by Tony Park
He read all the emails – the jokey ones and the tragic ones pointing out time and again how bad things were in Africa these days – and dutifully forwarded them on to his circle of ex-Rhodesian and South African friends. He bemoaned the state of Africa at dinner party after dinner party and, like all the other expatriate guests, silently patted himself on the back for being smart enough to move his family to Australia all those years ago.
It hadn't been easy. The air force had given George and Susannah a nice lifestyle that they'd never really had to pay for. They'd always lived in air force houses and George had eaten and drunk in the mess most days. His wages had been enough to cover Natalie's school fees and Susannah had never had to work for a living. When they'd made the decision to leave they'd done so with precious little savings.
George had started in the insurance business at entry level and had enrolled in an accountancy degree part-time. He'd slowly worked his way up to his current position as chief financial officer of the company. He'd learned about the markets over the years and had invested what spare money they'd been able to save.
The nightmares came, especially in the first year, but less and less often as time went on. He rarely saw the burnt-out hulk of the crashed Viscount any more, or the charred bodies. Last night, though, he'd seen and spoken to Winston in his sleep again – the first time in many years. He knew the conversation was directly linked to this trip, and had half-expected to see his mouth forming the word ‘why’ as his blood oozed out onto the floor of the helicopter. In real life, of course, Winston had been dead for hours by the time his body was loaded into George's helicopter. But in the dream, he always wanted answers from George about why he'd been killed by the security forces.
George stowed his wheelie bag in the overhead locker and handed his blazer to the flight attendant. The business class ticket had cost a small fortune and Susannah had raised her eyebrows and told him that an economy seat would have saved them a couple of thousand dollars.
Them? Susannah had worked the first eight years in Australia, but not since. She'd been employed in an upmarket dress shop and developed a taste for designer labels. They'd chosen the north shore because of the number of South Africans that lived there, but it was also a well-heeled part of Sydney, where women were expected to dress to a certain standard, no matter how little their husbands earned. George had suggested moving to Perth when a position in the insurance company was advertised internally, as there were more Rhodesians there than South Africans, but Susannah had objected, telling him that all her friends were in Sydney. She played tennis most days, which kept her figure looking almost as good as it did in her twenties, but did nothing to contribute to their finances.
George didn't really mind going to work every day; in fact, as the years wore on, he realised he actually preferred being at work to being at home. When he'd been a pilot, during the war, Susannah had seemed the perfect wife for a few years. She was pretty, fiercely patriotic, and she'd been a good mum to Natalie, especially after the trauma of Natalie's abduction. However, in Sydney she'd complained about having to do housework every day and work in the dress shop. She'd quit her job once Natalie finished school and they no longer had the fees to worry about. But even though she didn't work she still never seemed to have time to do the housework. Eventually they'd hired a cleaner, which had stopped Susannah from whining for a while.
The other passengers filed into business class and George glanced at them every now and then over the top of his newspaper. The flight attendant brought champagne and he thanked her and took a sip.
Susannah had had a healthy appetite for sex when they were younger, even though George knew he sometimes left her wanting. After the stress of missions, especially those in which either his own men or soldiers they'd been ferrying had been killed, he'd sought relief through beer and whisky and there had been plenty of occasions when he'd been too drunk to perform. He'd thought that moving to Australia would give them a chance to rekindle the spark they'd shared as newlyweds, but that hadn't happened.
He had more energy, working nine to five, but Susannah complained of being too tired after long days on her feet in the dress shop. After she became a lady of leisure it seemed the hours on the tennis court wore her out. Also, she lunched with her friends when they weren't on the court – and sometimes went for drinks after matches – and then it was she who was sometimes too drunk for sex.
Australia was different to Rhodesia. George had driven home drunk from the officers' mess or a pub most nights of the week when they'd lived in Africa, but since the early eighties drink-driving had been taboo in Australia. Susannah had been stopped by the police one afternoon on Mona Vale Road, near the St Ives Village shopping centre where she'd been lunching, and ordered to undergo a random breath test. She'd been arrested and charged with drink-driving and had had to go to court, where she lost her licence for six months.
