African Dawn

by Tony Park

  For this part of her trip, she was spending three days on safari, in the company of a small group of well-heeled tourists, and would write a glowing article on the wonders of the Serengeti for the magazine, to repay her free airfare and accommodation. However, what she really wanted to do was to make some headway with her book. Her meeting with Tate had been a disaster on that front, so she was hoping she'd get more out of his brother. For the time being, though, she was enjoying the ride as a tourist.

  Natalie hadn't seen an African elephant, or a lion or a rhino in the wild since she was ten years old, and that was too long a time. Her arms were brick red and she could feel her face was similarly burned by the unforgiving sun and the buffeting hot wind that blew in her face.

  She smelled elephant. Their mouldy, musty smell preceded them and she liked that she'd been back on the continent long enough to learn again how to identify an animal by its odour. There was something primal about that, and you couldn't get it from a television remote and a cable TV wildlife channel.

  Like an addict in recovery offered the needle once more, she'd weakened and succumbed to Africa's grasp. She'd been glad to leave the continent when she had, and had sworn off the place for years. She'd felt no vindication in the way Zimbabwe had crumbled into ruin over the past decade – her grandparents still lived there so she couldn't adopt the told-you-so smugness of the when-we crowd – but she'd been more than happy to live her life in exile in Australia.

  But life changed. She had changed.

  Natalie would be forty in a month's time, and she didn't want to be back in Australia when that happened. It wasn't some primal urge, however, that had sent her back to Africa – it was a man.

  ‘You know, Natalie,’ said Susie, a single woman from New York who was on the same package safari, ‘the only thing I miss is having someone to share all this with. Know what I mean?’

  Natalie nodded. She'd lived with Stephen for seven years, had known him for eight. He was a merchant banker, South African, originally from Durban. She found it easy to hate him now, and her therapist had told her that was OK, but at times like this she felt exactly the same as Susie. She'd catch herself wondering what Stephen would have thought of the safari guide's jokes, or the blood-red sunset over the plains.

  They'd both lived in Africa until roughly the same age, but Stephen had been learning to surf while Natalie's family had struggled to keep farming while her father spent most of his time away, flying helicopters into battle. And the war had come right into her home.

  Stephen was a couple of years older than her and had entered into an early midlife crisis, leaving her for a twenty-four-year-old secretary at his firm.

  ‘You never really opened up to me, Nat,’ he said to her, on the day he moved out. It was a low remark. She didn't think she had anything to do with Stephen following his cock to a bimbo young enough to be his daughter. Not that their sex life had been bad – at least Natalie had thought it was all right.

  You never really opened up to me. What the hell did that mean? Sure, she had the occasional nightmare, but she didn't feel the need to tell him about it. Her therapist disagreed, but Natalie had a policy of only taking the right advice from her. Natalie had suffered according to her therapist, but in Natalie's mind it was nothing compared to what had happened to other people during the war.

  She drank, probably to excess at times, but she kept herself fit thanks to three mornings a week in the gym back in Sydney and a sadistic female personal trainer. Stephen liked a drink, too, but he could be sanctimonious when he thought she'd had too much, particularly when it was his turn to drive.

  They had decided against kids, which was probably a good thing, Natalie thought. Unlike most of her friends, she had never been clucky, nor felt the presence of some hidden clock. In fact, when her workmates and friends started having babies she found herself repulsed, at times, by their clinical descriptions of pain and damage.

  Maybe she never opened up to herself. That was the sort of thing her therapist should have been asking, considering the amount of money Natalie paid her. Fuck her, she thought. And fuck Stephen too.

  Meeting Tate Quilter-Phipps had been the start of something, though.

  Nothing romantic – the scientist was far too prickly and, despite his lean good looks, too nerdy for her. Tate cared more about animals than he did about people. She wondered what his brother was like these days.

