Thirteen Hours (13 page)

The source of this dream, and the only constant throughout
her youth was her paternal grandmother. She spent every Christmas holiday with
her in the summer heat of Kirkwood and the Sunday's River Valley. Ouma Hettie
was a music teacher all her life, an energetic, disciplined woman with a
beautiful garden, a spotless house and a baby grand in the sitting room. It was
a house of scent and sound: marmalade and apricot jam simmering on the stove,
rusks or leg of mutton in the oven, her grandma's voice singing or talking, and
at night the sweet notes of the piano issuing from the open windows of the
small blue house, across the wide verandas, the dense garden and the
neighbouring orange orchards, to the rugged ridges of Addo and the changing hue
of the horizon.

At first Alexa would sit beside her grandmother and just
listen. Later she learned the words and melodies by heart and often sang along.

Duma Hettie loved Schubert and the Beethoven sonatas, but her
true joy was the brothers Gershwin. Between songs she would nostalgically
relate the stories of Ira and George. 'Rialto Ripples' and 'Swanee' were
magically coaxed from the keys, 'Lady Be Good' and 'Oh, Kay!' were sung. She
told Alexa how that song was inspired by George Gershwin's great love, the
composer Kay Swift, but that hadn't prevented him from also having an affair
with the beautiful actress Paulette Goddard.

On a sweltering evening in her fifteenth year, Ouma Hettie
suddenly stopped playing and told Alexa, 'Stand there.' Meekly, she took her
place beside the piano.

'Now
sing
!'

She did, in full voice for the first time. 'Of Thee I Sing',
and the old lady closed her eyes, only a little smile betraying her rapture. As
the last note faded in the sultry evening air, Hettie Brink looked at her
granddaughter and, after a long silence, she said, 'My dear, you have perfect
pitch, and you have an extraordinary voice. You are going to be a star.' She
fetched Ella Fitzgerald's
Gershwin Songbook
from her stack of LPs.

That was how the dream began. And Ouma Hettie's offical
tuition.

Her parents were not impressed. A career in singing was not
what they had had in mind for their only child. They wanted her to train as a
teacher, get a qualification, something practical 'to fall back on'. 'What kind
of man wants to marry a singer?' Her mother's words echoed ironically.

In her Matric year there was conflict, long and bitter
arguments in the sitting room of the bank manager's house in Bellville. With
the verbal ammunition provided by her grandma, Alexa fell back to her last line
of defence: 'It's
my
life.
Mine'
A week before her finals she went for an
audition with the Dave Burmeister Band.

Stage fright nearly got the better of her that day. It was
nothing new. She had already experienced it at eisteddfods and the occasional
performance at a wedding or with obscure bands in small clubs. It became a sort
of ritual, a demon that began systematically to attack her four days before an
appearance, so that, with a wildly beating heart, perspiring palms and an
overwhelming conviction that she was about to make a total fool of herself, she
could only complete the trip from dressing room to microphone with a supreme
effort of will.

But as soon as she began to sing, with the first note uttered
from her constricted throat, the demon melted away as though it had never existed.

At her first performance with Burmeister in a Johannesburg
club, her grandma had been there to hold her hand and give her courage. 'This
is what you were born for, my dear. Go out there and knock them dead.'

And she had. The reviews in
The
Star
were still beside Ouma Hettie's bed when she passed away quietly in
her sleep two months later. 'Alexandra Brink, in shimmering black, is so easy
on the eye - young, blonde and beautiful. But once she starts to sing, her
smoky, sensual voice, complete mastery of classical material, and innovative
interpretations indicate a rare maturity and an acute musical intelligence. Her
range encompasses Gershwin, Nat King Cole, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Bobby
Darin, with Dave Burmeister's arrangements fitting her style and personality
perfectly.'

Oliver Sands of Phoenix, Arizona, told Inspector Vusi Ndabeni
he had fallen in love with Rachel Anderson on Day Eight of the African Overland
Adventure. In Zanzibar. Over a plate of seafood that he had been eating with
great concentration.

'You are obviously enjoying that,' said Rachel.

He looked up. She stood on the opposite side of the
restaurant table with the emerald-green sea as a backdrop, long, dark-brown
hair in a plait over her shoulder, a baseball cap on her head and lovely long
legs in shorts. Ollie was a bit self-conscious, embarrassed by the way he had
been devouring his meal. But when she smiled and pulled out the chair opposite
him with a 'May I join you? I'll have to try some too,' he could scarcely
believe his luck.

He told Vusi they had had to introduce themselves to each
other on the first night of the tour - in a ring of camp stools beneath the
African stars. He hadn't even tried to remember Erin and Rachel's names.
Pretty, athletic, educated girls like that never noticed him. When she sat at
his table in Zanzibar and ate her own plate of seafood with gusto, he struggled
to remember her name, with a sense of panic. Because she had talked to him. She
asked him where he was from and what his future plans were. She listened to his
answers with interest, told him of her dream to become a medical doctor, and
that one day she would like to make a difference, here, in Africa.

And so he lost his heart to a nameless woman.

Alexa Brink's stage fright grew worse. The loss of her
grandma was a blow, as though a foundation had collapsed, so she learned to
smoke to control the fear.

Despite the glowing reviews and the enthusiastic response of
the small but loyal audiences in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, the demon
of self-doubt clung to her shoulders every night. With a mean voice it
whispered that one day she would be unmasked, someone in the audience would see
her for what she really was and cry out that she was an impostor, an outsider
and a fake. Alone in the dressing room she could not cope. One night she burst
in on Dave Burmeister in tears and confessed her fear. That was the beginning
of a vicious circle. With fatherly patience, Burmeister explained that all the
great names struggled with stage fright. At first his gentle, quiet voice
calmed her and got her behind the microphone. But every night it took a little
longer, a little more convincing and more praise before she could make the
terrifying walk across the stage.