After the initial embarrassment she'd curbed her drinking for a while, but her abstinence didn't last. She took more back roads, or the occasional cab, and often George would come home to find her with a bottle of wine open in front of her as she dozed in front of the television.
George didn't think about sex much at all these days. He and Susannah had, as people said, drifted apart, and there was little chance of drifting back.
To his shame, it had been one of their mutual friends, a former South African, who had told George that he might like to keep an eye on his wife's tennis coach. George had dressed for work one day, in his suit, and left for the train, but then called his office from his cell phone – a real status symbol back then in the late eighties – to say he was ill. He'd killed a couple of hours reading the financial pages at a local café then picked up a rental car. He'd parked outside the tennis court and watched Susannah say goodbye to her friends after their match was over. Susannah had waited in her Ford Capri convertible until Ben, her tennis coach, had walked out of the clubhouse and got into his RX-7. Susannah had driven off and Ben had followed her, with George a discreet distance behind.
They'd spent the afternoon at a cheap motel on the Pacific Highway.
He'd flown hundreds of combat missions in the bush war and put his life at risk more times than he could remember. He'd enjoyed it. Really, he had. He'd never felt as alive as he had in those years, despite the danger. He'd loved flying and he'd loved the time he spent on leave in his beautiful country with his beautiful, sexy wife and his perfect little daughter.
But all that had changed the day the terrs had raided his parents' farm and tried to steal his baby girl away. George's best friend in the world had been killed by friendly fire. His sister had been murdered shortly afterwards. He'd taken his young family away from Africa, to the safety of Australia, in the hope that they could live a normal life there. And that's when he'd started dying.
He'd grown scared. He was too much of a coward to confront Susannah over the tennis pro and he hated her, and himself, for his weakness. He was fairly sure she had cheated on him continuously over the years, but he'd thought it best, for Natalie's sake, to do nothing. He was also sure that Susannah knew that he knew, but she never said anything either. They just drifted apart. He'd talked about moving out, but in the end they'd decided it made more sense to keep living in different halves of the same house.
He was due to retire later in the year, and that scared him too. He didn't want to spend his days rattling around the big empty house with Susannah, each of them trying to avoid the other. She didn't like to travel at the best of times and had made a list of excuses as to why she couldn't accompany him to Africa to see his parents. Maybe, he decided on a whim, he'd check out some property while he was back. It wouldn't make financial sense to buy a place in Zimbabwe, even though he assumed he could buy a mansion with the proceeds of half his Sydney house, no matter how low the selling price. Maybe a beach house and a boat in Mozambique.
Mozambique. Thandi.
George looked out the window as the jumbo raced up the runway
. They lifted off and the wheels retracted with a clunk. Sydney's orderly sprawl and sparkling blue waters disappeared as the pilot banked. George was, he knew, in limbo. There was nothing beyond a few possessions awaiting his return to Australia, and there was nothing but memories – most bad, but some good – where he was headed.
30
Philippa wrapped an ornate hand-painted china serving dish in newspaper and handed it to Natalie, who laid it carefully in the packing crate with the rest of the antique service.
‘Honestly, I don't know why I'm bothering with all this stuff. I should just give it away or smash it to pieces so those bloody coons don't get hold of it.’
Natalie didn't reply. Instead she took another sheet of paper and began wrapping a dinner plate. Her grandmother had oscillated between tears and anger all through the day as they'd worked to pack the contents of the farmhouse. She couldn't remember ever having heard Grandma Pip use a derogatory term for Africans before. In fact, it was the opposite – Philippa chiding other people for using one.
‘Why do they hate us so, Natalie?’