  It hadn't been a coincidence that she'd ended up travelling to the Serengeti to do a story on a rhino-monitoring project being coordinated by Tate. She'd seen the name – there couldn't be two of those in the world, let alone Africa – and googled like crazy. It had seemed to her, as it sometimes did when the pieces of a story started falling into place, that there was some other force at work, guiding her. She'd even gotten the same chill down her spine and the tingling in her fingertips that she did when she was writing something good.

  She knew from his bio, which she'd found online appended to a paper he'd written, that he was the same Tate Quilter-Phipps her aunt had been dating. There was nothing much from his early career, other than an old feature story about him being one of the last white men in the Zimbabwean Parks and Wildlife Service. The story, predictably, was about rhino conservation.

  But there was nothing online about the twin brother, Braedan. No Facebook, no Myspace, no LinkedIn. If Braedan had a presence on the Net, he kept it well hidden. Her grandmother had contacted the twins' mother and got hold of an email address for Braedan, which was how she'd found him and established that he was in Zimbabwe and would be happy to chat to her when she arrived. She wondered what the man who had saved her life looked like now. She wondered what he was like, if he was a still a hero.

  18

  Zimbabwe

  Braedan threw up.

  He steadied himself with a palm against the toilet wall and shuddered. Shuffling backwards – at least he'd stay aimed towards the bowl – he groped outside in the darkened hall behind him for the light switch. He flicked it, but nothing happened.

  ‘Fucking ZESA.’ Just muttering the curse made him gag again, and he pitched himself forward and sank to his knees as the vile concoction of curry, Captain Morgan, cheap Mukuyu cabernet sauvignon and Castle lager spewed forth.

  ‘Braedan? Are you all right in there?’

  He ran a hand down his face, shuddered again and coughed. What the hell was her name? Mary? Margaret? He'd met her the night before in the Keg and Sable in Borrowdale, a relatively up-market Harare suburb. No, he corrected himself, make that this morning sometime. He was in her house and there was no electricity. Maybe that was a good thing.

  ‘Ja, fine.’ He padded barefoot down the hallway, coughing, feeling the dust cling to the soles of his sweaty feet. She needed to get the cleaner in more often, he reckoned, but everyone had to be paid in forex now, so people were cutting back on their staff. Braedan swayed in the dark and lurched into a door, which creaked open.

  ‘Come back to bed.’ At least she sounded as babelaas as he was. Good.

  The curtains weren't closed as tight in this room as the others and a chink let in some weak light. It was cold and rainy outside. He'd almost forgotten how cool it could get in Harare. It was a child's room – a son's. There was a signed cricket bat propped in a corner, an ancient computer gathering dust on a cheap chipboard desk, and the centre-spread from an edition of the Zimbabwe Hunter magazine – a cutaway view of a lion showing its vital organs and the best places to shoot it. On the facing wall was a two-year-old calendar showing a fading blonde babe in a bikini.

  ‘Babe? Please won't you fetch me some water out the fridge,’ the woman called from her bedroom.

  Braedan pulled the door softly closed. He wondered at what point in the small hours of the morning he'd become babe and a domestic, but he held his tongue in the hope that there might be breakfast in this. ‘Ja.’

  He navigated by instinct to the kitchen and swallowed hard when he saw the empty bottle of Spiced Gold on the bench. T
hey'd kicked on a bit after she'd driven him home. Braedan opened the museum-piece Frigidaire and found the water jug. He took a glass from the sink, swilled the rum out of it and filled it with room-temperature water. The electricity must have been off most of the night. ‘Fucking ZESA.’

  Braedan drank some water, gargled and spat in the sink. When he closed the fridge door he saw a picture of her kids. The boy, he of the guns and girls, looked about twenty, the daughter maybe a couple of years younger. Christ, he thought, he hoped she wasn't asleep somewhere in the house.

  He took the water back to the bedroom. She was lying on the bed, on her back, one arm over her eyes. The pose presented her breasts in their most flattering light. She was blonde, though the dye job wasn't as good as the girl's on her son's wall, and she'd be in her early forties. But she was in good shape – he'd clocked the treadmill in the garage when she parked her Fortuner – and her belly was flat and her arms toned. She looked over, reached for the glass and coughed.

