Treasonous

by David Hickson

  I was about to suggest that it was a good thing in that case that he was one of a kind, but Fat-Boy didn’t seem in the mood for flippancy. Besides, I wondered whether I would do the same, and I was hoping Fat-Boy would share the last cigarette.

  “I thought you’d end up here at the arse end of Africa,” said Chandler. “Going back to Dorset was never going to be your thing, and with your mother being from here ... They say South Africans always find their way home.”

  “Even half South Africans,” I said. Chandler lit the gas ring with a pop and watched as the flame settled. He gave a nod of approval. Our field kitchen was nearly complete. The fridge hummed quietly in the corner, the trestle table had fresh chopping boards and racks of knives, a portable cupboard unit was filled with dry goods, and a photo-flood light reflected an even glow off the concrete ceiling, powered by the diesel generator we’d set up in the basement.

  “That doesn’t explain why you stayed on here,” I said. “There’s no South African blood in you.”

  “Oh, you know,” Chandler shrugged. “Sun, the healthy climate … happy memories.”

  “No relatives? Friends?”

  “Associates,” he said. “You know how it goes … join the army, travel to distant places, meet new and interesting people …”

  He paused and lit the other gas plate, which popped and fizzed.

  “… and then kill them.” I provided the punchline to the old joke. He rewarded me with a tight smile.

  “There were a few that we didn’t kill, weren’t there?”

  “I like to think so,” I said.

  “So do I,” said Chandler, “so do I.” Then he told me about the menu he had planned for the week that we would be spending at the match factory. Chandler had always loved fine food and had dedicated himself in recent years to perfecting his culinary skills. I said it all sounded good, and he told me I would have to step onto the balcony if I wanted to light Fat-Boy’s last cigarette and so I did that.

  It was late afternoon, but the skies were ominously dark with some trouble brewing on the horizon. Chandler joined me a few minutes later.

  “This is going to be fine,” said Chandler as if I’d expressed some concern. “We’ll make a good team. Very good.”

  Chandler showed his nerves by constantly repeating the affirmation that everything would be fine. He’d always done it. I’d thought it was his idea of boosting morale, but I soon realised that he did it for himself and his own morale, no one else’s.

  “Fat-Boy has encouraging things to say about your leadership,” I said.

  Chandler smiled. “But he gave you a hard time? Did he complain about the cattle?”

  “He didn’t mention any cattle.”

  “Then you have a treat in store. Ask him about the cattle massacre of 1800-and-something. It was all our fault. The British people. He has a few screws loose, I told you that. But he’s good. The best.”

  That seemed like the perfect opening for me to ask Chandler about the years that had passed since the helicopters had dropped us into North Kivu. With Brian, and our optimistic futures. The head shrinkers who had examined me afterwards with their toy magnifying glasses had told me life would return to normal, just as it had for my Captain Chandler. But I discovered later that Chandler’s life had not returned to normal. He had lasted only three weeks with the psychologists. Then he’d packed his bags, thrown their blue and yellow pills in their faces and walked out. He’d boarded a plane the next day. At least that’s what I’d heard. Not from the blue and yellow pill people of course; they had told me all along that Chandler was doing just fine, and why couldn’t I do more like him?

  Perhaps in the end I had done like him. As different as we were, our stars were inexorably crossed, and here I was again blowing the smoke of my cigarette downwind from him as he gazed up at the sky as if he was waiting for the stars to come out so he could navigate a way out of all this. Brian might have been my closest friend, but he had been like a son to Chandler. And so instead of asking Chandler how he’d started working with the lunatic snoop-man Fat-Boy, or how he and Robyn had started their criminal careers, or how he’d got into this whole game, I said simply, “I’ll ask him about the cattle then.”

  Chandler nodded with approval. “You do that,” he said and gave me the tight-lipped smile that had always made me think everything would turn out okay. Then it occurred to me that his insistence that we cloister ourselves in this isolated space as we prepared for the task ahead was largely for my benefit. He wanted to watch me. Despite years of serving together, Chandler was still not certain he could trust me. I would have to prove that he could.

