Far Horizon

by Tony Park

  He wanted to reach out and crush her in his arms then and there, and tell her everything would be fine and that he would take her anywhere in the world she wanted to go. ‘Forget about it. Let’s get the fire started,’ he said instead.

  Although they had become good friends, Isabella had not opened herself up to him like that before. He wondered if they had left it too late to make the leap to intimacy, whether they would always be nothing more than good friends. He knew she still thought about her dead husband. He busied himself making a fire and opening a bottle of wine.

  They followed their beers with cheap red wine drunk out of the plastic mugs from her Thermos flask. The steak was good, and dessert was a tin of peaches doused in tinned sweetened cream.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he had asked her, marvelling at the way the reflection of the glowing coals turned her skin to pure gold as she stared into the dying embers.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your thoughts. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Juan,’ she whispered.

  It took him a second. ‘Ah, your husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She said nothing more for a time and he left it at that. ‘I guess we should get ready for bed,’ he said. She raised an eyebrow. ‘Set up our tents, I mean,’ he explained.

  Isabella didn’t need any help to erect the small two-person dome tent she’d brought with her. Mike climbed the small ladder welded onto the back of the Nissan to the roof carrier above.

  ‘Where are you sleeping?’ she asked.

  ‘Up here.’ From his kitbag on the roof carrier he took out a large green mosquito net with a metal hoop at the top end to give it shape. He tied the net to a low branch of the marula tree and unfolded it around him. On the roof of the vehicle, tied down with rope, was the rolled-up foam mattress and canvas bedroll he always took out bush with him. The mattress was a little smaller than a normal double one and just thick enough to protect his bones from the ground or, in this case, the aluminium slats of the roof carrier.

  ‘Is it safe up there?’ she asked.

  ‘You couldn’t be safer,’ he said, grinning in the dark.

  ‘Now, I think you are being cheeky, no?’

  ‘Goodnight, Isabella,’ he said as he shook the unzipped sleeping bag over his body and fluffed up his cheap, lumpy pillow.

  ‘Goodnight, Mike,’ she said, her words followed by the sound of a long zipper being fastened. And, after a few seconds, ‘And thank you, again.’

  He lay on his back, one arm crooked behind his head and smoked his last cigarette of the day as he gazed at the stars peeking through the leaves of the marula tree. No other campers had shown up and the couple in the rondavel had long since retired.

  Later, he found he couldn’t sleep. The night was warm and a pair of bats squeaked noisily away, their calls sounding like a rusty gate swinging in the wind. Every now and then he caught the swish-swish of nylon on nylon. Isabella was tossing on the floor of her little tent. Eventually he dozed off, succumbing to the effects of the wine and the beer.

  The lion woke him. He checked his watch and saw it was a little before midnight. He lay still and listened intently. He heard it again – the low, almost painful moan of a big male lion calling to his lionesses.

  ‘Mike . . . Mike!’ Isabella called. ‘What is that?’

  He smiled. ‘What do you think?’ he called down to her.

  He was answered with the long buzz of her zipper opening. Bare feet padded across the grass and the four-wheel drive began to rock as she negotiated the ladder. His heart started to beat faster, and it wasn’t because of the lion. The cat was probably more than a kilometre away.

  The mosquito net rustled and jerked and then she was beside him, lying rigid on her back. In the starlight he could see she wore a long white T-shirt and her legs seemed to stretch forever into the night.

  ‘I could not sleep,’ she said, as the lion groaned again in the distance.

  ‘Me neither.’ He rose on one elbow, reached his other arm out across her, and rested his hand on her belly.

  ‘I was not worried by the lion, you see, just . . .’

  He placed a finger on her lips. In a moment, he replaced his finger with his lips. She stiffened, hesitating for a second, and then she opened her mouth to meet his. She reached around his neck, drawing him closer.

  They made love that night. Urgent, hard and fast at first, like starving people sating their hunger. Later they kissed, caressed and explored each other beneath the stars. The vehicle rocked and squeaked beneath them again, but there was no one about to mind and they were, to all intents and purposes, alone under an African sky.

