The tall Matabele was driven backwards, as though he had been hit by a runaway automobile, and then he seemed to disintegrate, breaking up like a straw man in a high wind as the bullets tore him to pieces. He melted into the surface of the pan.
The second man came on, running and firing, screaming an incoherent challenge, and Tungata swung the machine-gun onto him. He paused for a micro-second to make certain of his aim, and he saw the flash of hard white flesh through the gunsight, and the diabolically painted face above it.
Tungata fired, and the heavy gun pounded briefly in his hand, then jammed and was silent.
Tungata was frozen, completely in the grip of supernatural dread, for the man was still coming on. He had dropped his FN rifle, and half his shoulder was shot away. The shattered arm dangled uselessly at his side, but he was on his feet coming straight at Tungata.
Tungata jumped to his feet and pulled the Tokarev pistol from the webbing holster on his side. The man was almost at the trench now, not ten paces away, and Tungata pointed the pistol at him. He fired and saw the bullet strike in the centre of the naked white chest. The man dropped to his knees, no longer able to come forward, but straining to do so, reaching out towards his enemy with his one remaining arm, no sound coming out of the open blood-glutted mouth.
This close, despite the thick mask of camouflage paint, Tungata recognized him from that never-forgotten night at Khami Mission. The two men stared at each other for a second longer, and then Roland Ballantyne fell forward onto his face.
Slowly the great storm of gunfire from around the rim of the pan shrivelled and died away. Tungata Zebiwe climbed stiffly out of the trench and went to where Roland Ballantyne lay. With his foot he rolled him down the bank of earth onto his back, and with a sense of disbelief saw the eyelids quiver and then open slowly. In the light of the star-shells the green eyes that stared up at him still seethed with rage and hatred.
Tungata squatted beside the man, and said softly in English, ‘Colonel Ballantyne, I am very pleased to meet you again.’
Then Tungata leaned forward, placed the muzzle of the Tokarev against his temple, just an inch in front of his earhole, and fired a bullet through Roland Ballantyne’s brain.
The paraplegic section of St Giles’ Hospital was a haven, a sanctuary into which Craig Mellow retreated gratefully.
He was more fortunate than some of the other inmates. He suffered only two journeys along the long green-painted corridor, the wheels of the trolley on which he lay squeaking unrhythmically, and the masked impersonal faces of the theatre sisters hovering above his, down through the double swing doors at the end, into the stink of asepsis and anaesthetic.
The first time they had built him a fine stump, with a thick cushion of flesh and skin around it to take the artificial limb. The second time they had removed most of the larger fragments of shrapnel that had peppered his crotch and buttocks and lower back. They had also searched, unsuccessfully, for some mechanical reason for the complete paralysis of his body below the waist.
His mutilated flesh recovered from the surgery with the rapidity of that of a healthy young animal, but the leg of plastic and stainless steel stood unused beside his bedside locker, and his arms thickened with muscle from lifting himself on the chain handles and from manipulating the wheelchair.
Swiftly he found his special niches in the sprawling old building and gardens. He spent much of his day in the therapeutic workshop working from the wheelchair. He stripped his old Land-Rover completely and rebuilt the engine, grinding the crankshaft and reboring the block. Then he converted it to hand controls, fitted handles and adapted the driver’s seat to make it easier to swing his paralysed lower body in and out. He built a rack for the folding wheelchair where once the gun racks had been behind the front seat, and he resprayed the body a lustrous maroon colour.
When he finished work on the Land-Rover, he began designing and machining stainless-steel and bronze fittings for the yacht, working hour after hour on the lathes and drilling presses. While his hands were busy he found he could crowd out the haunting memories, so he lavished care and total concentration on the task, turning out small masterpieces in wood and metal.
In the evenings he had his reading and his writing, though he never read a newspaper, nor watched the television set in the hospital common room. He never took part with the other patients in any discussion of the fighting or of the complicated peace negotiations which commenced with such high hopes and broke down so regularly. That way, Craig could pretend to himself that the wolves of war were not still hunting across the land.
