by Wilbur Smith
‘One of the poor white Afrikaners,’ Shasa recognized his type. ‘A bywoner, a squatter’s kid.’ His mother had forbidden him to play with them, but he had found that some of them were jolly good fun. Their attraction was of course enhanced by his mother’s prohibition. One of the sons of the machine-shop foreman at the mine imitated bird calls in such an amazingly lifelike manner that he could actually call the birds down from the trees, and he had shown Shasa how to adjust the carburettor and ignition on the old Ford which his mother allowed him to use, even though he was too young to have a driver’s licence. While the same boy’s elder sister, a year older than Shasa, had shown him something even more remarkable when they had shared a few forbidden moments together behind the pumphouse at the mine. She had even allowed him to touch it and it had been warm and soft and furry as a newborn kitten cuddling up there under her short cotton skirt, a most remarkable experience which he intended to repeat at the very next opportunity.
This boy looked interesting also, and perhaps he could show Shasa over the trawler’s engine-room. Shasa glanced back at the factory. His mother was not watching and he was prepared to be magnanimous.
‘Hello.’ He made a lordly gesture and smiled carefully. His grandfather, Sir Garrick Courtney, the most important male person in his existence, was always admonishing him. ‘By birth you have a specially exalted position in society. This gives you not only benefit and privilege, but a duty also. A true gentleman treats those beneath his station, black or white, old or young, man or woman, with consideration and courtesy.’
‘My name is Courtney,’ Shasa told him. ‘Shasa Courtney. My grandfather is Sir Garrick Courtney and my mother is Mrs Centaine de Thiry Courtney.’ He waited for the deference that those names usually commanded, and when it was not evident, he went on rather lamely, ‘What’s your name?’
‘My name is Manfred,’ the other boy replied in Afrikaans and arched those dense black eyebrows over the amber eyes. They were so much darker than his streaked blond hair that they looked as though they had been painted on. ‘Manfred De La Rey, and my grandfather and my great-uncle and my father were De La Rey also and they shot the shit out of the English every time they met them.’
Shasa blushed at this unexpected attack and was on the point of turning away when he saw that there was an old man leaning in the window of the wheelhouse, watching them, and two coloured crewmen had come up from the trawler’s forecastle. He could not retreat.
‘We English won the war and in 1914 we beat the hell out of the rebels,’ he snapped.
‘We!’ Manfred repeated, and turned to his audience. ‘This little gentleman with perfume on his hair won the war.’ The crewmen chuckled encouragement. ‘Smell him, his name should be Lily – Lily the perfumed soldier.’ Manfred turned back to him, and for the first time Shasa realized that he was taller by a good inch and his arms were alarmingly thick and brown. ‘So you are English, are you, Lily? Then you must live in London, is that right, sweet Lily?’
Shasa had not expected a poor white boy to be so articulate, nor his wit to be so acerbic. Usually he was in control of any discussion.
‘Of course I’m English,’ he affirmed furiously, and was seeking a final retort to end the exchange and allow him to retire in good order from a situation over which he was swiftly losing control.
‘Then you must live in London,’ Manfred persisted.
‘I live in Cape Town.’
‘Hah!’ Manfred turned to his growing audience. Swart Hendrick had come across the jetty from his own trawler, and all the crew were up from the forecastle. ‘That’s why they are called Soutpiel,’ Manfred announced.
There was an outburst of delighted guffaws at the coarse expression. Manfred would never have used it if his father had been present. The translation was ‘Salt Prick’ and Shasa flushed and instinctively bunched his fists at the insult.
‘A Soutpiel has one foot in London and the other in Cape Town,’ Manfred explained with relish, ‘and his willy-wagger dangling in the middle of the salty old Atlantic Ocean.’
‘You’ll take that back!’ Anger had robbed Shasa of a more telling rejoinder. He had never been spoken to in this fashion by one of his inferiors.
‘Take it back – you mean like you pull back your salty foreskin? When you play with it? Is that what you mean?’ Manfred asked. The applause had made him reckless, and he had moved closer, directly under the boy on the jetty.
