The young white man with his girl friend found Tambudza on the road. The flames were nearly finished and the uniform was gone and the flesh was peeling back and the bones were showing through and Tambudza was still crying. The young man stifled the flames with his jacket and he examined the man in the car lights. He turned to the girl and said: ‘Go and fetch the police and an ambulance.’
The girl roared away in the car and the young man sat down on the tar next to Tambudza and he held his head. There was no light save the moon and no sound but the cries of Tambudza and the singing of the night insects.
‘Tell me who done it,’ the young man said.
But Tambudza only said: ‘Holdi my handi, Sah, Ah em dying.’
Chapter Forty
Out in the country there were the gangs carrying sticks and stones and axes and wearing fur hats on their heads and slogans on their lips, the press-gangs marching through the hot dry bush swaggering through the villages and beating on the doors and dragging out the people and demanding to see their Party cards and beating and killing and burning their huts and trampling their crops and maiming their catue. In the bush there were the meetings, the round-ups of the people, the young men and women and the old people and the children, the young men with their sticks driving the people along the paths to the meetings, the fur-hatted ones shouting the slogans: ‘Every person must join the Party! Every person must fight for the Party! Any person who does not join is a Tshombe. Find who are Tshombes and burn their huts and kill them and destroy their cattle and their crops. Kill! Burn! Action, boys, Action! One man one vote! Burn the diptanks in which the Government makes us dip our cattle. Burn the white farmers’ houses. Burn the mission schools. Burn the churches. Action, boys, Action! Make petrol bombs: Burn – Burn—!’ And in the nights there were the flares of matches and then the roar of burning thatch and the crackle of burning timbers and the screams of women and children and the screams of burning pigs and goats, and the footsteps of the gang running away in the night. And there was the shattering of glass and the whoosh of burning petrol and the screams of men and women and children beating their burning flesh, and the sounds of the feet of the gang running way into the night.
In the African townships round Salisbury and Bulawayo it was very bad. The grey Land Rovers rumbled down the dirt roads with their searchlights flashing and in the back were black and white policemen in their riot overalls and they carried shields and long truncheons and in every Land Rover there were Greener shotguns. There were wire mesh screens on all the windows of the Land Rovers and over the headlights and the stones and rocks came hurtling through the air from behind the hedges and from over the roof-tops of the houses and from the knots of youths and men and young women. The gangs roved the townships stoning the houses of the Sell-outs and the Tshombes and throwing their petrol bombs through the sleeping windows and challenging people to show their Party cards. And if they could not show their Party cards the gangs chased them and stoned them and beat them and kicked them and then the gang ran away. The gangs went into the beerhalls and through the beergardens and they kicked over the tables and they knocked over the mugs of beer and they chased the people out of the beerhalls. And in the early morning the gangs lay in wait for the people who were Tshombes because they were going to work and they drove them home again and they threw stones at the buses carrying the workers. And in the evenings they waited for the Tshombes who had gone to work and they beat them. And now policemen rode on the tops of the buses with Greener shotguns and there were policemen with dogs at the bus stops and the Land Rovers rumbled through the townships. And the courts were crammed.
The Party thugs did not trouble Edward alias Phillimon alias Wiseman alias Moyo, however. Nothing troubled Edward, except maybe the ignition wires on certain models of Continental cars he hadn’t quite got the hang of yet, but Edward preferred American jobs anyway and he had their ignition systems licked. The only thing about the Party thugs that troubled Edward was all those cops around with their roadblocks and their checkpoints. That cheesed Edward off so much that he punched up every Party thug that came his way on principle. Once when the shebeen he was holing up in was raided by a gang Edward got so mad he pulled out his .38 pistol, arrested six of them, tied them up, went to the public telephone, and called the police anonymously to come and fetch them. Party thugs and the police had a hard time catching up with Edward because he didn’t stick around in one place long. Every second day or so Edward hijacked another car and moved to the other end of the colony just for the hell of it.
