by Peter Rimmer
“If you wish.”
“Should I not wish? Weeks and weeks of preparation. Have you not got what you, Penny Bains, wanted?”
“Yes I have.”
“Then why not me? Why may I not have what I want? I give you a career in writing and you give me a night or two in bed. A rather good trade, I would imagine. All this moral righteousness is for losers, Penny Bains. We both know the price of winning. There is always a price. We have a contract, you and I. Will you honour that contract?”
“Yes,” she said quietly for the second time.
“But you find me repulsive?” Penny lowered her eyes away from the question. “Is it my age and corpulence or the methods I use to make money?”
“Both.”
“You are honest. Have you not enjoyed any of the time we spent together? Surely there was something you have learnt? A quick, sharp lesson in the perversions of man? Now, I think we must go. My restaurateur friend has a taxi waiting for us. You are not working tomorrow. Fact is, I told the Green Dolphin you have resigned. A rich writer, about to be famous, does not wait tables. All your dues but one have been paid… Are you ready, Penny Bains?”
“Yes, I am.”
“So quiet. So unlike you.”
The door to number 47 Buckingham Court was thrown open and Penny stepped over the threshold. There was a strong scent of incense which surprised her and the flat was poor for so wealthy a man.
“I have been here since I was your age,” said Byron. “The only thing that has changed is me. Look in that mirror and remember yourself at twenty-four. Remember well. It never lasts. Do you want a drink?”
“No.”
“The time has come. Sit down, anyway. Make yourself comfortable. I have waited nearly five years.”
“You won’t hurt me, will you?”
“I tell you what. Go into the bedroom and take off your clothes while I have a small brandy.”
For five minutes there was silence in the flat broken by the clock ticking on the mantelpiece.
“Are you naked?” he called through the closed bedroom door.
“For God’s sake, Byron. Come and do it.”
“You can put your clothes on again and come back in here.”
“What the hell’s going on?” she said, coming back into the lounge.
“It’s all over. You’ve fulfilled your contract. You see, Penny, the chase is always more exciting than the catch, the hunt better than the kill.”
“Would you have published my book if it was no damn good?”
“Certainly not. You would have received a contract and a royalty advance and silence.”
“So this was all a charade?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I enjoyed proving once again that every person has their price. We are all whores, Penny Bains. Just some of us are more expensive than others. Send me a signed copy. The taxi is still waiting for you downstairs in the street. Have a good life.”
3
At the end of 1985, when Penny Bains was signing copies of her book at Harrods, little or no rain had fallen in Central Africa. The main rivers were nowhere in sight. In Zimbabwe, where Mugabe had harangued but not nationalised his commercial farmers, ninety-five per cent of whom were the white settlers he had fought in the bush war, the food situation was not so serious as Zambia, where Kaunda’s brand of socialism had chased out his commercial farmers. In both countries, without help from outside, the present subsistence farmers would starve. In the villages, the rickety storage silos built of bush timber were empty of maize cobs.
In Zimbabwe, Mugabe drew from the surplus grown by his commercial farmers, much of the crop grown under irrigation. With the foreign exchange generated by the commercially grown tobacco crop he imported grain from America. In Barotseland, with no such help, the famine had begun to kill.
Perversely, in northwestern Angola the rains had been good and by the end of April 1986, the Zambezi began to swell, rushing precious water past the parched bush where the grass, for as far as the animals could eat and return to water, was grazed to the roots.
The last two truckloads of maize flour sent from Port Elizabeth in South Africa by Goldblatt and Sons, paid for by Will Langton’s bankers in Switzerland, had been hijacked in Zambia and looted. There was no grain food left on the mission and the buck, buffalo and bush pig were so emaciated the only food from them would have been skin and bone. Resigned to their fate, a fate that had been passed down to them through the centuries of Africa’s feast and famine, the people sat under the leafless trees and waited to die. For the first time in his life Will Langton knew the agony of permanent, gnawing hunger and there seemed nothing, with all his money, he could do except leave the country to its destiny. The population of man, like the population of animals, was being culled by nature. Once again only the fittest would survive the decimation ensuring the future strength of the gene pool. The clever diligently fished the river and irrigated vegetable patches close to its banks, heaving bucket after bucket of water up the slopes to the plants. Day and night the diligent watched their small patch of vegetables, chasing off the marauding baboons.
After the second hijack, Goldblatt and Sons, the company owned by Hymie Goldblatt’s family, refused further transport and no one else in South Africa was prepared to chance a vehicle further into Zambia than the capital, Lusaka. Will watched the river rise from the good rains at the Angolan headwaters and thought of Horst Kannberg. From the mission he sent a message to the trackers still patiently waiting for his return to the half-demolished base camp. Then they waited, Will, Hilary and Mary, watching the steady rise of the Zambezi while their patients, staff and schoolchildren slowly shrunk from hunger.
