Authors: Wilbur Smith
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.
T
he 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.’