Peter shared Cameron’s research interests and had read a number of his articles. He had been aware of the rumours about Cameron at the time of his hurried departure from South Africa but had been strongly inclined to dismiss them on the basis of what he had read. Nevertheless, as soon as Lynn had raised with him the possibility of a visit from Cameron, Peter had contacted two of the senior members of the ANC he was friendly with to ask their advice. Both men had reassured Peter that as far as the ANC hierarchy was concerned any remaining wisp of suspicion hanging over Cameron had long dispersed. Although nobody had come forward at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to provide any indication as to what had happened to Mirambo, it had become as clear as it ever could be that, whatever it was, Cameron had been in no way responsible.
Peter had rapidly managed to put Cameron at ease on that score, and over a relaxed lunch had even succeeded in making him feel comfortable enough to give Peter an account of what had happened.
The university’s affirmative action policy, which Cameron fully endorsed, meant that Peter couldn’t offer him any formal teaching, even if he had wanted to, but he indicated that the Department was under a lot of pressure where graduate students were concerned and that some supervision and examining might well be possible. As Cameron had gone to the lunch with no more in mind than the hope that he wouldn’t be treated as persona non grata, that was much more than he had expected by way of an indication of acceptance. Peter also told Cameron that a permanent Lectureship, squarely in his research field and for which he was ideally qualified, was soon to be advertised for the new academic year starting in January. It had been taken for granted that Cameron would appreciate that if there were a suitably qualified black candidate he or she would get the appointment.
Lynn drove Cameron back to her flat after lunch and spent the afternoon marking essays while Cameron rested. When Cameron joined her in the kitchen as she was preparing supper, Lynn turned to him and said there was something she needed to tell him.
‘You thought that it was borrowing my car to go to Edendale to look for Mirambo that brought the Special Branch down on me like a ton of bricks, didn’t you?’ Lynn said. In response to Cameron’s nod she went on, ‘Well it wasn’t. Nobody followed you, nobody in Edendale made a note of my car’s number plate. The reason the SB knew you were going, and knew you had borrowed my car, was because Michelle told them.’
‘What?’ Cameron said.
‘I discovered when I was in the cells at the SB offices that Michelle was passing information on to them. What better source of information could they have than the secretary in the History department, who had access to information about staff and students? She had been having an affair with a member of staff in Fine Art, her husband had a propensity for domestic violence, and the SB were blackmailing her.’
‘That explains why Mirambo’s file was empty when I went to try to find that address in Edendale,’ Cameron said. ‘I always suspected someone in admin must have been working for the SB, but I never dreamed it might be our Michelle. Thank God the phone-call I made to ask her to pass the message on to you when I got to Cape Town was so brief.’
‘What message?’ Lynn asked.
‘I tried your office when I got to Cape Town, you were already in a staff-meeting, so I phoned Michelle and asked her to pass the message on to you that I was OK. Don’t tell me you didn’t get the message.’
‘She never said a thing to me,’ Lynn said. ‘As far as I was concerned, you just murdered someone and disappeared out of my life without saying goodbye.’
‘Oh God – I’m sorry,’ Cameron said.
‘It wasn’t your fault, any more than your borrowing my car was responsible for what happened to me afterwards,’ Lynn said. ‘I got the impression that there were other staff members being blackmailed in similar ways, but I never discovered who they were. Anyway, let’s eat.’
Lynn opened a bottle of Rustenberg red wine to go with the spaghetti Bolognese she had cooked. Cameron was glad that the dinner was clearly not intended as a repeat of the one she had prepared for him before they slept together the first time. He restricted himself to one glass of wine but noticed that Lynn kept quietly refilling her glass until there was nothing left in the bottle. Their conversation focussed mainly on Cameron’s discussion with Peter Ngubane over lunch.
As they moved from the kitchen to sit down in the lounge, Cameron, walking just behind Lynn, reached out with his usable hand to catch her gently by the shoulder and turned her round to face him.
‘Lynn, my love,’ Cameron said, ‘I’m sure you are right in saying that we are, in some ways, different people from the ones who knew and loved each other twenty-three years ago. We are certainly older than we were, and we’ve been through some very different, and sometimes extremely unpleasant, experiences, but I’m not going to be able to carry on as though we’ve only just met. I enjoyed your company and valued your support before Jules left me, and I grew to love you very deeply in the few short weeks we lived together. As I watched you sitting in that chair in my room in the hospital, I realised just how much I must have loved you through all these years, no matter how hard I tried not to think about you. I can’t stay here with you and pretend that we are such different people that we don’t have a shared history.’
As Lynn looked up at him, Cameron could see tears welling in her eyes.
‘But Cameron part of that history is so ugly we can only start again as different people,’ Lynn said. ‘I betrayed you, Cameron. I loved you, and still love you, but to stop myself being tortured I was prepared to lead you to your death.’
