Storms Over Africa

by Beverley Harper

  ‘Good God, how did you get this?’ Judging from the angle, Steve had to be at the same level as the rhinoceros to take the shot. The beast looked to be no more than 60 centimetres from the camera. The photograph was of a portion of its head. The little piggy eyes glared viciously at the lens, mad and red.

  ‘That’s Chantel. Isn’t she lovely?’

  ‘Who named her that?’

  ‘Me.’

  He snorted. ‘That figures. How did you get the shot?’

  ‘I was leaning over the truck. One of the men was sitting on my legs. It was quite safe.’

  Richard wondered if she had been in more danger from the man sitting on her legs, probably gazing down at her wonderful bottom. No doubt she was wearing shorts.

  She showed him the next shot. Chantel was vigorously attacking a split-pole fence. Steve had obviously been sitting on the fence, just above her. Dust billowed around the rhinoceros and chips of wood flew through the air as her horn splintered the wooden fence. Five tonnes of angry rhinoceros in full assault mode 150 centimetres below her and Steve’s photograph was crisp and steady. ‘You’re a helluva photographer,’ he said, handing it back, grudgingly respectful.

  The entire sequence of shots of the darting episode literally dripped with danger, heat and the dedication of the men involved. They were brilliant. ‘You could exhibit some of these,’ he said. ‘People would buy them.’

  She saved the best till last. Three entire rolls taken of African people. She had gone into a village and captured the simplicity and dignity of the villagers. Her understanding of lighting caught the lines on their faces, the gentleness in their eyes and the humour in their mouths. Some of the shots of the huts looked like wash drawings. Children were happy, splashing in the river, their plump bodies shining, drops of water spraying and caught by her camera like sunbursts as she had photographed them from just the right angle.

  ‘It’s nice to see you don’t use cheap tricks.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We had a team come from America before the war. They wanted to get the poverty and suffering, not the real truth. They threw money into garbage bins and then photographed the kids leaning in to get it. It was reported as starving children reduced to raiding bins to get food to eat.’

  ‘There is a lot of starvation in Africa, though.’

  ‘Then they should have gone to where it’s prevalent, not misrepresented Rhodesia.’

  ‘Sometimes you call it Rhodesia and sometimes Zimbabwe.’

  ‘Depends on when I’m talking about.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, nodding. ‘If you’re referring to before the war it’s Rhodesia.’

  ‘We all do that.’

  ‘Even the Africans?’

  ‘Especially the Africans. Some of the more rural African people still call it Rhodesia. Wellington can never remember to say Harare, he still refers to it as Salisbury.’

  ‘It’s complicated here. Australia is just Australia. No border patrols, no passports required. Everyone is free to go anywhere.’

  ‘Must be very boring,’ he said dryly.

  She grinned at him. ‘Now, now,’ she admonished gently.

  She had business to attend to at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management. He reluctantly gave her Joseph Tshuma’s name as a contact and she made an appointment to see him. While she was gone, Richard, who had nothing better to do, sat in the lobby at Meikles reading the newspaper. He was deeply into the complicated machinations of what he saw as the united Europe mess and John Major’s problems, when a man sat next to him and said, ‘Bugger me, if it isn’t old Didd.’

  Only one person called him that. Major Greg Yeomans, who, during the war had been a field operative with Intell-Salisbury attached to the Selous Scouts, had not endeared himself to his superiors because of his habit of deliberately bastardising everyone’s name. They tolerated him only because of his efficiency but even that counted for nothing when, in the same report, he once referred to General Walls, then Commander of the Rhodesian Army, and Lieutenant Colonel Ron Reid Daly, who formed and commanded the Selous Scouts, as General Window and Lieutenant Colonel Nightly.

  The habit would have been irritating in most people. Greg Yeomans, however, was a warm and intelligent man who was well liked. In fact, in some circles this renaming was considered to be a sign of acceptance. If you didn’t have your name turned around by Yeomans, you weren’t part of the team.