Shasa launched himself without warning, and Manfred had not anticipated that so soon. He had expected to trade a few more insults before they were both sufficiently worked up to attack each other.
Shasa dropped six feet and hit him with the full weight of his body and his outrage. The wind was driven out of Manfred’s lungs in a whoosh as, locked together, they went flying backwards into the morass of dead fish.
They rolled over and with a shock Shasa felt the other boy’s strength. His arms were hard as timber balks and his fingers felt like iron butcher’s hooks as he clawed for Shasa’s face. Only surprise and Manfred’s winded lungs saved him from immediate humiliation, and almost too late he remembered the admonitions of Jock Murphy, his boxing instructor.
‘Don’t let a bigger man force you to fight close. Fight him off. Keep him at arm’s length.’
Manfred was clawing at his face, trying to get an arm around him in a half Nelson, and they were floundering into the cold slippery mass of fish. Shasa brought up his right knee and, as Manfred reared up over him, he drove it into his chest. Manfred gasped and reeled back, but then as Shasa tried to roll away, he lunged forward again for the head lock. Shasa ducked his head and with his right hand forced Manfred’s elbow up to break the grip, then as Jock had taught him, he twisted out against the opening he had created. He was helped by the fish slime that coated his neck and Manfred’s arm like oil, and the instant he was free he threw a punch with his left hand.
Jock had drilled him endlessly on the short straight left. ‘The most important punch you’ll ever use.’
It wasn’t one of Shasa’s best, but it caught the other boy in the eye with sufficient force to snap his head back and distract him just long enough to let Shasa get onto his feet and back away.
By now the jetty above them was crowded with coloured trawlermen in rubber boots and blue rollneck jerseys. They were roaring with delight and excitement, egging on the two boys as though they were game cocks.
Blinking the tears out of his swelling eye, Manfred went after Shasa, but the fish clinging to his legs hampered him, and that left shot out again. There was no warning; it came straight and hard and unexpectedly, stinging his injured eye so that he shouted with anger and groped wildly for the lighter boy.
Shasa ducked under his arm and fired the left again, just the way Jock had taught him.
‘Never telegraph it by moving the shoulders or the head,’ he could almost hear Jock’s voice, ‘just shoot it – with the arm alone.’
He caught Manfred in the mouth, and immediately there was blood as Manfred’s lip was crushed onto his own teeth. The sight of his adversary’s blood elated Shasa and the concerted bellow of the crowd evoked a primeval response deep within him. He used the left again, cracking it into the pink swollen eye.
‘When you mark him, then keep hitting the same spot.’ Jock’s voice in his head, and Manfred shouted again, but this time he could hear the pain as well as the rage in the sound.
‘It’s working,’ Shasa exulted. But at that moment he ran backwards into the wheelhouse and Manfred, realizing his opponent was cornered, rushed at him through the slimy fish, spreading both arms wide, grinning triumphantly, his mouth full of blood from his cut lip and his teeth dyed bright pink.
In panic Shasa dropped his shoulders, braced himself for an instant against the wheelhouse timbers and then shot forward, butting the top of his head into Manfred’s stomach.
Once again Manfred wheezed as the air was forced up his throat, and for a few confused seconds they writhed together in the mess of pil
chards, with Manfred gurgling for breath and unable to get a hold on his opponent’s slippery limbs. Then Shasa wriggled away and half crawled, half swam to the foot of the wooden ladder of the jetty and dragged himself onto it.
The crowd was laughing and booing derisively as he fled, and Manfred clawed angrily after him, spitting blood and fish slime out of his injured mouth, his chest heaving violently to refill his lungs.
Shasa was halfway up the ladder when Manfred reached up and grabbed his ankle, pulling both his feet off the rungs. Shasa was stretched out by the heavier boy’s weight like a victim on the rack, clinging with desperate strength to the top of the ladder, and the faces of the coloured fishermen were only inches from his as they leaned over the jetty and howled for his blood, favouring their own.