  Fifteen

  That evening we carried a folding table and chairs up to the roof, and Fat-Boy fetched pizza and beer because our gourmet dining would only start the next day. We sat up there with Fat-Boy’s mini satellite dish catching moments of the sunset which oozed under the clouds, an amateur artist exploring the range of oranges and slashing them in great angry brush strokes until the low cloud base finally got the better of him. Behind us loomed the flat-topped Table Mountain, to the left the lights of the city, and to the right the great plain of the Cape Flats over which the flickering lights of airliners etched their arrival routes like aliens staging an invasion.

  “Royal Guards. That’s where I served,” said Fat-Boy, who was brooding over our earlier discussion and clearly wanted to draw Chandler out on the subject of the military.

  None of us responded, and so he elaborated. “Fucked me up.”

  “I didn’t think they accepted Xhosas,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Bubbles. Gave me my own horse.”

  “A big one?” enquired Chandler politely.

  “Yeah, a big one,” said Fat-Boy.

  “Not the Swedish Royal Guard then,” said Chandler. “The Queen’s Guard?”

  “That was us,” said Fat-Boy. “Protecting the old lady. Up and down on our horses.”

  “You’re a lunatic. Have I ever told you that, Stanley?”

  Fat-Boy glared at Chandler over the thick end of his beer bottle as he finished it.

  “You’re not here because of your military service, as remarkable as I’m sure that was,” said Chandler. “So you can stop making up stories. All we need from you right now is to get that little bird singing.” He indicated the dish in its tinfoil wrapping.

  “She’ll sing alright, Colonel.”

  “You’re certain they have a patch bay on the roof?”

  “What’s certain, Colonel? What does that mean? You think I’m psychic? They’ll have one somewhere up there. We’ve been over the wiring diagrams, and I’ve installed enough of those doozies to know. You don’t run hard lines to all those cameras. There’ll be a patch bay. Tomorrow I’ll locate it. Easy peasy.”

  “You’ll do it, Fat-Boy,” said Robyn who had rigged an extra camp chair to form a couch, and was reclining like a cat, her legs resting on my lap. “You’ve never let us down,” she said, and blew out a cloud of smoke. Her eyes were half closed, whether from the smoke or exhaustion, I wasn’t sure. There was a moment’s silence as the implications of the fact that Fat-Boy hadn’t let us down before whirled about in the smoke. Robyn bit her lip and gave me a coy smile. Strictly speaking she hadn’t broken Chandler’s rule about them discussing previous jobs.

  “Besides,” said Fat-Boy, who had not noticed Robyn’s slip. “I’ll have the war hero with me.” He gave me a glum look to show me how little he was looking forward to it.

  “You and the Angel Gabriel will do just fine,” said Chandler.

  “Sure,” said Fat-Boy without enthusiasm. I didn’t deny his ironic war hero epithet, but there was very little heroic that I could remember of my life as a soldier, particularly in the later years. I’d been a square peg trying to fit myself into the round hole that the army cut out for me – until I joined Chandler’s squad and realised I was not the only one who didn’t fit. We had been a squad of misfits. Nothing that we did was in any way heroic.

>   “You want that last piece of pizza, Colonel?” Of all of us, I suspected that Fat-Boy was the only one not standing with one foot in the past.

  “You go ahead Fat-Boy, I’ve had my share.”

  “Too right you have,” said Fat-Boy helping himself, and opening another beer. “’Cos you’re a lion, Colonel, that’s what you are. You guys ready for a bit of Xhosa culture?”

  Robyn rolled her head to see Fat-Boy better. “Hit us, Fat-Boy,” she said.

  Fat-Boy took a deep slug of beer.