  ‘This is right, no?’ she asked, as they shared a cigarette beneath the mosquito net later.

  ‘This is as right as it gets.’

  4

  The cab stopped outside the hospital. ‘Quanto?’ Mike asked the driver as he pulled out his wallet.

  The fare was outrageously high. No doubt, Mike thought, the driver had thought he was a tourist, thanks to the kitbag he was lugging. Normally he would have bargained the driver down, but he was in too much of a hurry to see Isabella and tell her he was leaving the army. He hadn’t quite worked out what he was going to do with his life, or what he was going to tell her. He’d just have to wing it. He peeled off a few grimy meticas notes, climbed out of the cramped, dusty little cab and retrieved his bag from the boot.

  He and Isabella had made love like newlyweds for the rest of that bliss-filled weekend in the Kruger park and afterwards at every opportunity their inconvenient jobs allowed. That wasn’t often enough for him, as he regularly travelled north, to Maxixe, on the coast, to meet with the warrant officer who made up the other half of the Australian mine-clearing contingent in Mozambique. Isabella occasionally travelled to remote clinics, such as the one at Mapai, where she had spent the weekend. Mike hoped to find her back at work now and, despite the weight of his kitbag, bounded up the cracked concrete stairs into the dingy hospital.

  He walked past reception and the usual collection of walking wounded down the yellowed corridor to Isabella’s surgery. Patience, the nurse whom he had met on his first visit who looked after Isabella’s schedule, intercepted him before he knocked on the door.

  ‘Bom dia, Major, how are you?’ Patience asked with a smile. Africans are the beneficiaries of some unusual names. The nurse shared hers with a virtue that was not one of Mike’s strong points.

  ‘Where’s Dr Nunes?’ he asked, not bothering to return her greeting. He knew it was rude of him, as Africans like to take their time in coming to the point of a conversation, starting with a ritual round of pleasant greetings.

  Patience recoiled. ‘Ah, but she is not back from Mapai yet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There was a bus accident. Some men from the ambulance, they say it was very bad. Very many people hurt. I think Dr Isabella has had to operate at that place. Maybe we will see her tomorrow.’

  Shit, he said to himself. ‘Thanks, Patience.’ It was clear she had no idea when Isabella would be back.

  He weighed his options. He could go back to his flat for a day or two while he waited for Isabella to return, or he could swallow his pride and go back to Jake and cadge a lift to Mapai. He had no wish to revisit the scene of Carlos’s death, but he had no other way to get north, short of buying a ticket on one of the ridiculously crowded local buses and risk ending up as another of Isabella’s patients.

  He borrowed a pen and paper from Patience and scrawled a quick note to Isabella, explaining he was on his way to Mapai and hoped to catch her before she returned to Maputo, or maybe on the road in between. Patience promised to deliver it to her the moment she saw her. Hot, sweaty and angry, he stormed outside and hailed another cab.

  Dr Isabella Nunes was so tired she felt like crying. She had arrived at the small clinic at around nine on Thursday night, an hour later than planned, thanks to a punctured tyre. Father Patrick – she found it odd calling a man five years
younger than herself ‘Father’ – had greeted her warmly as usual. Patrick was a good-looking, lanky, red-haired Irish boy of twenty-six and she marvelled at his commitment, isolated in the bush, half a world away from his homeland. She, too, was far from home, but against the odds she had found someone special in this sad, torn country.

  ‘How are things, Father?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, Isabella, same as always – never enough medicine, generator on the blink, water pump broken again. Bloody Africa, excuse my French.’

  The mission had been built by Portuguese priests in the early part of the twentieth century and expanded over the years with donations from around the world. Father Patrick lived in an old two-bedroom cottage made of stone daubed with a mixture of mud and cattle dung which had set to the consistency of concrete and then been reinforced with countless coats of whitewash over the decades. The cottage, like the neighbouring one where the nuns lived, was topped by a steep-gabled thatched roof. Across a dusty square were the schoolhouse, which catered for seventy children of all ages from infants through to high school, and the clinic itself, where Isabella worked during her visits. Both these newer structures had whitewashed breeze-block walls to waist height, topped by flyscreen mesh the rest of the way up to their new corrugated tin roofs. The clinic had the added protection of metal louvres over the flyscreen mesh, which could be closed to keep out dust during high winds. When she visited, Isabella slept in Father Patrick’s spare bedroom.

