Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  Angel, still focused on the gun, felt around underneath the shop counter for anything he could use as a weapon. His fingers touched something flat with a handle. It was a butcher’s cleaver, a large rectangular hatchet for hacking through bone.

  The cleaver wasn’t sharp. It didn’t need to be. Angel brought it up and down quickly, with a lot of energy. Nels’ arm, chopped clean through at the elbow, fell onto the counter top, the Welrod still held tightly in his fleshy fingers. Nels, just like the African at Cassinga, looked around and sat down carefully.

  *

  Egypt Air’s desk at Cairo airport had no customers and Angel had a clear view of Ralph trying to buy a ticket. It was obvious there was some problem.

  “Athens. Sixty-five dollars,” said the ticket agent.

  He sat behind a desk, fat and sweaty with a big moustache. Ramadan had just started and Angel imagined he would be feeling hungry and uninterested.

  Ralph took a small plastic bag from his pocket. He had a little over fifteen dollars. He was fifty short, exactly the amount taken by the Sisters of The Sacred Heart in Juba.

  Angel saw a cleaning trolley, unattended outside of the washrooms, a grey overall coat over the handle. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his own brown leather wallet. He quickly sanitised it but left all the cash, 150 dollars, and debated leaving a note. For the camera, with love from the South African Police.

  Angel had always wondered why his government had become involved with Ralph, convinced that there had to be more of a reason than Ralph’s inheritance from the sale of Blackie Swart’s farm. He hoped that whatever the reason he and Ralph had made a difference, that it was a small something that may momentarily weaken his adopted country but would ultimately strengthen South Africa and bring injustice to an end, peacefully.

  Ralph didn’t see the man approach. It was just a cleaner, talking Arabic, who handed the ticket agent a wallet.

  Wordlessly the ticket agent took out some money and held out his hand for Ralph’s fifteen dollars. He handwrote a ticket and handed it to him with the wallet. Inside was a hundred-dollar bill. Ralph looked around for the cleaner. He’d gone.

  Angel watched him board at the gate.

  “Go to your father,” he said and walked away.

  *

  Roux found Angel clearing out his basement office at the National Intelligence Service. Angel would be sad to leave it. He had enjoyed the solitude.

  “What about Koos Snyman?” Angel asked.

  “Leave him to me,” said Roux.

  “And Nels?” asked Roux. “What happened to him?”

  In the bazaar Angel had taken a rope, used for tying the feet of carcasses before hanging them on a hook for sale at the butcher’s shop. He’d pulled it tight around the pulsing stump of Nels’ arm and twisted it with a steel for sharpening knives, telling Nels to hold the improvised tourniquet with his other hand or he would pass out from loss of blood. He’d lowered his hood and looked at him, talked to him in Afrikaans, Nels’ own language.

  ‘Your people could be great,’ he’d told him. ‘Afrikaners are determined, courageous, resourceful and innovative. But you’ve grown arrogant, like a hide to protect yourselves, and in your arrogance you’ve forgotten that you are just men, such as I, and not Gods.’

  He’d left him, taking the Welrod after peeling the gun from the lifeless fingers of a severed arm with a tattoo that looked like an upside-down jellyfish.

  “He’ll turn up,” Angel told him.

  “South Africans like Nels always turn up,” said Roux. “I saw Lombard about a new assignment for you.” Lombard had approved his idea of what they should do with Angel, and even ‘The Grim Reaper’, head of the Heining, was onboard. “I think he’s forgotten all about the money from Elanza Swart’s inheritance leaving the country. It’s the season for Southern Rights apparently. It’s all he can talk about. He’s wishing he was at his beach house at Hermanus watching the whales in Walker Bay, or out shooting a springbok somewhere in the Karoo, anywhere but the office.”

  “A new assignment? Not my old post?” asked Angel.

  “No. A promotion for a new job. An important one. They call it Project Hobo.”

  Angel thought of Elanza.

  “Based here or in the field?”

  “Here, office based in Pretoria. Domestic travel only. Some liaison with the Israelis. Better come upstairs,” said Roux. “Do some real work.”

  *

  Koos Snyman thought of his wife. He’d been drinking, a bottle of good Scotch half empty. Danelle had been a trophy, beautiful. He smiled, remembering when she used to call him Kosie. Not for a long time now. He took another drink. She would be all right. It wouldn’t take her long to find a new host, like a parasite.

  He heard the two cars turn up. Not police anyhow. That was good. Danelle would be upset if the neighbours started talking. They didn’t need ‘Police’ written on the side for Snyman to know that they had come for him.

  *

  Angel found that Elanza’s illness had progressed.

  “I have diarrhoea constantly. And I’ve got funny ulcers in my mouth.”

  She imitated the doctor.

  “Lesions on the hard pallet and gums.”

  She opened her mouth for him to see.

  “Please move in,” she asked.

  He would have liked to stay, to take care of her, but he hardly looked like domestic staff and they’d never give him a pass to live in Hyde Park.

  “Ralph said he wanted to join the British Army,” he said, desperate to cheer her. “I dissuaded him. He’s going to be a farmer instead.”

