by Tony Park
George nodded. ‘This whole business of searching for rogue rhinos in the bush can't be helping. From what I know of it, Dad's paying all Tate's expenses, but he's just lost his only source of income. He can't afford to play the eccentric naturalist any more. We've got to look at some nursing homes for them, too, while I'm here, Nat. They can't stay with Sharon forever and I'm worried they're too old to care for themselves.’
‘They lived all right at the ranch,’ she said, annoyed by his condescending tone.
‘They had a small army of servants and workers there, Nat.’ He had a point.
‘Sharon's little windfall mustn't have been too little,’ her father said as they wandered slowly back down the hallway. ‘Fresh paint, new furniture, good food on the table. Mom told me a while back that lots of pensioners were doing it tough here, and she mentioned Sharon in particular.’
Braedan's muscular bulk filled the door leading out onto the garden terrace.
‘My mom was in financial trouble for a while,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ George said, then lowered his voice. ‘Braedan, I'm sorry for gossiping about your mother like that.’
Braedan waved a hand dismissively. ‘Forget it. No harm done. Have you two got a minute? I want to go out back for a cigarette. Mom doesn't like me smoking and Tate will have a hissy fit if I exhale in his general direction. Do you mind coming with me?’
George looked at Natalie and she shrugged. ‘Very well,’ her father said formally. She knew the two men didn't get on, and wondered what it was that Braedan wanted to say to them away from the others. They retraced their steps to the kitchen and walked out the back door.
Braedan pulled a pack from his khaki shirt and offered it to George.
‘No thank you. Not for about thirty years, in fact.’
‘Since the war?’
George nodded, but it was clear he wasn't prepared to indulge in small talk with Braedan.
‘Natalie, Mr B, I'm worried about something that happened at the ranch.’
‘Yes, well, the ranch is no more,’ George said, folding his arms.
Braedan ignored the sarcasm. ‘It's about the last rhino incident, the one that was darted and its horn removed. I –’
‘Well,’ George interrupted, ‘I can assure you there's no way my father would have anything to do with trade in rhino horn, despite what these local keystone kops say.’
‘I agree,’ Braedan said. ‘But someone tranquillised that rhino, dehorned it, gave the animal the antidote and then sold the horn. That's a sophisticated operation that wasn't carried out by your usual run-of-the-mill poacher.’
‘Maybe it was Emmerson Ngwenya?’ Natalie said. ‘He knew security at the ranch was good, and that my grandfather had employed you to tighten it up. He would have known that gunfire would have alerted the security detail. Also, if he was pretty sure he was going to be taking over the ranch soon, maybe he didn't want to kill a rhino that would soon be his, and which he'd eventually be able to dehorn again.’
George nodded. ‘You think Ngwenya wants to get into the business of sustainable rhino horn farming?’
‘It's a possibility,’ Natalie said.
Braedan exhaled cigarette smoke away from them. ‘You're partly right, I think – someone wanted to get into sustainable harvesting of rhino horn, but I don't think it was Ngwenya.’
‘Why not?’ Natalie asked.
‘You can't just send one of your foot soldiers in to dart a rhino with M99 and expect them to be able to revive the animal as well. M99's a controlled substance – you can't just go to a pharmacy or a veterinary surgery and buy or steal some. Even if you could, it's a very precise science, especially administering the antidote. It's pretty easy to kill a rhino with a dose of M99, but to care for it while it's down, and then revive it, is specialised work.’
‘I don't understand,’ George said. ‘Are you saying there's a crooked vet involved with this? Surely the number of people in that category could be counted on one hand in Zimbabwe these days, and I wouldn't imagine any of them would do such a thing.’
Braedan took a pace to his left and looked through the kitchen, down the hallway. When he was sure no one was in earshot he ground out his cigarette. ‘I really hate having to say what I'm about to say, but my mom, you know, she's not all there.’
‘What do you mean, Braedan? She's lovely,’ Natalie said.
‘Ja, she is, but she's very old and I think she's suffering from dementia.’ He looked over his shoulder again. ‘I don't think there was any long-lost insurance policy from the UK. I don't think that's where she got the cash to fix up the house and start living like a human being again. And, I'm sorry to say, the money didn't come from me.’
