Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘Hi,’ Cameron said quietly, testing his voice. ‘Thanks for being here.’

  Lynn jumped slightly. Her eyes when she looked at him reminded him of the startled look he’d seen in the eyes of a duiker when it had emerged into the sunlight from the from the shade of thick bush and spotted him sitting quietly on a rock a few yards away. After freezing for a second or two the duiker had retreated rapidly into the safety of the bush – Lynn looked as though she would like to do the same.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘Harriet suggested it might be a good idea for someone to be here when you woke, she couldn’t be here herself as she has appointments all day.’

  So Harriet was taking her fence mending of other people’s fences to another level.

  ‘I don’t pay my solicitor to sit beside people’s beds in hospitals,’ Cameron said, ‘not even when the hospital bed is my own. What happened?’

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ Lynn answered, ‘so I can only repeat what I have been told. Apparently the man at the reception desk and the hotel manager heard two shots going off and both rushed to the conservatory where they found you unconscious on the floor, bleeding heavily, and van Zyl in his wheelchair with the top of his head blown off.’

  ‘If the top of his head really was blown off,’ Cameron said, ‘his automatic must have been loaded with dum-dum bullets. Venter always loaded his 9mm service automatic with hollow-nosed bullets. They might well have been standard issue. They are standard issue here, as seen when police so-called “marksmen” pump them at point-blank range into the heads of Brazilian plumbers on tube-trains.’

  ‘I can’t pretend I’m sorry about van Zyl,’ Lynn said, so quietly that Cameron could barely hear her.

  ‘Why should you be?’ Cameron said. ‘The man was an out and out bastard who had been unforgivably cruel to you. The world is a much cleaner and better place for his death.’

  ‘I’m the last person to need to be convinced of that,’ Lynn said. ‘The last live person, that is, I’ve no doubt that there plenty of dead people who would take even less convincing.’

  ‘He was trying to make me lose my temper,’ Cameron said, as it all came back to him. ‘Being cold-bloodedly provocative – telling me I’d as good as thrown Hilton and Nicky out on the trash heap. He ended up succeeding, of course. I don’t know what I was going to do to him but I lent over and grabbed the arms of his wheelchair. Then I remember thinking he was, very bizarrely, getting an enormous erection. He was lifting the automatic under the blanket covering him to point it at me. It took me a fraction of a second too long to realize that it was a gun.’

  ‘Well, they say men like guns because they think of them as extensions of their penises,’ Lynn said. ‘They make them feel powerful. Quite some ejaculation that was – how is your shoulder feeling?’

  ‘Numb. I can’t feel it at all,’ Cameron said, looking at the bag of liquid hanging on the stand next to his bed connected by a tube to his arm. ‘If that bastard was using dum-dum bullets my shoulder must really be a mess. I expect that bag is full of morphine.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Lynn.

  Cameron thought about what van Zyl and his sidekicks had done to Lynn, who hadn’t had the benefit of morphine, and stretched his free arm out towards her chair. He couldn’t reach far enough to touch her, but after a slight hesitation Lynn leant over and held his hand for a moment or two before giving it a gentle squeeze and letting go. Lynn’s hand was much colder than Cameron had expected.

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked. ‘Your hand feels cold.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lynn said, again barely audibly.

  ‘Don’t be sorry – there’s no need to say sorry,’ Cameron said. ‘If you are cold, you are cold, it’s not anything to be sorry about – we just need to work out how to get you warm. But it’s OK to say “sorry” about little things, as long as we both understand that there is no need to say “sorry” about the big thing. At least I hope there isn’t – if you follow me. Sorry, I haven’t put that very well.’

  ‘You’ve put it perfectly well, Cameron,’ Lynn said. ‘But twenty-three years is a very long time and we have both been through a lot. I know I am a very different person from the one I was when you knew me – I expect you are different too. We live in countries six thousand miles apart, so there isn’t going to be much opportunity to say sorry about the little things.’

