Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  *

  Quebec Jean stood at the door to the aircraft and studied the night sky.

  “He’s drunk,” he told Ralph. “I won’t talk to him.”

  Ralph looked inside the fuselage. Jim sat in his seat singing to himself, a bottle beside him already half empty.

  “Loki is supposed to be dry but he swapped the diazepam in the medical kit for Russian vodka.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Who cares?”

  Together they went inside. Jim heard them approach and put the vodka on the floor, the open top of the neck of the bottle held between his knees.

  “Jean was right, the old Canuck, just a knackered old Antonov twenty-six. I tell you, anyone would need Valium to fly that thing.”

  He thought seriously about the Russians.

  “Nice muckers, though. From Kiev.”

  He started to sing again, quietly, as though not to disturb the Russians parked the other side of the apron.

  “What time in the morning, Captain?”

  Jim, although drunk, noted the inflection.

  “Hundred and seventy nautical miles to Juba. Just under an hour.”

  “What time, sir?”

  Jim turned on him angrily.

  “You just get the fuel. Seventy-three gallons an hour in the cruise. But she’s guzzling over three times that at take-off. And don’t you forget.” He laughed to himself. “She drinks the stuff at full power.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  Jean turned to Ralph.

  “I’ll see you in the morning. I’m going down to the tail.”

  Ralph watched him lay a bedroll in the aisle at the far end of the aeroplane. With the door wide open Jean could lie down on his back and still see the stars. Ralph felt hot and would have liked to have sat in the door, the breeze around him and stars above.

  “Who was Jack?” he asked.

  Jim moved in his seat and lifted the bottle.

  “Jack Phillips? Phillips & Powis Aircraft, one of the forgotten, great, British wartime aircraft manufacturers.”

  Ralph thought it best to let him talk.

  “Their companies designed and built nearly sixty different types of aircraft. Over seven thousand aeroplanes, trainers, tugs, STOL cargo.”

  Jim took a mouthful of vodka and made a noise through his teeth after he swallowed.

  “Phillips & Powis and a guy called FG even designed a jet to break the speed of sound. They made a model of their supersonic jet, the M52, and it was last seen on radar heading out into the Atlantic at Mach 1.3 something. I think that was way back in ’43. The Americans were having a go as well but couldn’t control it when transonic. Phillips & Powis cracked it with an all-moving tail.”

  Jim punched Ralph on the shoulder.

  “The little men from Woodley aerodrome found the solution no one else could.”

  Ralph looked down into the aeroplane. He couldn’t tell in the gloom at the far end of the fuselage if Jean was awake.

  “Just as they finished the first airframe, the government cancelled the project and Phillips & Powis went bust. You see, after the war the country was bankrupt. We owed America billions of dollars, and the only thing we had of any worth was what you call intellectual property. Phillips was forced to give all the design work to what became NASA. It should have been a technology sharing deal. The US shared nothing. They took the M52, copied the all-moving tail, and the Bell X-1 and Chuck Yeager were able to go through the speed of sound.”

  He looked at Ralph and lifted the bottle.

  “You should be very proud of him.”

  Ralph had never heard anyone in his family mention Jack but he said nothing. In his experience people in drink talked and others listened.

  It was hot; hotter at night than in Nairobi. Ralph listened to Jim with sweat running down his back and beading on his forehead. He felt dizzy. He should have eaten something.

  Jim’s thoughts started to wander.

  “My first solo was in a Phillips & Powis aircraft. A Magister at Long Kesh.”

  Ralph struggled to concentrate, confused.

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “An RAF airfield in Northern Ireland, south of Belfast.”

  Jim looked at the bottle.

  “You know why I’m still alive? I’m a coward. I scare easily.”

  Jean sat at the back of the plane listening, his hands loose in his lap. He looked forward. The cockpit was filled with recumbent pilots, Jim through drink in the left seat, the boy in the right with a fever.

  “Jean scares me. He hasn’t had the fear, you see. No one’s tried to kill him as he flew. It’s always just been for fun.”

  Jean went forward and took the empty bottle from him.

  “Do you want me to help you lie down?”

  “I’ll sleep here. Done it before. In the war I did three trips to Stockholm in one night. In my Mossie. Nine and a half hours’ flying, forty-five minutes on the ground. It’s in my log book if you don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you, Jim.”

  “So dark at night. So lonely. Eyes blurred looking at instruments, looking for fighters. Asleep in my seat before I set the brakes.”

  Jean watched him until he slept and returned quietly to the back of the aeroplane.

  *

  Ralph awoke shivering with cold, shaking chills running up his back. He felt a pain low down in his abdomen and he’d been sweating all night, his clothes still wet and sticking tightly to his body. His mouth was dry but he felt too weak to stand and look outside for water. He held his head to shut out the noise of a truck revving its engine close to the wing. African voices were shouting and Jean was laughing. He was alone in a damp, cold, noisy world.

  Jim saw him sitting up.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Ralph shook his head.

  “It feels like a bad flu.”