‘Braedan, no!’ Natalie whispered, putting her hand over her mouth.
‘Where do you think it came from then?’ George asked.
Natalie's mind raced back to the night she'd spent with Tate at the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge. ‘My God, Dad, sustainable farming of rhinos for their horns – I've heard someone else talking about that.’
‘Who?’
Natalie looked at Braedan, who said nothing. ‘Tate.’
‘Tate? You're kidding. He's the biggest bunny-hugger I've ever met in my life,’ George said. ‘Always has been. Part of his problem, if you ask me. He couldn't relate to people so he immersed himself in wildlife.’
Natalie recognised the reference to Hope, and she wondered if Braedan had caught it as well. She felt dizzy as the pieces of the puzzle spun through her mind and fell neatly into place. ‘Don't you see, Dad, it's because Tate cares so much about the plight of the rhinos that he's actually in favour of farming them. He's accepted that he won't be able to save them all from the poachers, so he's actually advocating farming and controlled dehorning. He wants to dehorn the remaining rhinos, sell the products to the Chinese or Vietnamese or whoever, and use that money to promote more conservation and captive breeding. He knows better than anyone in Zimbabwe how to use the drugs to put a rhino under and to wake it up again.’
‘This makes me feel terrible,’ Braedan said. ‘I mean, on the one hand I really don't blame him if he's done something crazy like this to help our mom. There was no way either of us could have afforded care for her here, or to move her to a nursing home. I looked at the email that advised my mother about the money being transferred into her bank account. She barely knows how to operate the computer and it was Tate who was checking her email account and clearing it for her. She hadn't looked at her messages for weeks. At first I thought the message was one of those Nigerian internet scams, but it said all she had to do was check her bank account. Tate offered to check it for her, just before he left for Kariba, and when he came back with the statement it showed that the money really was there. I told Tate it didn't look kosher, but he just said she was lucky to have the money.’
Natalie sat down on the back doorstep. The news was like a body blow.
George's face started to colour. ‘The stupid, thieving bastard.’
‘Steady, Mr B,’ Braedan said.
‘Don't call me that.’ Braedan just stood there. ‘Your bloody brother's got my father in trouble with the police and he gave Emmerson Ngwenya the excuse he needed to take over the ranch. If he thought he was doing any good for anyone other than your mother, then he's more stupid than you are.’
Braedan squared up to the older man. ‘What do you mean by that?’
Natalie looked at her father, and she was scared. He was clenching and unclenching his fists as he faced Braedan; neither man was backing down. George's face was an alarming shade of red and there was a vein pulsing in his neck. For a moment she thought that he was either about to have a heart attack or punch Braedan. The two men stared each other down, like a pair of old elephant bulls with locked tusks, each waiting for the other to move.
Her father exhaled noisily through his nostrils. ‘Nothing. But your brother needs to be reported to the police, for all the good it will do.’
‘Dad, plea
se,’ Natalie said, moving between her father and Braedan. ‘We don't know for sure that Tate was involved. This is all just speculation, right, Braedan?’
Braedan relaxed his muscles a little and shrugged. He eyed George coldly. The tension between the two men was presumably related to Aunty Hope's death all those years ago. It was a long time, she thought, for her father to hold a grudge. Hope had been a grown woman who had made her own choices. It was tragic what had happened to her, but it was more than thirty years ago. People had to move on.
With a startling jolt of clarity Natalie realised that she was moving on. She'd come to revisit the ghosts of her past but she had been confronted by stark reality, and a living, breathing part of her nightmare in the form of Emmerson Ngwenya. She was still scared of him, and the power he wielded in this lawless country, but she also knew that her problems were not as serious as those facing her grandparents. Her demons were in her past and she doubted Emmerson Ngwenya was still out to harm her after all these years. His threat to her grandparents and their rhinos, however, was explicit and real.
In safe, orderly Australia Natalie had, she now realised, lived a carefree life. Ironically, that had given her time to dwell on her past. Now there was so much more to worry about than her experiences during that long-ago war.
