by Tony Park
They had been home from school for an hour. Jess liked school, but it was home she was dreading. She was meeting her mother for coffee at the Wimpy in half an hour. ‘I don’t want to go.’
‘Sheesh, man, I know what she did was hectic, but she’s still, like, your mom,’ Mandy said, pulling the bud out of her ear.
‘Jess?’ called Mandy’s mother. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’
‘Oh my god, I hope she hasn’t come to collect me. I don’t want your mom having to talk to her,’ Jessica said. ‘How embarrassing.’
Mandy’s mother, Charmaine, was at the doorway. ‘Jess, are you expecting someone from the mine to come and fetch you?’
‘No, Mandy and I were just going to walk to the Wimpy, why?’ It was only a short walk, and Mandy’s mother would need her car to go pick up Mandy’s younger brother, Gareth, from rugby practice.
‘The dominee’s here, with a guy from the mine. Please come to the door, Jess.’
Mandy’s mother had gone pale. She looked at Mandy, who put her hand over her mouth and looked at her mother. Jessica felt a sudden pang of terror. She remembered Mandy talking about the day her dad died, in an accident at the mine, and how the local clergyman, the dominee from the NG Kerk, the Dutch Reformed Church, had come with Jess’s father to deliver the news. Jess’s dad had come home afterwards and cried.
‘No.’
‘Please, Jess. Come see what they want.’
Jess felt her legs turn to jelly as she tried to stand. Mandy’s mother put an arm around her and Mandy followed close behind as they walked to the door. The dominee was a tall thin man, with grey hair and a long, skinny face. ‘Jessica, I have news. This is Solomon, he is a driver at the mine. He was sent to fetch me.’
The man behind the dominee bobbed his head. Jess recognised the Global Resources uniform but not the driver. But she remembered the dominee. She’d stopped going to church about a year earlier, when her mother had overheard some of the other parishioners saying something about her after a service and vowed never to go again.
‘I’m very sorry, Jessica …’ said the dominee.
‘No. I don’t want to hear if something’s happened to him.’
She started to turn, but Mandy’s mother held her in a tight embrace.
‘There has been a plane crash, in Zambia, the flight your father was taking with the Australian woman, on business. Solomon was sent on the orders of Mr Coetzee, the new mine manager, to fetch me. I checked on my computer, on News24, just before I left home. The reports are that there were no survivors, Jessica.’
‘No! He can’t be dead. They must check the bodies. He’s alive!’
‘The reports are there were no survivors,’ the dominee said again. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, but we must be strong.’
The man in the mining company shirt shuffled forward a pace. ‘Mr Coetzee says you must come to the mine, miss,’ he said to Jess. ‘Your mother is coming there now. She knows we are coming to get you.’
‘We must go there,’ the dominee said, nodding his head. ‘We will get more facts, do some more investigating.’
‘You’re sure her mother knows about this?’ Mandy’s mother said.
‘Yes, madam,’ said the mine man. ‘She was crying. She said she didn’t know if she could come for Jessica now. She wanted to go to the mine to find out more from Mr Coetzee.’
Mandy’s mother harrumphed as if, Jess thought, she would have expected nothing less from Jess’s mother. Jess felt a prickle of defensiveness. ‘I need to see her now. I’ll get my things.’
She walked back to Mandy’s room and grabbed her bag. Her vision started to blur at the edges and she choked as the tears rose in her throat. Not her dad. It couldn’t be. Not him.
The dominee put his bony arm around her and she cringed, but she let the men lead her to the mine bakkie. Jess turned and waved to Mandy and her mother.
‘I’ll come as soon as I’ve collected Gareth. We’ll all come and you can stay here tonight if you don’t want to go home, Jess. For as long as you like.’ Mandy was crying too now and Jess turned away from the window as the bakkie pulled away.
The dominee sat in the front passenger seat, and Jess was all alone in the back of the double cab. She sniffed and tried to dry her eyes. It had to be a mistake. Solomon was driving very fast. Her dad would have told him off, as he always did anyone who broke the speed limit in a company vehicle.
She leaned forward, between the two front seats. ‘How long have you worked at the mine, Solomon?’
