The Last Road Trip

by Gareth Crocker

  ‘You don’t think this Elephant Pause business is just something the game rangers cooked up to have fun with gullible Americans? Oh look, fat bastards from Texas … that elephant’s in … uh … full pause at the moment. You see, he’s paying homage to a dead cousin. Oh and there’s another elephant doing precisely the same thing. And another. And another. Wow, this must be an elephant cemetery they’re standing on. Want to buy a key ring?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Your cynicism is almost charming, Rosie. Almost.’

  Rosie’s stare was fixed into the rear-view mirror, but she said nothing in return.

  ‘Rosie?’

  She remained silent for a few more seconds, her face frozen, as if in a trance. Then, she appeared to come out of it. ‘Sorry, Jack. I just sensed that we had driven over the ghost of a dead buffalo and I was paying my respects.’

  Before any further banter could ensue, Elizabeth asked Jack to turn up the air conditioning. ‘I think Pilot’s getting a little hot back here. He’s quite restless.’

  Jack looked back and could see that the Labrador was agitated by the heat. His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth and he was beginning to pant and whimper.

  ‘When last did he have any water?’

  ‘Before we left. Half a bowl.’

  ‘I’ll open my window,’ Sam volunteered. ‘Maybe he needs some fresh air.’

  As a stiff breeze circulated through the cabin, Jack noticed that it was doing nothing to calm the dog. Now there was a wildness in the Labrador’s eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  Elizabeth reached out and started to stroke the Labrador’s head and neck, but this served only to heighten his distress. A moment later Pilot began to bark at them – loudly and without respite.

  ‘Pilot? What is it, boy?’ Elizabeth asked, wrapping her hands around the top of his head.

  It was only when Jack stopped the car and turned around that he realised what was happening. Or rather, what had happened. He felt something cold clutch at his chest. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he whispered to himself.

  Everyone had turned to Pilot and was trying to calm him down.

  Everyone but his owner.

  Albert remained slumped up against the window in a pause that Jack knew, at once, was permanent.

  Nineteen

  After they returned to the estate it took only a week to put Albert’s funeral together. Seven days to bury more than seven decades of life. While Albert’s attorneys handled his will and financial affairs, Rosie and Elizabeth took care of all his personal effects. Jack and Sam, in turn, dealt with the undertaker and with the less dignified aspects of death. When it came to the funeral service itself, Elizabeth volunteered to speak. She, in particular, had grown extremely fond of Albert and wanted to share her recollection of him.

  Reaching the pulpit, she steadied herself, clinging to the wooden frame for support.

  ‘Some weeks ago, Jack Everson stood up here on behalf of a man he hardly knew,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘Today I find myself in much the same position. I can’t tell you a great deal about the life of Albert Brooks. I know he had a daughter who, tragically, passed away some years ago. That he owned a property business and was very successful in what he did. I can also tell you, as many of you will remember, that Albert had a great love for birds and would spend hours searching the trees on the estate and making notes in that book of his. A book that he was seldom without. I take great solace in the fact that Albert had something in his life that he cherished so deeply. And while there may be little else that I can share with you about his earlier life, I was fortunate enough to spend a good many hours with Albert over the past few weeks. Hours that, as I stand here, have taken on a quality that is difficult to explain adequately. The best I can do is tell you a story. It’s about the last week of his life. And his search for his favourite bird.’

  As Elizabeth took the mourners through the final moments of Albert’s life, her gaze kept returning to Pilot, who was sitting beside the bier that held Albert’s coffin. The mournful look in the Labrador’s eyes threatened her resolve, but she managed to keep talking long enough to get through the eulogy. When she was done, she walked over to the Labrador, knelt down and kissed him gently on the top of his head. He stirred and licked her cheek. That, as it proved, was as much as Rosie could bear and she began to cry. Sitting between Jack and Sam in the front row, she lowered her head into her hands and wept openly.

