African Dawn

by Tony Park

  Braedan looked back over his shoulder. The cart man had run around back and was heaving on the handle of Natalie's black carryon bag. ‘Shit.’ The smart bastard would know that this was the one that had the passport, the money and the stuff that was too valuable to put in a big check-in bag. His useless brother was looking around, as though he was still half-asleep.

  ‘What is it?’ Natalie's voice was edged with concern.

  ‘Stop!’ Tate yelled. He stood in the back of the bakkie with his fists clenched by his side. The man dragged the bag all the way out and started running.

  ‘Lock yourself in,’ Braedan said to Natalie. ‘There might be others.’ He opened the door and grabbed the tyre lever he kept by the side of his seat. He slammed the door closed and ran after the fast-disappearing man. ‘Look after the rest of the stuff,’ he yelled back to Tate. His woolly-headed brother was standing in the tray of the bakkie, watching him. Bloody useless, Braedan thought.

  The black guy was probably thirty years younger than Braedan, but his arms and legs were like skinny sticks. Braedan hadn't been working out since he'd come home from Afghanistan, but over there he had pumped iron and run on the treadmill every day. He was in a business where his workmates came from some of the best military units in the world – British SAS, South African Recces, American SEALs – so he had to stay in shape to keep up with them. Plus, if Natalie was like most experienced travellers she'd probably pushed the limit on the weight of her carry-on bag, so the thief had to be lugging close to ten kilograms as he ran.

  ‘Stop, you thieving bastard!’ Braedan yelled.

  The man made the mistake of looking back and he tripped. Braedan was on him a second later, raising and swinging the tyre lever. The younger man was wheezing underneath him and he yelped like a dog as Braedan brought the edge of the steel bar down on the back of his legs. He hit him again. A horn honked behind him and Braedan turned to see the Nissan bakkie, with Natalie at the wheel. Tate was standing in the back, with his palms flat on the roof of the cab.

  ‘Leave him alone, Braedan,’ Tate called. ‘You'll kill him if you're not careful. He looks done in.’

  Braedan stood. He was furious. The rage had overtaken him, as it had often done in combat. He looked down at the moaning form below him. He kicked the man in the ribs, then hoisted Natalie's bag and strode to the bakkie. Braedan pointed the tyre iron at Tate. ‘You stupid prick, this wouldn't have happened if you hadn't fallen asleep.’

  ‘You drove into his bloody cart,’ Tate retorted.

  ‘Enough, guys,’ Natalie said. ‘Let's just get out of here. And thank you for getting my bag back.’

  Tate looked down at the injured man. ‘I think we should wait and see if he's OK. He might need help.’

  ‘Help? That fucking munt just tried to rob us. Jesus Christ, Tate, what is it with you and these people?’

  Through his peripheral vision Braedan could see people moving closer, the way they always did when there was an accident or a fight or anything out of the ordinary. Africans seemed to come out of the woodwork at times like this. He knew he should get in the car and drive, but Tate was doing everything he could to piss him off.

  ‘You just never know when to stop, Braedan, when to back off.’

  Braedan reached up and grabbed a handful of his twin brother's shirt and jerked him off the back of the truck. Tate landed in a heap at his feet. ‘Get up!’

  Tate reached for his glasses, which had fallen off and were lying in the dirt. ‘I'm not going to fight you, Braedan.’

  Braedan was breathing hard, the tyre iron still hanging loose in his hand. He wanted to kick the shit out of his brother for being such a waste of oxygen. You should fight me, he thought. You should fight me and you should kick the living shit out of me and get all the shit in our lives out into the open and be done with it for good.

  Natalie was out of the car, standing with her hands on her hips. ‘Hang on, what's going on here? You two are acting like twelve year olds. What's all this about? Tate fell asleep, that's all. It's not a crime, Braedan.’

  Braedan shook his head. ‘It's not about him falling asleep.’

  Tate straightened himself up and slowly climbed back up into the bakkie. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It's about Hope. It always is.’

  20

  ‘So that's why my dad hates you?’ Natalie asked as Braedan drove through Kadoma, another once-prosperous town whose local economy had been gutted by years of government excess and mismanagement.

