by Tony Park
Tom nodded, staring out the windscreen. He was trying to find the right words to express sorrow for her loss, but he knew from his own experience that nothing anyone ever said was right – or made it easier. He looked across and caught her glancing at him before returning her piercing gaze to the road.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘For not saying anything.’
It all looked so normal. The industrial suburbs on the border of the airport reminded him of Staines, near Heathrow. He saw as many white faces as black ones as Sannie took an on-ramp onto a six-lane freeway. Signs advertised mobile phones and department stores and a casino. Johannesburg – Africa – might look like other parts of the world, but the pistol lying between them spoke of the violent subtext of life in this part of Africa.
Sannie said nothing more and he watched the way she drove. Aggressively defensive, he would have described it. Watching her rear-view mirror, keeping her distance from the car in front. When the traffic lights – the robot, as she had called it – turned red she stopped five metres from the car in front, so she had room to manoeuvre if someone accosted them.
‘You said you had a son?’ he said.
‘Ja, a son and daughter. My boy is nine and my girl is five. My mother lives with us and she looks after them when I’m away.’
Sannie changed lanes and accelerated, pushing the speedometer up to a hundred and twenty kilometres. ‘Are you divorced, or do you just take your wedding ring off when you travel, like . . . ?’ She glanced across at him.
He looked down at his left index finger. He’d only taken it off six months ago. He’d figured it was time, but he, as had Sannie, noticed there was still a faint tan line and an indentation caused by fifteen years of wear.
‘Alex died a year ago. Breast cancer.’
‘Oh, man, I’m so sorry. I knew you’d lost someone, but I didn’t realise it was your wife.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Not talking when I told you what happened to my husband and baby. It’s the people who haven’t known real grief who think words can make it easier. It doesn’t really go away, does it?’
‘Not that I can tell.’ He wanted desperately to change the subject. ‘What you were saying before, about taking off a wedding ring when travelling, you said “like”. Whose name were you about to add?’
‘Forget it,’ she said.
‘Like Nick?’
‘Look, if he’s a friend of yours, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry he’s missing.’
‘But?’
‘What?’
‘I sensed there was a “but” coming then. Our wives knew each other better than we did. Nick’s a colleague, Sannie. I do want to try to work out what happened to him, but I can’t say I know him well enough to guess why he went missing – if it was a voluntary thing.’
‘Okay, well, I first met Nick about four years ago, when my husband was still alive and when Nick was still married.’
‘And?’
‘And he tried to hit on me.’
‘Really?’
‘Ja. First trip, in the car on the first drive, just like you and me now. I couldn’t believe it. He says to me, “What goes on tour stays on tour.” I can tell you, I gave it to him big time.’
‘Did he ever try again?’
‘Once more, last year, after his marriage is over and my husband’s dead and my miscarriage, and he thinks I’m now available. We were in a pub with some other police. My friends were at the bar and we were alone and he says, “Is the time right now, baby?”’
‘What did you do?’
‘I told him that the time wouldn’t be right if we were the only two people left in the world, and then I klapped him, good and hard across the face.’
Tom smiled, but he was learning more about Nick and it wasn’t good.
‘I’m so gatvol of men these days.’
‘Gatvol?’ he asked. She had pronounced the ‘g’ as though she was about to spit at him, so the word, whatever it meant, seemed to match her sentiment.
‘Like “I’ve had enough” in English. But no offence, hey?’
He laughed. ‘None taken.’
From a map he’d glanced at, he knew the airport was on the eastern fringe of Johannesburg, and the factories, warehouses, mine slag heaps and outlying gated communities of townhouses hiding behind high whitewashed walls soon gave way to open grasslands and farms. Sannie explained that Johannesburg was on the highveld – at a higher altitude than where they were headed. Kruger was in the lowveld. ‘Hotter there. Stickier. I hope you brought your mozzie muti with you.’
‘Insect repellent?’ he checked.