Edward Moyo was driving very fast out of Bulawayo on the Salisbury road in a new Ford Thunderbird he had found. He did not propose going as far as Salisbury unless he had to, because he had just come from there: he was trying to shake off the police Bee car that was chasing him. Edward had no doubt that he could lose the Bee car because he knew the Bee car could only do about ninety whereas he was doing a hundred, but he was worried about staying on the main road because he knew the police would radio the next town and they would throw up a roadblock. He took a chance and slowed down to eighty and swung off the tar down the dirt road. He heaved round the bend on two wheels and then back on to four and the big T-bird heeled on to the other side of the road. He swung her back to the other side and then he put his foot on the accelerator again. The Bee car was five hundred yards behind him. Then he picked up the police roadblock in his headlights, three hundred yards ahead.
They had barrels across the road and there was a Land Rover parked at the side and there were five policemen in riot kit. They trained their spotlight straight into his windscreen and they waved their arms to flag him down. There was nothing else for Edward to do. He kept his foot flat and he leaned on his hooter and he charged the roadblock at a hundred and ten miles an hour.
The policemen at the roadblock scattered. The Thunderbird hit the barrels with a clap like thunder and the barrels crumpled and flew through the air, six forty-four gallon barrels flew through the air like slugs out of a shotgun. The big blazing light of the Thunderbird went out in a clatter of glass and there was the crack of its big body denting. It heaved in the road and there was a drum crushed under its wheels and it caught under the big chassis and it made a screaming noise on the road. The Thunderbird swayed across the road at a hundred miles an hour and Edward heaved her back and then she was swaying the other way. And then she went into a broadside. She was doing seventy miles an hour. She roared off the road with the police Land Rover spotlight trained on her, and she went over the shoulder of the road and her offside keeled over and her nearside came up, and she rolled. She rolled seven times through the long grass and the bushes with a great noise of metal and crashing bushes. Then she came to rest on her hood.
The Bee car screamed up to a stop with its spotlights beamed on the wreckage in the bushes. The doors opened and the sergeant jumped out with his Greener shotgun. The police from the roadblock came running up.
‘Okay, Edward, take it easy,’ the sergeant shouted. There was no reply.
‘He’s dead, for Chrissake,’ the constable said.
‘You don’t know Edward,’ the sergeant said.
He started walking through the grass towards the wreckage with the Greener. When he was fifteen paces off the door creaked open and Edward crawled out.
‘Stop, Edward!’
Edward got to his feet and started to run. He pulled out his .38 and fired one shot behind him. The sergeant dropped to his knee and he raised the Greener and he fired.
The slugs hit Edward in the back but he kept on running flat out. He was gone into the black bushes and there was only the sound of his running.
The sergeant held up in his hand.
‘I got him in the back. He’ll pitch up at a hospital in a day or two and we’ll nobble him.’
It was a week, actually, before Edward took himself to the hospital. A witch-doctor had cut eleven slugs out of his back with a dirty razor blade and the witch-doctor smeared his own special muti into the holes
and they had festered. Edward’s back was a hump of swollen flesh before he staggered to the hospital. The cops nobbled him. But it was two weeks before they could move him to the prison to interrogate him, which was the only safe place to interrogate a tough cookie like Edward, and it was several days before the cops could find time to deal with him.
Edward accepted it philosophically. He had had a bloody good time and it was a fair cop. I admit, he said, while he chain-smoked the policeman’s cigarettes.
‘Were you alone each time?’ the policeman said. The cop had never had it so easy.
‘Sometimes I was with my friend,’ Edward said. He leant over the table and took another cigarette. The policeman passed him his lighter.
‘Who?’
‘It is very troublesome in prison without cigarettes,’ he said.
The policeman pushed the box over. ‘Take the lot,’ he said.
Edward picked up the box and put it inside his tunic absently.