‘I am only new, miss. I am very sorry to hear about your father. I know he was a good man. Everyone said so.’
‘Amen,’ said the dominee.
Jess saw a glint of metal as Solomon depressed the clutch to change gear. He wore a company shirt, and jeans, like many of the guys who worked above ground, but his shoes were soft polished leather with little chains across the top of them. They looked expensive.
The driver glanced back at her and saw her looking down at his shoes.
‘Nice shoes,’ she said.
‘Thank you, miss.’ He licked his lips and Jessica felt the car start to move faster. They were through Barberton now, on the road to the mine. She knew the turn-off was coming up soon. It was funny, then, that he was speeding up.
‘I feel sick,’ she said.
The dominee swivelled in his seat. ‘What’s wrong, my child? Is it the shock?’
She nodded. ‘Please, pull over, Solomon, I think I need to be ill.’
He glanced back at her again. ‘Nearly at the mine, miss. We will find somewhere for you to lie down there.’
‘Solomon, if the child is going to be ill, better it not be in the vehicle. Pull over, man.’
The turn-off to Eureka was in sight. Solomon changed gears again and Jess knew there was something wrong.
‘His shoes, Dominee, his shoes!’
‘What, my child?’ the old man looked confused.
‘They’re not safety shoes – he doesn’t work for the mine!’
Solomon glared at her. The needle on the speedometer climbed above a hundred and thirty.
‘That was the turn-off, man,’ the dominee said, craning his head to look back. ‘Turn around, Solomon, you stupid …’
Solomon leaned forward, one hand on the wheel, and reached under his seat. When he sat up again he was pointing a black pistol at the dominee. ‘Shut up, you old fool, or I’ll kill you and the girl.’
Jessica grabbed Solomon’s arm with both her hands and bit it.
‘Ow!’ The gun boomed and Jessica screamed. She cowered back into the seat. ‘You stupid little bitch.’
‘Please, please, don’t hurt me,’ the dominee whined. He held up his hands in surrender. The bullet had passed him and gone out the open window.
They passed the turn-off to the Diggers’ Retreat Hotel. After that, Jess knew, it was just the Sheba mine and Sheba siding, where a lot of the illegal miners lived. She guessed he was one of them. From then on, it was just bush until the R38 joined the N4. No one would find them if he stopped out here.
Jessica moved to the door and saw Solomon check her out in the rear-view mirror. He stamped on the brakes and Jess was thrown into the back of the dominee’s seat as the car skidded and stopped on the gravel verge. ‘Get out,’ Solomon said to the dominee.
Jess saw her chance and fumbled open the back door, stumbled and fell to the dirt, then got up and started running.
‘Stop!’ Solomon called behind her.
She ran into the thornbushes on the roadside, not caring about the barbs that scratched her all over. ‘I’m going to kill him if you don’t come back, Jessica!’
Jess slowed her pace, then stopped.
‘Come out, come out wherever you are,’ he called.
Jessica was panting, her arms and legs criss-crossed with blood from the thorny branches. She was confused and terrified.
‘I’m going to count backwards from ten and then the churchman dies if you don’t come out
, Jessica.’
Jess screwed her hands into her eyes. She didn’t even like the dominee. She thought he was creepy. But she slowly retraced her steps, until she came to a tree big enough to hide behind. She peered around the trunk and saw the old man, kneeling with his hands behind his head. He had cried like a girl, she thought, begging Solomon in the bakkie not to hurt him. What about her, she wondered.
‘Seven, six, five, four, three, two …’
Solomon’s arm was out straight and she could see, even from this distance, his finger curling around the trigger. She wished she had just kept running. She didn’t know what this man wanted with her and the minister but she couldn’t let him be killed.
‘Wait.’ She walked out from behind the tree with her hands up in the air.
‘No … my child,’ the dominee said through his sobs. There were tears running down his cheeks. ‘You should have run.’
‘Come closer,’ Solomon said, ‘or I will kill him.’
She walked towards him, trying not to show how scared she was.
‘Kneel down.’
She did as she was told.
The dominee sniffed back his tears. ‘And you, with a name from the Bible. You will burn in hell if you don’t release us now.’
