Blood Safari (29 page)

They were listening. The fuckers were tapping the phones and cell phones. How, I didn’t know yet, and I didn’t know who yet, but I knew they were doing it.

Emma’s phone. Somehow or other they were listening in on her calls and her messages. Phatudi’s too? Maybe. But definitely Emma’s.

So many questions. How had they known they should monitor her calls? How long had they been doing it? Were they just lucky? What did it take to tap a cell phone? Did a bunch of khaki-clad bunny-huggers in the Lowveld have access to such technology? Or were they part of something bigger, something more sophisticated?

Don’t worry about what you don’t know. Focus on what you do. They were listening, I was sure of it. That gave me an advantage.

How could I use it?

I looked for soap to wash. There wasn’t a traditional cake. I ran my fingers down the row of bottles. The two in front contained liquid soap in pump dispensers. I squirted some into my palm and washed.

How could I use my new knowledge?

How could I get them? How could I find them?

There was one way. I had to play my cards right. If I was clever and thought it through carefully, it might work. I must fetch Emma’s cell phone. It was in her handbag in the VIP suite at the hospital.

Don’t go looking for them.

Let them come to me.

I pulled on my shorts and lay down on the single bed with my arms behind my head and thought for forty minutes, until I had the whole thing planned.

Then I got up because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. My head was too busy. I went into the sitting room. Tertia’s bedroom door was ajar. Or was she Sasha when she was home? I leaned against the door frame and looked in. There was a large, dramatic four-poster bed with more Indian fabric draped over it and a horde of cushions. From the ceiling hung a framework of silver birds in
flight. There were more paintings against the wall, an easel and paintbrushes in the corner, heavy-duty curtains, a dressing table full of bottles and jars. A bedside cupboard with books, an exercise apparatus, one of those they advertise on morning television to keep the body in shape and stay young.

What did Emma le Roux’s bedroom look like? What was her house like inside?

I sat in the orange-lava-lamp twilight of the sitting room.

Emma’s home would be different from Tertia/Sasha’s. More subtle. Open and clean and light. Her clothes would be white and cream, her furniture of Oregon pine with a little glass and chrome. Her curtains would be open wide to let in the light of day. At night the lamps would be bright.

How people differed.

The things that made us what we were.

I got up and went to Sasha’s bookshelf. Paperbacks from end to end. Dog-eared from being read over and over, or bought second hand?
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.

Searching Sasha.

Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death. Earth Angels: A Pocket Guide for Incarnated Angels, Elementáis, Starpeople, Walk-Ins, and Wizards.

Did she really believe this stuff? Truly? Or was it a sort of game, a way of escaping reality now and then, a form of fantasy?

The Unicom Treasury: Stories, Poems, and Unicom Lore. Dragons and Unicorns: A Natural History. Man, Myth and Magic: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and the Unknown.

And then
Linda Goodman’s Love Signs: A New Approach to the Human Heart.
And
Sexual Astrology: Sensual Compatibility.

I pulled out the last book and opened it. What was Emma’s star sign? She had said she shared a birthday with the old South Africa: 6 April. Another Aries, just like me. I looked in the index and found the reference.
Aries and Aries. An excellent match, with an intense sexual attraction and mutual erotic satisfaction, but it is a high-maintenance
sensual relationship: both man and woman demand lots of sexual attention. Potential for a long-term rehtionship is far above average.

A load of bullshit.

I looked up what the book had to say about the Aries woman:
Turn off the lights, and she will become a tiger, anywhere, any time. But be warned, she is more focused on her own pleasure than on yours.

I shut the book. I went to the bathroom, urinated and then returned to my single room. I closed the door, opened the window in the hope that the night would cool down and turned off the light. I had to sleep. Tomorrow would be an interesting day.

At midnight the racket woke me. I went back to sleep. Not deeply. Restlessly.

At one o’clock I heard drunken voices and a fumbling at the door of the chalet next door.

At half past one the blue door opened. After a while I heard taps running in the bathroom. Between sleep and waking I couldn’t keep time. I smelt the sweet scent of marijuana, heard her in the sitting room. A last joint before bedtime. For the New Year.