  He led her to the cottage, carrying her backpack for her. Once inside, he placed her pack in her room and led her back to the small kitchen. He pulled two bottles of Dois M beer out of the paraffin refrigerator and opened them with a Swiss Army knife. ‘I’m probably blaspheming, but you won’t find any Irish whisky here. I detest the stuff,’ he said as he passed her a bottle. ‘Cheers.’

  As often happened, Father Patrick was using Isabella’s visit as a chance for him to slip away to Maputo for a couple of days. He had a meeting planned with his bishop and also needed to stock up on food and supplies for the mission. He would leave Friday, around lunchtime, and be back the same time on Sunday. With Isabella at the clinic, along with two African nuns who had trained as nurses, he felt sure the mission was in good hands in his absence. Isabella had no fears for her safety, as the mission had a nightwatchman armed with an old shotgun and, besides, Father Patrick and the sisters were well liked and respected in the local community.

  Isabella was sleeping soundly on her first night at the mission, thanks to the effects of the long journey and two more of the priest’s cold beers, but woke with a start to the sound of thumping on her bedroom door. She looked at the luminous dial of the man’s diving watch she wore, and saw it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. ‘Quem e?’ she called out, annoyed and confused at the disturbance. ‘Who is there?’ she repeated in English.

  ‘Isabella, it’s me,’ Father Patrick said. ‘Come quick, there’s been a terrible accident. A bus and a lorry have had a head-on. The bus was full of passengers.’

  Isabella fumbled for the flashlight on her bedside table and awkwardly slid into her knee-length khaki skirt and matching long-sleeved shirt. She always dressed more demurely when travelling to these remote rural towns than she would have in Maputo which, by comparison, was cosmopolitan and relaxed.

  Father Patrick had been woken by the screams of a woman passenger who had run into the mission from the nearby main road. Her son, a toddler of three, was dead in her arms. He had been flung from her lap when the two vehicles collided, and his neck was broken when he slammed into the back of the seat in front of him. There was nothing Patrick could do for the child or the mother, but a stream of walking wounded were heading for the clinic building, its big red cross on the shiny tin roof clearly visible in the moonlight.

  After waking Isabella, Patrick roused the gardeners and the two nuns and set off for the scene of the accident. He left one nun to cope with the injured that had already arrived.

  ‘Fetch stretchers from the clinic,’ he yelled to the gardeners, who stumbled from their housing compound, blankets wrapped around their shoulders. The young priest was a teacher, not a doctor, but had studied first aid to an advanced level. He prayed Isabella would not be far behind him.

  Isabella stepped into her sandals and ran out into the night. She paused briefly, hopping on one leg, to pull the strap of one up over her ankle. In her other hand she clutched the small zip-up canvas holdall that contained her medical supplies and operating instruments.

  The crash site was like a scene from a disaster movie. Blood dripped from the windows of the bus where people, alive and dead, were being dragged out without care for their injuries, pain or dignity. Isabella beckoned to the African nun, who was still wearing a dressing gown, to join her. Quickly but calmly, Isabella assessed each patient in turn and gave her instructions to the nun.

  ‘Lacerations to the face and arms – broken glass most likely, he can wait for cleaning and dressing. Broken arm, he can walk. Shattered kneecap – get the gardeners to carry him. Give him a shot of morphine, Sister, then quickly dress yourself,’ she added kindly to the nun. ‘I’ll see you back at the clinic.’

  The dead, the two drivers and the passengers sitting closest to the front of the bus, were horribly mutilated and most were trapped in the wreckage of the vehicles. Of more concern to Isabella were the two people who lay at her feet, a man in his forties and a young girl, probably no more than seventeen. Isabella called Patrick over to her.