Horst Kannberg had never seen fit to build a house. The doctors had told Betty Gulliver many years before that she never would have children so there had seemed no point for more than a caravan. Most of the time in Zimbabwe was spent outside of a building and like the Africans, Horst treated his home as a place to sleep. Betty, married to Horst twenty years ago on the Zambezi Queen the First, had turned fifty and both of them missed the children they had never had. It was the only cloud above their happiness.
Two years after Will Langton had watched them being married, the Victoria Falls municipality built a campsite for tourists around the launch site of their cruise boat, making them pay a mooring fee for their boat and a campsite fee for their caravan. The compensation was a game fence, an ablution block with constant hot water and a stream of tourists, all of whom wanted a trip upriver on the Zambezi Queen. When Mugabe took over the country in 1980, the bush war came to an abrupt halt and within two more years foreign tourists were again enthralled by ‘The Smoke that Thunders’, the Victoria Falls. In three years, Horst and Betty invested their profits in new boats so that by the time Onepenny and Fourpence had paddled the five hundred kilometres downriver from the base camp, there were three Zambezi Queens being lapped by the waters of the Zambezi River. On the bank above the moored boats was the immobilised caravan surrounded by Betty’s garden of ferns and flowers, orchids and palms, and a vegetable garden tightly guarded against baboons and vervet monkeys by a walk-in cage of strong wire mesh. From the tall trees that drank the waters of the Zambezi, the monkeys swung over the game fence and foraged for food among the tourists.
Sixpence had stayed at base camp complaining of old age. His hair, curly and tight, had gone from pepper grey to white. He was probably five years older than the other trackers and his eyes could no longer count a herd of impala at two thousand metres. Over his eyes an opaque film was growing, and he knew that soon he would be blind. With his fishing line and the small garden protected by the thorn trees he would wait for them to return from their journey.
The makori, cut from the trunk of a single tree to give them access to the river and the fish that swam away from the riverbank, was the length of one and a half men stretched flat on the ground. With the verbal message from Will Langton, they used this to go downriver but would abandon it when they reached Baa
s Horst.
Horst was reading a letter from his brother in Cape Town. It was the middle of July and cool under the jackalberry tree. In midstream he noticed a dugout canoe trying to beat the flow and turn in to shore. One of their parent’s relatives, the son of his mother’s sister, had written from Riga in Latvia saying the Russian Empire was about to collapse. There was even hope of the properties owned by their grandparents being returned to the family. The two blacks in the makori had fought out of the current and were heading directly for his jetty. All three of his riverboats were on the sunset cruise upriver.
The order on Goldblatt and Sons in Port Elizabeth was fulfilled in seven days. The bags of maize meal were loaded from the five-ton lorry straight onto the deck of the Zambezi Queen the First whose adjustable outboard motors were more likely to navigate the rapids. Horst Kannberg filled in the amount of the invoice on Will Langton’s cheque in Swiss francs, which included the duty charged by the Zimbabwean government at Beit Bridge and paid in rand by Goldblatt’s clearing agent. The cheque already signed by Will Langton on the mission and delivered with a letter by Fourpence was the kind of business enjoyed by Hymie Goldblatt’s brother. The cheque would be deposited in his illegal bank account in Switzerland against the day a communist government in South Africa nationalised his business and threw him out of the country.
At the side of the Zambezi Queen the First, the same boat designed and built by Will Langton, three tenders each made of four sealed and empty forty-four-gallon drums supported drums of petrol for the voyage up and down the river. The five tons of food were stacked on the lower and upper decks of the boat. With the permanent captain and crewman now under the command of Horst Kannberg, the boat left the jetty and pushed upriver, avoiding the central flow by keeping to the riverbank. Behind, the tenders followed, attached to the steel wire ropes. Both the captain, a Matabele cadre who had fought for Joshua Nkomo in the Rhodesian bush war, and Horst were armed with hunting rifles.
On the third day, the cargo of maize meal reached Katima Mulilo and the Zambian border. Horst showed the Zambian custom’s official the letter from Will Langton which he tried to read upside down, all the time glancing at the sacks of maize meal and the drums of petrol. Fourpence and Onepenny were taken away because they didn’t have passports. Horst tried to explain the trackers were Zambians who had paddled five hundred kilometres to seek help for starving people.
“Unload your cargo for inspection,” said the man, returning the upside down letter. “Bring those drums ashore. You may not bring petrol into Zambia without paying duty. They are confiscated.”
“Then we go back to Zimbabwe.”
“You have left the Zimbabwe border post. You are in Zambia. Unload those sacks for inspection. There is duty to pay.”
“The food is a gift to the people on the mission.”
“There is always duty to pay. Unload your cargo for inspection.”
“I refuse.”
“You have guns under those sacks! You are a South African agent. Your passport is South African.”
“I have lived in Zimbabwe over twenty years.”
“Unload your cargo or I have you arrested.”
“I’m going back to Zimbabwe.”
“Do you have Zimbabwe papers to export your maize and petrol?”
“The petrol is for the journey to Mongu. The maize is a gift.”
