Does it Hurt to Die

Christian de Villiers is about to embark on the journey of his life. A
South African who moved to Australia with his mother when he was four,
nineteen-year-old Christian doesn't feel that he can move on and
progress with the next stage of his life until he has found the answers
to the mystery surrounding his father's death. With the support of his
father's old friend Mike, Christian feels that he is coming closer to
understanding his father, the surgeon, but are the secrets hidden for a
reason and will those secrets threaten Christian's safety?              

Paul Anderson lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is a surgeon who specialises in upper gastrointestinal and hepatobiliary surgery. Born in Rotorua, New Zealand, his tertiary education began at Waikato University before he went on to further studies in Scotland, California, and South Africa where he completed both a Ph.D. and a medical degree. The passion for writing has latently manifested, thanks to the encouragement and direction of many friends.

Paul G. Anderson

Does It Hurt To Die

Copyright
© Paul G. Anderson (2014)

The right of Paul G. Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN
9781784550981

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2014)

Austin
Macauley Publishers Ltd.

25 Canada Square

Canary
Wharf 

London
 

E14 5LB

Acknowledgments

With any writing, there are many contributions in many different forms. They are all extremely valuable and each in their own way adds to the final story and pleasure of reading. Pre-eminent on the gratefulness ladder, has to be the family that you have who support you. They might be biased, but there are days when you love their bias. Their belief in your writing and its value to others as entertainment is an invaluable spur when the creative well has only a few lo
nely drops left in the bottom.

Gabrielle
, a wonderful sister and my favourite son Jordan. Independently you are both of inestimable value. Gabrielle your unswerving and consistent enthusiasm always astounds. Jordan has read so many books it embarrasses his father, but in having done that provides invaluable analysis and critique. Thank you for the suggestions, kiddo you are an invaluable part of writing.

At eighteen years of age, Christian de Villiers had an angulated coltish appearance. Shoulders that were broad but without significant muscle definition and rakishly long legs suggested that testosterone had not yet finished its subtle hormonal sculpturing. He was a head taller than most boys his age. A leptorrhine nose was framed within a shock of wavy sun-bleached hair that reached his shoulders. It was his smile that was most disarming. It assuaged the impact of his physical presence and drew you to the youthful inquisition that resided in his eyes. Nearly everyone remarked on how similar in appearance he was to his father, with one exception—his mother.

Christian had moved to Adelaide from Cape Town in South Africa with his mother, Renata, when he was four years old. The beautiful bluestone villa that they lived in for the next fifteen years was typical of many Adelaide homes. Blocks of bluestone, mined in South Australia at the turn of the century, had then been smoothed with chisels and cemented to form solid walls. The thickness of the walls provided warmth in winter, and protection in summer from the harsh forty degree heat. The bluestone block in their villa was set off with an elegant woodwork edging around the top of a whitewashed veranda, which contrasted starkly the deep blue corrugated roof. He had liked it from the moment they first moved in.

Despite the solid walls and its elegance, Christian had come to understand their villa was not maintenance free. Every few years the wooden parts of the house needed painting and protecting from the termites, which were endemic in South Australia. His mother had insisted from an early age that privilege was earned and not a birthright. Each time the house was due to be painted there was no discussion, just the presentation of sandpaper and paintbrush and a look which demanded compliance. He effectively became a labourer’s navvy for the week that it took to complete the treatment and painting. He hated doing it, but more so the apparent satisfaction it gave his mother to see him doing menial work. What he was meant to learn from this he could neither work out nor get his mother to explain.

Now nearly nineteen years of age, he felt there were other things he could more successfully do with his time, especially as he knew his mother could afford to employ someone. However, he had never been able to change his mother’s mind once it was made up and guessed it would not probably happen now. He knew it was somehow related to her Teutonic background: some kind of genetic inflexibility which demanded perfection, a standard which he found difficult to live up to and deal with at times. He often wondered how his father had dealt with his mother.

Jannie de Villiers, Christian’s father, was murdered in Cape Town just before Christian’s fourth birthday. Christian knew he was a surgeon and that he had been the head of the Cape Town liver transplant unit. He also knew that he had been caught up in a terrorist attack carried out by a radical black group who wanted to destroy the apartheid government. His father had survived that only to be murdered a week or so later. What was particularly strange about his father’s death was that no one, especially not his mother, seemed to want to give him any more information about why or how his father had died. The older that he grew the more it irritated him that no one would talk about his father.