  “So there was this lion, his buddy the wolf and a sneaky fox,” said Fat-Boy, indicating each of us in turn with the neck of his beer bottle. “They went out hunting together and got themselves a good haul. A nice juicy buffalo, a fat zebra and a little rabbit for afters. Later, while the wolf is getting the fire going, the lion comes up to him and says ‘Mr Wolf, would you be so kind as to divide the meat for us today?’ The wolf says, ‘I think it best, your royal highness that you should have the buffalo and my friend the fox should take the rabbit.’” Fat-Boy took a bite of pizza and chewed it noisily. Behind him the silent flickering light of an airliner banked for final approach over Tygerberg. “’Me,’ says the wolf, ‘I shall be most content with that zebra.’ On hearing this, the lion was furious. He raised his mighty paw and struck the wolf on the head.” Fat-Boy demonstrated and splashed beer over the table. “The wolf fell to the ground and died. His skull had been cracked by that blow. The fox says nothing, and the lion, he pads quietly over to the fox, and says to him, ‘Now Mr Fox, you should be so kind as to try and divide our meal better.’ The fox was frightened, of course, but he didn’t show it. He spoke quietly and solemnly. ‘The buffalo will be your midday dinner, sir, the zebra will be your Majesty's supper and the rabbit will be your breakfast tomorrow morning.’ The lion is much pleased by this, also surprised. He asks the fox, ‘When did you gain so much wisdom?’ The fox replies, ‘Your Royal Highness, when I heard the wolf's skull cracking.”

  “That’s not a Xhosa story,” said Robyn.

  “It is too,” said Fat-Boy. “Baked into our culture it is.”

  “When I heard the wolf’s skull cracking,” said Chandler, and he bared his teeth. “That’s a good one. Very good.” And he laughed. It was one of only a handful of times I have ever heard Chandler laugh.

  We parked the white panel van before oh seven hundred hours, and Fat-Boy grumbled as we sat in the back and drank the espresso shots Chandler had provided in a flask. He looked into his plastic mug and then across to mine.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” he asked.

  “Espresso. It comes in small servings.”

  He looked unconvinced but threw his shot back and pulled a face at the bitterness of it. I guessed that Chandler had only sent the flask because I’d made a fuss about the early hour. It wasn’t the kind of kit that he normally sent Fat-Boy out with.

  “Couldn’t they have found one my size, for fuck’s sake?” said Fat-Boy as he tried to squeeze the shirt together over his belly where a button had popped.

  “When did you see a Telkom guy in a suit that fitted?” I said to make him feel better about it, but he poked at his flesh despondently as if he might be able to squeeze it back in.

  “You and sex bomb an item?” he said.

  “No.”

  Fat-Boy delivered a side-looking sneer. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not interested. Not my league,” he said. “Besides, she’s a skinny bitch. I prefer something to hold on to. Stick insects don’t do it for me. Anyway, Colonel wouldn’t approve.”

  “You worked much with him?” I asked casually.

  Fat-Boy allowed his lazy eye to droop as he gazed out at the desolate street and considered that. “Never,” he said. “Never worked with him before.”

  I left it at that. We had an hour to kill before the curtain went up, but if he didn’t want to talk about Chandler, I would respect that.

  “You often dream these things?” asked Fat-Boy.

  “What things?”

  “Where you need to get yourself a file out the archives. All desperate like, and you need a genius like me and a screwball like sex bomb to do it for you.”

  “Not often,” I said.

  “Don’t like dreams,” said Fat-Boy. “I told the Colonel that but he said the yellow metal we’re pulling out’ll be good for my health. What I don’t get is why he’s getting us twisted up in your shit. Get the gold, no problems, but why bother with your bits of paper? Where’s the benefit? Is what I say. When the Colonel said it was paper you were after I said that was okay. I can do paper, so long as it’s wrapped in bundles and fits nicely into my top pocket. Then he says you gonna bring down the new president with your paper. Why the fuck you wanna do that?”

  “It’s about exposing the truth,” I said. “Not bringing anyone down.”

  “So what if he killed some bitch?” said Fat-Boy. “Colonel said you wanna bring him down for that.”

  “You don’t think that’s a problem?”

  “Problem?” said Fat-Boy, and he opened his lazy eye to project his scorn. “You all tried to kill him, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think that the blame for the fire he survived can be laid at my feet.”

  “Sure it can. That’s the point, isn’t it? He’s the Phoenix, our president is. You all tried to kill him. Why shouldn’t he kill a few bitches in return? I said to Colonel: what makes Bubbles so special he thinks he can bring the Phoenix down?”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Said I didn’t know you as well as he did.”

