The Chameleon's Tale

by Andrea Bramhall

“I read the letters you sent me,” Amahle said.

  “When?”

  “The day we both ended up in the orchard.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wish he’d given them to me. I wish he’d sent you the letters I gave him for you.”

  “You wrote to me?”

  “Knowing what we know now, do you really think I wouldn’t have written to you then?”

  Imogen shook her head. “No, I suppose not. Do you still have them?”

  “No. I have no idea where they are. They weren’t with the letters I received from you. I thought he might have given them to you.”

  “No. I wish he had.”

  Amahle ate for a few moments. “Are you still angry?”

  “About which part?”

  “In your letters you were angry at being sent away and not allowed to come home.”

  “I’m still hurt by that, yes. I’m still hurt by it all, but I don’t think angry is the right word anymore.” She took a sip of wine. “I was thinking about that this morning while I was up Table Mountain. I can’t say I’m not angry about it, because if I let myself I can feel it build up inside me again. I think it’s more that I chose not to let it, I don’t know, infect the rest of my life.” She swirled the wine in her glass. “It happened and I can’t undo it. I can’t bring back the past. All I can do now is move forward and refuse to let myself be victim to someone else’s will again.”

  “Commander of your own ship, as it were?”

  “Something like that.” She drank the last of her wine and placed the glass back on the table. “Do you remember that night?”

  “Your last night?”

  “Is that how you think of it?”

  “Yes. And yes, I remember it vividly.”

  “Do you remember your mother going to the main house and your grandmother saying something to her about it?”

  Amahle looked down at her plate. “Yes.”

  “I didn’t understand it then. I know you didn’t either. Do you think she was sleeping with my father?”

  “I’ve asked myself that same question a thousand times since his funeral. I’ve gone over a thousand conversations, a million looks, and just don’t know, Immy. I honestly don’t.”

  “But it is possible, isn’t it?”

  “That Sipho’s your brother as well as mine?”

  “No. He’s not.”

  “Why is it so hard for you to believe that your father sired Sipho but not that he slept with my mother?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Of course.”

  “Timing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t believe my father cheated on my mother.” She shook her head. “I can’t accept that. I can’t believe he’d put us through what he did because he loved her so much, but that he was willing—no, able—to cheat on her.” She tapped her temple. “It just doesn’t compute up here, and I think your mother was pregnant before my mother died.”

  “I’ve gone over the dates myself, Immy. It’s bloody close.”

  “That’s why I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t cheat on my mother. Her clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe when I got here. Did you know that he never got rid of them? Never even packed them away.” She watched Amahle shake her head. “He wouldn’t have done that. But once my mother was gone…” She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She reached for the glass of wine as Amahle refilled it. “Maybe.”

  “Why does that make a difference to you?”

  “The only way I can accept that my father threw me away is that I reminded him too much of her. That he loved her so much he couldn’t bear any reminder of what he’d lost. If he could cheat on her, it reduces all that pain to nothing. It means his illegitimate son was worth more to him than I was. It means that I wasn’t good enough for him.” She wasn’t sure where it was all coming from, and she wasn’t sure why she needed Amahle to understand. But she did. She needed Amahle to not only understand but accept her reasons. Accept her. “I’m not trying to be difficult, or call your family liars. I’m simply trying to keep my sanity intact.” She stabbed at her steak.

  “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Stop playing with your food. It’s already dead.”

  “Sorry.” She took a large bite. “It’s really good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Enough about me and all this shit. Tell me about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “Well, you’re gorgeous, successful, live in one fucking awesome house, and you’re not married. Pick a place to start and we’ll go from there.”

  “You know, I was interviewed not long ago, and I was talking about how what happened to you inspired me to go into politics.”

  “How so?”

  “I vowed never to be helpless in the wake of someone else’s power.”

  “And that drove you to politics?”

  “No, that drove me to excel. Nelson Mandela giving a speech at my school.” She smiled. “That drove me to politics.”

  “Must have been some speech.”

  “It was. He talked about how we can’t expect our lives to be made better by the state simply because we have needs. We need to go out there and work for the changes we need to see in our lives. We need to work for the changes we want to see in our country, and in our people. We need to be leaders who lead by example, people who put the greater good before their own individual needs in order to make a South Africa that we can all be proud of.”

  “And are you?”

  “What?”

  “Proud of the South Africa you are a part of?”

  A shadow crossed Amahle’s face. “Sometimes.”

  “What aren’t you proud of?”

  “Many, many things.”

  “Can you change them?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You’re very cryptic, Ms. Nkosi.”

  “I’m a politician, Ms. Frost. It comes with the office.”

  Imogen laughed. “I’ll just bet it does. You know, in so many ways you’re exactly as I expected you would be.”

  “And in others?”

  “You couldn’t be more different.”

  “That’s the problem with expectations, Immy. They always let you down.”

  A phone rang and Amahle stood to go and fetch it.

  “Never off the clock?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Amahle smiled at Imogen as she picked up the phone. “Hello.”