Lynn was crying now, but Cameron couldn’t put his arms around her to comfort her. It’s impossible to hold someone close when one arm is in a sling and your shoulder feels as if it is falling apart.
‘Lynn, my dear love, everyone will have what Malcolm Gladwell would call a tipping point – Winston Smith’s Room 101, if you like – the point beyond which they will do anything to stop the torture. It is the torturer’s business to find and exploit that point. Often they succeed, sometimes they don’t – but when they don’t it doesn’t mean that the person being tortured, however brave and resilient, doesn’t have a tipping point. It just means that the torturers didn’t manage to find it. I’ve been lucky – as yet nobody has had the pleasure of torturing me. If they had, I’m sure that I would have cracked very quickly. You managed to withstand their barbarity much longer than most people would.’
Cameron put his good arm round Lynn as best he could and pulled her gently against him so that her forehead was resting on his right shoulder. He could feel her tears wetting his shirt.
‘Lynn, may I kiss you?’ Cameron asked quietly.
‘Yes please, gently,’ Lynn said, turning her face up towards him, her eyes closed and tears still making their way down her cheeks.
Cameron kissed her gently on the lips, and then kissed her on her forehead as she rested her head back on his shoulder. He changed the position of the arm holding her so that he could stroke her hair.
‘What I haven’t told you, Cameron,’ Lynn said, so quietly it came out almost as a whisper, ‘is that I’ve been in counselling for twenty years now and I still don’t know if I will ever be able to make love with a man again.’
Cameron felt a sudden fearful emptiness in the pit of his stomach.
‘Have you tried making love with a woman, then?’ he asked as evenly as he could.
‘Yes,’ Lynn said, ‘but it didn’t work. I didn’t enjoy it and I couldn’t come. I guess I’m just neither gay nor bisexual. I’m sure it wasn’t in any way the fault of the woman I went to bed with – she was very sweet and very attractive.’
‘I guess, some people are, and some people aren’t,’ Cameron said, trying to speak in a measured way that would disguise the surge of relief he was feeling.
Lynn didn’t say anything.
‘Sex isn’t the be all and end all,’ Cameron went on after a few moments. ‘It isn’t a case of “take it or leave it” for me, but as one gets older it becomes less urgent. Closeness is what matters. Just having you close to me in the hospital made all the difference – I’m quite sure it speeded up my healing.’
‘I’m scared, Cameron,’ Lynn said, ‘scared and scarred – scared among other things that my scars might turn you off. Do you remember how I undressed in front of you the first time we made love? And do you remember how I walked in front of you swaying my bottom as an invitation to you to follow me to my bed?’
‘How could I ever forget?’ Cameron said.
‘I’m scared that you wouldn’t want to follow me now,’ Lynn said.
‘Because of the marks they left?’ Cameron asked.
Lynn nodded mutely, biting her lower lip.
‘I know its easy to say,’ Cameron said, ‘but you should be proud of them. I don’t need to see them to know that they are nothing to be ashamed of. Every mark is a mark of courage, evidence that they had to hit you again because hitting you the previous time didn’t get them what they wanted. And, talking about scars, how much of a turn-on do you think this shoulder of mine is going to be once it gets undressed? Your scars won’t get in the way of you being sexy if you want to be – and nothing could stop me from finding you sexy. I’m not, incidentally, suggesting you should want to be sexy now.’
‘I don’t,’ Lynn said. ‘My body has felt deadened ever since they did that to me. But thank you, Cameron. There’s something else even bigger I’m scared about. I’m not sure if I should tell you this, and I can’t articulate it properly in my own words. I realised what it was in the hospital, when we were opening and closing each other’s fingers like petals while we recited that verse from “somewhere i have never travelled”. I remembered how the next verse goes:
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending….
These last few weeks I’ve sensed the possibility of opening, as if just being with you might allow me to open, petal by petal, myself, after years and years of being tightly closed around that self. My fear is that, if you wished to, you could close me up again – and that if that happened my life really would shut. cummings’ flower shuts because it imagines the snow. I wouldn’t be imagining the cold – I would die of it. It might be sudden but it certainly wouldn’t be beautiful. I’m terrified of being so vulnerable.’
‘Would you believe me if I told you I had been thinking exactly the same thing?’ Cameron asked. ‘And cummings really is talking in ultimate terms – it doesn’t get much more terminal than his saying that her intense fragility renders “death and forever with each breathing.” I, too, am afraid of being so exposed to death and forever. But the image of the snow carefully everywhere descending is an image of infinite gentleness. We just need to be that gentle with each another – remember the last line, “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” It doesn’t get any more gentle than that. Anyway, I know, as certainly as I have ever known anything, that my wish will never be to close you.’
‘And mine will never be to close you,’ Lynn said quietly, before going on more brightly, ‘anyway the snow never descends, carefully or otherwise, on Cape Town and only very seldom on Table Mountain. We get plenty of the gentle rain from heaven in winter – but that’s different.’