  After Albert’s casket was wheeled to the waiting hearse and the congregation headed from the courtyard to the vestry for tea, Arnold West approached Jack. Pulling up alongside him, he wrapped a hand around Jack’s arm. ‘Didn’t I tell you that Albert wasn’t fit to travel?’

  Jack glared back at Arnold and wrenched his arm free. Sam was about to step between them, when Jack raised a hand. ‘It’s OK, Sam,’ he said evenly, and then turned to face Arnold. ‘Nothing we did placed Albert’s life in any more danger than it already was.’

  ‘We could’ve kept him alive here.’

  ‘The hell you could’ve. His heart just gave out. Nothing could’ve prevented it from happening.’

  ‘So now you’re a doctor as well, are you, Jack?’

  Jack leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. ‘Let me tell you something. Albert lived more in the last week than he has done here in years.’

  ‘That so? Sounds to me like you’re trying to justify what you did. This is all on you, Jack. And you know it. How does it feel?’

  ‘Hey,’ Sam said, raising a finger. ‘That’s enough.’

  And that was when Rosie stepped into the fray. Using her bulk, she pushed her way past Sam. ‘They can’t do this,’ she said, ‘but I can.’ With that, she leaned back and kicked Arnold in the knee. He winced and dropped to his haunches. She then shifted her weight and kicked the other leg. Harder this time. He went down onto his side, his face taut with pain.

  ‘You’re welcome to press charges against me, you fucking shit,’ she said, before turning away. ‘Just remember to get my age right. Not a day over thirty, Sunshine.’

  Twenty

  Elizabeth was first to ask the question. ‘So do we carry on?’

  ‘I think so,’ Jack replied. He looked around at Sam and Rosie and they both nodded their agreement. They were sitting together on the estate’s clubhouse patio, watching the sun go down over the golf course.

  Jack tapped his fingers on the table. ‘I suppose the question is when?’

  ‘Why hang around? I’m sick of this place,’ Rosie said, folding her arms. ‘I don’t want to be here any more. Let’s leave tomorrow.’

  Jack waited for an objection, but none was forthcoming. ‘You really want to go so soon?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Sam? Lizzie?’

  ‘I think I’d also feel better out on the road.’

  ‘It just doesn’t seem like there’s enough air around here,’ Elizabeth added.

  ‘OK. Well I guess if everyone’s on the same page, then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll head out tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Sam replied. ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Just away will do for now,’ Rosie said.

  ‘We’ve still got some time to decide. Maybe we should just get onto the back roads and work our way south to Sutherland. We’ll detour as we go.’

  ‘Pilot will love it on the farm,’ Elizabeth offered. ‘There’s so much space for him down there.’

  ‘Maybe we can stop off in—’

  ‘Hopetown,’ Rosie interrupted Jack. ‘I’d like to go to Hopetown for a while.’

  They all turned to look at her.

  ‘What’s in Hopetown?’

  Rosie shrugged, her gaze fixed on the horizon. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But there’s a place or someone there that you’d like to see?’

  ‘Yes, Jack. Something like that.’

  Before anyone could pry any further, a Cape robin landed on the railing in front of them. They watched for a while as
the bird did little of anything in particular before heading back into the trees from where it had come.

  ‘He was like a bird himself, you know?’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘God, I miss him so much.’

  Part 3

  * * *

  ICE, IN THE SUN

  Twenty-one

  They had been on the road for barely two hours, but already Elizabeth and Rosie were sound asleep. The last few days had taken their toll on everyone.

  Sam, sitting in the front passenger seat, was nursing a now tepid mug of coffee.

  ‘Can we talk?’ Jack asked.

  Sam turned to look at him. ‘Sure. What about?’

  ‘Your cancer.’

  ‘There’s not really much to say on the subject.’

  ‘Still. Would you mind?’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess not.’

  Jack eased the Chrysler into the oncoming lane and proceeded to overtake a large coal truck. It was the first vehicle they had seen in more than ten minutes. ‘Do you have some sort of,’ he hesitated, searching for an appropriate word, ‘timeline?’

