CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA. OCTOBER 1999
In the first weeks, right after Jadini, he insisted she accompany him on his travels, take time out from her business. First it had been Rome, then a mysterious excursion to Jerusalem—her first taste of the hobo life in which he invested so much passion, took so seriously. “And to think they pay us good money to do this,” a colleague of his, a Canadian reporter from a big-time American television network, told her over drinks at a subterranean bar in Jerusalem, at the hotel where the journalists, the shitholes men and women, stayed to await the latest outrage. Once, she thought she caught a glimpse of her—the Frenchwoman—in a rental car parked outside the hotel in the pale, limestone backstreets of east Jerusalem. But, before she could make inquiries and for no discernible reason, the orders changed. Tel Aviv–Johannesburg–Cape Town. Jadini was her turf, her arena, where she set the rules, and he was the novice seeking initiation. Cape Town switched the markers.
Comic likes boom-boom. So boom-boom’s good for Joe. But we’ll be OK in the Nellie. So much gobbledygook, so much energy diverted into high-octane travel and adrenaline for the purposes of what? Ink on a printed page with colored photographs that became the detritus of long, tedious airline flights, to be tossed aside, gathered by the cleaners, pulped.
The Nellie, she knew, meant the Mount Nelson Hotel, under the great wall of Table Mountain, Africa’s grandest hotel where the staff at reception greeted him with a discreet, knowing welcome, casting a speculative eye over her as if she were only the latest trophy brought in from the hunt. The other guests observed a basic dress code but Joe Shelby stuck to his jeans and vest, believing devoutly that a Platinum Card overcame all etiquette. Main suite, he insisted—comic’s paying, for Chrissakes—on the garden side, if you please. And, from the bar at the sound of his voice, a matching apparition made an entrance in faded jeans and olive tee shirt and scuffed Texan boots, cropped black hair and a deep tan from too much time in the bush: meet Du Plessis, soldier and photographer, tracker and adventurer and never trust yourself alone with him. The southern Africa guy—sixteen wars and still snapping. One of his people. One of his collection of spirits who seemed to glide past humdrum obligations, believing themselves called to the higher vocation of observing and recording, using other people’s catastrophes to vindicate their rejection of the common laws and duties governing the lives of lesser beings. They floated, his people, from hotel to hotel, never owning anything or paying the bill or accepting responsibility for anything beyond the indulgence of their own foibles: they lived in a world of rental cars and hired rooms, expense accounts and adrenaline that demanded an ever greater fix of catastrophe from those they fed on. It was not her way, and it grated with her: she had been raised to discretion, to quiet solid wealth fixed in place by property and land and the sense that it was poor taste indeed to flaunt riches among people sliding ever further into poverty.
“How’s it, Joe? Hey, Eva. Welcome to the deep south. Big boom-boom. Let’s hit it.” Du Plessis spoke in the clipped, hybrid tones of southern Africa. In the social order of the continent’s white minorities, that denoted a lower class than the officers and gentry who had colonized further north, in Kenya in particular. She held his taunting gaze that fell on her as if to say: don’t think I haven’t seen you before. She looked back scornfully into mocking eyes that said: don’t imagine that you are the first bimbo Joe Shelby has brought here. And don’t think that you belong in the places we go.
—
Eva Kimberly was well-traveled: her father had seen to that. They had taken rooms at the Oriental in Bangkok and the Savoy in London, the Plaza in New York, the Crillon in Paris. Even Jeremy had sometimes shown a lover’s extravagance, putting them up once at Brown’s in Dover Street rather than his usual cramped club quarters that came cheap as part of the reciprocal arrangement with Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club. But she had never been in a hotel suite quite like this before—the brocade and antiques and high ceilings and the sheer size of the place, big as a squash court. Two bathrooms, of course. And a sitting room with a well-stocked bar and deep sofas and flower arrangements at every turn, a writing desk in the bay window, looking out over the palms and roses and bougainvillea of the gardens and the swimming pool.
