Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “When you’re over fifty you shouldn’t do things like that,” he muttered in Xhosa to himself.

  “Sometimes it is good for the soul,” said the black man with the empty glass. “Today is a great day for South Africa.” When Luke left the Albert Hall at three in the morning, he was again dressed in his evening clothes under a thick overcoat. Three policemen were still outside and one of them tipped his hand to his hat.

  “Quite a party, sir.” It was the first time Luke had been called ‘sir’ by a policeman and, as he turned back to smile at the man, someone caught at his elbow. The woman looked old and drawn from the cold and he heard her say his name, but still there was no recognition.

  “I want my son back,” the woman asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I WANT MY SON!” she shouted.

  “Bit of trouble, sir?” asked the policeman, moving forward.

  “I’m not sure… This woman thinks I have her son.”

  “You do, Luke. I’m Anita, remember. Our son.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” Luke told her coldly.

  “We had a son.”

  Luke looked down at her from his full height, directly into her eyes.

  “Where is he?” she whimpered. “I can’t have any more. I tried.”

  Luke shook his head and turned away, leaving Anita Hylan on the steps of the Albert Hall. He should have done, but he did not feel sorry for the wreck of a woman he had not seen for six years. When he climbed into the taxi that would take him home, his heart was as cold as the English weather.

  In his pocket was a photograph of his son trotting behind Matthew Gray and holding hands with Robert Gray. The picture had come in the post a month earlier, and the happiness of Matt and his family had spoken to Luke from all the distance that kept them apart. When he turned to look back at the woman who had given birth to the child, she was sitting on the step, three up from the pavement. Not even the policeman was taking any notice. Her figure grew smaller as the taxi drove farther away.

  It had taken Ben Munroe six weeks to compile the most damning indictment of the white man’s stewardship in South Africa. The misery of the poor, the hopelessness of the ignorant, the generations of poverty to come unless the world of money and power came forward to stop the human degradation was in every shot, every movement of his film and he knew it was the best reporting he had ever done in his life.

  He and his cameraman had gone into seven of the black townships across the country without the required permission from the government. Under the laws of apartheid, no white man was allowed into the sprawling poverty of the townships across the country without a permit, which was only given to journalists under strict police supervision, the regime deciding where the reporters would be taken.

  Every day of his odyssey, he had expected the police to arrest him and deport him from the country but, as he passed through customs with his cameraman, the excitement of having made the scoop of his life made him want to shout with joy and raise two fingers at the government of the country he was about to leave. There was no longer a direct flight to America, sanctions having stopped American airlines from flying to South Africa and South African Airways from landing in America. Still treading on eggs, he climbed up the steps to the first-class section of the British Airways Boeing 747 and found his seat.

  Ten minutes later the great plane moved out and away from the terminal with Ben Munroe still clutching the video tapes that would make him more famous then he had ever been before.

  “Champagne, sir?” asked the hostess, whom he noticed was pretty.

  “Scotch for both of us,” and he looked up into her eyes, glowing in triumph.

  “You had a good trip,” she laughed.

  “You can bet your life on it.”

  Frikkie Swart had watched his man for six weeks and, when the plane came off the end of the runway on flight for Nairobi and London, he spoke into his two-way radio and set the police on a series of swoops that would net them some of the ANC sleepers they had been hunting for years. There was a sneering smile on his face that had been there all the time as he had watched Ben Munroe move through the airport procedures.

  At Heathrow airport, London, Ben changed planes and took the first flight to New York without waiting to catch upon any sleep. A taxi at J F Kennedy airport took him straight to the television station where they were waiting for his expose, having sold it to networks across America and around the world. The head of the network shook his head, and the news editor took the videos, pressed one into the player, and they all looked up at the screen.

  “This one’s blank, Ben. You put in a blank?” He flipped out the cassette, pushed in another and pressed the button.

  “This one’s also blank, Ben,” he exclaimed, puzzled, after half a minute.

  “The bastards.” Ben was white with anger.

  “What about your contacts? They’re still in South Africa.” The head of the network had understood.

  “I’ve blown every one of their covers and there’s not a damn thing I can do… When it’s too good to be true it usually isn’t. They set me up! Those bloody bastards set me up.” Ben ran across the room to a telephone and dialled rapidly. He waited. The phone at the other end rang for a long time, but no one answered.

  The man he was phoning was already dead, dropped on his head from the fourth floor window at John Vorster Square police station. After twenty four hours of interrogation, exquisitely enjoyed by three white policemen who had tortured the terrorist for information from the moment they had him in the back of the truck in Soweto, they had allowed the man to run at the open, beckoning window. “Bloody kaffirs can’t take it,” one of them had said in Afrikaans, as he closed the window.

  “Man, you’d better go down and see he’s properly dead.”

  “You think he told us anything Koos.”

  “How the hell would I know? Check it out, man. Bloody kaffirs are nothing but trouble.”

  2

  Two months earlier, Sunny Tupper had arrived in Port St Johns, on the same day that she drove Archie’s car out of the garage, taking the terrible dirt road from Umtata down to the coast along the winding path that leads through the Transkei hills.