  ‘These two, Father, they are the most serious. The others I can bandage or stitch up, but these both have serious internal bleeding from where they were thrown into the seats in front of them. If we do not get them to a hospital, they will die.’

  The priest nodded. ‘Right. Do you want me to take them, or do you want to get back to Maputo yourself?’

  Isabella knew there was nothing she could do for the seriously injured people between Mapai and Maputo. Her only hope would be to get them to theatre as quickly as possible, and Patrick could drive as fast as she, if not faster. If she left, the two nuns would be swamped with the forty or more other injured people from the bus and, besides, there were other patients who would have been waiting for weeks to see her at the clinic. ‘No, you go, Patrick,’ she said finally.

  ‘You’re sure you’ll be OK?’ he asked. The question was a stupid one, she thought, but she was too tired to rebuke him.

  ‘Go. The sisters and I will be fine. But please, find my assistant at the hospital – you know her, yes? Tell her that this accident has put my schedule back at least a day, so I probably won’t be back in Maputo until Monday or Tuesday. It is important, as someone may be looking for me.’ She had no way of knowing if Mike Williams had got her message and would be able to meet her here, at the clinic, over the weekend, or if he would be waiting for her to return to the capital.

  The priest jogged back to the mission and returned shortly with their battered old Land Rover, a gift from a parish in England whose hearts were bigger than their bank accounts. Isabella supervised the lifting of the critical patients into the back of the four-wheel drive and wondered silently if there was any chance they would survive the agonising trip.

  ‘Good luck, and God bless,’ Father Patrick said with a wave. Despite his best efforts, the priestly words never seemed to gel with the image of a young, freckle-faced man in a T-shirt and shorts, Isabella thought. Suddenly she felt very alone.

  Her exhaustion was starting to show, while the tin roof of the clinic pinged and squeaked as it expanded with the warmth of the morning sun. She found it hard to focus her eyes and twice now she had dropped the forceps she was using to pull chips of glass from a teenage boy’s arm.

  For nine hours she had been suturing, bandaging, plastering and comforting. The nuns had worked tirelessly at her side and had even found time to make her a sandwich and coffee sometime in the early hours. Isabella had lost count of the total number of people she had treated after the first thirty. Mo
st were minor injuries, thankfully, and the majority of the patients had been released.

  News of the accident spread, somehow, to the town of Mapai a few kilometres up the road and enterprising minibus taxi drivers had been running a regular shuttle service all morning, picking up those who were able to travel. Isabella was left with just nine patients, those with broken limbs, head wounds or other injuries that needed monitoring over the next day or so. That meant all the clinic’s beds were full.

  A steady stream of general patients, those she had actually come to the mission to treat, had been arriving in ones and twos all morning, and been turned away by the sisters. It broke Isabella’s heart to see them turn and walk back to the main road, especially the very old and the very young, clutched to anxious mothers’ breasts. All had been told the doctor would see them the very next day, at the same time, and word had soon passed back through the town.

  Isabella stepped out of the clinic building into the bright mid-morning sunlight and had to shield her eyes from the glare with her hand. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she reached in the pocket of her dark-stained skirt for her cigarettes and lit one with a small gold lighter. She wondered again if Mike had got her message. She desperately needed to talk to him. She wanted him to hold her, right now. His muscled arms encircling her always made her feel safe, wanted, loved.

  Looking around her at the mission compound she knew she would make the right decision when next they spoke. His time in Mozambique was drawing to a close and he would soon be returning to Australia. They had avoided discussing their future in any great detail. She didn’t think of their time together as a fling, but she had been as reluctant as he to broach the subject of a more lasting commitment.

  Isabella was pretty sure Mike loved her as much as she loved him. Their careers, though, were poles apart and, very soon, they would be living worlds apart. She had been in Mozambique for two years and, despite the sadness, the death, the poverty and the frustrating bureaucracy, she loved Africa. She knew Mike loved this crazy continent as well, but she doubted he was ready to leave the army. Isabella had a guaranteed tenure at the hospital for as long as she wanted it, but what would he do if he stayed in Africa? If he became a safari guide – something he had trained for – she worried she would see even less of him than she did now.