As he unpacked his tote bag, Joe Shelby suggested that she might want to make business contacts in the city while he and Du Plessis went to work in the townships. Look, he said, there are people here who are really into all the same stuff as you are. Web cams. E-commerce. Synergies. Talk to them while I’m out in the townships. But she wouldn’t have that, not after the way Du Plessis had looked at her.
I’m not some popsy, some bimbo, some Jeffrey Archer floozy, Joe Shelby, she said firmly. I’ll talk to them when I feel like it, but as for the townships, you forget that I grew up in Africa, and I’m not afraid of Africans.
So wait ’til you meet these Africans, he said. Generation X. No bwanas and memsahibs here. Still, it’s your choice. But you’d better wear this, he said: from his bag he pulled a Kevlar bulletproof vest. It was not new and it was not her size. She could guess whose sweat and smell had stained its collar, but said nothing, pulling it across her chest as if it were her totem of victory.
From Crossroads, they traveled to Guguletu—Gugs, Du Plessis called it—and on to Khayelitsha and the Cape Flats, piloting the rental car around smouldering barricades, navigating by the columns of oily smoke rising from burning tires, some of them—horribly—fast around the necks of randomly incinerated victims. The photographer had gone on ahead in a separate rental car, calling in by cell phone like a tracker on safari, directing them from this kill to that, from one barricade to another, from township to squatter camp.
And these were not her Africans. They were young men wild with inchoate rage at someone’s failure to deliver on the promises made by someone equally indistinct. They were saying: where are the jobs, the money, the BMWs, the life we fought for? Where is the land for us when the whites sit fat and pretty behind their high walls and security fences, around their pools and tennis courts and barbecues, while we scavenge and steal? They were not her Masai, her warrior sons and sisters, her meandering Kikuyu, her wily Kalinjin. They were not her people of the limitless savannas, the sweeping Rift Valley and the big skies, but the product of loose associations in mean shacks, half of them HIV-positive and spoiling for a fight with the next Big Lie to come their way: freedom and prosperity, health and jobs, justice and peace, security and longevity—lies, all of them. They wore torn trousers and ragged vests and cracked hand-me-down shoes without laces. Their eyes shone with rage. She cowered from them when they approached the car, grasping knobkerries driven through with six-inch nails.
Joe Shelby was not especially impressed. No scoops here, no big exclusive, too many hacks, he said, watching with amused indifference as a car full of his colleagues came under a barrage of rocks and gasoline-bombs ahead of them on a broad railroad bridge in Mitchell’s Plain, where people of mixed race had been dumped by apartheid and never left when the race barriers came down again.
But what about the ordinary people, Joe, aren’t they always the ones that suffer?
Good point, very good point, he said, backtracking from the front lines of conflict between an angry, flowing, unpredictable mass and a police force that used pretty much the same tactics as it always had, pulling back from the stray rounds and crackle of gunfire and the appalling, itching, scratching stench of CS gas.
Cowering behind lace curtains in a neat house with a yard and gate that mimicked the far grander estates of Cape Town’s whites was a middle-class, mixed-race couple, he a teacher, she a sales clerk. Eva talked them in, sliding past their fear, their objections. She softened them for his gentle, prodding, never-intrusive questioning that did not seem to be all cynical manipulation. They told him how they shuttered their homes and lived in darkness for fear of marauding gangs, out on the Cape Flats where the currency was crack cocaine and the anger never eased. They told him how they strug
gled to keep a few rands back from the protection money they paid to the minibus drivers who carried them to and from work, avoiding the gangs and the gunmen and the shakedowns. They admitted, finally, that their own children—their hope, their pride—were out there, somewhere, now, with the mob, running wild, never going to school, and they did not know where they were and would not be surprised if they came back in a coffin and might even be glad that the struggle was over. But where could they go? Where was safe? This was their home and it was a home from hell with even their own children turned into unrecognizable monsters. They sang their song for him and he called on his cell phone for Du Plessis to make his way to their coordinates. To her surprise, Du Plessis showed tenderness, empathy, and she took that to mean he had some inner understanding of what it was to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, to be excluded. He spoke to the couple in their native Afrikaans, the language bequeathed by the first Dutch settlers. As if this were a wedding or a baptism, he sat them for a stylized family portrait, in front of their glass-fronted display case with its framed photographs of their lost children, and large television and overstuffed brown sofa with its antimacassars and fringed velour cushions—a vertical shot that would make the cover story: “The Innocents—the scramble to get by in a blighted nation.”