One day, at his wits' end, Burmeister placed a glass of
brandy and Coke in front of her and said: 'For God's sake, just drink it.'

Oliver Sands controlled his attraction to Rachel Anderson
with an iron hand. Instinctively he knew he must not reveal his burning desire,
he must keep his distance. He didn't look for a seat close to her on the truck,
he didn't pitch his tent in her vicinity in the evening. He waited for those
magical moments when - usually with Erin - she talked to him spontaneously, or
asked him to film them with her video camera at some tourist spot. She
sometimes saw him with a book in his hand and asked him what he was reading.
They began a conversation about literature. In the evening she would come and
sit beside him at the campfire and with her dazzling zest for life would say:
'So, Ollie, did we have a good day today or what?'

Day and night he was completely aware of her, he knew where
she was every moment, what she was doing, whom she spoke to. He saw that she
was friendly with everyone in the group, he kept count of the time she spent
with others and realised he was especially privileged - he received more of her
attention and conversation than anyone else. The two lean and self-assured
chief guides were very popular with the other girls, but she treated them just
the same as the men in the tour group, friendly and courteous, while choosing
to take her meals with Ollie, talk to him and share many more personal secrets.

It was like that until Lake Kariba. On their second day
there, when they boarded the houseboats, she was different, sombre and quiet,
the joy and spontaneity gone.

Alexa Barnard learned to have three drinks before a
performance. The dose required to keep the demon sufficiently quiet. It was her
limit. Four made her slur, the lyrics swimming in her memory, Burmeister's
proud paternal smile wiped from his face by a worried frown. But two was not
enough.

She understood the risks. That was why she never had a drink
during the day or after the show. Just those three glasses - the first one
tossed back an hour and a half before the curtain, the other two taken more
slowly. The cellist suggested gin since it didn't leave the odour on the breath
that brandy did. She tried gin and tonic, but didn't like it. Dry lemon was her
ultimate choice of mixer.

In this way, she kept the demon under control for four years,
hundreds of appearances and two CD recordings with Burmeister and his band.

Then she met Adam Barnard.

She noticed him one evening in the little Cape theatre - the
tall, virile, attractive man with a thick head of black hair who had listened
to her spellbound. The following evening he was back again. After the show he
came knocking on her dressing-room door with a bunch of flowers in his hand. He
was fluent and charming, and his compliments were measured, and therefore
seemed more genuine. He invited her out: a business lunch, he made it clear.

She was ready for what he suggested, aware of the limits of
her chosen genre. She was known and popular in a small circle, she had a few
glowing interviews in the entertainment sections of a few dailies and modest CD
sales. She was aware of the limited scope of her career, audience and income.
She had reached the highest rung of a short ladder and her prospects were
predictable and uninspiring.

Three days later she signed a contract with Adam Barnard. It
bound her to his record company and to him, as manager.

He made good on his professional promises. He sought out
Afrikaans compositions from Anton Goosen, Koos du Plessis, and Clarabelle van
Niekerk, songs to suit her voice and what would become her new style. He hired
the best musicians, developed a specific and unique sound for her and
introduced her to the media. He courted her with the same quiet
professionalism, and married her. He even weaned her off the three
pre-appearance gins with his total support, belief in her talent and his
silver, silver tongue. For two years her life and career were everything she
had dreamed of. One day an open-air photo shoot for
Sarie
magazine was cancelled due to bad weather and she came home
unexpectedly. There, in the same sitting room where she and Griessel had sat,
she found Adam with his trousers around his ankles and Paula Phillips on her
knees in front of him, performing skilful fellatio with her long fingers and
her red-painted mouth. Yes,
that
Paula
Phillips, the dark-haired singer with long legs and big boobs, who was still
dishing up pointless commercial junk to middle-class ears. That was the day
Alexa Barnard began to drink in earnest.

Even though Rachel Anderson had changed in her behaviour
towards everyone, Oliver Sands knew it must have been something he had said or
done. He replayed every interaction, every word he had said to her, but he
could not pinpoint the source of her aversion. Had he said something to someone
else, or done something to someone else that had upset her so much? He lay
awake at nights, on the trips to Victoria Falls, the Chobe Game Reserve, the
Okavango, Etosha, and finally, to the Cape, he would stare out of the window in
the faint hope of gaining some insight, some idea of how he could make things
right.

The previous night in Van Hunks in Cape Town he had cracked
under the strain. What he ought to have said was: 'I can see something is
bothering you, Rachel. Do you want to talk about it?' But he had already downed
too many beers for Dutch courage. He sat down beside her and like a complete
idiot said: 'I don't know why you suddenly hate me, but I love you, Rachel.' He
had gazed at her with big hungry puppy eyes in the crazy hope that she would
say, 'I love you too, Ollie. I've loved you since that magical day in
Zanzibar.'

But she hadn't.

He thought she hadn't heard him over the loud music, because
she just sat there staring into the middle distance. Then she stood up, turned
to him and kissed him on the forehead.

'Dear Ollie,' she said and walked away between the crush of
people.

'That's why I came back here,' Sands said to Vusi.

'I'm not following you.'

'Because I knew the dorm would be empty. Because I didn't
want anybody to see me cry.' He did not remove his glasses. The tears trickled
under the edge of the frame and down his round, red cheeks.

Rachel Anderson lay on her stomach behind the stacked pine
logs, powerless and gutted.

Something pressed uncomfortably against her belly, but she
did not move. She couldn't hold back the self-pity any longer; it overwhelmed
and paralysed her. She did not cry; it was as though her tear ducts had dried
up. Her breathing fast and shallow, mouth gasping, she stared at the grain of
the sawn wood, but saw nothing.