The man laughed. ‘My name isn’t Solomon, it is Wellington Shumba. I am a general and a lion, and I take no orders from you.’
‘You’re Wellington?’ Jess said. It was a name she’d heard her father speak often.
He smiled down at her. ‘You should have listened to the preacher man, little girl.’
Wellington pulled the trigger and the dominee pitched forward.
*
A cellphone beeped and buzzed and Chris Loubser opened his eyes, momentarily disorientated by the sea of fluffy pillows he seemed to be drowning in.
Tertia Venter put her phone down on the bedside table, lit a cigarette, drew on it, then passed it to Chris, who struggled to shrug his way up to a sitting position and escape his prison of Egyptian cotton.
‘You fell asleep. Did I tire you out, my poor baby?’
‘Yes,’ he grinned. Chris took a puff, coughed and handed the vile cigarette back. He hadn’t smoked since he was sixteen, and he had hated it back then too. There were some things she couldn’t make him do, but, he reflected, not many. ‘That will kill you.’
‘I don’t care. I’ll die happy knowing I saved this place.’
He rolled onto his side and propped himself on his elbow. He was enchanted by her; not just her body, but by her toughness and her supreme confidence. She feared nothing. ‘What makes you so sure you have? It’s not over yet.’
She blew a stream of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘The mine’s closed, pending the review of the air quality samples, and we know how that’s going to turn out; the unions are threatening to stop work in Global Resources’ other operations; the government’s ordered an inquiry into the company’s fitness to mine coal here; and, I’m almost sorry to say, we’re not likely to be hearing from Dr Hamilton or Mr McMurtrie again.’ Tertia lifted the duvet and swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood.
Chris yawned and scratched his head, then down below. He was sore. She had been insatiable, as always. They’d had a bottle of wine and some spirits before lunch and retired to her house for an afternoon of making love, golden sunlight bathing her pale body as they sated each other. He had fallen into a deep postcoital nap. He watched her walk across the room to a desk, where her laptop was open. She was full-figured, womanly, sexy, not like the younger girls who sometimes threw themselves at him. Tertia knew more than any of them; how to please him, what she wanted. He felt himself stirring as she sat and turned on the computer.
‘A friend of mine just SMSed me. Told me I must check News24.’ She tapped at the keys, opening her internet browser. ‘Yes, here it is. Dr Kylie Hamilton and Cameron McMurtrie have been killed in a plane crash in Zambia.’
‘What?’ Chris threw off the covers and jumped off the bed. He darted to her side. ‘Let me see. Oh no. My God, Tertia, no.’
She looked up at him. ‘Yes.’
How could she grin? he wondered. He knew how much she hated the company, but these were people he knew – Cameron especially. He read the story online over her shoulder, twice. ‘He has a daughter.’
‘Yes, well I’m sorry about that, of course. But McMurtrie was going to head up their new mines division. He would have overseen the destruction of our beautiful paradise, Chris.’
She took his hand. He gripped it, out of grief rather than sympathy with her cause. Cameron was a good man and Chris couldn’t find anything to celebrate in his death, no matter what it meant for Lion Plains or Tertia.
‘He was just doing as he was told, Tertia. I got the feeling his heart wasn’t in this project at all, or in his new job. He never wanted to leave the mine.’
She let go of his hand. ‘Just following orders? Grow up, Christiaan. That’s what the Nazis used to say. He would have happily turned this place into a pit of coal dust.’
He didn’t like being spoken to as a child, or admonished. He hated it when his mother called him Christiaan, and it had the same effect when Tertia used it. ‘He was a good man, Tertia.’
She shrugged. ‘Well, I can’t say I will miss him, or that woman. She was a cold fish. The company’s in chaos and their CEO from Australia, Jan Stein, is flying out to try and prop things up out here, but there’s nothing he’ll be able to do. Their share price has collapsed.’
She put an arm around his naked body and reached for his semitumescent member. ‘Things will work out fine, and you can leave the mine and come and run this place with me. It’s what you want, isn’t it, baby?’
He stared at the screen. It had been what they had talked about so often, but Cameron’s and Kylie’s deaths had taken the shine off things. It wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.