  Braedan had explained, matter-of-factly Natalie thought, that Tate's anger was still due to Braedan sleeping with Hope when she had been Tate's girlfriend. Natalie had known there was something about Hope's death that her family had always shied away from talking about.

  Her mother, Susannah, often seemed reserved when talking about Hope. When Natalie was growing up she'd thought her mother was trying to blot out the tragic details of Hope's death, but as she'd grown older she'd begun to wonder whether there was a side to Hope that didn't fit with the family's innocent golden girl. When she'd asked her mother, in the context of the book she was writing, what she remembered of Hope, Susannah had told Natalie that Hope was a bright girl who liked to party.

  Braedan stubbed his cigarette out in the Nissan's overflowing ashtray and shook his head. ‘No, your old man never liked me. I don't know why. Me sleeping with your aunty is why Tate hates me.’ Braedan jabbed his thumb back over his shoulder, at Tate's back, which was pressed against the rear window of the bakkie's cab.

  ‘Do you blame him?’ Natalie asked.

  Braedan shrugged. ‘Hope's been dead thirty years and he still can't get over it. Took me a long time, too. I still don't really know how it happened between us. I mean, I always fancied her, from the first time I saw her, and no one forced her to come out with me the night before she died. Tate blames himself – and me – for her being on that flight home. Whether he's right or not, it was just bad luck that General Walls was on the other flight and that the terrs got the wrong plane and all those civvies were murdered.’

  Natalie nodded, although she knew he was oversimplifying what had happened, and his role in it, and he was not acknowledging the horrible way Hope, and the others passengers, had died. Perhaps that was his way of coping.

  She could see what her aunt might have seen in both the Quilter-Phipps men. Tate was the brooding, sensitive environmentalist and intellectual, while Braedan was the muscular, hard-living man of action. Also, as Natalie was learning, Tate was aloof to the point of rudeness and Braedan was forward to the point of arrogance. He'd seduced his brother's girlfriend then claimed no responsibility for the tragic chain of events that followed.

  ‘You say murdered,’ Natalie said, ‘but Joshua Nkomo claimed the Air Rhodesia Viscount flights regularly transported military personnel and that it was a mistake of war that an aircraft full of civilians rather than Walls's plane was shot down.’

  Braedan scoffed. ‘Who are you, the devil's advocate, or just a bleeding heart commie?’

  ‘I'm a journalist and I'm trying to get my facts straight.’

  ‘That's a laugh. There was a woman reporter from South Africa who wrote that the female survivors on board the Viscount – including your aunt – had been raped before they were killed. It was a lie, and as bad as the whole mess was, I heard that your grandmother found that the worst thing about Hope's death. The facts, Natalie, are that your aunt and the other people who survived the crash were bayoneted by the same terrs who shot down the Viscount. That's murder.’

  She nodded. ‘I agree. I read the reports, the inquests.’

  Braedan changed gears and slowed as a policeman waved them to a halt as they approached a roadblock. ‘Ja, well I saw the bodies. Her body.’

  Natalie had been haunted by the image, confirmed in the archived reports of the inquests, of Hope rolling on top of the eight-year-old girl in her charge to protect her, and being stabbed to death. The child had been dragged from under her and killed in the same manner. ‘How …
’

  Braedan shrugged, as if he knew there was no point in trying to find an explanation or reason for the atrocity. They pulled up at the roadblock.

  ‘Good afternoon, how are you?’ the policeman asked through the driver's window.

  Braedan had his hands on the steering wheel. He stared fixedly through the windscreen. Natalie remembered there was no quicker way to insult an African person than by not replying to a greeting or asking a question before taking the time to say hello. The policeman sneered, but then turned his head as a voice came from the rear of the bakkie.

  ‘Kanjani,’ Tate said from the back, and then launched into fluent and rapid Shona that Natalie had no chance of deciphering. In a few seconds the scowl was gone from the young policeman's face and he was laughing. Tate leaned his head around to the driver's window. ‘Show the man your licence … if you have one.’

