Rhodes, a self-made imperialist backed by his wealth from diamonds and gold in South Africa. The Queen of England had given him a charter, based on dubious mineral concessions obtained from the local chiefs, to find the legendary gold of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in the ancient lands of Ophir, the land of Monomatapa in the heart of darkest Africa. Rhodes had told Mike Barro
w’s great-grandfather there was more gold in the hinterland than all the gold in the Witwatersrand and he was wrong.
The first night Laurie Hall and Mike Barrow camped next to the river deep in the mopani forest, Laurie started collecting wood for the big fire in the way Will Langton had shown him what to do.
“Major Scott said not to make fires the terrs can target,” said Mike Barrow.
“On that score Anthony Scott is an ass,” said Laurie Hall, going about his business of collecting thick pieces of fallen wood. “There are more bloody lion, leopard, hyena, jackal and wild dog in this bush than terrs by a multiple of ten thousand to one, but I do have a plan for Moscow’s messengers of liberation. And I’ll take another bet, young Mike. The poor bloody terrorists exploited by the Great Party of Liberation which will tie their balls in a knot far worse than the British will die in far greater numbers from wild animals than any firefight with our great security forces. You believe Uncle Laurie; build a fire. I’ve been here before. For a lion we are just part of the food chain. Also, I hate eating cold food when there’s game to be shot without a game ranger telling me what to do. In a war, the rules go. We make our own. Now, young Mike, you get the fire prepared while I go off and shoot us something to eat.”
“You’re going to shoot with an automatic rifle?”
“One single shot. And there’s another lesson from my friend Will Langton. Never, but never shoot more than you can eat.”
It was almost dark when Mike heard the single shot from upriver. The tree frogs and cicadas fell silent for a brief moment before resuming the croaks and screeches that deafened the night. He waited, clutching his new FN rifle, and as he waited the last of the light went and he could hear fish plopping in the Zambezi River and the grunting of the hippos in the pools they had passed when a half-kilometre from making camp. Up above, the planets were visible, the moon nowhere to be seen, the void of the great universe as black as ink.