  Fat-Boy’s cheeks sagged, and he pouted his lips as he searched my face for some redeeming quality that might explain it. He didn’t find one. “I told him I don’t like the Brits,” he said as if proving a point.

  “Even though he is one?”

  “I like him for other reasons,” said Fat-Boy.

  “And when he told you I wasn’t a Brit?”

  “I like the Yanks less than I like the Brits,” said Fat-Boy.

  “My father was Canadian. Yanks are from the United States.”

  “Same thing,” said Fat-Boy.

  “In the same way that the Xhosas and Zulus are the same?”

  Fat-Boy focused his lazy eye on me. He knew I was taunting him, but he rose to it anyway.

  “Ain’t nothing the same,” he said. “’Cept maybe the colour pencil you use in your kiddie books. Actually … no, even our colours is different. You seen those brothers from the Sudan? They’re blue man, nothing black about them. We’re all different, even one clan to the other is different.”

  “Clan?”

  “I’m Khumalo. The Khumalo clan is the most trustworthy. AmaXhosa have clans. Your clan is your people. You don’t marry your clan, they’re like your family. Same ancestors, aren’t they?”

  “Is there a clan that sounds like ‘fuck you’?” I asked with Johansson’s sneering voice sounding an echo in my mind.

  Fat-Boy looked at me to be sure I was not mocking him. He nodded.

  “Far-coo,” he said. “F-A-K-U, Faku. Khumalo are better though.”

  We watched some early risers making their way proudly down the road with the skip in their step that people get when they’ve got the best parking spot.

  “The Colonel says any case you not doing this ‘cos of the new president, he says you don’t give a shit.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said.

  “He said you doing it ‘cos you got problems, personal problems.”

  Fat-Boy’s good eye matched the droop of the lazy one so he could better see my problems. I gave him a smile to show I didn’t hold it against him or his Colonel. A drizzle started to fall, and the early risers picked up their pace as they realised they’d left their umbrellas at home.

  “Sex bomb Robs says it has to do with your past,” said Fat-Boy, making it clear that he hadn’t fallen for that one. “Something you did together in the army. Some boyfriend of hers who died. That’s why you doing it, and that’s why t
he Colonel’s helping you. She says you’ve got big issues, and he’s doing it because of your shared past or some shit. She’s a real psychologist that one.”

  At oh eight hundred hours sharp Fat-Boy clambered out of the panel van and placed the metal trestles to form a protective square around the junction box. I stayed in the back of the van because the Telkom technicians usually went solo. Fat-Boy pulled the metal handle with the square socket out of his pocket and inserted it into the front panel of the box. The lever was stiff, but after a bit of jiggling and an extra effort that had his cheeks pop out like a jazz trumpeter it gave way and the panel swung open, revealing about a thousand coloured wires scrambled like a Pollock painting. Fat-Boy seemed undeterred, and if I hadn’t known what the plan was, I would have thrown in the towel at the thought of finding the correct wires in that jumbled mess. I passed Fat-Boy his little folding stool, and he sat down in front of the panel and unrolled the canvas bag of tools on the ground. He pulled his cap lower against the light drizzle. “Ready?” I asked.

  “Give me a moment to get in the zone,” he said. “Hang on while I find my mandala.” He glared at me. “Of course I’m fucking ready, what the fuck do you think?”

  I dialled the number on the cheap phone Chandler had given me the night before. It rang three times and was answered. Gold standard service that was. “How may I direct your call?” asked the receptionist. I ended the call.

  “OK, go,” I said.

  Fat-Boy used a large screwdriver and a pair of pliers to detach the entire top section of the junction box. It came away like the innards of a mechanical animal, trailing wires and metal spikes. Over a hundred phone lines died without a whimper. He turned to me and nodded. I hit the redial button. Three rings and an answer. I let the receptionist complete the greeting. “Sorry,” I said. “Wrong number.” I shook my head and Fat-Boy inserted the panel again, careful to line up all the metal spikes. He fastened the screws and then moved on to the next one.

  It was on the fifth section of eight that the Gold Archives stopped answering. Fat-Boy stood up and grabbed a long torch from the back of the van, as well as a case with cables and another of his favourite breakfast dishes inside. He gave me a nod.