  She had never been more frightened in her life. But there was nowhere to turn round and the nightmare had continued into the night, her car tilting at angles that threatened to drop her down into the gorge, hundreds of metres below, in the dark. The money to repair the road had long been embezzled by the Transkei administration who treated the South African government cheque accounts as their own.

  Sunny had booked into the Cape Hermes Hotel, where she spent an exhausted night. The following morning her courage failed, and she wanted to drive back home, but the dirt road was too terrible to contemplate. It was over twenty years since the night of her greatest stupidity. It was still fresh in her mind, frequently played through and twisted, haunting her nights. The man and their subsequent marriage had been more of a fiasco than the night when Matt had come home to the Halfway House smallholding and found her in bed with the driver of the Mercedes 45OSLC parked in the driveway.

  At lunchtime, she sat beside the pool, looking out over the silted estuary which prevented Port St Johns from operating as a port any longer. She drank a stiff gin to calm her nerves and give her the courage she needed to drive on down to Second Beach, to the colony and Matthew Gray.

  If anything was clear in her life, looking back, it was that he had been her only love; the twenty-two years that followed the night of the fiasco had been empty. Nothing of any importance had happened since. She had gone on living her life, but the brilliance had gone. Life after Matt had been dull and leaden. She had never felt vibrantly alive again and the man just down the road from her now was the cause of it.

  She looked around the pool bar at the young men, not one of them interested in catching her eye. There was nothing in her to attract men any longer. She wondered if life was only for the
young, that modern man with all his medicine made people live too long, until they were of little further use to anyone else, or even to themselves. Sitting alone under an umbrella, close to the bar for replenishment, she drank steadily throughout the afternoon, trying to remember and trying to forget. They brought her sausage rolls and the day wore on relentlessly, with the great Wild Coast sea rolling in to the shore, a kilometre of white-topped breakers.

  She had supper alone in the near-empty dining room keeping her maudlin thoughts to herself and wondering why old people on their own seemed so ridiculous, while the young were so full of potential. At eight o’clock, a little drunk but still in full command of her faculties, she went up to her room to be on her own, and slept the night through. Her dreams were beautiful and she was young again, the laughter ringing and everyone calling her name.

  Somehow, she could not think why, it made her feel better in the warm light of the new-born day. The morning sun was streaming through her open window, with the smell of the salty sea air and the tumbling roar of the waves. She had a bath and fixed her face as well as she could. She prepared her mind for the job ahead, as job it was, and all the past pain in her mind had nothing to do with the desperate task in hand.

  She went down to Archie’s car and drove the seven kilometres to the Vuya restaurant, where she parked it and prepared to walk across the beach to Matt’s rondavel.

  Everyone she spoke to knew Matt and everyone smiled at the mention of his name. Nothing had changed. She always smiled at his name herself. Sitting under the tall trees in front of the Vuya, she looked across the beach that had been his home for sixteen years, trying to summon up her courage for the long walk back into the past of her life.

  And then she saw her giant man, striding down the beach, coming straight towards where she sat as if he had expected her to be there. Some ten paces behind came two young boys, one white, one black. A tall colt of a girl was part of the family and she ran back into the warm sea, calling to her father to join her in the water. But the person Sunny watched was not the children, or even Matt himself after the first lurch that turned her stomach upside down, but the woman holding his hand and walking so comfortably at his side, her long, light-brown hair down a well-tanned back and with the figure of a girl. Sunny could feel their love from where she sat on the beach, watching the tableau sweeping into her sanctuary under the trees.

  She rose, as the family approached, and nervously emerged into the sunlight.

  “Hello, Matt,” she volunteered with a tremulous smile.

  “Good gracious! It’s Sunny! Lorna, this is Sunny Tupper! Sunny, what on earth are you doing in Port St Johns?”

  “There’s a terrible problem at Security Lion, Matt, and you’re the only person who can sort it out. I’ve come to plead with you.”

  “Come off it, Sunny, I’ve forgotten what an insurance policy looks like. How are Archie and Lucky? How’s Teddie?”

  “Teddie’s dead, and Arch and Lucky have every chance of going to jail.”

  Matt sank down on the bench on the other side of the wooden table, patting the seat next to him for Lorna as Sunny returned to her seat.

  “You had better tell me what this is all about.” He was as white as a sheet, and the fear that stabbed Lorna was greater than that she had felt when she had seen the surfboard disappearing with him into the giant wave on his birthday.

  The children drifted off on their own as Sunny began the story from the time when she had realised Teddie Botha and Archie had lost control of the company, some years before the tank exploded in the Angolan bush.

  They sat under the trees for an hour, the life of the colony continuing around them unnoticed. The geese were being fed on the pathway; Jonathan and Raleen wandered past, happy in their cocoon; Carel was taking out the boat with Charles and the hamper; tourists were helping to push the ski-boat into the surf. Children were playing in the warm Indian Ocean, children of all races, laughing, chasing and enjoying each other’s company. It was a place of joy and sunshine, in deep contrast to the world of the big city, the way of war, the ways of confrontation.