Bingo, Joe said, as they left. You’re a star.
But not a photographer, she murmured and, for a moment, he looked inexplicably hurt.
—
Back at the hotel, she bathed for a long time, listening to a classical radio program that played Vivaldi and Mozart to accompany Joe’s tip-tip-tapping on the laptop and enthusiastic vending of his story to an editor in New York. The Innocents—caught between the lines of Africa’s newest conflict.
Their room-service dinner arrived with great fanfare on a trolley attended by four separate retainers to spread the white linen tablecloth, pour the Cape Sauvignon from its ice bucket, retrieve the crayfish from its warming trays and spoon vinaigrette over the salad.
“Where you guys from?” Joe inquired as he riffled through his wallet for an unnecessarily generous tip—guilt money, she surmised.
“Guguletu, sir,” the lead waiter said.
“We were there today, weren’t we Joe?”
“We are there every day, madam.”
That night they made love in a wide bed with a passion that was not the spontaneous coupling of the Italian hedgerows or the Kenyan savanna, but a darker, anguished lovemaking of the kind only survivors understand, more familiar to him than to her.
—
“What would she have done? It was her flak jacket wasn’t it?” Over breakfast, delivered by the same fugitives from the front lines, she tried to keep her voice light, as if she’d inquired about the weather forecast.
“Faria? She’d have said: let’s go for the boom-boom.”
“So I failed boom-boom 101?”
“No way,” he said with a big grin. “You got me a cover. You took me out of the darkness and showed me light.”
“Bullshit, Joe Shelby.”
“No bullshit. It’s true. I’d have gone for more boom-boom, the defining moment, the blood. You saw Du Plessis. Where do you think he’d have dragged me? Right into the middle of it. You showed me the real people.”
“Then I feel sorry for the others.”
He shaved, showered, dressed and lifted both Kevlar vests from the floor.
“Coming?”
“Where?”
“Du Plessis says there’s more boom-boom.”
“But you’ve got your story.”
“No, you’ve got to be there. You’ve got to be up at the sharp end because that’s where people show themselves. That’s where you find out. And anyhow, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings.”
“And when might that be?”
“When the final deadline tolls the knell on Friday night.”
“Then give me the numbers of the business people. I’ve had enough boom-boom for one week, thank you very much. You don’t mind?”
“Mind? I love you, Eva. I love you for whatever you are and whatever you want to be. And I love you for giving me the idea yesterday.”
“And you don’t think I’ll be letting you down?”
“One idiot is enough.”
“Two with Du Plessis.”
“He’s two all by himself. That’s why we go in separate cars.”
“You know, I may not be too good on boom-boom 101 but I think I’ve figured Joe Shelby 101.”
“Meaning?”
“In my part of Africa there’s a saying: the wife who stands between a warrior and a lion is a foolish wife.”
“Really?”
“Not really. But work it out.”
LANGDALE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000
Langdale, it transpired, had a New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel and an Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, and a place called Wall End. There was Great Langdale and Little Langdale and the Langdale Pikes, though they were covered in mist. A sign at a campsite ordered: “No noise after 11 P.M.” Another, near a cattle grid across the narrowing road, told her: “Road unsuitable in winter conditions.” Unsuitable for what? Driving? Skiing?