  ‘I have one.’ Braedan fished in his jeans pocket for his wallet.

  ‘What were you talking about?’ Natalie asked Tate through the open window while the officer took his time studying Braedan's licence.

  ‘He told me that you should be riding in the back of the bakkie and I should be in the front,’ Tate said.

  ‘Very funny,’ Natalie said.

  ‘He was serious.’

  The policeman grinned. ‘Good afternoon, madam.’

  ‘Afternoon.’

  ‘Ah, you may proceed.’ The policeman returned Braedan's licence and touched the peak of his cap in a salute to Natalie.

  Braedan put the Nissan in gear and drove off without even making eye contact with the officer.

  ‘He was only doing his job,’ Natalie observed.

  ‘Hah! These bastards have been cowed, crooked and conned for so long they've forgotten what their bloody job is,’ Braedan said. ‘They stood by while white farms were invaded and innocent men beaten and murdered. They don't get involved in criminal investigations any more because there's usually a political angle, and when the pricing controls came in a couple of years ago they were at the head of the queues looting all the shops.’

  Natalie had read about President Mugabe's ludicrous policy of fixing prices at below cost, when inflation was running out of control. He had forced supermarkets and other retailers to lower their prices to such an extent that they went out of business. Police and military personnel were given first preference for shopping when the new prices were introduced, and corrupt officers bought up entire stocks of stores then sold them at a huge profit on the black market in Zimbabwe or transported their goods across the border to Botswana where they sold them to similar retailers and made tidy profits in foreign currency.

  ‘Things have improved, haven't they, since he did away with the Zimbabwean dollar?’ Natalie asked, playing devil's advocate again.

  Braedan shrugged. ‘You can get just about anything you want these days as long as you have US dollars or rand to pay for it, but you're paying well over the odds. That's OK if you've got a job that pays you in forex, but if you don't …’

  ‘What are you doing these days? My grandfather said he'd heard you'd been in Iraq.’

  ‘Ja.’ Braedan lit another cigarette. Natalie was a reformed smoker who occasionally bummed one from girlfriends when she'd had too much to drink. She wanted one now, but said nothing. ‘And Afghanistan as well. Those places are kak.’

  ‘Why did you come home to Zimbabwe?’

  ‘It wasn't nostalgia, I'll tell you that. The money was good, hey, but the outfit I was working for, Corporate Solutions, got a bad reputation in Iraq and lost its contracts.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘On or off the record?’

  She smiled. ‘I could say off the record, but you know there's really no such thing.’

  ‘Well, it's no skin off my nose anyway. I was part of a crew headed by a South African nutter called Van Zyl. He killed a senior Iraqi army officer. The camel jockey was in civvies and Van Zyl said he ran a roadblock, but I was there. He was executed. We were all arrested by the local police, but no charges were laid, not even against Van Zyl. The rumour was our boss was being paid by the CIA and they wanted the Iraqi dead. I hope the boss got a lot of money, because the rest of us were kicked out. There was a bit of work in Afghanistan after that, guarding convoys, but that dried up when the smaller firms like CS were muscled out by the American players.’

  ‘Couldn't you have got a job with one of them?’ Natalie asked.

  Braedan shook his head. ‘Who wants a geriatric Rhodie when there are twenty-two year olds leaving the army every day for the big bucks? My wife left me and I didn't want to go back to Australia, so I came back here.’

  They rolled into the town of Kwe Kwe, which Natalie recalled as being spelled Que Que in her youth, and drove around the clock tower, which she also remembered. Like many things in Zimbabwe, the clock was broken. Braedan pulled up outside a liquor shop.

  ‘Back in a minute.’ He got out and said, over his shoulder, to Tate, ‘Want anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Braedan shrugged and disappeared into the store. Natalie started in her seat when someone rapped on her window. She turned to see a small boy holding a tin cup made out of an old fruit tin, with a handle riveted to it. An elderly man with dark glasses and frizzy grey hair stood behind the boy, with his hand on his shoulder. Natalie had been surprised she hadn't seen more beggars in Zimbabwe, given the widespread poverty and unemployment. She reached into her shirt for the travel wallet that hung around her neck and pulled out a dollar note.