With his free leg Shasa kicked backwards, and his heel caught Manfred in his swollen eye. He yelled and let go, and Shasa scrambled up onto the jetty and looked around him wildly. His fighting ardour had cooled and he was trembling.
His escape down the jetty was open and he longed to take it. But the men around him were laughing and jeering and pride shackled him. He glanced around and, with a surge of dismay that was so strong that it almost physically nauseated him, he saw that Manfred had reached the top of the ladder.
Shasa was not quite sure how he had got himself into this fight, or what was the point at issue, and miserably he wished he could extricate himself. That was impossible, his entire breeding and training precluded it. He tried to stop himself trembling as he turned back to face Manfred again.
The bigger boy was trembling also, but not with fear. His face was swollen and dark red with killing rage, and he was making an unconscious hissing sound through his bloody lips. His damaged eye was turning purplish mauve and puffing into a narrow slit.
‘Kill him, kleinbasie,’ screamed the coloured trawlermen. ‘Murder him, little boss.’ And their taunts rallied Shasa. He took a deep steadying breath and lifted his fists in the classic boxer’s stance, left foot leading and his hands held high in front of his face.
‘Keep moving,’ he heard Jock’s advice again, and he went up on his toes and danced.
‘Look at him!’ the crowd hooted. ‘He thinks he is Jack Dempsey! He wants to dance with you, Manie. Show him the Walvis Bay Waltz!’
However, Manfred was daunted by the desperate determination in those dark blue eyes and by the clenched white knuckles of Shasa’s left hand. He began to circle him, hissing threats.
‘I’m going to rip your arm off and stick it down your throat. I’m going to make your teeth march out of your backside like soldiers.’
Shasa blinked but kept his guard up, turning slowly to face Manfred as he circled. Though both of them were soaked and glistening with fish slime and their hair was thick with the gelatinous stuff and speckled with loose scales, there was nothing ludicrous nor childlike about them. It was a good fight and promised to become even better, and the audience gradually fell silent. Their eyes glittered like those of a wolf pack and they craned forward expectantly to watch the ill-matched pair.
Manfred feinted left and then charged and rushed from the side. He was very fast, despite his size and the heaviness of his legs and shoulders. He carried his shining blond head low and the black curved eyebrows emphasized the ferocity of his scowl.
In front of him Shasa seemed almost girlishly fragile. His arms were slim and pale, and his legs under the sodden grey flannel seemed too long and thin, but he moved well on them. He dodged Manfred’s charge and as he pulled away, his left arm shot out again, and Manfred’s teeth clicked audibly at the punch and his head was flicked back as he was brought up on his heels.
The crowd growled, ‘Vat hom, Manie, get him!’ and Manfred rushed in again, throwing a powerful round-house punch at Shasa’s pale petal-smooth face.
Shasa ducked under it and, in the instant that Manfred was screwed off balance by his own momentum, stabbed his left fist unexpectedly and painfully into the purple, puffed-up eye. Manfred clasped his hand over the eye and snarled at him. ‘Fight properly, you cheating Soutie.’
‘Ja!’ a voice called from the crowd. ‘Stop running away. Stand and fight like a man.’
At the same time Manfred changed his tactics. Instead of feinting and weaving, he came straight at Shasa, and kept on coming, swinging with both hands in a terrifying mechanical sequence of blows. Shasa fell back frantically, ducking and swaying and dodging, at first stabbing out with his left hand as Manfred followed him relentlessly, cutting the swollen skin that had begun to bag under his eye, hitting him in the mouth again and then again until his lips were distorted and lumpy. But it was as though Manfred was inured to the sting of these blows now and he did not alter the rhythm of punches nor slacken his attack.
His brown fists, hardened by work at the winch and net, flipped Shasa’s hair as he ducked or hissed past his face as he ran backwards. Then one caught him a glancing blow on the temple and Shasa stopped aiming his own counter-punches and struggled merely to stay clear of those swinging fists, for his legs started to turn numb and heavy under him.