Only at night he could not control the tricks his mind and memory played upon him, and once again he sweated with terror in an endless minefield, with Roly’s voice whispering obscenities in his ears, or he saw the electric glare of star-shells in the night sky above the river and heard the storm of gunfire. Then he would wake screaming, with the night nurse beside him, concerned and compassionate.
‘It’s all right, Craig, it was just one of your feemies. It’s all right.’ But it was not all right, he knew it would never be all right.
Aunty Valerie wrote to him. The one thing that tortured her and Uncle Douglas was that Roland’s body had never been recovered. They had heard a horror story through the security forces’ intelligence that Roland’s bullet-riddled corpse had been put on public display in Zambia and that the guerrillas in the training camps had been invited to spit and urinate upon it to convince themselves that he was truly dead. Afterwards the body had been dumped into one of the pit latrines of the guerrilla training camp.
She hoped Craig would understand that neither she nor Uncle Douglas felt up to visiting him at present, but if there was anything he needed, he had only to write to them.
On the other hand, Jonathan Ballantyne came to visit Craig every Friday. He drove his old silver Bentley and brought a picnic-basket with him. It always contained a bottle of gin and half a dozen tonics. He and Craig shared it, in a sheltered nook at the end of the hospital gardens. Like Craig, the old man wanted to avoid the painful present, and they found escape together into the past. Each week Bawu brought one of the old family journals, and they discussed it avidly, Craig trying to glean every one of the old man’s memories of those far-off days.
Only twice did they break their accord of forgetfulness and silence. Once Craig asked, ‘Bawu, what has happened to Janine?’
‘Valerie and Douglas wanted her to go and live at Queen’s Lynn, when she was released from hospital, but she wouldn’t go. As far as I know, she is still working at the museum.’
The next week it was Bawu who paused as he was about to climb back into the Bentley, and said, ‘When they killed Roly, that was the first time I realized that we were going to lose this war.’
‘Are we going to lose, Bawu?’
‘Yes,’ said the old man, and drove away leaving Craig in the wheelchair staring after the Bentley.
At the end of the tenth month at St Giles’, Craig was sent for a series of tests that lasted four days. They X-rayed him and stuck electrodes to his body, they tested his eyesight and his reaction time to various stimuli, they scanned the surface of his skin for heat changes that would show nervous malfunction, they gave him a lumbar puncture and sucked out a sample of his spinal fluid. At the end of it, Craig was nervous and exhausted. That night he had another nightmare. He was lying in the minefield again, and he could hear Janine. She was in the darkness ahead of him. They were doing to her what Roland had described and she was screaming for him to help her. He could not move. When he woke at last, his sweat had formed a tepid puddle in the red rubber undersheet.
The next day the doctor in charge of his case told him, ‘You did wonderfully in your tests, Craig, we are really proud of you. Now I am going to start a new course of treatment, I am sending you to Doctor Davis.’
Dr Davis was a young man with an intense manner and a disconcerting directness in his stare. Craig took an immediate dislike to him, sensing that he would seek
to destroy the cocoon of peace which Craig had almost succeeded in weaving about himself. It was only after he had been in Davis’ office for ten minutes that Craig realized that he was a psychiatrist.
‘Look here, Doctor, I’m not a funny bunny.’
‘No, you are not, but we think you might need a little help, Craig.’
‘I am fine. I don’t need help.’
‘There is nothing wrong with your body or nervous system, we want to find out why you have no function in your lower body.’
‘Listen, Doctor, I can save you a lot of trouble. The reason I can’t move my stump and my one good kicker is that I stepped on an AP mine and it blew pieces of me all over the scenery.’
‘Craig, there is a recognized condition, once they used to call it shell-shock—’
‘Doctor,’ Craig interrupted him. ‘You say there is nothing wrong with me?’
‘Your body has healed perfectly.’
‘Fine, why didn’t somebody tell me before?’