Her father strode back into the kitchen and down the hallway, his shoes echoing on the timber floorboard. Natalie and Braedan followed him, and stopped just behind him at the front door. A black Mercedes had been buzzed through the security gate and was now parked on Sharon's gravel driveway. The front passenger door opened and a black man stooped with age, his curly hair grey and his face as creased and sagging as an old elephant's, grabbed the doorframe to ease himself out.
He stood there, wearing a charcoal business suit, white shirt and a maroon tie. He coughed into his hand, clearing his voice. ‘I am sorry to intrude on your tea.’
Tate was gathering his photos, hurriedly stuffing them back into the envelope in case the newcomer saw them. Grandma Pip stayed seated, but was staring at the man. Her grandfather stood, as creakily as the man who had just got out of the car. ‘Kenneth …’
‘Paul. I would ask how you are, my old friend, but I know you are in pain.’
No one else spoke as the two old friends walked slowly towards each other.
‘He's got a bloody hide,’ Sharon Quilter-Phipps whispered loudly.
‘Is that who I think it is?’ George asked his mother.
Pip nodded. ‘Yes. Kenneth Ngwenya. And Sharon's right. He has no right to be here after what his son did to us.’
In his nice suit and his fancy new Mercedes, Kenneth Ngwenya looked as though he came from a different world altogether from the whites sitting around their rusting garden table, clinging to the colonial traditions of an empire that no longer existed.
Paul and Kenneth clasped hands in the western and then the African manner.
‘I am well, my friend,’ Paul said, ‘all things considered. And you?’
‘Ah, I am fine. It has been too long, my friend.’
Paul nodded.
Pip turned away from the scene. ‘He's no friend of ours.’
If Kenneth heard Philippa's response he chose to ignore it, but Paul was determined to show Kenneth what hospitality he could. He looked at Sharon, perhaps in the hope that she might offer to organise some more tea, but she just folded her arms.
‘Pip,’ Paul said, ‘come say hello to Ken. It's been ages …’
Philippa turned her head and looked up at Kenneth, who was now within touching distance. He smiled at her.
‘What did I ever do wrong to you or your wife or your children?’
Kenneth licked his chapped lips and looked first to Paul, then to Pip. ‘You showed us nothing but kindness, Philippa.’
‘We took Winston in as if he was our own son. He was like a brother to George.’ George moved to his mother's side and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We brought food to your family while you were in prison … and then Emmerson goes and steals our home. How can you come into this house and call my husband your friend, Kenneth?’
Kenneth clasped his hands in front of him. ‘I wish I could apologise for everything that has gone wrong in this country for the last thirty years, in the same way that I sometimes wish someone would have once taken the time to apologise to me and my family for what went wrong in the thirty years before that.’
Philippa glared at him, but it was George who interrupted. ‘You mean those years when we had employment, a strong economy, first-world health and education systems and infrastructure that worked?’
Kenneth nodded. ‘Yes, we had all those things, and a system where I could advance no further than the post of schoolteacher; where my wife was left to raise three children while I was locked in gaol for attending political demonstrations.’
‘I sent her food, damn you,’ Pip hissed.
‘Pip,’ Paul chided softly.
But Kenneth just stood there and nodded. ‘Yes, and I thank you for it, even if my wife never did. What you didn't know was that she had been brutalised as a child. She was beaten by a white landowner who raped her mother. She and her mother were utterly powerless against that white man.’
‘Yes, well,’ said Pip, ‘I'm sorry to hear that. But she didn't have a monopoly on tragedy. Sometimes I think this bloody country was only so fertile because of all the blood and bone that had been spilled onto it. And now you people have even stuffed that up – you've squandered the land and the wealth that people bled and died to create.’
‘Us people,’ Kenneth paused to cough again, then seemed to get his emotions in check, ‘include my daughter, who is a minister in the new Government of National Unity. She is working to turn things around.’
‘Pah! The MDC hasn't achieved a single thing,’ Pip said.