‘Who is your friend?’
Edward pulled on the cigarette.
‘When the box is finished my craving will be very bad.’
‘Okay, Edward,’ the policeman said, ‘I’ll bring you some more tomorrow, I promise.’
Edward did not blink. ‘His name is Paradise Mpofu,’ he said.
The policeman wrote it down. ‘And where is he now?’
‘How many cigarettes will you bring?’ Edward asked.
‘A hundred,’ the policeman said. Edward shook his head.
‘A thousand,’ he said.
‘For Chrissake, Edward,’ he said, ‘how am I going to smuggle a thousand cigarettes in?’ Edward shrugged and said nothing.
‘Okay,’ the policeman said. ‘A thousand, I promise.’
‘What kind?’
‘Any kind,’ the policeman said, ‘this kind.’
Edward shook his head. ‘Lucky Strike,’ he said.
‘Okay, Lucky Strike for Chrissake.’
Edward nodded. ‘He is already here in prison for another crime,’ he said absently.
‘Here?’ The cop stood up and he went to the door and opened it and he said to the prison sergeant: ‘Bring me Mr. Paradise Mpofu.’ The sergeant came back with number 7635, Paradise Mpofu.
‘Are you Paradise Mpofu?’ the policeman said. Samson Nhdlovu alias Paradise Mpofu nodded. ‘Your nice friend Edward says you stole lots of cars with him. What do you say to that?’
Samson Ndhlovu looked unabashed. ‘Have you any cigarettes?’ he said.
‘Sure.’ The policeman felt in his tunic pocket and brought out a new packet of twenty. Samson took the whole packet.
‘When will we go to Court?’ he said.
The policeman was pleased with Samson’s attitude.
‘That depends,’ he said pleasantly. ‘The courts are very full these days. This case must go to the High Court. Maybe in two months. First there will be a preparatory examination in the Magistrate’s Court.’
Samson nodded thoughtfully.
‘Well?’ the policeman said. ‘Do you admit?’
Samson looked at him. ‘Maybe I admit,’ he said, ‘but maybe I forget to admit.’
The cop nodded. ‘How many?’
‘A thousand,’ Samson said.
‘Yes, and what kind?’
‘Benson and Hedges Kingsize,’ Samson said.
Chapter Forty-One
Mahoney drove his beat-up Vauxhall west along the black road carved through bush. He held the wheel with his right hand and his left hand rested on the neck of the cold beer bottle on the seat. There were three more cold ones lying on the seat next to his black gown and his wig tin. The beers vibrated together and Mahoney leaned out and stuffed his gown between them. Then his hand went back to the opened beer and he lifted it to his mouth and tilted back his head and watched the road down his cheeks as he swallowed. Then he put the beer down on the seat again and felt for the packet of cigarettes, took one out and lit it. The two empty beer bottles rolled between his bare feet at the pedals and he cursed softly and heeled them back under the seat. He started humming tunelessly again, the same old tune, ‘Volare.’ Then he deliberately cut the tune in mid-hum and he pulled on his cigarette and frowned as he searched for a new song to sing out loud, a new catchy song to stop him brooding. He felt under the gown for a new beer and opened it with his teeth. He began to sing:
‘Where have all the flowers gone?
—Long time passing—’
His eyes were crinkled up against the glare of the sun on the bonnet of the car. The bush was brown and hot and the sparse grass was short and brown and the ground was hard and dry for he was approaching Matabeleland now and the drought was very bad. There were very few cars on the Salisbury-Bulawayo road. There were some black people every few miles walking along the road in old white men’s clothes, sitting at the side of the road with their bundles waiting for the kaffir bus to take them out there into the brown ocean of bush to their pole and mud and thatch kraal and their thin cattle.
‘Where have all the maidens gone?