  Jean came through the aeroplane and slipped into his seat.

  “The fuelling is done, boss. And I did a walk around.”

  Jim had his head in a bag behind his seat. He pulled out a sachet with writing on it, a clear liquid.

  “Chew the corner off this and see if you can drink it. If you can do that without throwing up it’s because you need it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ringer’s lactate. Saline, intended for intravenous,” said Jim.

  He turned to Jean.

  “How much fuel?”

  “A bit more than we need. I took her to half tanks. That’ll see us the 533 miles all the way back to Nairobi with an hour and twenty minutes’ reserve.”

  Jean consulted a flimsy stained notepad.

  “I think it was half tanks. I heard Air Canada is going to change from imperial to metric. They’re bound to mess up pounds and kilograms and turn a 767 into a glider over Manitoba or somewhere.”

  Jim smiled and passed Ralph some water. Jean was all right. He was being too hard on him.

  “And there’s no weather at Juba,” said Jean.

  “No weather?”

  “Well, no reported weather. You know what they’re like. Nairobi, however, is going to be CAVOK all day.”

  “No rain? Amazing.”

  Jim looked out of the port window. The fuel truck had moved clear.

  “You fly this leg, Jean. Start when ready.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was thinking. We’ve got plenty of runway here, right?”

  “Over six thousand feet.”

  “Yeah. And what’s the density altitude? Four thousand and something?”

  “Four thousand one hundred and seventy-eight.”

  “That’s what I guessed.”

  Jim watched the refueller get out of his truck and wave. He waved back. With half tanks of fuel, they would be
nearly 2,400 pounds under max gross.

  “Why don’t you try a reduced power take-off? Save Skyways a bit of money.”

  *

  Ralph looked out of the window. He had covered himself in a foil blanket from the emergency grab bag but still felt cold. There was little to see. They were flying to the north of the Didinga range of hills, shrouded in cloud. The bare brown land beneath them gave way to sparse trees and bushes. Ralph could see no tracks or visible roads, no huts, villages or towns. He had no idea how he would have walked overland to Juba.

  Through his headset he listened to the coded conversation of the pilots as they checked power, mixture, fuel system and gauges, Jim reading from a list. Ralph, still shivering, saw a river underneath him. The Nile at Juba looked brown and slow. He’d crossed over it at its source in Uganda, hiding his face under a borrowed hat, and now, as the sweating returned, he hid his face again in his hands.

  *

  From its source in Uganda, the Victoria Nile had quietly left the world’s largest tropical lake at Jinja, tripped over the Bujagali Falls and entered Lake Kyoga, bigger than the whole of Greater London but only five metres deep, with shallows full of water lilies and the swampy shoreline covered with papyrus and hyacinth.

  At Murchison Falls it squeezed through a gap only seven metres wide and, still young, playfully fell forty-three metres, but entered the swampy delta of Lake Albert as a lazy sluggish stream.

  Draining from the north of Lake Albert as the Albert Nile through forested cliffs and ravines, and running east as well as north, it left Uganda, making a ninety-degree bend at the Sudanese border town of Nimule. It had run 645 kilometres from its source.

  It flowed north now following the edge of an escarpment, widening as it matured, and as the Bahr al Jabal, the River of the Mountain, arrived at Juba, the most southerly navigable point of the great river. It had covered over eight hundred kilometres from the bridge at Jinja, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes sighing and bubbling, to get just five hundred kilometres north toward the Mediterranean Sea and oblivion.

  Sweating with fever Ralph bribed a guard for the issue of a visa he should have bought in Nairobi and walked trembling from the open terminal into the southern Sudanese town of Juba. From crossing the source of the Nile at Jinja he’d travelled 1,600 kilometres in a Toyota Hilux through Uganda and on a bus to Nairobi, and then in a rattling vintage aid plane via northern Kenya.

  He was, like the Nile, just five hundred kilometres closer to his destination: Cairo.

  Twenty

  Angel and Elanza sat close together at her house in Hyde Park. Angel liked to spend as much time with her as he could, helping in small ways, comforting when he was able. Both were bruised about the face.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Did you fall?”

  “Nels came back for seconds. He wanted to know where Ralph was. I can’t imagine why he thought I would know. I haven’t seen Ralph for ages.”

  Angel thought about the men in Nairobi.

  “He found out some other way,” he said.

  “I had the feeling he already knew but that he had some unfinished business – me.”

  Angel, too angry to reply, thought of the man who would beat a blind woman.

  He put his arm around her. Elanza rested her head on his chest and lay her hand on his thigh. Angel stroked the top of her head.

  “Do you want me, Angel?”

  Angel stiffened, his arm falling to her side. She sat up abruptly.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Angel shook his head.

  “Is it the thought that Nels has been through there?” she spat.

  “Elanza, please.”

  “Don’t worry. He didn’t in the end, thankfully. He prefers fighting to sex. Or maybe I’m the wrong age, or the wrong gender.”

  She coughed and tried to stand.

  “Or the wrong species. I don’t know.”