‘I don't know, Grandma.’ Natalie could understand that some people felt genuine grievances over land. There were real veterans of the liberation war who had received nothing from Mugabe's government and had been justifiably angry as they'd watched the political fat cats get richer while they starved. But there was no doubt that the land redistribution had been an unmitigated disaster.
While the vast majority of white farming families had been evicted from their land in Zimbabwe, Grandma Pip and Grandpa Paul's case seemed especially unfair. When the farm invasions began they had met with the local people – the real surrounding communities rather than the bus loads of outsiders who had been brought in by the ruling party to squat on white farms – and ceded several hundred hectares of arable farming land. The Bryants had used the land to grow crops, primarily to feed their dairy cows when dairy had been their main business. As her grandparents had grown older they had progressively downscaled the dairy and shifted their focus to breeding and conserving black rhinos. They were doing something for the nation, and living off the profits of their farming life rather than making money from their land.
Grandma Pip had confided to Natalie that while they still had money in the bank, it was fast disappearing. Kiabejane had once been a popular tourist destination, but tourists had all but abandoned Zimbabwe over the previous decade and the ranch's main revenue stream had dried up. They were supported by overseas charities in Australia and the UK, and the trickle of foreign volunteers who still made the pilgrimage to the ranch provided some extra hands and a small contribution.
‘That Emmerson Ngwenya is hell bent on destroying us,’ Pip said.
‘But why, Gran? Why does he hate us so much?’
Her grandmother shrugged her bony shoulders and went back to her packing.
Natalie sensed there was much more to the story, but didn't have the heart to push the issue at the moment. Her grandmother was tired to the point of exhaustion and worried sick about Grandpa Paul, who was in hospital in Bulawayo, so it was no wonder she was repeating herself. Paul had suffered a mild heart attack at the police station, where he was being interviewed about the missing rhino horn, and the police member in charge had driven the elderly white man in his own car to the hospital.
Natalie wanted to tell her grandmother that it was a younger Emmerson Ngwenya who had abducted her from this very house all those years ago, but that would only add to her grandmother's anxiety. Natalie shivered. She could understand how heart-wrenching it was for her grandparents to leave the house they'd lived in for so long, but the place still held terrible memories for her and she would be happy to leave the farmhouse for good.
Philippa sniffled and wiped her eyes. Natalie wrapped an arm around her grandmother's thin bony shoulders. She felt so tiny, as though the life force was ebbing from her by the minute.
‘I'm sorry, my girl. I'll be all right. We must go see to the rhinos.’
‘All right, I'll go get Braedan,’ Natalie said.
Braedan was outside in the dark with half-a-dozen farm workers, supervising the loading of a lounge suite from the formal sitting room onto the back of a flatbed lorry. ‘Chova!’ he called, and the men pushed, but then he raised a hand and told them to stop. ‘Hey, go easy with that, mudhara,’ Braedan said to an old man with a cap of grey frizzy hair who had dropped his end of a couch with a loud thud.
Natalie's cell phone rang and she took it from the pocket of her jeans.
‘Hello?’
‘Natalie, it's Tate. I can't get hold of your grandparents. Their phone doesn't seem to be working. Is everything all right?’
‘Hardly,’ Natalie said. ‘Emmerson Ngwenya's convinced the government to hand over the ranch to him. My grandfather's in hospital in town – he had a heart attack. It's a disaster here, Tate.’
‘Oh.’
She wondered if that was all he had to say for himself. ‘We're packing, Tate. My grandmother's been given two days to move out. My father's on his way from Australia, but it seems like there's nothing anyone can do.’
‘I found the rhino,’ Tate said down the static-plagued phone line. ‘I've just got back into cell-phone range. Your grandfather was right, Natalie! It's not a myth – there's at least one black rhino still alive out here, in the wild.’
‘That's wonderful, Tate,’ she said, not bothering to mask her sarcasm. ‘But it's all gone to shit here so it doesn't really matter how many rhinos you find out in the wild, because my grandparents' animals are probably going to wind up dead.’