  ‘You mean when am I going to die? Nope. No real timeline. I did ask the question though.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was expecting the standard six months, but they kept it pretty vague.’

  ‘They must’ve given you some sort of idea.’

  ‘Could be as long as eighteen months or as short as half that … was the best I could get out of them. Of course, that’s the sort of thing I might tell a patient if I knew he only had a couple of weeks to live.’

  ‘And treatment’s really not an option?’

  ‘Oh, it’s an option all right. Just not one worth taking. My oncologist tells me that treatment could slow the cancer, maybe buy me a few extra months. But what would be the point? I’d be sick to death half the time and it’s not as though I’m going to live forever. No thanks. They can keep their poisoned drips. This is the way I’m meant to go out. And that’s OK with me, Jack. I’ve made my peace with it.’

  Jack tried to find a hole in the logic but couldn’t. ‘Do you at least have some pain medication?’ he asked, and then added quietly, ‘For later.’

  ‘In my bag.’

  A light rain began to pepper the windscreen. ‘Is there anywhere you want to go? I don’t care where it is. Anything you want to do?’

  Sam rolled down his window and let his arm hang out in the wind. He watched as his fingers swayed and rolled in the stiff breeze. He turned to Jack and smiled. ‘Thanks, Jack. But I’m doing it right now.’

  Twenty-two

  ‘Let’s do something crazy,’ Rosie suggested, yawning.

  ‘Four geriatrics in a twenty-year-old van, driving between hell and high water on a lonely road. That sounds pretty mad right there,’ Sam replied.

  ‘Yes, but shouldn’t we be stopping in some one-horse town to cause a bar fight or to swim naked in their river?’

  ‘Two things. One, this isn’t a film starring John Travolta and, two, you would have to cut the clothes off my cold dead body,’ Elizabeth said.

  Rosie shrugged, rubbed her eyes. ‘Where are we, anyway?’

  ‘About half an hour outside Virginia.’

  ‘Oh Virginia,’ she replied fondly, gazing out across the rolling fields. ‘It’ll be especially beautiful this time of year. I mean it’s always beautiful, but in summer it really pops. You know?’

  Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve been to Virginia?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. Of course not. Nobody’s ever been to Virginia,’ she replied, deadpan. ‘Is there any food in this rust bucket?’

  Elizabeth handed her the cooler box and Rosie quickly fished out a box of biscuits. She gave a biscuit to Pilot, before dispatching two herself. ‘Sorry, guy. I get two because humans are more important than Labradors. And we have thumbs. Those are the rules. It’s in the Bible.’

  Jack was pleased to see that Rosie was starting to get back to her old self, even if she was just papering over the cracks.

  ‘Rosie,’ he called from the driver’s seat, ‘we’ll be in Hopetown in a couple of hours. Is there anywhere specific you want us to stay?’

  ‘How about The Four Seasons?’

  ‘I doubt they take dogs.’

  ‘It’s an old mining town, Jack. The place would offer a bed to the Bubonic Plague if it paid its way.’

  ‘I take it that you’ve actually been to Hopetown before?’

  Rosie was quiet for a moment. ‘Once. When the world was still black and white.’

  Twenty-three

  As they drove over the old bridge that led into Hopetown, Rosie turned to look at the Orange River that flowed beneath them.

  ‘It’s pretty,’ Elizabeth said, rolling down her window. Pilot, sitting beside her, rested his muzzle on the door frame. His nose twitched in the breeze.

  ‘Not bad. Although they should’ve called it the Brown River.’

  Sam stretched out his shoulders and watched as the town grew larger in the windscreen. After so many miles of arid Karoo landscape – endless fields of scrubland and stubby grass – he was relieved to finally have something different to look at.

  ‘So what’s the name of this guesthouse?’

  Jack glanced back at Rosie. ‘Eureka.’

  ‘Eureka?’

  ‘Eureka.’