  Richard had not seen the man since the war. ‘Greg,’ he said, pleased. ‘Where did you spring from?’ He had barely changed. Tall and almost painfully thin with a shock of fiery red hair which sprung up from his head and stuck out in tufty disarray. Red eyebrows, thick and bushy, over intelligent blue eyes. A nose which looked as though a child had modelled it out of putty, lumpy and long. The only thing missing was the huge untidy red beard he had grown during the war.

  Yeomans tapped his long nose and answered. ‘Here and there.’

  ‘Still the conspirator I see.’ Richard remembered how impossible it had been to get any information out of the man.

  He tapped his nose again, ‘Now and then.’

  Richard laughed. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll ask. What are you doing these days?’

  And Yeomans, delighted at the opportunity, said, ‘This and that.’

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ Richard rose.

  ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

  They were at ease immediately. Of all the men he had known during the seven-year war, Greg Yeomans was the one he respected most. He had once seen him drop from a helicopter, hit the ground running, shooting and rolling in such a manner that Richard was convinced the man must break one of his spindly legs. Instead, he proceeded to take out seven terrorists who had been hiding in ambush and climb back into the hovering helicopter three minutes later, all with no discernible change to his breathing pattern. He had been alone on the ground and the covering fire from the helicopter had hindered, rather than helped him. ‘Jesus, Old Woman,’ he said to the gunner, who’s name was Youngman, ‘you bloody nearly shot me.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Youngman stammered. He was nervous and inexperienced.

  ‘Just don’t do it again.’ He had calmly lit a cigarette with hands that showed no sign of shakiness.

  They went into the bar. They talked of the war, of the funny incidents they remembered, and of mutual friends. It seemed that Greg was still involved in some kind of intelligence work, although he now lived in South Africa. He was deliberately vague about his work so Richard did not push it, knowing that if the man was reluctant to talk about it nothing would make him, and content in the knowledge that whatever he was up to it would be for the good of Zimbabwe.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Greg finally said. ‘Not here, though.’

  Richard thought of Steve who was due back in about an hour. ‘My room,’ he suggested.

  ‘Nope. Too many people have seen us together.’

  The old tingling feeling of danger came back. Something was on, he was sure of it. He wanted to know more. ‘Come to the farm.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Greg suggested.

  Steve would be there. ‘I have company. A woman.’

  Greg chuckled. ‘You sly old dog.’

  ‘This one is special.’

  Greg raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Come tomorrow anyway. We can get away and talk.’

  ‘Fine.’ Greg drained his drink and said loudly, ‘Great to run into you again, Didd. Hope to see you around sometime,’ and left, greeting one or two people as he went.

  He could not shake the feeling it was all starting up again. Speaking in hushed voices, checking over the shoulder to make sure your words were not being overheard, having one conversation while pretending to have another, it was terribly familiar. He was impatient to know exactly what was going on.

  He and Steve drove up to Pentland later that afternoon. They drove through several local thunderstorms, the water cascading out of the heavens like a waterfall, visibili
ty down to one or two metres on occasions, the sound of the rain drowning out their voices in the car. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she marvelled, as they burst through the edge of one such downpour like it was a curtain, the other side of which the road was quite dry. ‘It’s so selective, so local.’

  ‘That’s Africa for you,’ Richard said. ‘Everything’s local, everything’s different and everything’s spectacular.’

  ‘You love Africa, don’t you?’ She reached over and touched his arm.

  ‘With my very heart and soul,’ he told her truthfully.

  ‘Do you think I could learn to love it?’

  ‘You’ve already started if those pictures are anything to go by.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I need some time to work on the words now. Can I do that at Pentland?’

  ‘Take all the time you need,’ he said. ‘I hope it takes years.’

  ‘Don’t say things like that in the car. It makes me horny.’

  ‘No problem.’ He slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road.