‘It’s malaria country where we’re going, and quite bad this time of year – it’s the wet season.’
When they neared the exit for a town called Witbank he noticed his first car-jacking sign. It said, Warning – hijacking hotspot. Do not stop beneath a huge exclamation mark.
‘What do you do if you break down?’ he asked.
‘Pray,’ said Sannie, ‘and aim for the centre body mass.’
In Tom’s experience, most people living in supposedly dangerous parts of the world tended to talk down the perceived threat, usually issuing a few common words of warning such as, ‘Avoid such-and-such an area at night and you’ll be okay,’ or, ‘It’s not as bad as the media makes out’. From what Sannie had told him so far, the reverse seemed to be true in South Africa. People here were under no illusion about their local crime problem.
‘A lot of it is organised crime here, and the whites aren’t blameless. Also, we have people from all over Africa living in this country. The Zimbabweans who cross the border are dirt poor and some of them turn to theft – same with the Mozambicans. The Nigerians are the worst – they control the drug scene. It was different in the old days, when I first joined the police – back then we had the death penalty.’
And riots in Soweto and police opening fire on civilians, Tom thought, but said nothing. It was her country and he wasn’t here to make judgments.
‘I know what you’re thinking. But we’re not all mad racists, you know. I didn’t agree with a lot of what happened under apartheid, but we did have the crime problem under control.’
‘Depends on who you classed as the criminals.’
She smiled.
Sannie stopped for fuel at a service station just past the Middelburg toll plaza. It was exactly like one of the large complexes he would have encountered on a British motorway. Tom got out to stretch his legs. He yawned, but was feeling okay. There was little time difference between the UK and South Africa and he had slept well on the aircraft. It was good to feel sunshine on his face. Sannie returned with a couple of Cokes and some crisps. ‘How far?’ he asked.
‘Ag, shame, man, you sound like my kids. It’s about another three hours if we drive fast.’
And drive fast they did. Tom glanced over and saw that the speedometer rarely dipped below a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. The locals had an interesting form of traffic etiquette, where slow vehicles pulled to the left – South Africans drove on the same side of the road as he did in England – to let faster cars pass them. The overtaking vehicle – Sannie in every case – put on its hazard lights as a way of saying thank you, while the car which had just been passed flashed its headlights as if to say, ‘You’re welcome’. It was like a parallel universe, Tom thought. Similar to England in some ways, but so completely different in others.
The road they were on – the N4 – took them eastwards, towards the border with Mozambique, according to the signs to that country’s capital, Maputo. Tom knew Mozambique was a former Portuguese colony, had suffered a long civil war and supposedly had good beaches. Beyond that it was just a name on a map. He thought he would find some books on Africa before he returned with Robert Greeves.
Sannie had the radio tuned to a station called Jacaranda FM, which played easy-listening music, mostly from the eighties and nineties. The announcers and newsread
ers switched from English to Afrikaans, sometimes midsentence. ‘Do you and your kids speak Afrikaans at home?’
‘Ja, and English. There are about a dozen official languages in the new South Africa. My kids are learning Xhosa at school. I figure it’s good for them to be able to speak the language of the ones who are in charge now.’
‘I suppose it’s been tough on . . . on people like you, since the Africans took over the country.’
She shrugged. ‘First of all, I am an African. I just happen to be a white one. Sure, there was a lot of affirmative action after the ANC took over. I suppose I’m lucky that I’m a woman.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Tom asked. Traffic had slowed marginally as the road started to descend through a series of sweeping bends.
‘In the new South Africa it’s all about empowerment. Black women have had a hard time, so they’re now at the top of the list for good jobs or promotions, followed by black men. Then it’s coloureds and Indians and then us white women, followed by white men, who are now at the bottom. It used to be the other way around.’
She didn’t seem bitter, he thought, just resigned to making the most of her life. If he was going to judge her, it would be on how she did her job as a police officer, not what she thought of life under black majority rule.