  ‘How long can you stay over here?’ Cameron said, already certain that he didn’t want Lynn to leave

  ‘Four more weeks at most,’ Lynn said. ‘My sabbatical ends at the beginning of term, and that’s only five weeks away. Five weeks you are almost certainly going to have to spend in here. I’ve still got a couple of papers I need to finish before term starts, not to mention some lectures to prepare. I can do a lot of that on my laptop. Because this is a private ward, the nurses have said I can come and go as I please.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see you there when I woke up,’ Cameron said.

  ‘I just didn’t want you to find yourself alone when you came round,’ Lynn said.

  Cameron had wondered how loaded with meaning her ‘just’ was.

  Lynn had become a fixture in her chair in the corner of the room with her laptop and books for the next few weeks. The wound on Cameron’s head had healed well, but his shoulder was another matter. The surgeon who was responsible for repairing it said Cameron had been lucky. Because the bullet hadn’t impacted directly on the bone, it hadn’t ‘blossomed’ properly, as he put it, so the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been – but it would need at least one, and probably two, more operations. Cameron had echoed George Orwell’s comment after being hit in the throat by a bullet in the Spanish Civil war, telling the surgeon that he couldn’t help thinking that it might have been luckier not to be hit at all. He refrained from commenting on the obscenity of comparing the destructive effect of a dum-dum bullet to the blossoming of a flower.

  Cameron spent a good deal of time lying watching Lynn as she worked. Much of the time she seemed oblivious of his gaze, at others she was conscious of it and looked up at him with a still constrained smile. The past was ever present – and always would be, Cameron thought – but just by being together, without even needing to talk, they seemed to be managing to shift it slightly to one side so that it no longer stood so squarely between them. They were comfortable in each other’s company and, after an initial awkwardness, became comfortable with the hospital staff’s assumption that they were partners. But the more comfortable they became, the more acutely aware Cameron was of how much he would miss Lynn when she had to go back to Cape Town. He wasn’t going to be allowed home for at least a week after Lynn had left.

  Two days before Lynn was due to leave, Cameron woke very early – woken for once not by an incessant electronic beeping but by a feeling of panic about Lynn’s impending departure. The thought of an empty chair in the corner was more than he could bear. Had there been some way of reestablishing their earlier intimacy he felt sure that Lynn would be saying goodbye to him as the partner the hospital staff assumed she was. But being tied to an array of monitors put technical obstacles in the way of making love, and, even if the nurses did think Lynn was his partner, he suspected that they might disapprove of patients making love on their hospital beds. One of his favourite poems, ‘somewhere I have never travelled,’ kept going round and round in his head.

  Lynn came in as usual after the morning traffic had died down, kissed him chastely on his cheek and settled down to put the finishing touches on one of her papers. As the weeks had passed her chair had been drawn, little by little, closer to his bed. After sitting watching her for a while, Cameron ventured the first lines of the poem.

  ‘Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence.’

  ‘Cummings,’ Lynn answered. ‘I’ve always loved that poem. But there are some experiences you can be v
ery glad you have never travelled to, never mind beyond. For my part, I’m very glad nobody has ever shot me in the shoulder with a dum-dum bullet. I’m very glad it wasn’t worse.’

  Cameron stretched his good arm out and rested the back of his hand on Lynn’s knee with his fist closed.

  ‘Your slightest look easily will unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers,’ Cameron quoted.

  Lynn smiled at him and slid one hand under Cameron’s closed fist.

  ‘You open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose,’ Cameron went on, reciting the lines slowly. As he did so, Lynn solemnly extended the fingers of Cameron’s closed hand one by one until his hand was stretched out open on her knee. Holding Cameron’s eyes, she lifted his hand and bent her head forward, planting a kiss in the middle of his palm. Then she gently closed his fingers one by one again so that his hand could hold her kiss.

  ‘When you look at me like that,’ Cameron said, ‘how can I resist going on with “the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses”?’