Heard the door of my room open quietly.

Then nothing. I opened my eyelids a crack.

Sasha stood in the doorway, shoulder against the door jamb and a hand on a tilted hip. Behind her nakedness was a vague soft light. Not the orange of the sitting room. Something else. Candles. She stood and looked at me. Her face was in deep shadow, unreadable.

‘Lemmer,’ she said very softly, nearly inaudibly.

I don’t like my surname. It rhymes with gemmer, or ginger. It hints at the Afrikaans word for blades, and knife fights in back alleys. Thanks to Herman Charles Bosman it has a certain backward connotation that in my case lies too close to the truth. But it’s better than ‘Martin’ or ‘Fitz’ or ‘Fitzroy’.

My breathing was artificially shallow. A familiar game, for new reasons. I shut my eyes completely.

She stood there for a long time. Once more she said ‘Lemmer’, and when my breathing did not change, she clicked her tongue and I heard her footsteps recede.

Her bed creaked.

Searching Sasha.

A week ago I would have accepted this invitation with gratitude.

Ironic. I felt like laughing. At myself. At people. At life. A few nights ago, I was too scared to stretch out my arm to Emma. Too afraid of rejection, too scared that she would jerk back violently and say, ‘What are you doing, Lemmer?’ with indignation. Too aware of my status, the chasm between us and the consequences of an incorrect assumption.

Emma had stood next to me. Why had she stood beside my bed? Was it because she was a little drunk? Had she remembered the embrace when I had comforted her? Was it because she was lonely, she wanted to be held again, because I was available? Or had she been lost in thought and stood there accidentally? I wasn’t her type. Neither in background, or appearance.

I knew that instant would remain in my head. I would relive it over and over when I lay in my bed at home in the silence of a Loxton night. My single bed.

From Tertia’s room I heard a faint scuffling noise, like muffled footsteps.

With her standing in my doorway there had been no doubt, no question, no difference in position. I was not afraid. Just unavailable. Ironic.

The rhythmic rustling from her bedroom could be ignored or explained away at first. It was slow and soft. But it kept on, way beyond the time frame of logical alternatives.

I pricked my ears. Was it her exercise apparatus? No. Subtler, softer, slyer.

Then the knowledge bloomed like a flower in my brain. It was the sound of a mattress and a bed gently swaying. Endlessly.

Unhurried. Peacefully, the tempo gradually, unconsciously quickening.

A sound joined in. It wasn’t her voice but her breath, forcing past her throat or nose or teeth, keeping time with growing enthusiasm.

My body responded. Faster.

It was very hot in the room.

Harder.

Dear God.

Fiercer. My imagination conjured up the image.

I lay listening, captivated, held. What she was doing was both mean and brilliant.

I wanted to press my hands to my ears. I wanted to make some noise of my own to shut out hers. I did nothing. I lay and listened.

I visualised it. For how long I didn’t know. Four minutes? Eight? Ten?

Eventually she was a machine, racing, fast, in a mad, urgent rush.

If I went in there now, I knew how it would be. Vocally she would encourage me, shout out her joys, she would move artfully, roll her hips with skill, she would turn over and offer a new sensation, she would climb on top, she would know when to withdraw so it would last longer, stretch out the hours, so that she would not have to be alone.

Just like all the rest. Desperate, lonely and meaningless.

My head told me all this. It wasn’t worth it. When everything was over, my conscience would call Emma’s name, but Tertia would want to be held, she would want to light a cigarette and talk about tomorrow.

I got up in one movement. It was only four flowing strides to her door. I saw her on her bed. There was a candle on the bedside cupboard. She lay on her back, knees apart, her beringed finger stroking quickly, the light flickering over her shuddering, sweating body.

She saw me. She had known I would come. Only her eyes betrayed it. Her face was taut with effort and pleasure.

She took her finger away just before I thrust into her violently.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Fuck me.’

I was up at twenty to five.