  Fat blue veins pulsed in her thin pale neck.

  “You have sex with women, don’t you?”

  Angel took her face in his two hands. He knew she wasn’t able to see him but he held her empty stare with his own, looked at her with longing for the relationship they both craved, wishing that she wasn’t blind and that his skin colour didn’t matter.

  “Yes, Elanza. I have sex with women. I make love to women. I know that there is a difference.”

  She slumped, deflated, as though shrinking in size as he held her.

  “Angel, I’m sorry.”

  Elanza thought she might love him, and it scared her. It seemed that since her father had died everyone she met, other men she had briefly thought she’d loved, had tried to take advantage of her. At first she’d worried that Angel would be the same. Her wealth was to blame. She understood that; everyone wanted her money. Eventually it had ceased to matter, but it made her sensitive to those few rare moments of genuine kindness. The boy Ralph had been kind to her and made her a cup of tea. She’d loved him for it, loved him for a simple unselfish kindness. She gave her love easily and instantly on those infrequent occasions. She felt that Angel would be compassionate and kind-hearted and could have her love too, even though she knew little about him.

  “Tell me about the women who have loved you, Angel, about your friends.”

  Angel didn’t believe he’d been loved at all. He’d been an outsider his whole life, looking in at a different world: a Swazi at a school in Dorset, a soldier in a foreign army, an oddity at university tolerated for his language skills. No one had loved him there. He had compensated by making his work his whole life but no one had loved him there either. He had few friends and no loves. He was respected at work but the colour made it difficult. He wasn’t invited to weekend braais, department fishing trips, or stag dos. His mother hadn’t even loved him enough to name him. Zelda had dumped him.

  “There was a girl at work.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “Why?”

  Angel wanted to tell her it was because of his colour. Zelda had taken him as she took many others, randomly, like choosing a manicurist. They had conducted an intense and clandestine affair, having sex in obscure locations: her car in a basement car park, the middle of a corn field, an office toilet. He’d never taken her for a drink, never had dinner cooked in her apartment, or been introduced to her friends. At a well-planned rendezvous at a remote fishing lodge by a reservoir they’d spent a weekend making love for the first time rather than having sex, and then she’d dropped him at a station on a quiet Sunday afternoon and told him they wouldn’t see each other again. He knew why.

  “We didn’t have that much in common.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Who knows?”

  But you are different, he thought. You are blind to my colour. I can love you and you won’t end it as Zelda did, leaving me alone in a foreign place. I won’t ever be an embarrassment to you in front of your friends because you don’t have any friends either.

  She looked very tired and thinner than ever. He sat with her, feeling the bones in her shoulder.

  “Talk to me, Angel.”

  “What about?”

  “Anything. Tell me what happened at Cassinga.”

  Angel stroked her arm. It was a long time before he talked.

  “It was 4th May, 1978. Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary. The South African Defence Force carried out an airborne assault on a town in Southern Angola. We claimed that it was a key SWAPO military headquarters, a training camp and a logistics base. SWAPO claimed it was a refugee camp and that the six hundred people who died in the attack were innocent civilians. We said we’d dealt SWAPO a significant military blow. SWAPO said that we’d carried out a brutal massacre of old people, women and children.”

  Angel wondered if she was asleep. He had no idea if she
was listening. He could feel her head on his shoulder and her steady breath on his neck.

  “We travelled by train from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein. A Bedford troop lorry took us to the De Brug training area. It felt different. It felt like more than just a training camp exercise. At an old derelict farmhouse, tents had been pitched in neat rows beneath the blue gum trees, and we were issued kit.”

  Training started at once. There seemed little doubt they were preparing for something big. They had all been civilians until a few days earlier and needed some brushing up. A ‘weeding out’ process took place and their numbers depleted.

  “These younger conscripts were in awe of the swaggering older hard-looking men like us. But they were in the better position – young, at a peak of fitness and hardened by operational deployment. We’d been out of uniform for several years, and softened by civilian life.”

  Their commander addressed them, turning off the public address system. In two days’ time, he said, they would jump more than two hundred kilometres inside Angola and attack SWAPO’s main headquarters.

  “It was exciting. We’d trained for years just to do an operation like this. A formation of C130s roared overhead and we all cheered.”

  Angel looked at Elanza. She held his hand and kissed him softly behind the ear.

  They trained afterwards with enthusiasm. They were given Soviet rocket-propelled grenades and tank mines. No one had ever seen them. A sergeant cut one open and having worked it out began to train the others on the unknown weapons. He’d even worked out the weapon’s weakness and had them practising with it in crosswinds. They retrained as mortar men and took turns house-clearing in the old farm buildings.

  Their commander was away when a chaotic rehearsal jump was organised. They blamed the Air Force. It had been the only opportunity to practise and it had been wasted.

  “Military Intelligence gave us a list of questions we had to find answers to if the opportunity arose to interrogate prisoners. They told us what documents to seize, who to bring home. Top of the list was a guy called Dimo.”