Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  Both laughed.

  “I bet your mum and dad were worried. It sounds dangerous to me. You must have had an angel watching over you.”

  “Why did you do it?” the stripy man asked.

  That, thought Ralph, was the question. He looked out of the window at southern England in June, so green that he wanted to hum Jerusalem.

  “The truth is I didn’t mean to. I spent some time in Joburg working in a bar and then I made a bit of money acting in a TV commercial. I wanted to see the ‘real’ Africa so I walked to Victoria Falls. Then I just kept heading north. I thought I could join my flight home in Nairobi but the airline wouldn’t let me on. So I had to come all the way. Overland.”

  Ralph looked at the stripy man and wondered if they’d met before.

  “Maybe I was just trying to prove something.”

  “Prove something?” he asked. “To who?”

  “Myself.”

  The stripy man smiled.

  “How much money did you have?”

  “I left Johannesburg with 450 dollars but some nuns in Sudan stole fifty from me. I still had a bit left when I got to Cairo. I think the trip through Africa cost 385 dollars.”

  “How much is that?” the round pink man asked.

  The other answered him.

  “Two hundred and twenty-five pounds.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I’m nineteen today.”

  “Oh, happy birthday,” the round pink man said cheerfully.

  The stripy man had a smile on his face.

  “So, you were eighteen, alone, and you walked two thousand miles, travelled nearly eight thousand miles all the way through Africa, kept going even though you were carrying a few interesting tropical diseases, dodged arrest for spying and escaped from thieving nuns, and lived for six months, all on just over two hundred quid.”

  “Yes. I suppose I did.”

  All three of them, surprised, looked out of the window at the green and pleasant land and at a cathedral spire towering above a river valley.

  Jumbo talked to Zac, ignoring Ralph as though something had been finalised, as if he’d seen enough.

  “Have you seen the cathedral?” he asked. “Quite magnificent. Four hundred and four feet tall but built on a swampy bog. Bishop Poore took the credit, but of course Elias did all the work.”

  The two men left together silently at the City of Salisbury and stood on the platform looking at Ralph through the carriage window until they both walked over a pedestrian bridge and stood on the platform opposite. Ralph craned his neck when the train pulled away. They hadn’t left the station to visit the cathedral. He could see them standing to wait for the next London-bound. It would take Zac straight back to where he’d just come from, back to Waterloo and the glass office block on Westminster Bridge Road with a petrol station at its base, London’s worst-kept secret, and Jumbo Cameron to his busy desk six stops up the Northern Line at the top of Gower Street.

  *

  Just before Gillingham railway bridge, as the train slowed to a stop, Ralph saw a bedsheet draped over some bushes in view of the track. There was a message handwritten on it, ‘Welcome Home’, his aunt and two young cousins waving vigorously above it.

  An old man waited on the platform. His hair hung in grey strands over a bald head, and a paunch above his belt pushed the bottom buttons of his shirt open. Ralph felt that the man had aged rapidly, as if on an exponential curve, but his face still had that way of crinkling up when he smiled, just as Ralph remembered it.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “Hello, my son.”

  The old man stood looking at Ralph, unsure what to say.

  “Your mother has been frantic since your call. Where’ve you been?”

  He’d meant since Ralph had called from London that morning, but the same question applied to the time since he’d left for Cape Town more than six months previously.

  “Come on. Let’s go. I’ll tell you both all about it.”

  On a bench outside the station a girl moved so that the sun fell on her face and hair. A large brown dog lifted its head from her knee.

  Ralph and his father noticed her at the same time.

  “I’ll take this to the car,” he said and lifted Ralph’s light rucksack with one hand.

  Ralph, the girl and the dog looked at each other and all three of them smiled. Wordlessly she held his arm. Ralph put his hand in his jacket pocket. He pulled out two black plastic pots and looked at them, puzzled by how they’d got there. They were a little over 35mm long with grey snap-on lids and letters written on the top with a thick blue marker. On one the letters R-E, on the other a solitary letter O.

  South Africa and England

  2003

  Twenty-seven

  Elanza, her pneumonia unimproved, looked fine and papery, as if made of tissue. She had chest pain and difficulty breathing, and no matter what Angel did he seemed unable to stop her severe wasting. He didn’t need to be continually told the seriousness of her condition but her doctor called him at work regularly with vaguely disguised warnings, conditioning him for that day when there wouldn’t be any need for disguise. Angel tried to ignore the pessimistic reports, remembering other dreadful times that they had struggled through, and encouraged her to keep on fighting, proud of her but aware that ultimately it was an unwinnable battle. It hadn’t been easy for either of them, Elanza often angry with herself and the world.

  At one time, maybe fifteen years ago, he’d gone to see her and immediately felt sorry for her. She’d been sweating, scratching wounds on her torso, hopping from one foot to another because the lesions were on the soles of her feet.

  “Shall I tell you how all this started? It’s good to know, right? To study your enemy.”

  Angel had said nothing.