I didn’t stop to think. I didn’t stop to wash. I took my things and crept out like a coward while she slept deeply under the starry Indian heaven. I walked to the Audi and opened the door quietly, tossed in my bag and drove away.

The sun came up beyond Hazyview, the first day of the New Year.

I stopped at a garage and used the restroom. I could smell her on me when I opened my fly to urinate. I washed my member in the basin with sweet-smelling pink liquid soap. I shaved, brushed my teeth and washed my face, but I didn’t feel clean.

I drove to the hospital where Emma lay. I thought about what I must do, but my brain followed other paths.

I lay on top of and inside her and in the searing heat of the moment I said ‘Sasha’ and something changed in her face, a fleeting moment of intense joy, as if she had been discovered, like an island in the ocean.

She had been seen.

‘Yes!’ she answered with glowing green eyes.

I remembered the first time someone saw me.

It was during my first year as a bodyguard, for the Minister of Transport. It was a summer morning on his farm. I was preparing to go jogging on the dirt tracks between the cornfields. He came out of the homestead with a wide-brimmed hat and a walking stick.

‘Walk with me, Lemmer,’ he said, and we walked in silence up the koppie from where he could survey his whole property.

He was a smoker. He sat on top of a big rock, lit his pipe slowly and said, ‘Where do you come from?’ I gave him a broad outline,
but he wasn’t satisfied. He had a way with people. He made me open up, so that eventually, while the sun came up behind our backs, I told him everything. About my father and mother and the Seapoint years. When I had finished he thought for a long time. Then he said, ‘You are this land.’

Twenty years old, still wet behind the ears, I said, ‘Sir?’

‘Do you know what made this land what it is?’

‘No, sir?’

‘The Afrikaner and the Englishman. You are both of them.’

I didn’t answer. He gazed into the distance and said, ‘But you have choices, son.’

Son.

‘I don’t know if this country has any more choices. The Afrikaner’s claustrophobia and aggression and the slyness of the Englishman; these things have brought us to this. It doesn’t work in Africa.’

I was dumbstruck. He was a member of the National Party cabinet.

He knocked his pipe out against the stone and said to me,
‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.
Do you know what that means?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It’s Zulu. It’s where the word
“ubuntu”
comes from. It means many things. We can only be human through other humans. We are part of a whole, of a greater group. Inextricably. The group is the individual. It means we are never alone, but it also means damage to another is damage to you. It means sympathy, respect, brotherly love, compassion and empathy.’

He looked at me through his thick glasses and said, ‘That is what the white man in Africa must search for. If he doesn’t find it, he will forever be a stranger in this land.’

I was too young and stupid to understand what he was telling me. And I never got the opportunity to ask him about it, because he shot himself, on that same koppie, to save his family the trauma of his terminal disease. But I thought about it over the years. I studied myself and other people, remembered, questioned. I developed the talent to watch their appearance and actions for threatening
behaviour, but also to guess their life stories and ask myself: ‘How am I human through them?’ I wondered about my inability to be part of a whole. The community is a primitive organism with a selectively permeable membrane and I could not be selected, my shape didn’t fit.

Later, when I had more perspective, I wished I could talk to the minister on the koppie again. Tell him Africa was the source of
ubuntu
, that was true. In the eyes of many people I saw the softness, the sympathy, the goodwill, the great desire for peace and love.

But the continent had another side, yang to the yin of
ubuntu.
It was a breeding ground of violence. I wanted to tell him that I could recognise in others the type of man I had become, thanks to my genes and my father’s relentless instruction. That absence in the eyes, like something dead inside, of the man who no longer cares about feeling pain and experiences a certain pressure to dish it out, to hurt others.

And nowhere did I see it more frequently than in Africa. In my travels with the National Party and ANC ministers I saw the world – Europe, the Middle and Far East, and my home continent. And here in the cradle of mankind, in the eyes of politicians and dictators, policemen, soldiers and bodyguards and eventually fellow jailbirds, I recognised the majority of my blood brothers. In the Congo and Nigeria, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, Angola and Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania and Brandvlei Prison. People forged by violence who spread it around like a gospel.