  ‘Richard, don’t you dare. We’re on a main road.’

  ‘Into the back.’ He was unbuttoning his shirt.

  ‘You’re mad!’ But she shot into the back seat with a kind of backflip movement and had her shirt off before he could join her. The thunderstorm they had just come through caught up with them, pelting the car with rain.

  ‘See, even God is on our side.’ The windows had immediately fogged without the car’s air-conditioning to prevent it. A BMW was a fairly spacious car but Richard was forced to admit, after they made love, that he was too old for canoodling in the back seat.

  ‘Didn’t seem to hamper you.’ She was shiny with perspiration and curled into him like a child.

  ‘You know something?’ He was speaking without really considering his next words, full of honesty and feelings he thought had died in him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I love you.’ He was amazed at himself.

  She leaned back and looked at him, a tiny smile on her lips. ‘Oh, goodie,’ she said, cheeky and enigmatic.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded gruffly, needing to hear her say it too.

  She waggled her hand in a ‘so so’ gesture. ‘You’re not bad,’ she finally conceded.

  ‘Steve!’ he said sternly.

  She snuggled back into him but he pushed her away and stared her down. ‘Stephanie,’ he said finally.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ she begged.

  ‘Stephanie!’

  ‘Okay, okay you win. I love you. I love you,’ and when he smiled, added wickedly, ‘any-thing’s better than Stephanie.’

  A movement outside the car, blurred through the fogged windows, caught his attention. A remarkable phenomenon takes place in Africa whenever a car stops on what appears to be a deserted road in the middle of nowhere. Children appear. It never fails. One minute the landscape is devoid of anything moving, the next, small black heads pop up from the tall grass, or from behind mounds or trees. Steve and Richard had an avid audience who were giggling and pointing and highly entertained at the antics in the car. All their young lives they had shared a hut with their parents. The car’s rocking movements, coupled with enticingly obscured images of naked white bodies, told these young children exactly what was happening in the car. They approved heartily.

  ‘Get your clothes on.’ He grabbed for their clothes which were scattered throughout the car’s interior.

  She was laughing so hard she could barely get dressed, especially when he wound the back window down a little and growled ‘Bugger off,’ to the assembled throng. The children scattered, delighted.

  ‘Have you no shame, woman?’ He thrust her blouse at her.

  She giggled. The knot of hair at the top of her head had slipped sideways and was slowly unravelling. She looked like a little girl. He caught her in his arms and held her close, feeling her heart beating against his, loving her more than he thought possible.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he said huskily, wanting her to feel at home at Pentland, wanting her to belong there, belong to him, belong to Africa.

  When they arrived back at Pentland Park, Wellington was clearly delighted to see her again. ‘Welcome back, madam.’ He normally maintained a dignified silence to the few women Richard had brought home since Kathy died.

  ‘Thank you, Wellington,’ Steve replied, smiling. Her Australian heart was turning African. The Australian Steve would have shaken Wellington’s hand. The African Steve was becoming a ‘madam’.

  ‘Put the madam’s things in my room.’

  Wellington bowed and said, ‘Of course, master.’

  After he left them, Steve asked, ‘Won’t he be offended?’

  ‘Too bad,’ the old Richard said, but then relented when he saw she was serious. ‘He accepts you and approves. You have won his heart. That’s quite a feat for a savage Australian like yourself.’

  She dug him in the ribs. ‘What about your children?’ she asked, worried.

  ‘Now that really is too bad,’ he responded. ‘My children don’t run my life.’

  ‘They’re bound to resent me.’

  Richard sighed. ‘My children resent everything if it suits them,’ he said finally. ‘Penny is twenty-two. She makes trouble because she considers it her duty to do so. David might be a problem, he was very close to Kathy,’ he put his arm around her and led her into the house. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. We’ve got two more weeks before David gets here. Let’s enjoy them.’