  Lynn just smiled and leant forward, resting her closed hand on the blanket covering Cameron’s lap, reciting the earlier verse in her turn and inviting Cameron to open her own hand, petal by petal. When he had planted his kiss in her hand and closed her hand over it, Lynn closed her other hand over it too and held both her hands to her chest between her breasts.

  ‘What made you think of that poem?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s been going round in my head all morning,’ Cameron said. ‘In fact I think it started going round in my head when I was still asleep, so I don’t really know – but I think, if anything, it might have been the line that talks about “the power of your intense fragility”. I’ve watched you a lot as you’ve sat in that chair over the past few weeks….’

  ‘I know,’ Lynn said. ‘I’ve been very conscious of that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cameron said. ‘I hope it hasn’t been disconcerting.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ Lynn answered. ‘I’ve rather liked it. Sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘We are obviously getting good at only saying sorry about the little things,’ Cameron said with a smile. ‘Getting back to “the power of your intense fragility”, I’ve been struck by how fragile you seem, when I know how strong you are. I understand from Harriet that you held out for a long time against their beatings.’

  ‘That was only pain,’ Lynn said, and fell silent.

  ‘Jules said she would have survived being beaten by Venter,’ Cameron said to break the silence. ‘She said she knew she could have lived with the pain because she had been through childbirth.’

  ‘I haven’t been through childbirth,’ Lynn said, ‘but I knew I could survive the pain. It was the degradation I couldn’t survive. I was tired to death, almost literally – they keep you awake night after night after night to wipe out your resistance – and it seemed that everything I am would have been annihilated if that man had been allowed to do what he wanted with me. You could smell the fat, sweaty, stinking bastard’s filth from yards away as he got his kicks from beating me. I would have had to find a way to kill myself if he had raped me.’

  ‘Enough, love, enough – you don’t need to be remembering all that,’ Cameron said.

  ‘No, I do, I do need to tell you,’ Lynn said. ‘But I won’t need to talk about it again.’

  Neither of them spoke for a minute or so. It was Lynn who broke the silence.

  ‘Talking about fragility, what are you going to do when they’ve finished putting Humpty-Dumpty’s pieces together again?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, as you can imagine, but I haven’t come up with any answers.’

  ‘Why … why don’t you come and spend a bit of time with me in Cape Town?’ Lynn asked hesitantly, before continuing in a rush: ‘You could carry on with your writing there and finish your book. With three universities within easy reach, I’m sure you could get some lecturing. But you need to know, first, that I haven’t really been close to anybody, not really, since they let me out of prison – and I don’t know if I can. As I said before, I’m a very different person from the one you knew, and I don’t know whether I could ever have a long-term relationship. But I’m not assuming you would want one with me even if I could, I’m just suggesting….’

  ‘It’s OK, Lynn,’ Cameron said. ‘I understand.’

  There was some kind of ambiguity behind the repetition of ‘really’, but now was not the time to explore it.

  ‘I don’t know how long they’ll want me to stay within reach of the hospital,’ Cameron added, ‘and there’s going to be a murder trial here that I’m going to need to testify at – a murder trial that, by way of a change, won’t feature me in the dock.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lynn said. ‘I’d forgotten about that – but you haven’t said you’d like to come.’

  ‘Of course I’d like to come,’ Cameron said. ‘Apart from anything else, what is there here for me to stay for? As van Zyl said to me in one of his saner moments, “You live in a drab terrace house, in a grey post-industrial city, under generally leaden skies.” My allotment has been completely neglected since early spring and will be a jungle by now – a jungle I won’t be able to do anything whatever about with my shoulder like this.’

  Cameron paused for a moment or two before going on, wrestling with the need to be as upfront as Lynn had been, while at the same hoping not to put her off.

  ‘If there were to be any chance of my coming to stay with you, even for a short time,’ he said, ‘I would need to issue my own Health and Safety Warning. I’m still having counselling for PTSD – although, interestingly, I haven’t had any of the dreams that were the main symptom of that since I’ve been in here. You’ll also have gathered that I lose my temper much too easily – although I promise I’ll try to avoid head-butting any of your friends. And Brian would tell you, in his inimitable way, that I somehow manage to be a grumpy old man without even being old.’