A blurred movement of greyish-green in the grass to the left caught his eye. ‘Bloody hell! What was that?’
Sannie glanced over. ‘Oh, bobos. Baboons – we call them bobbejaans in Afrikaans.’
Tom watched the troops of a dozen or so primates. A large one stared back at him and snarled with long yellowed teeth from its dog-like snout. ‘But we’re not in a national park, are we?’
‘No. You’ll see bobos and monkeys wherever there is still some bush or trees left for them. A lot of this country is taken up with farming, but there are still some wilderness areas.’ The toll road split and Sannie explained that while they could go either way to get to Kruger, the right-hand fork would take them via Waterval Boven, down a steep pass where the highveld ended. ‘The countryside’s more scenic than on the road via Lydenburg.’
The drive took them along the course of a river which had cut through the rock, forming the pass. Plantation gum trees met their end in a smoking paper mill. Tom saw skinny black workers in baggy overalls, and wondered if the men were ill with HIV-AIDS.
He started feeling drowsy after more than three hours on the road, and Sannie stopped at another garage to buy more Cokes and chips for the two of them. Tom again got out of the car for a stretch and was struck immediately by the change in climate. It was much hotter than Johannesburg and the air felt heavy with moisture. Sannie told him they were approaching Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga province, once known as the Eastern Transvaal. ‘The lowveld. We’re getting close to the bush now.’ She said it with fondness, almost reverence. ‘Some people call it the slowveld, because nothing much happens in a hurry. It’s the heat.’
In the distance Tom could see a few tall office buildings, but Sannie turned left before they reached the town proper. They began climbing into some hills.
When they reached the town of White River, all the traffic signals were out. A black policeman was directing traffic with the exaggerated movements of someone doing a robot dance. ‘He seems to be enjoying his job,’ Tom said.
‘Ja, but it’s no laughing matter. The electricity is out – again. Our power company, Eskom, calls it “load shedding”. They switch off entire districts so the whole system doesn’t collapse. Supply can’t keep up with demand in South Africa, and not enough money’s been spent on infrastructure in the last decade.’
Leaving the town they wound through hills forested with plantation trees – pines and Australian blue gums. They crested a high peak and, looking ahead, the forests vanished, replaced by a vista of red dirt and mud-brick shacks of the same hue. There wasn’t a tree in sight. ‘Townships like this are where a lot of our people still live. The government is building new homes through the regional development program but they can’t keep pace with demand. On one hand they’re spending tens of thousands of rand to change the names of towns from Afrikaans to African names, and Jan Smuts Airport to OR Tambo, but they can’t put a decent roof over their own people’s heads or keep the country’s electricity supply working.’
Tom heard the bitterness in her voice. Most of the houses had rusting tin roofs. Some looked as though they were made entirely of homemade mud bricks and old packing crates. He smelled wood smoke through the aircon’s inlet and guessed it was the trees which had once stood on these hills. Toddlers walked barefoot, their lower legs spattered with red mud. A skeletal woman carried a baby on her back, wrapped in a piece of stained cloth tied around her midriff. Sannie kept her speed up and ignored the malevolent stares of a group of teenage boys dressed like American ghetto dwellers, brightly coloured boxer shorts protruding above low-slung jeans. Plenty of bling. Would-be gangsters.
‘We don’t want to break down here,’ she said. They passed a turnoff to the Kruger Park’s Numbi Gate, but Sannie said they were headed further north, to an entrance closer to the park’s internal police station. ‘I just wanted to show you how some people live, so you can maybe understand the crime problem a little better.’
Tom nodded. Something Sannie had said before, about African women, reminded him of his brief informal investigation into Nick’s disappearance. ‘Did you ever notice Nick taking an interest in black African women?’
Sannie sniffed. ‘That man would take an interest in a cobra if you held its head. Why do you ask?’
‘I think one of the last people to have seen him was a South African woman.’