In a gap between squalls of horizontal rain, she pulled over to consult the map and grab a fresh pack of cigarettes from her overnight bag, along with the bottle of single malt for their reunion. She wedged it between the front seats of the car and lit a cigarette, opening the window to blow out the smoke on draughts of cold, damp air. He was out there, somewhere, in this awful weather. When the cloud cracked open for a moment, the valley unfolded as a deep U, its floor an uninviting bed of boulders, glacial moraine. Leading off it, trails led to the high ground like pale surgeon’s scars drawn across flanks of coarse grass and the ubiquitous rocky outcroppings that left no ridge or hillside unbroken, as if the weathered granite refused to be hidden. Then the cloud closed again. She switched on the engine and the headlights, nudging the car forward onto a narrow track that seemed to head in the roughly southerly direction she needed to cross over the shoulder of land between hills that would bring her to the junction with the Wrynose Pass road. She thought of denying herself a bracing nip from the whisky bottle, but succumbed.
TAPE TWO, SEGMENT ONE
SEPTEMBER 14, 2000, 4:30 P.M.
MONITORED1 SEPTEMBER 17
Smoke break. Not easy. The wind’s dropped a bit but the rain’s settled into a drizzle. Soaks the Rizlas. And with this arm refusing to cooperate, it’s a bit tricky. The cigarette looked like a cross between a beginner’s spliff and a piece of toilet paper. Tasted about the same. Water’s low, but this is the final stage for today. I think. GPS coordinates 27053 00961. That should put me on top of Great Carrs. There’s supposed to be the wreck of an airplane up here somewhere. So that makes two wrecks. The GPS is fine but it can only point you between A and B: it doesn’t tell you what’s actually between A and B. Like the crags that the map shows on both sides of the path. I’ve worked out a bearing on the old compass, though, north for four hundred yards, then veering north-northwest ten degrees to get onto Wet Side Edge and allegedly a path zigzagging down to Wrynose. Camp One on the icefall. Tempting to think of hitching a ride to a B&B and a hot bath and a couple of pints of bitter. Call Eva. Call somebody. Because one thing I hadn’t quite reckoned with: there’s no one to talk to up here. Come to think of it, there’s no one at all.
WRYNOSE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000
Right from the beginning, he had denied it, refused it. When his arm weakened, he merely readjusted his body into a deformed crouch to be able to get both hands to the keyboard. When his leg weakened, he told people it was a war wound and left it at that. When his bosses called to send him to his usual shitholes, he said: fine, great, on my way. His tote bag was never really unpacked. The Kevlar vest was his second skin. But she knew he was scared, running from reality, accepting his assignments, telling no one at head office that he should not really be doing this. He’d seen the doctors in London and the United States. Th
ey had offered him a choice between utterly grim and just plain average grim and he pretended nothing was happening. Like this silly expedition. If he was proving something to himself, so be it. But all he was proving to her was how pathetic the male ego really was. Where did he think he was? The north wall of the Eiger? Everest? Quite probably. He had a professional gift for embellishment and, in his own mind, he would doubtless enhance this experience, if he survived it. But why did he seem to assume that she would simply be there, a disconnected spectator, somewhere on the sidelines? She had not been raised as a carer. She could extend her heart to those in need, in the Rift Valley, among the Masai and the Samburu, but that did not make her some kind of Nurse Eva. Why did they shy from the strongest possibility, the nearest they had to a diagnosis: that this was incurable, that his mobility would be ever further reduced until—and this was part of the nightmare—he would require someone to dress him and tend him, feed him and wipe him, push his wheelchair, manhandle him into a passionless bed, wait with him until the final set of muscles around his lungs expired and he died an invalid’s death, without a warrior’s glory, a slow progression not a simple, clean cutoff of the kind he had so often chronicled in his reports. He would not wish to wait that long, but maybe they would not oblige him. Maybe the doctors and nurses and administrators and lawyers would deny him the morphine pump or whatever they used to camouflage euthanasia. She did not believe that she could bear that—the watching and the decline, the withering away of everything he had ever been. She was no Florence Nightingale. Nor was meant to be. The courage and stoicism were just not there. Perhaps even love did not stretch that far, if people were honest with themselves: for love intervened at a specific moment, a specific coincidence of needs. It did not necessarily contain the seeds of transformation to cope with a completely different set of circumstances. If he had been ailing when they met, would she have abandoned her life with its known rhythms and expectations for him, for—say the word, woman—a cripple? Of course not. But this was Judas talk, whisky talk. Pray it was no more than that.
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