Manfred was tireless, pressing him relentlessly, and despair combined with exhaustion to slow Shasa’s legs. A fist crashed into his ribs, and he grunted and staggered and saw the other fist coming at his face. He could not avoid it, his feet seemed planted in buckets of treacle and he grabbed at Manfred’s arm and hung on grimly. That was exactly what Manfred had been trying to force him to do, and he whipped his other arm around Shasa’s neck.
‘Now, I’ve got you,’ he mumbled through swollen bloody lips, as he forced Shasa to double over, his head pinned under Manfred’s left arm. Manfred lifted his right hand high and swung it in a brutal upper-cut.
Shasa sensed rather than saw the fist coming, and twisted so violently that he felt as though his neck had snapped. But he managed to take the blow on the top of his forehead rather than in his unprotected face. The shock of it was driven like an iron spike from the top of his skull down his spine. He knew he could not take another blow like that.
Through his starring vision he realized that he had tottered to the edge of the jetty, and he used the last vestiges of his strength to drive them both towards the very edge. Manfred had not been expecting him to push in that direction and was braced the wrong way. He could not resist as they went flying over and fell back onto the trawler’s fish-laden deck six feet below.
Shasa was pinned beneath Manfred’s body, still caught in the headlock, and instantly he sank into the quicksand of silver pilchards. Manfred tried to swing another punch at his face, but it slogged into the soft layer of fish that was spreading over Shasa’s head. He abandoned the effort and merely leaned his full weight on Shasa’s neck, forcing his head deeper and still deeper below the surface.
Shasa started to drown. He tried to scream but a dead pilchard slid into his open mouth and its head jammed in his throat. He kicked and lashed out with both hands and writhed with all his remaining strength, but remorselessly his head was thrust downward. The fish lodged in his throat choked him. The darkness filled his head with a sound like the wind, blotting out the murderous chorus from the jetty above, and his struggles became less urgent until he was flopping and flapping his limbs loosely.
‘I’m going to die,’ he thought with a kind of detached wonder. ‘I’m drowning—’ and the thought faded with his consciousness.
‘You have come here to destroy me,’ Lothar De La Rey accused her with his back against the closed door. ‘You have come all this way to watch it happen, and to gloat on it.’
‘You flatter yourself,’ Centaine answered him disdainfully. ‘I have not that much interest in you personally. I have come to protect my considerable investment. I have come for fifty thousand pounds plus accrued interest.’
‘If that was true you wouldn’t stop me running my catch through the plant. I’ve got a thousand tons out there – by sunset tomorrow evening I could turn it into fifty thousand pounds.’
Impatiently Centai
ne lifted her hand to stop him. The skin of the hand was tanned a creamy coffee colour in contrast to the silver white diamond as long as the top joint of the tapered forefinger that she pointed at him.
‘You are living in a dream world,’ she told him. ‘Your fish is worth nothing. Nobody wants it – not at any price, certainly not fifty thousand.’
‘It’s worth all of that – fish meal and canned goods—’
Again she gestured him to silence. ‘The warehouses of the world are filled with unwanted goods. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you read a newspaper? Don’t you listen to the wireless out here in the desert? It’s worthless – not even worth the cost of processing it.’
‘That’s not possible.’ He was angry and stubborn. ‘Of course I’ve heard about the stock market, but people have still got to eat.’
‘I’ve thought many things about you,’ she had not raised her voice, she was speaking as though to a child, ‘but I have never thought you stupid. Try to understand that something has happened out there in the world that has never happened before. The commerce of the world has died; the factories of the world are closing; the streets of all the major cities are filled with the legions of the unemployed.’
‘You are using this as an excuse for what you are doing. You are conducting a vendetta against me.’ He came towards her. His lips were icy pale against the dark mahogany tan. ‘You are hounding me for some fancied offence committed long ago. You are punishing me.’
‘The offence was real.’ She stepped back from his advance, but she held his gaze and her voice though low-pitched was bleak and hard. ‘It was monstrous and cruel and unforgivable, but there is no punishment I could deal out to you which would fit that crime. If there is a God, he will demand retribution.’