Craig wheeled his chair down the corridor to his room. It took him five minutes to pack his books and papers, then he wheeled himself out to the shiny maroon Land-Rover, slung his valise into the back, dragged himself up into the driver’s seat, loaded the wheelchair into the rack behind him and drove out to the yacht.
In the St Giles’ workshop he had designed and put together a system of pulley and hand winches to lift himself easily up the high side of the hull to deck-level. Now the other modifications to the yacht absorbed all his energy and ingenuity. Firstly he had to install grab handles to pull himself around the deck and cockpit and below decks. He sewed leather patches on the seat of his trousers and skidded around on his backside, as he adapted the galley and the head, lowered the bunk and rebuilt the chart-table to his new requirements. He worked with music blaring out from the speakers and a mug of gin within easy reach – music and liquor helped to chase away unwanted memories.
The yacht was a fortress. He left it only once a month, when he went into town to pick up his police pension cheque, and to stock up his larder and his supply of writing-paper.
On one of these trips he found a second-hand typewriter, and a ‘teach yourself to type’ paperback. He screwed the carriage of the machine to a corner of the chart-table where it would be secure even in a gale at sea, and he began converting the mess of handwritten exercise books into neat piles of typescript; his speed built up with practice until he could make the keys chatter in time to the music.
Dr Davis, the psychiatrist, tracked him down at last, and Craig called down to him from the cockpit of the yacht.
‘Look here, Doc, I realize now that you were right, I am a raving homicidal psychopath. If I were you, I wouldn’t put a foot on that ladder.’
After that Craig rigged up a counter-balance so that he could pull the ladder up after him like a drawbridge. He let it down only for Bawu and each Friday they drank gin and built a little world of fantasy and imagination in which they both could hide.
Then Bawu came on a Tuesday. Craig was up on the foredeck reinforcing the stepping of the mainmast. The old man climbed out of the Bentley, and Craig’s happy cry of welcome died on his lips. Bawu seemed to have shrivelled up. He looked ancient and fragile, like one of those unwrapped mummies in the Egyptology section of the British Museum. In the back of the Bentley was the Matabele cook from King’s Lynn who had worked for the old man for forty years. Under Bawu’s direction, the Matabele unloaded two large crates from the boot of the Bentley, and placed them in the goods lift.
Craig winched the crates up, and then lowered the lift for the old man. In the saloon Craig poured gin into the glasses, avoiding looking at his grandfather, embarrassed for his sake.
Bawu was truly an old man at last. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused, his mouth slack so that he mumbled and sucked noisily at his lips. He spilled a dribble of gin down his shirt-front and didn’t realize that he had done so. They sat in silence for a long time, the old man nodding to himself and making small incoherent grunts and burbles. Then suddenly he said:
‘I’ve brought you your inheritance,’ and Craig realized that the crates on the deck must contain the journals that they had haggled over. ‘Douglas wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway.’
‘Thank you, Bawu.’
‘Did I ever tell you about the time Mr Rhodes held me upon his lap?’ Bawu asked with a disconcerting change of direction. Craig had heard the story fifty times before.
‘No, you never did. I’d love to hear it, Bawu.’
‘Well, it was during a wedding out at Khami Mission – must have been ‘95 or ‘96.’ The old man bumbled on for ten minutes, before he lost the thread of the story entirely and lapsed into silence again.
Craig refilled the glasses, and Bawu stared at the opposite bulkhead, and suddenly Craig realized that tears were running down the withered old cheeks.
‘What is it, Bawu?’ he demanded with quick alarm. Those slow painful tears were a terrible thing to watch.
‘Didn’t you hear the news?’ the old man asked.
‘You know I never listen to the news.’
‘It’s over, my boy, all over. We have lost. Roly, you, all those young men, it was all for nothing – we have lost the war. Everything we and our fathers fought for, everything we won and built, it’s all gone. We have lost it all over a table in a place called Lancaster House.’