  “I’ve been asking about it. The pathophysiology is very complex. It’s the HIV that gets you. AIDS just finishes you off. The HIV virus enters the body. In my case a shared needle. His blood straight into my blood. Bam. Job done. It replicates rapidly. That’s stage one, the so-called ‘acute’ stage. It destroys something called CD4+T cells which are a component of the immune system. Three to four weeks after infection it’s usual to get flu-like symptoms. It often goes undiagnosed. Mine did. I just thought I’d bought some bad drugs. ‘Opportunistic’ infections can start at this very early stage, like the CMV that led to my blindness.”

  “Elanza, please.”

  She’d held up her hand to silence him.

  “Then there’s a latent period when not much happens. Good old CD8+T cells are activated and they kill HIV-infected cells, allowing CD4+T cells to recover. That’s why not much is going on for three years and you can live a normal life drugging and whoring. At the end of stage two, though, you get weight loss, enlarged lymph nodes and… and…”

  She had become angrier, Angel unable to comfort her.

  “And then the big one. Fifty per cent of people die within ten years, so let me see. Oh yes. Any day soon.”

  He had taken her hand and passed her a towel as she’d started coughing.

  “In the end you get AIDS because HIV has killed all the CD4+T cells. When a blood test for p24 antigen levels shows that you are HIV-positive, and you get a CD4+T cell count of less than two hundred, you are officially AIDS ridden. Your Human Immunodeficiency Virus has opened the door to a ‘defining’ illness, like my old friend cytomegalovirus, and you have Acquired an Immune Deficiency Syndrome. I take comfort in the big words. Makes you feel you’ve got your money’s worth.”

  She had gone to the sink then, nauseous.

  “I couldn’t tell you which one of the many men I slept with had herpes, by the way. He wasn’t wearing a sign. I’ll never know who made me blind.”

  She had started crying. Crying had always been the most difficult for Angel, more difficult than ange
r.

  “Or Kaposi’s sarcoma. That’s another herpes bastard. Gives you these skin cancers.”

  She had held up her foot to show him.

  “Violet plaques.”

  He had gone to her as she held the sink, waiting for her to vomit.

  “Eventually they’ll break down and start ‘fungating’. Which will be something to look forward to anyway. Terminal diseases are so… interesting.”

  She had exhausted herself and stopped talking. Angel, as always, had felt helpless.

  “I’m sorry, Angel. I’m taking a new thing. An ‘antiretroviral’. It’s called AZT. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. Makes me want to throw up. Good job I’m rich, though. This stuff is so expensive.”

  She had taken a huge pill.

  “The heart grinds rotten things,” Angel had said.

  She’d shouted at him again: “Shut up with all the African shit! Talk like a white man.”

  Angel had remained silent and let her talk.

  “How can they bomb a shopping centre? Hyde Park. Right here. Three injured.”

  She’d changed the conversation without realising.

  “It’s that Mandela’s fault. They should lock him up.”

  “He is,” Angel had reminded her.

  “It’ll go back to the bush, you know, with them in charge. Thankfully I’m dying. They’ll be murdering us in our beds anyway.”

  Angel had always found it gruelling when Elanza was irritable and mulish, and questioned how he could love this side of her, until, as always, he excused her obstinate headstrong manners, knowing them to be a symptom of her wretched cheerless condition.

  Angel had helped her to a chair. He thought it then that she’d told him about the will.

  “Talking of death,” she had said, “I’ve changed my will. Not by much. I’m leaving some to medical research. There’s still a lot of money despite my having wasted it. And Koos Snyman’s best efforts, of course. Extraordinary, but it appears that the rest of the world is still functioning financially, even if South Africa isn’t. I’m told I’m worth a hundred and sixty million dollars. And you are the executor. You know what that means.”

  Angel had been too drained to interrogate her about it.

  And then there had been the time, Angel thought eight years ago, when Elanza had picked up her first pneumonia. She’d been using a new spray medication which she inhaled in a noisy squirt from an aerosol. It’d made her cough.

  “Don’t worry. It’s only PCP,” she’d laughed.

  The lesions had at that time been on the side and tip of her nose – purple blotches the size of a penny.

  “And I’m on combination therapy now,” she’d explained. “More tablets. Stops resistance. The old AZT wasn’t doing the job. This one pill has got two, or more, ingredients. I don’t remember. If I’m a good girl and take them every day I might get a few more years.”

  She had chuckled but, as always, had ended up in a coughing fit.

  Angel had tried to cheer her up.

  “Ralph is a farmer, south of Lisbon. He speaks pretty good Portuguese apparently. And he’s started a rugby club. Thirty-something-year-old expats who should know better and some Portuguese soccer players. They played a game against a visiting Royal Navy submarine.”

  Angel realised now that he’d been proud of him.

  “Those sailors must have been underwater so long, like turning out cattle from a kraal. Of course, Ralph’s team lost. Ralph had never been a rugby player really. He broke two ribs. Old men pretending they’re still young.”

  Elanza had held his hand.

  *

  Angel spoon-fed the broth a cleaning lady at the office had made for him to take to her. He held her head carefully, like a child, her hair thin on her scalp.

  “I have some news about Ralph,” he told her.

  She smiled and opened her mouth obediently.