  Elanza smiled.

  “Father would have liked that. Watch over him, Angel. Like you watch over me.”

  “They’ve arrested Koos Snyman,” he said.

  “My father trusted him,” said Elanza.

  “Fathers aren’t always right.”

  “It’s all about our fathers, Angel. Ralph doing this crazy, pointless walk through Africa only to prove to his father that he’s a grown-up. And me. Since Father died I’ve been looking for ways to forget, thinking to kill myself, and I’ve finally succeeded. And you, Angel. You needn’t be here at all. You’ve seen things men shouldn’t see just to be here to find your father. Do you think they know how powerful their influence has been?”

  Angel sat beside her, their shoulders touching.

  “They want me to go to an AIDS conference in Durban. Make a speech. I’m not sure I feel up for it.”

  He held her hand.

  “Let me feel you,” she said.

  He took her hand and nervously guided it to his face. She touched him. Felt his lips, his nose. She turned her head to hide the tears in her eyes but didn’t remove her hand, stroking his face.

  “Dear Angel.”

  He wanted to tell her that he was half Swazi and that he understood. Swaziland had the highest rate of HIV in the world – twenty-six per cent of adults.

  And she was right. He had come back to South Africa all those years ago to find his father. He’d put up with abuse during his national service to be allowed to stay in the country, saw horrors at Cassinga, all for his father.

  Angel loved her and wanted to tell her but he’d left it too late – Elanza had fallen asleep.

  Southern England

  28th June, 1982

  Twenty-six

  Ralph had flown to Athens in an Egypt Air 737 and seen the pyramids at Giza as the aeroplane banked after take-off and turned north. He’d never had a chance to see them from the ground and somehow didn’t think he’d ever be back. It had taken an hour forty in the air and Africa was far behind.

  In Athens he’d rented a twenty-dollar room, ten times what he’d paid in Egypt at the Golden Hotel, and spent an hour in a hot shower. He’d met two nurses from Sydney and with a new confidence that surpr
ised him invited them to join him for dinner. It’d been that easy. He’d eaten two five-dollar lasagne dinners one after the other while they got drunk on ouzo and watched him.

  At dusk the next evening he’d boarded a sixty-hour non-stop bus through Europe to London. It had cost him fifty of Angel’s dollars. He’d survived the trip on tinned tuna, crackers, and stale water from the toilet cubicle at the back.

  A ticket from London Waterloo railway station to Gillingham, Dorset, had just about cleared him out. If lucky he might have enough money for a cup of tea on the train.

  Ralph picked up a pay phone and asked for a reverse-charge call.

  A woman asked primly, “Will you accept the charge for a call?”

  A tired voice sighed and answered, “Yes, I will.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hello, my son. Happy birthday.”

  It was the twenty-eighth of June. He would be home for his nineteenth.

  *

  The conductor read the stations over a crackling tannoy. Ralph sighed and relaxed into the seat, comforted by the familiar litany, relieved to finally hear the long-awaited recital that signalled the way home: Woking, Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury, Tisbury, Gillingham. The train would continue on through fields of black and white cows, but Ralph rarely travelled further west. Gillingham had always been his stop, the end of the line.

  With a hundred miles to go Ralph thought for the first time of his future. He had nothing planned, just a small English country town, grey-green in the winter and golden-green in the summer but always green. The trip now nearly over he wondered why he’d come back. When he’d left, thinking only of the adventure ahead, he’d said goodbye to a high-school sweetheart and at the time it had been a wrench that felt like something inside would snap. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought of her, not since Elanza.

  Two men ran along the platform toward the departing train as it made to leave London. They nimbly sidestepped a platform guard who, frustrated at having failed to stop them, puffed with bluster into a burnished whistle. The train whined like a wounded animal and then hesitated as if in pain and limped to an unexpected stop. The two men boarded, late and sweating, and looked around for a seat. The younger stocky man, solid like a second-row rugby player, had short cropped hair, almost bald, and a closely shaven face that shone. He must have recently been in the sun with more hair and a beard, distinct stripes between brown and white skin making him look like a thickset tabby cat. The other looked unusually round and pink.

  The round man squeezed in beside Ralph before asking, “Is this taken?”

  The other man slumped across two seats opposite. He opened a broad paper and hid behind it so that Ralph could only see his hands, freshly scrubbed but with engrained blackness on the sides of his index fingers and at the tips where his nails had been trimmed.

  “Been somewhere nice?”

  The newspaper hadn’t moved and Ralph glanced around, unsure if the man intended talking to him.

  “I’m sorry?”

  A face appeared above the headlines.

  “You’ve got a good tan. Been on holiday?”

  “Not really. Just travelling.”

  “Ah.”

  Ralph hadn’t been on holiday for years. Holidays required camping in the rain in Snowdonia and climbing wet Welsh mountains, or burning on a hot Spanish beach and swimming with coloured Mediterranean fish. Travelling had been different, like a task that had to be completed. Ralph realised, with regret, that he’d travelled blindly in a series of jumps. He’d focused too hard on the next destination along the way rather than slowly savouring the locations around him. He remembered people more than places, those who had helped.