  “I warned you, bitch.”

  “How did you get this number?” She gripped hold of the side table and swallowed hard. There was noise in the background, but it sounded muffled and unclear as he breathed heavily into the mouthpiece.

  “Not the question you should be asking.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Who’s that screaming behind me?”

  Suddenly, her focus shifted. She blocked out the laughter that bubbled in her ears and zeroed in on the bloodcurdling, pain-filled scream in the background. “Who…who is that?”

  “Someone you know.”

  She tried to listen behind his voice again. A sharp expulsion of air followed by a gut wrenching, hacking cough filtered through. “Please don’t hurt him.”

  “You don’t even know who it is?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Imogen crossed the room and placed her hands on her waist, her gaze filled with questions and a deep concern. As much as she wished she didn’t need it, she sank into the comfort being offered and placed her hand over Imogen’s. The only person she could think of it being was Dr. Marais. It made sense that it was him. He was her secret weapon, her informant, and the biggest danger to her enemies. Letting them know she knew would no doubt cause him more suffering so she decided to play along. “Whoever it is doesn’t deserve to have you torture him.” She closed her eyes and hoped that the doctor wasn’t badly hurt. She reached out for a pad and searched for a pen, dragging open a drawer. Imo
gen seemed to figure out what she was looking for and quickly handed her what she needed.

  “Maybe he does.”

  She scribbled across the pad, “Get Thambo, please.” Imogen nodded and held her hands up in a questioning gesture. Amahle pointed to her phone. “No. If it truly was someone who deserved that, you wouldn’t be on the phone to me while you did it. You said it’s someone I know, and I don’t know anyone who deserves to be hurt like that.”

  “Well, maybe he deserves it by association. Did you think about that, bitch?”

  Imogen quickly placed the call and watched Amahle as she waited for him to answer. “Association with whom?” Amahle asked.

  “You.”

  A loud thud sounded in the distance followed by the most harrowing scream yet. Indistinct words flowed into each other so quickly she couldn’t make any of them out.

  “Now, back off, kaffir bitch, or maybe I’ll come visit you next.” Then the laughter came again. “Oh, and, Minister, Thambo’s just missing you to pieces.”

  “No!” she screamed down the line as it went dead in her hand.

  “Amahle, sweetie, tell me what he said?” Imogen wrapped her in her arms as the tears slid down her cheeks and her knees gave way, dragging them both to the ground.

  “Thambo,” she cried.

  “No answer. I left him a message.”

  “No, he can’t come.”

  “Ami, he’s your bodyguard, and you’re being threatened. He needs to be here.”

  “No, you don’t—”

  “Amahle? What happened? What did he say?”

  “He said Thambo’s missing me to pieces.”

  Imogen put the phone on speaker and dialled Thambo’s landline and waited for an answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Thambo?”

  “No, he’s not here.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “His brother. Sizewe.”

  “Do you know where he is? Amahle needs him and he’s not answering his phone.”

  “He went to get food. About an hour ago now. He should have been back by now.”

  She heard banging on the other end of the line.

  “Wait a minute. That’s probably him now. Must have forgotten his keys.”

  She heard a soft bang as the handset was put down and a scream as a hinge creaked. Sizewe’s cries and shouts for help in the distance turned Amahle’s knees weak. She slid to the floor even as she heard Imogen dial an ambulance and search through Amahle’s phone for Thambo’s address. They could all hear Sizewe shouting that his hand was gone. That he couldn’t stop the blood. That Thambo was bleeding to death.

  She shook her head and managed to get enough air into her lungs to make her brain work for a few seconds. Just long enough to give them his address and find out which hospital he’d be taken too.

  “I’ll take you.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Amahle whispered.

  “What?”

  “Take me to the hospital.”

  “I know. But I am.”

  “What if I don’t want you to?”

  “Tough.”

  “Imogen, I’m serious. I don’t want you near me. I won’t put anyone else in danger.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “That’s what everyone says. Then it’s three men, with guns to your head, taking turns, beating you, raping you.” The hands that had been rubbing her back froze for a moment then the grip around her body tightened.

  “Who did that to you?” She felt lips pressed against her hair. “I’ll kill the bastards.”

  She pushed herself out of Imogen’s arms. The fierce look of protective determination made her eyes shine. Her chest rose and fell as she saw clearly the effects of the adrenaline that coursed through Imogen’s veins, and there was no doubt that she was ready to fight. If only it were so simple.

  Amahle shook her head. “Not me.” She ran her hand down Imogen’s arm, feeling the tense muscles beneath the butter soft cotton shirt. She fought the urge to continue touching Imogen, just feeling something rather than living with the thoughts in her head, but there was simply too much she had to do. Too many responsibilities that she needed to deal with, and too many people who needed her. She couldn’t give in to the feelings that threatened to spill out. Fear or anything else. It didn’t matter when there was work to be done.