‘Sheffield winters are never short of snow,’ Cameron said, ‘but it doesn’t descend carefully – it usually blasts in on a gale from the North West and does its best to smother the seven hills. I’m going to need that gentle rain to help my roots grow back deep down into the rocky soil of this land I’ve been away from for so long.’
‘If we can be together,’ Lynn said, ‘I’m sure that same gentle rain, carefully everywhere descending, while you touch me with your gentleness, will bring my body back to life. But it could take a long time.’
‘Time, my love, is the one thing I have in abundance,’ Cameron said. ‘I’m not in any hurry – and at the moment I only have one usable arm anyway.’
Appendix
‘Security’: Forest Gate
by
Cameron Beaumont
At 4am on 2nd June 2006, Hanif Dogha was woken by the noise of breaking glass and splintering wood as the door of the terrace house his brother Ayub was renting at 48 Lansdown Road in Forest Gate in east London was smashed open. Ayub, who was an Imam at the local mosque, was already at work, but Ayub’s partner, Rukhsana, was at home with their baby. Two of Ayub’s adult nephews were also in the house. As Hanif got out of bed, the door of the bedroom burst open and he found himself confronted by a man dressed in black who was pointing an MP5 carbine at him. He later told reporters from The Guardian that he was so terrified he thought he was going to die and went on to say: ‘I saw a guy with a machine gun pointing and he hit me on the side of the head straight away with the butt. Another man hit me behind my knees, then tied my hands with plasticuffs.’1 One of the men then took out a bandage and put it on Hanif’s head to stop the flow of blood from a wound that later required stitching in hospital. Hanif’s timing had clearly been less than ideal when it came to choosing when to pay his brother a visit.
Rukhsana had been in the bathroom when the house was invaded. She told reporters that she ran back to her room thinking that the men must be thieves. It was only when they told her to pick up her baby and go with them to the police station that she realized they were policemen. Rukhsana asked if she could prepare some milk for the baby and put some clothes on because she was in her nightie, but both requests were refused.
Everyone in the house was taken to the Plaistow police station where they all – apart, one assumes, from the eight month old baby – had their DNA and fingerprints taken and were questioned. None of them was arrested and they were released without charge twelve hours later. They were, however, told that they couldn’t return home because the house they were living in had been sealed off to be searched. It took seven days for the search to be completed.2
The family’s solicitor, Gareth Pierce, commented: ‘They were never arrested, instead they were assaulted and unlawfully detained. Police officers are particularly warned that any blow to the head is potentially fatal. This was as lawless as the wild west.’
What happened at 48 Lansdown Road that morning was, however, just a sideshow. The main drama was being played out next door at number 46 with a cast, if not of thousands, certainly of hundreds. Some 250 police officers had been mobilized for a raid on this modest mid-terrace house on the strength of intelligence that a device of some sort, possibly a suicide vest, that could explode and spread either chemical or biological agents, was being manufactured there for use in a terrorist attack. The police contingent included officers from Scotland Yard’s S019 elite firearms unit.
Fifteen of the 250 police officers deployed that morning burst into No. 46 without announcing themselves as police. They had come to arrest Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, and his brother Abdul Koyai, 20, both British-born, who lived there with their Bangladeshi parents, Abul Kalam and Alif Jan. Besides apprehending the two suspected terrorists, the police had been instructed to search for a chemical bomb.3 They weren’t about to take any chances, as the subsequent IPCC report tells us:
A number of specialist firearms teams from CO19 were tasked to carry out the entry into both premises. Because of the information all the officers wore full Chemical, Biological, Nuclear and Radiological (CBNR) suits and respirators. The suits are made up of 3 layers of clothing, two pairs of gloves (inner of cloth and outer of rubber), cloth boots and rubber overboots. The officers also wore bullet resistant vests, equipment vests, ear defenders, helmets and radios. In addition the officers carried their personal issue Glock 17 pistols and a variety of ot
her weapons including the Heckler and Koch MP5 carbine.4
Abdul Koyai, who was sleeping in an attic room, was woken by the sound of breaking glass and, thinking that a burglary was underway, started shouting to alert the family. Abdul Kahar, whose bedroom was on the first floor, heard his younger brother shouting and headed down the stairs to investigate. He came face to face with the leading policeman on the half-landing of the staircase where a bullet from a Heckler and Koch MP5 was fired that hit him in the chest and exited through his shoulder, fortunately without hitting any vital organs.
In his testimony to the subsequent Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation into his shooting, Abdul Kahar said that as he moved down the stairs to the half-landing he saw a number of men dressed all in black, at least one of whom had something covering his face. He did not hear them speaking or realise they were police officers, and consequently believed that the family was being robbed. He said that when he was less than three feet from the men there was a bang and an orange flash as he was shot. The IPCC investigation subsequently accepted the findings of a forensic scientist who testified that the shot could not have been fired from a distance of more than two inches from Abdul Kahar’s chest and concluded that:
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