*
George Bryant wheeled his bag down the air bridge at Harare International Airport and joined the queue at the immigration desk reserved for foreigners requiring a visa. It had been many years since he'd surrendered his Rhodesian passport for an Australian one.
‘How long are you staying in our country?’ the man behind the desk asked him.
George was tempted to say, ‘I honestly don't know,’ but instead answered, ‘Two weeks.’ It was all the time he'd been able to take off work. Even though he was retiring later in the year, the end of the financial year was looming. Wouldn't it be nice, he thought, if he could just call work and tell them he wasn't coming back?
George had booked the tickets as soon as Natalie had called him and told him the news of his father's heart attack, and the likelihood – now being realised – that the ranch was about to go.
In the arrivals hall George took a moment to recognise Jamie MacDonald, a pilot he'd served with in 7 Squadron.
‘Have I changed that much?’ Jamie asked him as he shook George's hand. ‘Howzit, China?’
‘Good, and you? And yes, like me you're older, fatter and greyer.’
They laughed. As Jamie led him out into the car park, he filled in the gaps since George had last seen him, on a visit a decade earlier. ‘We lost the farm, of course, like everyone else, and Janet and I have been eking out a living in town. We grow some tomatoes and a few other bits and bobs in the backyard, and I fly charters when I can get the work. You made the right move getting out back when you did, George.’
George nodded, but he didn't want to appear as though he was gloating. ‘And how is Janet?’
Jamie shrugged. ‘Well enough, but she never really got over losing the farm. You see it in so many people's eyes. They soldier on, you know, but the light's gone out of their souls. Still, there's beer in the fridge – no electricity, though.’ Jamie forced a laugh and wound down a window and paid a grimy dollar bill to the airport parking attendant.
It had been a long journey and George was tired, but he had much to do.
‘So you're flying to Bulawayo tomorrow, is that right?’ Jamie asked.
‘Yes, but there's something I want to do, or rather someone I need to see, in Harare first tomorrow if possible.’
‘And who's that – another of the old squadron boys?’
‘No, it's a woman. A black woman.’
‘Really? And who might that be?’
‘Do you know anyone in government, Jamie? The thing is, I want to see the MDC's Minister for Women's Affairs.’
Jamie raised his eyebrows. ‘I know a couple of the MDC guys – I'm a supporter, or at least I was when I still had an income to speak of. So, you want to see Thandi Ngwenya?’ ‘Yes,’ George nodded. ‘Thandi Ngwenya.’
*
George woke at four in the morning, not sure whether he was hung-over or still drunk from the cheap Scotch Jamie had plied him with until midnight. He couldn't go back to sleep, and while it was no doubt partly to do with the jetlag, he knew it was also because he was thinking about Thandi.
Jamie and Janet had filled the bath tub in the ensuite with water two days before his arrival, when they'd had the unexpected good fortune of running water. George scooped some out with a jug and filled the hand basin. He washed his face and armpits and shaved with the cold water. It was more basic than his army days operating from forward airfields out in the bush.
He made himself coffee with water boiled on the gas bottle and hob sitting on the kitchen counter – there was still no electricity – and took his mug outside to watch the sun rise while he waited for Jamie and Janet to wake.
When they were up and ready Jamie started making calls on his cell phone. After four attempts he finally got the right number for Thandi Ngwenya's ministerial offices. His earlier calls had revealed that a young man Jamie had met at some MDC rallies was now working as a media adviser to the minister.
‘I'm through … on hold,’ Jamie said, giving George thumbs-up. ‘Matthew, hi, it's Jamie MacDonald. Yes … Jamie MacDonald from the old days at Wedza. I was wondering if I might make an appointment to see Ms Ngwenya.’
George waited anxiously while Jamie whispered that his contact, Matthew, was checking with the diary secretary. ‘Oh, I see. Booked solid all day, is she? It's just that I've got a very important visitor from Australia who's come all this way to meet her.’