  “He’s in Cambridgeshire.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In England, in the middle somewhere.”

  “What’s he doing there?” she asked, soup dribbling down her chin. Angel wiped it away tenderly.

  “He’s travelling all over the world buying fresh produce, vegetables.”

  “Vegetables?”

  “He’s running a business, probably not very well. He’s lost a ton of money trading Argentinian sweetcorn.”

  Angel laughed and Elanza smiled. After twenty-one years she knew very little about Angel’s job. He talked randomly of a promotion, of a new boss, of the office moving out of Pretoria’s central business district to Arcadia. She knew it was government work, that he was well thought of, that his translation and report writing sometimes took him around the country and occasionally abroad. He would return from these foreign trips tired and silent. He would politely dismiss the maid and the gardener for the weekend and quietly cook and clean for her, scold her for forgetting a medication and for smoking, sit her warmly in the sun while he swam countless lengths in the pool, and then read stories to her all evening, stories of Africa. For a while she wondered if he had another woman, or whether she should encourage him to get one, but she would forget to talk to him about it and then blame herself for being selfish and fearful of losing him.

  “How do you know this?”

  Angel couldn’t tell her. In 1985 NIS had opened Rietvlei, based on heathland around a dam south of Pretoria, as a world class National Intelligence Academy. At the new ‘Farm’, a programme called Owl Sight had been developed, with cooperation from the Italian state security machine SISMI. Roux considered the Italian Secret Service very underrated and excellent in the field of technology, particularly the interception of satellite communications worldwide.

  “A little bird,” Angel said. “I keep an eye on him.”

  Angel put down the soup bowl and tidied her up.

  “I’ve enjoyed following what he’s been up to,” she said. “It’s been a small reason to keep going.”

  Angel understood. They’d both lived vicariously through the triumphs and tragedies of this only vaguely remembered person doing things unfamiliar to them in an environment far different to their own. Watching Ralph’s life had been like watching a soap opera. He’d become a novella they could pick up and put down at will, his normal ordinary life simple and comforting, an escape from their own problems. They had analysed his loves and commiserated with his losses, toasted his successes and debated his mistakes, all without him having any idea that he’d become an important part of their lives, that he had brought and kept them together.

  They sat quietly for a long time, holding hands, content that there was no need to talk.

  *

  In the Arcadia building, near to the embassies and hotels of historic Pretoria, Deputy Director Angel Rots stretched and looked around his office, the new headquarters one of many changes. Gabriël Lombard had left before the first free elections to help create a fully democratic constitution for South Africa. Nick Roux had taken over his job but recently retired. Angel now worked for the second black African director general of the new South African Secret Service, the first one quickly fired by the President for fabricating intelligence reports. The director general had always been a political appointment, and Angel did the real work – both knew it, both accepted it.

  Angel missed Nick Roux. He remembered the day when he’d finally realised that South Africa would change. He’d been standing with Roux at Waterkloof Air Base, nervous of boarding a noisy old executive jet to fly to Ysterplaat for a prison visit near Paarl. Roux had astonished him. For three years, a senior minister, a member of the State Security Council, had been meeting the nation’s highest profile prisoner, a convicted violent communist saboteur, taking him home for his wife to cook him dinner and reporting back only to the President. Even Roux had known nothing about it. Roux had given Angel a parcel to carry, a suit o
f clothes for Prisoner 46664. Angel knew who’d been the 466th prisoner at Robben Island in 1964 and had thought, This is it; this is the end of it.

  Angel’s phone rang and it cheered him.

  “Hello, Nick, this is a nice surprise. How’s retirement?”

  Roux had found it hard adjusting to having perpetual leisure time.

  “Dull. I went through some old things and I sent you a video tape. Are you able to watch it now?”

  “Now?”

  “Please, Angel.”

  Angel watched a court setting, a feed from a monitor taken seven years previously at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an attempt in restorative justice at the end of apartheid. A man stood to attention while being questioned by judges, a subtitle on the screen stating ‘Human Rights Abuses – Bisho’. Angel remembered it well – a massacre by the security forces against a demonstration in a town in the Ciskei.

  “Are you watching?”

  “Yes. Who is he?”

  “Called himself Peter Farnham. He worked for the Civil Cooperation Bureau in ’88 in charge of Intelligence. Left the SADF in 1991 and joined the Ciskei Defence Force.”

  “Bisho,” said Angel.

  “Bisho. Then he became a senior staff officer in the new South African Army, when he wasn’t at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission Human Rights Violation Tribunal. Unbelievable.”

  “Why do you want me to see this, Nick?”

  “Look at him. He did God knows what evil but thought that if he called the black guys ‘sir’ often enough it would all be forgotten.”

  The man on the monitor turned to make a point to one of the judges. His right arm had been cleanly amputated at the elbow.

  “There’s something else, Angel. I had a call from Elanza’s doctor. He failed to get you on the phone at work and was redirected to me. Someone at the office doesn’t know that I’m not your boss anymore. I’m pleased to see that the bureaucracy hasn’t improved. Angel, I have some sad news.”