—Long time passing—’
He pulled on his cigarette. Then he found himself singing ‘Volare’ again. He stopped himself, because ‘Volare’ was Suzie’s song. He did not want to sing ‘Volare’ and he did not want to go to Bulawayo to prosecute at the High Court Criminal Session because both reminded him of Suzie. Suzie’s ghost was in both of them. He hummed something else tunelessly just for the sake of the noise. Then he was staring through the windscreen thinking again. Then he put his thumb and his finger to his eyes and pressed. ‘Suzie where the hell are you?’ he said aloud.
‘What’s the matter?’ he had said brusquely.
She was sitting in the only armchair in the big lounge of his house in Salisbury. The floor was red cement and there was one grass mat on it. There were no curtains in the windows and the grass outside grew higher than the window sill. There was a dining-room table ten feet long with eight dining-room chairs which he had picked up at an auction for ten bob. One end of the table was cleared for dining purposes but the rest was stacked with his papers and his books. He was sitting at the table writing with a quart of home brew beer beside him.
She was staring through the front door at the jungle that was the garden. Her face was steady and expressionless and her eyes were hard and sad. That look always unnerved him a little. He knew it from Bulawayo and London and New York. She blinked when he spoke to her and then she turned and looked at him and shook her head.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Oh for Chrissake.’
They looked at each other. She shook her head again.
‘You see,’ she said, it’s no good.’
‘What’s no good?’ But he knew what she meant.
‘Us.’ She was still looking at him steadily with those hard sad eyes, her long legs curled underneath her in the only armchair.
‘I should never have come back,’ she said, it has achieved nothing. We’re just the same as we were, Bulawayo, London, New York, everywhere and now Salisbury. Fine in bed and b-all to say to each other either before or after. Unless we’re half sloshed, which we are half the time.’
‘You mightn’t have noticed,’ he said crisply, ‘but I’m writing a book. And I’ve got a kingsize job on my hands as Crown Counsel!’
‘You’ve been writing one book or another ever since I’ve known you. And you’ve always been doing some kingsize job or another. Oh’—she closed her eyes and she waved her hand—’I’m not saying you shouldn’t write your book or do your job. It’s just that we don’t get on, that’s all. We fight. You’re clever and I’m dumb.’
‘You’re not dumb—!’
‘You’re always telling me I’m stupid.’
‘Because you say some goddam stupid things sometimes,’he said harshly. He was still at the table, glaring at her. ‘Why don’t you get with it, for Chrissake, instead of staring into space brooding about how we don’t get on? Why don’t you try to get on with me? Why don’t yo
u study something, any goddam thing. Psychology, yoga, politics, any bloody thing just so long as we can talk about it before and after. Here—’ he leaned across the table and grabbed a fistful of manuscript and shook it at her. ‘Why don’t you read my book I’m writing if you want to get on with me? Then maybe, just maybe, we can talk about it before and after. Why don’t you read the last bloody book I wrote—’
‘I did,’ she said tremulously.
‘Did you hell! You read the first ten pages and you gave up—’
‘I didn’t understand it—’ she cried.
‘Because you didn’t try to understand it! Why didn’t you try to discuss it with me if you didn’t understand it? That might have given us something to talk about before and after—’
‘I wish you’d drop this “before and after” bit—’ She was rubbing her hand across her forehead.
‘You said it, kid. You didn’t read that book because there wasn’t enough story in it to hold your butterfly mind—’
‘Is that a crime?’ she said softly. ‘Why does the average person read a book? Why wasn’t your book published?—’
‘I’m not talking about the average person, I’m talking about why we don’t get on! If you read a book for something more than mere entertainment maybe we’d get on a bit better. Have you ever stuck at a book that doesn’t amuse you—’
‘And if you didn’t get half sloshed every night trying to write your book we’d get on better!’ she shouted. ‘You’re like a bear with a sore head the whole time. Your book’s the slobbering of a drunken man—’
‘Christ!’
He was on his feet, he smashed his fist down on the table. He could have struck her in his anger, but he did not.
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