Her hand closed around him. It didn’t seem right, given the news. He stared at the words on the screen and felt her hand move up and down his length. Looking down at her he saw her shift on the office chair, opening her legs. Her right hand moved to her pubis. She started stroking herself, not looking up at him, and the sight of her doing that made him harder. She leaned her body against him as her fingers moved faster, on him and herself, bringing them both close to the edge.
Tertia threw her head back, gasping as she arched her back. Chris was worried he might come over her computer, but she pushed him aside, gripped her desk and pulled herself to her feet. She bent across the screen and led him to her. ‘Fuck me.’
He exploded as soon as he entered her.
They stayed there for a little while, panting, as she lay under him, across the machine. ‘We need to shower,’ she said at last.
They never used condoms. She was forty, eleven years older than he, but she told him she wanted a child, with him. It was, she said, proof of her love for him. He could have been some young stud just fucking her for sport, he thought, but she seemed to know how she had captivated him. It was why it hadn’t scared him off, the idea of them having a child together. It had made things, he’d thought, somehow honest, as though they were doing what they did to ensure the future of Lion Plains for the next generation.
He followed her to the shower and she turned on the water and stepped in. ‘What’s to stop the community simply doing a deal with another mining company, even if the Global Resources coalmine doesn’t go ahead?’
She massaged shampoo into her sopping red locks and grinned at him. ‘Two things … money and a little something I’m going to show you after we’re finished in here.’
He stepped into the shower, still annoyed at the way she had been before: her glee over Cameron’s death and her treating him like a child. But when she said turn, he did, and she scrubbed his back.
‘Tell me more,’ he said.
‘When we’re outside, on the game viewer. Away from prying ears. And we have to wait until it’s dark outside.’
She must have sensed h
is hostility towards her, because she dropped to her knees, in order to finish washing him.
Dried and changed, he followed her outside to her game viewer. Night had fallen. A scops owl called to its mate. Tertia stopped by her office to pick up her rifle in its protective sleeve, a heavy Pelican waterproof plastic camera case which she gave him to carry, and a pair of bulky-looking binoculars, which she slung over her shoulder. It was only six o’clock and the other vehicles were out, taking the lodge’s few guests on their evening game drives. They wouldn’t be back until seven-thirty, for dinner.
‘So, are you going to tell me why you’re so sure you’re out of the woods?’ The movement of the open-topped vehicle produced an instant breeze that ruffled her drying hair.
‘You know the property behind us, Kilarney?’
‘Yes.’ He’d studied maps of the area many times and the company had researched the neighbouring properties. Kilarney was a game farm that had once made its income from trophy hunting, but it had been mismanaged, and pilloried in the press for offering canned hunts. Stoffel Berger, the intransigent old man who ran it, had successfully fought the land claim on his property and, such were the vagaries of the land commission, he had won where Tertia had failed. Tertia suspected the community and its lawyers had put more effort into winning Lion Plains because it was bigger earning, through tourism, than Stoffel’s rundown, shot-out wildlife butchery. The coal discovery had been the icing on the cake. ‘It’s almost valueless. There’s no game, the fences are falling down, and no one will buy it as it’s going to have a coalmine between it and the Sabi Sand Game Reserve.
‘I’m going to buy it. For a song,’ she said.
‘You’re mad.’
She shot a look at him, before returning her attention to the rutted road. ‘Am I? When the mine is cancelled I’ll have my own land, which no one can take from me. The community will have no mine, and never will. I’ll tell them I’ll drop the fences between Kilarney and Lion Plains so the game can repopulate Stoffel’s place, and their reserve will in effect double in size. I’ll offer them a deal where I’ll still manage the lodge on Lion Plains but I’ll have my own place as well. Stoffel always resisted joining up with the rest of the Sabi Sand Game Reserve because he still wanted to hunt, and they wouldn’t allow that. I’ll merge Kilarney with the game reserve and the community will continue to get an income stream, and more jobs from my new lodge, which is what they care about, and no one will ever be able to try and mine on Lion Plains again, because the property will now be enclosed by the game reserve as opposed to being on the edge of it.’