Bawu’s shoulders were shaking quietly, the tears still streaming down his face. Craig dragged himself across the saloon and lifted himself onto the bench beside him. He took Bawu’s hand and held it. The old man’s hand was thin and light and dry, like the dried bones of a dead seabird. The two of them, old and young, sat holding hands like frightened children in an empty house.
On the following Friday, Craig crawled out of his bunk early and did his housekeeping in anticipation of Bawu’s regular visit. The previous day he had laid in half a dozen bottles of gin, so there was unlikely to be a drought, and he broke the seal on one of them and set it ready with the two glasses polished to a shine. Then he put the first three hundred pages of the typescript next to the bottle.
‘It will cheer the old man up.’ He had taken months to pluck up his courage sufficiently to tell Bawu what he was attempting. Now that another person was about to be allowed to read his typescript, Craig was seized by conflicting emotions; firstly by dread that it would all be judged as valueless, that he had wasted time and hope upon something of little worth, and secondly by a sharp resentment that the private world that he had created upon those blank white sheets was to be invaded by a trespasser, even one as beloved as Bawu.
‘Anyway, somebody has to read it sometime,’ Craig consoled himself and dragged himself down to the heads.
While he sat on the chemical toilet he could see his own face in the mirror above the hand-basin. For the first time in months he truly looked at himself. He had not shaved in a week, and the gin had left soft putty-coloured pouches under his eyes. The eyes themselves were hurt and haunted by terrible memories, and his mouth was twisted like that of a lost child on the verge of tears.
He shaved, and then switched on the shower and sat under it – revelling in the almost-forgotten sensation of hot suds. Afterwards, he combed his wet hair over his face and with the scissors trimmed it straight across the line of his eyebrows, then he scrubbed his teeth until the gums bled. He found a clean blue shirt, and then slid along the companionway, hoisted himself to deck-level, lowered the boarding-ladder, and found a place in the sun with his back against the coping of the cabin to wait for Bawu.
He must have dozed, for the sound of an automobile engine made him start awake, but it was not the whisper of the old man’s Bentley, but the distinctive throb of a Volkswagen Beetle. Craig did not recognize the drab green vehicle, not the driver who parked it under the mango trees, and came hesitantly towards the yacht.
She was a dumpy little figure, of that indeterminate age that plain girls enter in their late twenties, and which carries them
through to old age. She walked without pride, slumping as though to hide her breasts and the fact that she was a woman. Her skirt was bulky around her thick waist, and the low sensible shoes almost drew attention away from the surprisingly lovely lines of her calves and the graceful ankles.
She walked with her arms folded across her chest as though she was cold, even in the hot morning sunlight. She peered shortsightedly at the path through horn-rimmed spectacles, and her hair was long and lank, hanging straight and lustreless to hide her face, until she stood below the yacht side and looked up at Craig. Her skin was bad, like that of a teenager who was on junk food, and her face was plump, but with an unhealthy soft look, and a sickroom pallor.
Then she lifted the horn-rimmed spectacles from her face. The frames left little red indentations on each side of her nose, but the eyes, those huge slanted cat’s-eyes with the strange little cast in them, those eyes so dark indigo blue as to be almost black – they were unmistakable.
‘Jan,’ Craig whispered. ‘Oh God, Jan, is it you?’
She made a heart-breakingly feminine gesture of vanity – pushing the lank dull hair off her face, and dropped her eyes, standing awkwardly pigeon-toed in the dowdy skirt.
Her voice barely carried up to him. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I know how you must feel about me, but can I come up, please?’
‘Please, Jan, please do.’ He dragged himself to the rail and steadied the ladder for her.
‘Hello,’ he grinned at her shyly, as she reached the deck-level.
‘Hello, Craig.’
‘I’m sorry, I’d like to stand up, but you’ll have to get used to talking down to me.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I heard.’
‘Let’s go down to the saloon. I’m expecting Bawu. It will be like old times.’
She looked away. ‘You’ve done a lot of work, Craig.’
‘She’s almost finished,’ he told her proudly.
‘She’s beautiful.’ Janine went down from the cockpit into the saloon, and he lowered himself after her.