  ‘Thank you, madam.’

  She looked back through the rear window of the bakkie in time to see Tate pulling a sandwich from his daypack. It looked like it had come from the flight they'd both been on. Tate handed the boy the food, and the youngster beamed with gratitude. He was breaking it in two as he and the old man shuffled off.

  Braedan returned with half-a-dozen loose bottles of Castle Lager in his hands. Natalie leaned across and opened the door for him. Braedan upended one of the bottles and hooked the edge of its cap under the lid of a second bottle and levered it off with a loud pop. ‘Call of the wild, hey?’ He offered the open bottle to Natalie.

  She hesitated. ‘Is this legal, drinking in a car?’

  Braedan smiled. ‘You're not in Australia now.’

  She took the bottle, but nuzzled it between her legs as they drove off through town. Braedan kept his bottle out of sight, too, as he weaved around a ZUPCO bus belching black smoke and crabbing up the main street.

  The shops looked tired and in need of a lick of paint and a lot more business. Some stores were closed completely: newspaper behind broken windows or rusting wire mesh security screens pulled down and locked. A queue of people snaked around the corner from a Zimbank branch. Diesel, yes, petrol, no, the chalkboard in front of a fuel station read. Shortages might have eased since Zimbabwe's transition to foreign currency, but the country's problems were still a long way from being solved. It all seemed so terribly sad.

  And yet … there was something about the place. Natalie had suffered nightmares for years after what had happened to her. After her kidnapping and Hope's murder, Natalie's father, a decorated helicopter pilot, had resigned his commission and taken the family to Australia. Natalie had learned to love the peaceful order of Australia, but being back was stirring a mix of dormant emotions in her.

  ‘You know,’ said Braedan, pausing to take a long swig of beer once they cleared the small town's limits, ‘I always thought it was a shame your family left Rhodesia.’

  ‘Why's that?’ she asked.

  ‘It was like somehow the terrorists had won, even before the end. I kind of thought there was no hope, once you'd left. I don't know why your dad never liked me, but he was a legend in the air force. He was one of their most experienced chopper pilots and a hell of a brave oke. Him leaving must have hurt his squadron's morale. But, like, the whole country got a shot in the arm when …’

  She looked at him, waiting for him to finish. ‘What?’<
br />
  ‘Nothing.’

  He turned to glance out the window, but she saw the colour in his cheeks. She wondered if he had been going to say that the country's morale had jumped when he rescued her from the terrorist gang. He'd stopped himself, perhaps not wanting to sound boastful. Perhaps he wasn't as arrogant as he at first appeared. She changed the subject. ‘I remember Aunty Hope's funeral. You weren't there.’ She didn't tell him how much she'd wished he was. She had been devastated by Hope's death – they all had been – but Natalie remembered seeing Braedan just before Hope left for Kariba. She knew now, piecing it all together, that was the night he must have slept with her. Or had they been seeing each other more often?

  ‘My unit was sent on a raid into Mozambique a couple of days after the Viscount crashed. Just as well probably, as Tate might have killed me if I'd shown up.’

  Natalie couldn't share his smile. She knew she would soon have to write about her memories, and that many, like those of Hope's funeral, would hurt her. ‘I remember the coverage on TV. The government made such a big thing about it. Ian Smith came to our house. My father won't talk about it – any of it. Not about me being taken, or Hope being killed. I tried to get him to, for the book, but he's put up a wall.’

  Braedan nodded. ‘Maybe a good thing.’

  ‘What are you going to do here, for a job?’ Natalie asked, changing the subject completely. She didn't want Braedan to go all strong-silent-type on her now that she'd found him and got him talking.

  ‘I don't know,’ he said. ‘There's not much an ex-troopie and ex-farmer can do in this country. I'd like to get work as a safari guide, but the tourism business is still dead. If I can't find anything I might join the other three million Zimbabweans living in South Africa and Botswana and try and find work there. Trouble is, though, that I'm a middle-aged white man, which hardly puts me at the head of the hiring line in any African country.’