“My friend on the Zimbabwe side will arrest you for stealing food from the people of Zimbabwe. Unload your cargo. Do you have a permit for those guns?” He had pushed on board the Zambezi Queen and seen the rifles.
“We have Zimbabwe licences.”
“You are in Zambia. Give me the guns.”
“No.”
The man shouted in Bemba and armed men ran out of the border post and boarded the Zambezi Queen.
“Unload the maize for inspection,” he said, smiling. The two rifles were removed by the soldiers.
“If you are going to steal food meant for starving people, unload it yourself.”
“No. You unload your cargo for inspection.”
Three hours later the sacks of maize were piled on the wooden jetty alongside the full drums of petrol. The sun was going down.
“You are not cleared for Zambian water,” said the man who said he was a customs official. “You will moor in Zimbabwe water.” He was still smiling.
In the morning, the food and petrol had gone from the jetty and when Horst asked for the customs official a new man said he didn’t know what Horst Kannberg was talking about. There was one other man at the border post. The soldiers, if they were soldiers, had gone.
The schoolchildren had gone home to whatever they would find and the last patient had died in the mission hospital. A scrawny chicken that had long since stopped laying eggs had been boiled and boiled to give Mary Bains a few bowls of chicken broth. She was sixty-one years old and dying. By her bedside the Reverend Hilary Bains was reading out loud from his Bible but Will Langton, standing in the open doorway, doubted if she could hear the words of her God. The thin, dirty sheet, dirty from washing without soap, covered her skeletal body and her eyes were shut. Outside, the October sun was scorching the scorched earth and the only sound that came through the open window was the sound of silence. Hilary put down his Bible and stared at his wife. He had lost his son to malaria and now he was going to lose his wife. They had been married for twenty-eight years and never left the home in which she was dying. They waited, Hilary and Will, while the rain clouds outside in the heavens tried to compete with the burning sun as the new season built up the rains. They waited patiently and then she died.
They buried her in the grave dug by Will in the dry brown earth of Africa. At her head stood a wooden cross that would soon be eaten by termites. The sun was down way over behind the distant Zambezi, making the heavens red and scarlet.
“Did God mean us to end like this?” asked Hilary of Will. “Alone? Our life’s work come to nothing?”
“Better to ask me ‘is there a God?’”
“You don’t believe, do you, Will?”
“Not anymore. Maybe I never did. I just don’t know.”
“But why? There has to be a God.”
“There should be, to make any sense, but doesn’t all this horror make more sense if there isn’t a God? Maybe pain and suffering are real and part of life, not some means of redemption. Didn’t man, maybe, in his search for a better life that he has never found on earth conjure up another world in heaven, the perfect world of his mind? In their bid to make life more tolerable on earth, did not the holy men invent a promised land that we would only reach if we behaved ourselves on earth? Did not man need God so desperately that he believed in him to live in his mind to make the pain of living tolerable? And with that image of his God, man wrote down his religion in His Bible, calling it the word of God, every word true, every word to be believed. Believe or be damned. The fires of hell! Better the God of compassion who died for our sins! The wonderful story of Christ!… Oh, how we needed our God. All we had to do was believe in Him. Blind faith in Him… I envy you, Hilary, with your faith, your goodness and your God. Without your God I agree there is nothing much worth living for.
“But then the blue heavens were penetrated by moon rockets and man knew he could journey to the stars. He gazed with new science and understanding into the galaxy. Elsewhere Darwin was proved right, man had evolved from the slime. We even know the make-up of our bodies; galactic dust that has been recycled a billion times… So what happens to an educated man? He cannot accept many parts of his Bible because science has proved it false. Once part of the story has been destroyed the rest just drifts away. We question with certainty the very creation written in the Bible and we are lost in a violent world without the balm of faith. We are animals, Hilary, who have evolved to have the ability to think, to try and understand. We have searched through science to prolong our meagre lives. Probably we will self-destruct because in our searching for the truth of life too many of us question
the presence of God. Man has lost his faith and yes, I think he will destroy himself to run away from all the pain and suffering.”
“One day you will find your faith again… But now, what are we going to do, Will, you and I?”
“Go back to my base camp and wait for the trackers, they were likely robbed like Goldblatt’s trucks. Then, somehow, make ourselves a life. The mission is finished, Hilary. There is nothing further you or I or the Church of England can do about it. You have done your job as did Mary… We have enough petrol in the big tank to reach the base camp with your books and what else has value. We have all done our best, and that is all a man can ever do. Maybe someday we will go back to England. Who knows? Long ago I would have said only God knows. Now I am not even sure of that.”
Epilogue
Many years later Will Langton left the river running strong and returned to England and Langton Matravers. On the anniversary of their first meeting, he took the path from the back of the house, up to the Downs and the cliff path down to Dancing Ledge. He walked to the pool that had been blasted from the rock ledge for the refugees from the Blitz and stood looking into the water. Deep in the pool he could see her image and even though he was an old man he began to cry.