‘Perhaps, perhaps not,’ Kenneth said, ‘but they, too, have fought and bled and died for the right to try.’
Natalie watched her grandmother twitch her lips, then look down into her lap. This battle of wills was uncomfortable to watch, but no one seemed to want to interrupt it. It was as if these things, as cruel as they might be, had to be said.
‘But it's all for nothing, Kenneth,’ Philippa said, not looking up at him as she twisted a linen serviette in her fingers. ‘Because the MDC couldn't stop the farm invasions and now we have nowhere to live.’
‘It is true, Philippa,’ Kenneth said. ‘Your ranch is gone and I am afraid it is unlikely that you will get it back. It has been given to the local community to run as a conservation and tourism project.’
‘Those bastards will kill our rhinos and strip our house before you know it, and your son, Emmerson, will be the first in the door.’
‘I have some news.’
‘I don't care,’ Philippa said.
‘Pip,’ Paul said at last, ‘let Kenneth have his say.’
‘My son wanted to give me a farm for my last birthday,’ Kenneth said, ‘but I said, “No, I am a retired schoolteacher, what do I know of farming?” So I declined.’
‘More fool you,’ Pip snapped.
‘Pip!’
She looked at her husband, and nodded.
Kenneth cleared his throat again. ‘But my daughter called me yesterday. Until then I didn't know that my son had appointed himself as chairman of the community trust that was going to run your ranch and the rhino-breeding program. Thandi told me it was in the newspapers, but I don't read them because I never believe most of what's in them. But I'm rambling, I think … I don't pretend to understand the politics of the new government, but Thandi does. She told me that while Emmerson is the Assistant Minister for Land Redistribution – still a very powerful position – he has enemies within ZANU–PF. There is much jockeying at the moment amid the party faithful as they try and map out a future for themselves once the President dies or retires. There are many who are jealous of Emmerson's influence and wealth.’
‘That's money he made from poaching rhinos,’ Tate said.
‘Yes, well, I know my son is alleged to have done many things in his life,’ Kenneth continued. ‘No doubt some rumours are true, but perhaps some are spread by his enemies.’ When Tate started to speak again Kenneth held up a hand. ‘Please, I am an old man and I don't find breathing as easy as I once did. Please let me finish. My daughter, Thandi, may be a senior member of the MDC but she still has contacts within ZANU–PF. She made approaches to a woman who approached a man who approached the President and suggested that perhaps Emmerson would not be the best person to head up the rhino-breeding facility at your ranch, given the international speculation of his involvement in the rhino trade.’
‘So the ranch will go to some other puppet,’ Pip said.
‘No, Philippa,’ Kenneth said, finally letting some of his exasperation show in his words. ‘I am to head the community trust that will now run Kiabejane.’
Philippa blinked and shook her head, as if to clear it. ‘You?’
Kenneth smiled and spread his hands wide, palms up. ‘I was as surprised as you are. The President apparently gave the order himself that I was to be given control of the ranch in thanks for my work during the struggle. Ironic, I know, given that I have not been a supporter of the man or his party for many, many years now. But life moves in a direction beyond our control.’
Philippa started to stand and George lent his arm for his mother to steady herself on. ‘But Kenneth, what does this mean? Can you protect the rhinos from your son?’
Kenneth put his hands back down by his side. ‘As I said before, Philippa, I know nothing about farming, or rhinos, or how to protect them. I fear that as an old man I would be no match for armed poachers or organised criminals … yet you two were able to hold them at bay for a long time, and to continue to breed rhinos.’
‘We did our best.’
‘Yes, Philippa, you and Paul did your best, and that is why I would like to invite you, on behalf of the community trust that I seem to have inherited, to come back to the ranch and stay on for an indefinite period as the managers of the ranch and the rhino-breeding program. I will see that you are paid a wage … it won't be a fortune, but you will have your house and your game animals and your prized vegetable garden. Perhaps in time you will be able to find another home, in town, but I would hope that in the intervening period you would work with me to train some bright young souls, unsullied by the politics of race and hate, who might one day take over the breeding program and run it the way you would wish to see it run when it is time for you to move on.’