  ‘Your kids aren't living at home, are they?’

  She grimaced. ‘Gawd. Did I tell you I was married? No, they're not at home. Shane's in the UK and Jenny's at varsity in Cape Town.’ She coughed again.

  Braedan nodded. ‘Ja. You told me your husband's doing contract work in Afghanistan. Same as me. That's how we got talking. You also told me you wanted to divorce him.’

  ‘I did?’

  He nodded and sat back down on the bed. He bent to reach his jeans, which were lying on the floor. Saying it reminded him that he had had second thoughts about going home with her. It was almost like sleeping with an army friend's girl, and he wouldn't have done that when he was a troopie. Well, not often.

  She reached out and put a hand on his forearm. ‘Stay. It gets bloody lonely here, you know?’ He left the jeans where they were.

  He did know, but he couldn't be bothered telling her his sob story. His wife had left him for a doctor, while she and Braedan had been living in Australia. Lara had got them residency because of her qualification as a nurse. She'd qualified during the last year of the war, although she'd never actually worked in a hospital in the new Zimbabwe. She'd become Braedan's wife in 1980 and they'd got some land from her folks, had an OK life for nineteen years.

  Then the farm invasions had begun. Braedan and Lara had been farming tobacco, and they had been one of the first to be targeted by the politics of greed and envy. If it hadn't been for their two daughters, who were home at the time from school, Braedan would have gone out to the yard, behind the chickens, and dug up the FN wrapped in oiled blankets that he'd buried there in 1980. It was a fantasy of his, one he still liked to indulge in every now and then when he was feeling depressed, that he'd gone down fighting for the farm with a gun in each hand. It might have been better for all of them if he had.

  He'd been a failure in Sydney, pure and simple. All he knew was soldiering and farming, and he'd been too old to join the Australian Army, and no outsider could afford to buy into a farm in Australia and run it. There hadn't even been a farm manager's job and, besides, Lara had been recruited by a hospital in the city.

  He knew a lot about cars, but he wasn't a skilled mechanic. He'd drawn up plans for tobacco sheds on his own farm and supervised their construction, but he wasn't an architect or a builder. He was a jack of all flipping trades and master of none.

  Braedan paused, reached for his cigarettes and matches on the side table, and lit one. ‘Please,’ said the woman on the bed. What the hell was her name?

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled through his first drag. He shook out another Newbury and lit it for her, off the end of his. He passed it to her and she coughed as she took her first hit of nicotine for the day.

  ‘You didn't tell me,’ the woman said, shifting herself up into a seating position, her back against the padded bedhead. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Bit late for second thoughts, hey?’ he said.

  She smiled and nodded, her cheeks colouring slightly. ‘Don't worry,’ he added, then exhaled towards the ceiling. ‘I'm just waiting for the divorce papers to come through.’

  ‘I'm going to divorce mine … as soon as he's paid off the house.’

  Braedan laughed, but not at her joke. He wondered if that's what Lara had been waiting for too. It was the way it had happened. Of course, she'd paid more off the house than he had, although in the last five years he'd worked in that dust-blown shithole and been shot at plenty of times in order to make his belated share of the mortgage repayments.

  After they'd arrived in Australia he'd found himself a job, a string of them in fact. He'd hated every one of them. He'd worked nights in a service station, behind the till. In Australia, he learned on his first day in the country, customers filled their own cars with petrol. One night a South African woman had come up to the counter and started berating him about the state of the toilets. She told him he should send someone in, immediately, to clean up the mess in the ladies room.

  It was late, and he'd had two people that night already who'd driven off without paying. He knew the Indian owner of the service station would blame him and make a big deal out of it. What the hell, he thought. He didn't have a gun, so he couldn't shoot the thieves. Besides, people didn't shoot each other in Australia. ‘There's no one to clean the toilets,’ he told the ex-Kugel, who sounded as though she'd just stepped off the SAA jumbo, ‘we're fresh out of kaffirs.’