  “Where?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Where have you been travelling?”

  “Africa.”

  “Africa? What, all of it?”

  “Not all of it. Cape Town to Cairo.”

  He put down his paper and looked at Ralph intently. The round man slightly tilted his flushed and glowing head, only pretending to read his book, listening carefully.

  “How?” the stripy man asked.

  The same questions, thought Ralph, always the same questions. No one ever asked about ‘separate development’ in South Africa, or the effects of tribalism in Uganda, or the disparate economies of northern and southern Sudan. People wanted to know how he did it, how far, how long it took, where he slept, what he ate, how much it cost.

  “How did you do it?”

  “I walked.”

  Ralph looked out of the window, ignoring the men, fascinated by the orderly little fields of England after the large untamed spaces of Africa. He felt uneasy, as though the two men needed to form a judgement of him, that he was being evaluated by strangers as in an interview. His apprehension was increased by the stripy man who, clear of the camouflage of his newspaper, appeared a little too friendly and relaxed, as if they had known each other for some time.

  Ralph went to the bathroom as the train approached a station, hopeful that the two men would have left when he returned, and glared at himself in the mirror. His hair, longer than it had ever been, fell in blond curls over his shoulders. His face looked thin and brown but his beard was still ginger fluff rather than black stubble. He was faintly angry. It didn’t look like he’d grown up at all.

  The two men looked at other passengers as they boarded at Basingstoke, laying claim to the space around them and Ralph’s empty seat.

  “What do you think?” Zac asked.

  Jumbo Cameron puffed out his cheeks.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “He’s very,” he searched for the word, “opinionated.”

  “He’ll grow out of it.”

  Jumbo shifted his weight in the seat.

  “He’s a loner,” he said.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  Jumbo seemed unsure.

  “Write your report. We’ll see if he pops up somewhere.”

  Zac looked around and noticed Ralph walking back down the carriage. He nodded to Jumbo, who with plump pink fingers pushed two small black canisters, round like short pieces of plastic tube, into the pocket of Ralph’s jacket.

  *

  On the train the round pink man and the stripy man looked at Ralph curiously.

  “Tell us, how did you do it?”

  “I told you. I walked.”

  Ralph prepared himself for the next questions: how far, how long, where he slept, what he ate, how much.

  “You walked through Africa? How far is it?”

  Ralph turned his head from the view outside the window to look at the stripy man.

  “In a straight line it’s exactly 4,500 miles but the route I took was nearly double that.”

  The round pink man had put his book down.

  “You walked all the way?” he asked.

  Always the same questions. People had no idea of the geography.

  “No. I walked a quarter of it.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “I left Cape Town on the 1st of January and got back here this morning. All told it’s been six months. I walked for a hundred days, but not consecutively.”

  The stripy man sat on his newspaper so that the little table between them wasn’t cluttered.

  “And the rest of it? In a bus or something?” he asked.

  “A lot of it was on boats. There’s a big lake in the middle of Africa that would stretch from Southampton to the top of Scotland, and the River Nile is navigable for almost half the length of the continent. I walked a quarter, and nearly another quarter of the total distance was on water.”

  “What about the other half?”

  “I got rides in pickup trucks, lorries, quite a lot on the railway. I got a ride in an old plane for a little way.”

  “Where did yo
u sleep?” the round pink man asked. “Hotels?”

  “Not really. I only spent thirty-nine dollars on accommodation. It would have been more but I did a runner from a bed and breakfast in Kenya without paying. Most of the time I slept by the road somewhere.”

  “Thirty-nine dollars a night?” the stripy man asked. It seemed reasonable. Twenty-two or twenty-three pounds.

  “Thirty-nine dollars in six months.”

  His brow furrowed and he looked away.

  “You slept by the road? Were you camping? It sounds very dangerous,” the round pink man said.

  Ralph hadn’t thought about it.

  “I don’t know if it was dangerous. I didn’t have any problems. Oh, I was arrested for spying in Uganda.”

  The stripy man looked out of the window.

  “What happened? Were you formally charged?”

  “No. There was a vehicle crash close by and I sort of got away.”

  “You sort of got away.”

  Ralph didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure if he believed him.

  “Did you get tummy troubles?”

  The round pink man thought it was a natural question to ask. He always fell ill while on holiday abroad. All that foreign food.

  “I think I had malaria and hepatitis at the same time. You know, the type of hep you get from dirty water.”

  Ralph thought that needed clarifying.

  “I’m still getting over it. I could scare you to death with some traveller’s toilet tales. And I think I’ve got a jigger in my toe.”

  “What’s a jigger?”

  “It’s a tiny flea that lives in the sand and burrows under your skin. It sits there chomping away getting fatter and fatter. All you can see to start with is a little black dot which is its bum. It lives inside you, growing ten times its original size from feeding off your blood, and throwing eggs out of its bum back onto the ground. Hurts like hell.”