‘A hooker?’
‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
‘How can you guess?’ Sannie asked, giving him a deadpan look.
‘Actually, she was what we might in polite circles call an exotic dancer.’
‘A stripper? Sounds like him. He and a couple of the male cops went to a table-dancing club in Pretoria one time. My colleagues told me Nick was particularly interested in the one girl, and she was black.’
‘I wonder if it could be the same one,’ Tom said, thinking out loud.
‘Could just be that he was into any girl who would talk to him – even if he had to stick money in her garter, you know.’
They had passed back into rural countryside, lush farms which covered the mountains in different shades of emerald in the afternoon sun. Tom noted banana farms and tropical fruits such as avocados and mangoes for sale on the side of the road. Fertile country. ‘I grew up near here, on a banana farm,’ Sannie said as they passed through a small but chaotic town – a ‘dorp’ she called it – named Hazyview. ‘I was a real bush baby. My family took my brothers and me into the Kruger Park every school holiday and many weekends. But I never got sick of it.’
Workers heading home thronged the sidewalks, and pick-ups laden with farm produce and fertilizer queued at the robots in a mini peak-hour traffic jam. Loud hip-hop blared from giant ghetto-blasters parked outside an electrical goods store. A gaggle of schoolgirls in starched uniforms giggled at something.
‘Did you stay at a lodge like the one we’re heading for? From what I’ve read it’s very expensive.’
She chuckled. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, my friend. Kruger gets about three million visitors a year, and most of those are local families. You can stay in national parks rest camps which have camping sites and self-contained rondavels – huts. You don’t need to stay at one of the larney places. There’s something for everyone, although when I was a little kid the park was for whites only. It’s good now, though, to see more black families visiting. I take my kids camping there a few times a year.’
They continued driving and Sannie checked her watch. The kids would be out of school soon, and when she could she would call her mother to make sure they had got to her place safely and talk to them for a bit. Tom appeared deep in thought, and she guessed he was still mulling over what ha
d happened to his police colleague. As much as she disliked Nick, a tiny part of her still felt bad that a detective who, despite all his faults, was always punctual and professional – at least around the man he was protecting – had suddenly disappeared. She felt a pang of guilt that she had secretly wished him ill. She hoped he would turn up drunk or stoned in the bed of some African stripper. The bollocking – to borrow an English word – that he would receive would be long overdue and might teach him a lesson. She had never seen Nick use drugs, though when they were off duty she had noticed him easily matching Pol and Kobus, the other members of her team, drink for drink, and they were major soaks.
She had been mildly offended the night in Pretoria that the three of them had announced in the pub that they were going to the strip club. Not because they were leaving her, but because they hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to go too. She’d never been to such a place, not even as part of her job, and she was curious to see what went on.
Sannie took the turning to the Paul Kruger Gate, a major entrance point to the national park. She really did love coming to this place. Whether in the old South Africa or the new, the park was a Garden of Eden, a natural oasis where one could forget the day-to-day problems and challenges of life and immerse oneself in the restful, inspiring tranquillity of the bush. Even though she was here on a work assignment, she felt the stress melt from her body and her grip on the steering wheel relax as she crossed the Sabie River. She pulled up a hundred metres short of the thatched gatehouse and unloaded and cleared her Z88. She noticed Tom watching her out of the corner of his eye. She handled her weapon confidently and safely and was an expert shot, regularly outshooting all of her male colleagues on the firing range. She put the pistol back in its holster and smiled at him.
‘Won’t you need that for lions and tigers?’
‘No tigers in Africa, I’m afraid. No, this place is about as safe as it gets in South Africa – as long as you stay in your car.’
Tom grimaced and she laughed at him. He was a good-looking guy. Solidly built. He had a full head of hair and blue eyes, which she liked the look of, and a strong jaw. Unlike some of the other detectives she worked with, this one obviously kept himself fit. There was no sign of a beer belly hanging over his trouser belt.