  ‘Don’t you mean Eureka!?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  As they turned into the main road that cut through the centre of town, two things were immediately clear. One, the town appeared to be running a little short on the hope that it boasted in its name and, two, they would not be needing further directions to the Eureka Guest House. While the rest of the town presented itself perfectly in the character of most small Karoo towns – wide and dusty roads, tin-roofed houses trapped in decades past, outdated shopfronts and at least one church with a tall spire that javelined skywards – their accommodation for the next three days looked as though it had been lifted straight out of 1980s’ Las Vegas.

  Shimmering in the late-afternoon sun ahead of them, the guesthouse played rather obviously on the fact that Hopetown had been the site of South Africa’s first diamond rush. The knee-high wall that guarded the front of the house was adorned with football-sized plastic diamonds that, at one point in their lives, might well have been a brilliant blue-white, but were now a dull and sad yellow-beige. Some of the jewels had cracked and at least one appeared to have partially melted in the sun. But the perimeter wall was merely an entrée to the main course. The guesthouse itself was decked from ceiling to floor with several hundred strings of diamantés that alternated with fairy lights. Standing proud on top of the faded blue tin roof was an enormous weather-beaten sign, ‘The Eureka Guest House – Where Diamonds are Forever’.

  This was an irony not lost on Jack as he pulled up to the front gate. The diamond rush that had given life to the town had lasted barely a few years.

  As they stepped out into a heat so profound they seemed to be wading through something only marginally less dense than water, the front door to the guesthouse swung open and two faces appeared, smiling a great deal more than seemed necessary.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Rosie said. ‘The figurines on the diamond cake are alive.’

  Taking the lead, Jack summoned up a smile of his own and headed for the gate. ‘Good afternoon. We spoke on the phone. It’s Bill and Margie, right?’

  ‘Right!’ Margie replied, planting her hands on her cheeks in a gesture that was both patronising and wildly exaggerated, as though Jack were two years old and had finally managed to evacuate his bowels in something other than his own pants. ‘You remembered!’

  ‘I’m good with names,’ was all Jack could think to say.

  Margie was in her late sixties and painfully thin. Apart from some freshly applied lipstick, her skin was the colour of desert bone. Thin blue veins crisscrossed her cheeks and neck like threads of fine cotton. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun.

  Rosie gave Margie’s floral dr
ess the once-over and then whispered to Elizabeth, ‘Somewhere inside the diamond cake a window’s missing its curtain.’

  Bill hurried forward and stabbed out a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Jack. Welcome to Hopetown.’

  For his part in the pantomime, Bill was fiercely blue-eyed and appeared to be approaching his eighties at a gallop. He wore short navy-blue pants, black sandals and a vest that years ago might have been white but was now the colour of weak tea. What remained of his hair was neatly trimmed, and he sported a manicured grey pencil moustache that was almost symmetrical. As if infected by the exuberance of his gaze, his eyebrows had come to resemble the wild and curled bristles of an old scrubbing brush. Thick and grey, they twisted and weaved flamboyantly up his forehead. For some reason, they appeared exempt from the close cropping the rest of his face had been subjected to.

  ‘And you are?’ Bill asked, poking a hand in Rosie’s direction.

  ‘Amazed at the beauty of your guesthouse,’ she beamed, more cubic zirconia than diamond. ‘I’m Rosie.’

  Both Bill and Margie graciously palmed away the compliment.

  Sam and Elizabeth then introduced themselves in a flurry of embraces, handshakes and back pats. Even Pilot was hugged.

  ‘You sure it’s OK that he stay inside with us?’ Elizabeth asked, looking down at the Labrador.

  ‘Of course. We’ve had many dogs stay with us over the years. He’s part of your family isn’t he?’

  ‘He is,’ she replied, tickling Pilot under his chin.

  Moments later they were ushered into the entrance hall, a large and dark-wooded space, complete with buck and zebra trophies.

  ‘So what brings you folks to our humble town?’ The eyebrows twitched.

  Jack exchanged a quick look with Rosie. ‘Nothing specific really. It just looked like a good place to visit. We’re heading to Sutherland and then on to Cape Town.’