  TEN

  Greg Yeomans arrived at Pentland Park around four the next afternoon. His approval of Steve was instant and total. He delighted Wellington and Elizabeth when he greeted them in perfect Shona and, during the ten-minute conversation, it was discovered that he knew Wellington’s brother. Winston adored him immediately because of his willingness to throw the tennis ball and the puppy, Maxwell, showed his fondness by thoughtfully chewing one of his boots to shreds within the first hour.

  After greeting him, Steve went back into Richard’s study where she was working on the words for her article. Greg inclined his head after her and whistled softly. ‘You’ve still got it, you old dog.’

  Richard grinned, inanely pleased. ‘She’s something else, isn’t she?’ He felt extravagantly smug about Steve, a feeling he knew he should try to hide but, because it felt so good, made no attempt to do so.

  Greg grinned back. ‘Only a pleasure, my man, only a pleasure.’

  ‘Want to go for a drive?’ He was impatient to hear what Greg had to say.

  They called out goodbye to Steve and set off in the Land Rover, past the farm workers’ huts, down the escarpment to where the grass grew green and the cattle fat. The flatlands stretched into the distance, towards the game reserve, dotted by the dark shapes of his cattle, and were dominated by the hills, craggy and wild and beautiful. Richard stopped next to a large dam. He had planted pines on one side and they grew in a dense thatch, five hundred metres wide and stretching up the slopes to meet the hills. They gave this part of the farm an oddly European look.

  Greg looked at the tranquil scene. The blue waters of the dam mirrored the pines closest to it, white fluffy clouds reflected in its perfectly still surface. A rustic old wooden wharf lurched crazily at one end, a small canoe tied to it, ready for fishing the brown trout Richard had introduced into the dam. ‘Little bit of ye olde England here,’ he commented.

  ‘More like ye olde Scotland,’ Richard corrected him.

  ‘Of course, I’d forgotten you were Scottish. You’ve lost your accent.’

  ‘It comes back now and then.’

  ‘Like when?’

  ‘When I’m pissed off.’

  ‘Or just plain pissed.’

  ‘That too.’ Richard laughed as he remembered a night during the war when they had been dispatched to report on a situation developing in Chiredzi and, having submitted their report, had been at a loose end in the capital. Richard and Greg had tossed a coin to see if
they should go home to their wives for the night or spend the evening on a binge. Such were the conditions under which they lived that both men were relieved when the coin came down heads . . . a binge. It was a means of relieving tension, of letting loose briefly. They could then return to the field, hungover but more relaxed.

  They did not look for women. Richard experienced regular bouts of impotence during the war and, even with Kathy, was rarely inclined to put his masculinity to the test in case it let him down. From conversations he had heard, other men had the same problem. He presumed it had something to do with the constant danger and was confident the condition would go away at the end of the war, when life returned to normal. In fact, both he and Kathy looked on it as a blessing in disguise. It was a relief for her, knowing her husband was unable to function that way. She knew he sometimes went to Salisbury from the field and could only speculate as to what he got up to. For Richard, it removed temptation, something he was reasonably sure he would have given in to considering the stressful circumstances under which he lived.

  They embarked on a pub crawl with serious dedication to the task at hand. They were not drinking for pleasure, they were drinking to get completely, motherless, legless, spewing drunk. Regular customers at the hotels and bars gave them a wide berth. They were used to men from the field cutting loose like this, they understood why it happened but they didn’t want to get involved. When men from the war got drunk this way it was better to leave them alone.

  Halfway through the night they teamed up with a couple of Security Forces sergeants, themselves out on the town trying to drown their fear. There was great rivalry between the Selous Scouts and any of the other forces within Rhodesia but the four men buried their differences as they lurched from one bar to the next. Around two in the morning, having been thrown out of the last five bars, one of the sergeants suggested they find some women.

  ‘Don’ wanna,’ Richard said, swaying and blinking owlishly.