  She stormed out, but the problem was that the bloody basket-weaving hippie woman queuing behind the South African had heard what he said and called the manager to complain about him. The Indian gave him a ‘verbal warning’ and told him racism wasn't tolerated in Australia.

  He'd walked out on the Indian, without a word. Lara had been furious at him and had begged him to go back and apologise. Apologise, be damned. He'd lived around black people all his life and he wasn't a racist – despite what the fucking munts had done to him. He hadn't, in fact, used the K word since he was a young troopie in the army. He'd only said it to take the piss out of the South African. To hell with the bloody curry-muncher if he couldn't take a joke.

  ‘I'm thinking I might go to Australia when we split up,’ the woman on the bed said to him. ‘I've had enough of this place. You said last night you lived there for a while. What's it like?’

  He wondered if he should just leave. He looked down at his jeans and trainers on the floor, again contemplating making a run for it, but when he turned back to her she'd raised one leg, bent at the knee, and he got a glimpse of her neatly trimmed bush. She put a hand out and patted the sheet. One of her blood-red nails was chipped. He remembered the sting on his back as she'd scratched him.

  ‘You wouldn't like it,’ he said.

  She raised an eyebrow and drew on her cigarette.

  ‘You'd be arrested and fined for smoking inside, with double demerit points for doing it in bed, and if you'd driven in Australia after drinking like you did last night you'd be publicly executed.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘Ja. Seriously, I lost my licence for driving at forty-three kilometres an hour.’

  ‘Now you really are joking.’

  He shook his head. ‘True as nuts. I was working as a courier and it cost me my job.’

  She shook her head. He'd had other speeding offences as well, and the camera trap had exhausted the last of the points he had left on his Australian licence. He didn't tell her about the drink-driving conviction, because he was still embarrassed at having been dragged through the courts like a criminal.

  ‘I've heard they have a lot of rules there,’ she said.

  Braedan nodded. ‘Ja, too many politicians and not enough problems. They make up new laws all the time.’

  ‘My daughter wants to work there, once she graduates. She's going to be a radiographer.’

  Braedan was about to say he hoped she'd find a nice doctor, like his wife had, but he didn't want her sympathy. ‘I should go,’ he said, standing.

  ‘
Wait …’ She exhaled a stream of smoke from the side of her mouth and gestured to his penis with the glowing tip of her cigarette. ‘You have unfinished business, China.’

  He looked down. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Only once last night. I think the drink got the better of you, hey?’

  Braedan had never been able to walk away from a challenge. He stubbed out his cigarette, reached out and grabbed one of her ankles. As he dragged her down the bed she giggled and quickly reached over to drop her smoke in the ashtray on the side table. By the time her arse was on the edge of the bed, he was hard. He spread both her legs and kept his feet on the floor as he leaned over and drove into her.

  ‘That's better,’ she said.

  He locked eyes with her. There was the hardness there of the survivor. All his tribe had lost something; some in the war, some in the peace. They lived as they played – there was no tomorrow for most of them.

  ‘Fuck me.’ She gritted her teeth, bared them. ‘Harder.’

  He took out his frustrations on her, in her. The wife who'd left him, the life he'd lost, the farm, the kids. Later, when he pulled on his jeans and buttoned the shirt that smelled of stale sweat and smoke, she kissed him and let him go. And he felt she'd used him the same way, for the same reasons.

  As he walked out of her house he looked up at the sky. There was a glimpse of sun through the clouds, but it was a metaphor of hope, only.

  There had been no water, as well as no electricity, in the house so she hadn't even been able to offer him a shower before he left. It was probably just as well, he thought, as he was sure the woman – what was her damn name? – would have wanted to climb in with him, and he doubted he could have risen to the occasion one more time.

  The power and water shortages had been worse over the past couple of years, but the country's basic infrastructure was so degraded that both would continue to be a fact of life. Harare was the only place in the world he knew where people could make dinnertime conversation about their bathing habits, and where the flicker of an electric light coming on could provoke applause. It hadn't been uncommon, during the worst of it, for people to draw the water from their swimming pools to drink and wash in.