  ‘Don’t worry, he has told me all that already,’ Lynn said with a smile.

  Cameron was pleased to see that Lynn’s smile didn’t look quite so constrained any more.

  That had been pretty much it. Lynn had come to say goodbye the next day. Farewell kisses had been meticulously placed on cheeks rather than lips, and declarations of love remained unuttered. But, even when Harriet or Brian had occupied it for a few minutes on one of their brief visits, the chair in the corner had been an achingly empty presence for the rest of the time Cameron spent in hospital.

  Chapter 24

  Cameron had been released from hospital ten days after Lynn had left – initially into the tender care of Brian because there was nobody at his house to look after him – and the day after his release he had booked a flight to Cape Town for the following week. He needed to report back to the hospital in eight weeks’ time, and the trial of Poggenpoel and Jacques had been scheduled for the following February.

  Lynn had come to the airport in Cape Town to meet him. Cameron had taken the day flight from Manchester via Amsterdam, so the flight had arrived late in the evening. Lynn had shown him into the spare room of her flat in Rosebank, just below the railway line. He’d been so tired that he hadn’t been woken by the noise of the passing trains and had slept most of the following day while Lynn was at work. They had made their pilgrimage – or his pilgrimage – to the cemetery, and Cameron had gone to bed early again in preparation for their early morning departure for him to visit the Rhodes Memorial.

  When Cameron had been told that it would take six months for the effects of the general anaesthetic from a four-hour operation to wear off completely, he hadn’t believed it. He wasn’t so sure now. As he sat watching the sunshine spread out over the Cape Flats, all the way to the Drakenstein mountain range beyond Stellenbosch, he still felt tired from the fligh
t, in spite of all the sleep he’d put in the day before. He also felt very apprehensive.

  Lynn had arranged for him to have lunch with her head of department after his morning at the memorial, and that brought him abruptly up against the anxiety that had kept him from ever trying to go back to work in South Africa after the end of apartheid. Although the circumstances of his hasty departure from South Africa had redeemed him in the eyes of many of the anti-apartheid activists who had been given pause to doubt him by the rumours the Special Branch had spread about him, he knew that some people had suspected an elaborate double bluff. The Special Branch might well have considered the early demise of a rogue officer a worthwhile sacrifice if that was what it took to get an agent entry to the ANC in exile. Moreover, nobody had ever discovered precisely what had happened to Mirambo. In the years immediately after Cameron had returned to England with his tail between his legs after his abortive lone attempt to contribute to the struggle, the ANC hadn’t been confident enough about his credentials to allow him near the leadership in exile.

  In the event, Cameron need not have worried. After a drawn-out coffee at the café, Cameron had made his way back down to the university campus and been welcomed by Peter Ngubane, the head of the History Department. Peter could trace his family’s political history back to the early days of the ANC and had, his father told him, been named Peter for the photographer Peter Magubane. Cameron gathered from Peter that the similarity of the two names had done no favours to students and other historians who regularly confused them when citing Peter’s books and articles.

  Peter had been one of a distinguished line of students, including Mandela three decades earlier, who had been expelled from Fort Hare as a reward for their activism. He had completed his undergraduate degree via the University of South Africa while maintaining his political activism and had attracted the malign attention of the security police in the process. When it became clear that that attention was likely to prove terminal, he had gone underground and eventually escaped via the route into Lesotho that Mirambo had hoped to follow. He had been encouraged by the ANC leaders in London to continue his academic studies on the grounds that post-Apartheid South Africa was going to need universities staffed by appropriate numbers of well-qualified black South African academics. Having completed Masters and doctoral degrees at Sussex and Leeds with the support of various scholarships, and having taught for a decade at universities in England and Ireland, he had returned to South Africa to take up a senior lectureship at the University of the Western Cape soon after Mandela had been sworn in as State President. Promotion to his current Head of Department role had followed five years later.