  Sunny refused their offer to visit them in the rondavel, not wishing to see his paintings or the trinkets of his love for Lorna, the small things that would have made her cry for the life she had lost. There were no secrets between these two, and she was sure that he had long ago told her all about Sunny Tupper, the girl from London who had blown it all for one brief orgasm. Lorna looked at her with sympathy; not jealousy, the type of jealousy some women have for their men’s past.

  “Is there any other way out of here other than that terrible road?” asked Sunny.

  “Through Lusikisiki. Longer, but the road surface is better and there are not so many suicidal buses driving along the road. You really want to go now, Sunny? No food? Nothing?” He had risen from the beach when she rose to go.

  “Bad news doesn’t eat well,” replied Sunny dully. “You must talk to your wife. Unless you come to Johannesburg, a lot of people are going to lose their pensions and your two best friends are going to jail. You made them, you made the company, you started the public paying monthly to protect their children and their old age. You are the only person who can stop the registrar declaring the company insolvent, and you are the only person who can put all the systems you created back on the track. But, most important, I know and you know that you are the only person who can instantly restore confidence in Security Lion.”

  “They told me I was exploiting the public.”

  “They were wrong,” insisted Sunny. “You don’t exploit a country when you create wealth, jobs and stability for people in their old age. If you had not created the vehicle for the people to save, they would become a burden on the state when they are unable to work. There would have been more orphaned children with no money and the loss of their pride. The challenge will be greater now than when you started your companies and took over Security Life. You see, Matt, the likes of you and Luke are never able to be torn away from their responsibilities especially when everything, is going wrong. Then the real leaders have to stand up and be counted, when the tin-pot dictators and the manipulators have been destroyed by their own greed.

  “I’ll leave it with you, Matt, you and Lorna… I love your kids. I never had any children… If I don’t go now, Archie will do something silly. Despite all the hail-fellow-well-met, he’s not very strong. But you know that, you are his friend. Lusikisiki, you said? I’ll find my way. You look well, Matt… You look well.”

  They both watched her go in silence, embarrassed by the tears, both terrified to contemplate the decision that had to be made. The dog found them and jumped up on Lorna’s lap, trying to lick her face.

  Lorna stood up and walked out to the beach and the sunshine. She was wearing a bikini she had made herself from soft, yellow leather. It was nice to be able to wear a bikini after bearing two children. The sand was hot under her feet and she moved quickly to the wet sand where the sea-snails were making tracks in the film of water left behind by the flow of the tide. A pair of sandpipers was rushing in and out with the ebb and flow of the waves, picking at food and ignoring Lorna and the dog. A black-backed gull with its large yellow beak was hovering above the patch of flat rocks and bombing the ground with a black mussel that cracked open on impact. Lorna watched the satisfied gull land in a welter of flapping wings and eat the flesh exposed inside the cracked shell.

  A small cloud passed over the sun and patterned a shadow on the beach. The children were playing away from the dangerous backwash of the gully, Sipho and Robert throwing smooth flat pebbles at the surface of the sea, skipping them along into the face of the tumbling waves and competing with each other to see who could skip the stones the farthest before they sank. Peace was flirting with a young boy, an innocent prey to her instincts. Away towards the Gap, the rondavel looked across at them, the home of all their happiness. She had left him to think, knowing when it was time to talk and when to leave him alone.

  She knew
he would have to go. There were too many people involved, the great mass of dependants who relied on the likes of Matt to keep it safe for them. He had kept it safe for her and her children. So many precious years, and now they would have to go. They would all go; she made up her mind on that point, even though the thought of leaving the colony made her feel physically sick. There were just too many families involved, and she knew Matt well enough to know he would never allow his friends to go to jail for negligent management. Not if he could help it.

  She began to think of how she would pack and what she could wear. Matt’s long beard would have to go and they would clothe his wonderfully tanned body in a suit. He would have to cut his hair. They could stay with her mother and father until they found a home. Matt would say the job would be short, but they never were when other people were involved. Other people never allow you to come and go as you wish. They want part of you in the big new world and never let you go twice – rarely even once – eating you up for their pleasure, their need, exercising their rights.

  Lorna shuddered at the thoughts, feeling cold in the hot sun. She wondered how her children would react to the children of the other world, the world that by a miracle they had left behind for so many years. She wondered how Sipho would understand the taunts of racism, where he would go to school as the system prevented him from going to school with Robert… There were just too many problems, but the bigger disaster overwhelmed them all. If they stayed and thousands upon thousands of families lost their savings, Matt’s happiness would be shattered anyway. Maybe, just maybe, he would solve the problem quickly and they could go home. Just maybe. It was her only hope.

  Then she looked up from the waves and shouted, “NO!” The black-backed gull, too engrossed in eating the mussel, had not seen the dog slink up behind, and the shout of warning came only just in time. Her dog looked back with a clear expression that told her he had nearly gotten away with that one. The gull flew off, the broken mussel in its beak, looking back and downwards at the dog wagging its tail.