  “I think you’ve got some explaining to do, Ami.” Imogen rose gracefully to her feet and held her hand out to help her up. “And since I’m taking you to the hospital and then I’m not going anywhere, we’ve got plenty of time.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “And I don’t want you to be in danger, but you most definitely are. So that makes us even.”

  “Your reasoning defies logic. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Not getting you out of this.”

  Amahle sighed. She didn’t have time for delays to go over old ground. She didn’t have time to rake over the past and discuss her feelings. She had a shrink for that shit. She didn’t need another one, but the stubborn set to Imogen’s jaw told her that she would be in for a long fight to get her own way here, and time was not a luxury she had. “Fine.” She walked toward the sliding glass door. “If we’re doing this we’re doing it while you drive.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I don’t want any interruptions.”

  “Grrr. Fine,” Imogen agreed, somewhat reluctantly.

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Three men with guns at your head.”

  “Starting off easy?” Amahle climbed into the car and fastened her seat belt.

  “I thought I’d break you in gently.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Welcome.” She waited for the automatic gate to open and eased out of the drive. She waited until it was closed and no one had entered behind them before setting off.

  “You already know about my work with the HIV treatment programme.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, when we first started working on it, it wasn’t very popular with the ANC leadership. In fact, it was in outright opposition to the leadership of the time, Thambo Mbeki. His cabinet stated and maintained that HIV did not, could not, progress into AIDS. He said that a virus could not cause a syndrome.”

  “The man was a fool.”

  “You’re not the first to say that, but he was the president at the time, and his policies were what we had to deal with. By standing with a few, and I do mean a very few, of my colleagues in defiance of this policy we were risking our political careers within the ANC party.”

  “Did you think about switching parties?”

  “At one point, yes. The IFB set out its manifesto on the basis of providing HIV and AIDS medication to those infected and antiretroviral drugs to any victim of rape.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “They have no realistic chance of gaining power and this was something that needed to change. Fast. HIV is at epidemic proportions here. We need this treatment programme.”

  “So you chose to fight from within to effect the change you needed to see.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Just like Mandela said.”

  She smiled. “I suppose so.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We all began to receive threats.”

  “All?”

  “All of us who were campaigning for the programme. Letters at first. Then phone calls. One of my colleagues was beaten. His back was broken when he tried to crawl away from his attackers.”

  “Christ.”

  “It was pretty nasty shit.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “One night they broke into our home.”

  “Our?”

  She nodded. “Grace and I had been living together for about ten years by that time.” Her throat closed up, and she took a long moment before she could continue. “She was a lawyer, one of the ones we consulted with about the campaign, actually. She knew everything
that was going on, and she said it would all be fine. That we could handle the threats, and the letters, and the disgusting phone calls.” She rested her head back against the chair. “When they broke in they hit me over the head with the butt of a gun. Knocked me out. When I came to they’d tied me up in the living room. My arms were tied behind my back, wrists to ankles. One man kept dragging me around the room like that, until my shoulder dislocated. Then they just made me watch.”

  Imogen pulled into a parking space but didn’t say anything. She didn’t move or turn off the engine. She just waited for Amahle to finish.

  “They took turns with Grace. One after the other.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “One man painted the walls with her blood. He left me a message.” She laughed. “He left us all a message. ‘Back off, kaffir bitch.’”

  “What happened to Grace?”

  “She left me.” She turned to look at Imogen, and her breath caught at the look of compassion in her eyes. “I can’t blame her. After that happened, I should have put her first. I should have spent more time with her.”

  “You didn’t?”

  She shook her head. “I became so driven that they had to either give me the programme or shut me up. Permanently.”

  “But you didn’t care at that point.”

  “No, I didn’t. I’d lost Grace. I was going to get something out of the whole fucking nightmare even if it did kill me.” She chuckled. “At that point I had nothing left to lose.”

  “What about the rest of your family? Your mother, Sipho. They could have gone after them.”

  “And make martyrs of them? They couldn’t risk it. They would have only given me more ammunition.”

  “That explains why these calls are affecting you so much, but why are you getting them?”

  “Because they want me to back off, again.”

  “Back off what?”

  She released her seat belt. “Not until we know how Thambo is. This is going to take a while.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Sipho hung his head out of the car door and emptied the contents of his stomach by the side of the road. He accepted that he had only to do as he was told, and that it was none of his business why Tsotsi had wanted that man mutilated. But the fact that he knew him had only added to the nausea. He’d never much liked the man. Thambo Umpala had always been more than a little too serious for his liking, but he was a good man. He’d worked for his sister for a long time. They’d shared many a meal together. Watching Tsotsi shoot Thambo in the back with a Taser when he got out of his car seemed to happen in slow motion. Part of him wished he’d known where they were during the hours they had lain in wait for him. Oscillating between boredom and fear as the three of them had hidden in the bushes beside Thambo’s drive, he wished he’d known what was going to happen, that he could have sent him some sort of message to warn him. He might not have liked Thambo, but he didn’t deserve what had happened tonight.