Over the years, Christian had read on the Internet how his father had survived the terrorist attack on a church in Cape Town, in which twenty people were killed and fifty seriously maimed. The act of terrorism had divided the country. It seemed as a result of that attack, black people were considered even more unfit for democracy by the ruling white government. He had read how his father was seriously injured and had been interviewed on television and appeared in newspapers. There was, however, very little on his father’s subsequent killing. The
Cape Times
newspaper suggested that it was the unfortunate consequence of a robbery gone wrong. However, he could not imagine his father not putting up a fight or there not being a report of his resistance. It all seemed so incomplete—a puzzle that needed all the pieces arranged more neatly, at least in his mind.

Soon after his father’s death, his mother had decided that it was safer to leave the country. Through a job advertisement, Adelaide had been chosen because of the work potential for his mother, who was a medical doctor and pathologist. Like Cape Town, Adelaide had beautiful surrounding vineyards. His mother often used to remark that McLaren Vale and Barossa Valley reminded her of Paarl and Stellenbosch.

Christian could remember little of Cape Town or his father, although at times he would think there was something in his subconscious related to his father’s death that he could not quite access. Try as he might, he could never recall more than an uneasy feeling when thinking of his father. When he first arrived in Australia, he had had nightmares about him. He would awake crying out for his mother certain that he could see his father lying by a pool bleeding. His mother would reassure him until eventually he went back to sleep. With time, the nightmares became less frequent, but there was a disquiet that remained somewhere deep inside. He tried harder to research the murder as he got older, feeling that the disquiet would only settle once he knew what had happened to his father.

There were certain other strange things that he could not account for that he thought contributed to that disquiet. Christian knew his mother was professionally successful and there was not much in life that they had to worry about financially, but he had also been aware that his father had provided an offshore bank account. He had heard his mother discuss it with friends, obviously concerned that in some way this linked her to whatever Jannie de Villiers had been involved with in South Africa, before he was killed. When he asked his mother about it, she would never answer other than it was something that he did not need to concern himself about. That phrase to Christian was one of the most annoying answers he ever received from his mother and compelled him to find out more.

That his father had left them an offshore bank account initially hardly raised too many questions in his mind about where the money had come from. After all, his father was a surgeon who travelled abroad. That was until he heard his mother discuss with an old South African friend whether they should use it at all. Her friend, anaesthetist Charles Viljoen, had argued that it was their inheritance and provision for a future life, to which no past guilt could be associated.

He had not really understood the discussion but knew in some strange way it was related to what had happened to his father. If it had just been a straightforward murder, why should there be an overseas bank account with guilt associated with it. Other small things also piqued his curiosity about his father. After they arrived in Adelaide, there were the strange phone calls, which used to occur monthly. He remembered that they had seemed to frighten his mother. The phone calls continued for quite a few years before mysteriously stopping.

His mother had quickly established herself in the Adelaide medical community and had become a senior partner in a private pathology laboratory. Within a very short time she became a sought-after consultant in genetic counselling, an area of pathology that she had specialised in. As her reputation grew, she became a sought-after expert witness in profiling for DNA paternity suits. She would often talk about some of the cases to him, which intrigued Christian from an early age and helped spur his interest in doing medicine one day.

The other thing that intrigued him about his mother was why she had never re-married. She was of medium height, had natural blond hair which she usually wore pulled back in a bun, was of slim build and always dressed beautifully. He thought, in a biased-son-sort-of way, that she was very attractive. Male colleagues from work would often call in but were never encouraged to go beyond friendship, let alone stay overnight. That no man had featured in her life since his father had died was puzzling. It was something he never really understood. He wondered whether it was because the love that she had had for his father had run so deep that no one else measured up to him. The alternative, he sometimes reasoned, was that his father’s death was so traumatic that she never wanted to be involved in a serious relationship again. It puzzled him, though, that she never seemed to want to discuss anything significant about his father.

Sometimes Christian thought that she had completely forgotten about the life that they had started in Cape Town. The only times she really talked about his father was to acknowledge that he was a great surgeon and had done some wonderful things for the people in South Africa. This so exasperated him that finally, from the age of about twelve or thirteen, he had tried to gather as much information from the Internet about his father as he could. Some of the comments attributed to his father following the terrorist attack were racist, but he considered them to be not too antagonistic since five black terrorists had just shot him. However, racism did not quite fit with what little he knew of his father and seemed at odds with the other parts of his life, particularly the oath that he had taken as a doctor to save people’s lives.

Christian had also read on the Internet his father’s death notice, which followed a week or so after the terrorist attack. Accompanying this were acclamations about the great work that his father had initiated through the liver transplant unit. It mentioned in particular his courageous decision to do a groundbreaking liver transplant on a young South African boy called Sibokwe. To Christian that was all quite impressive and a legacy to be proud of. Why his mother did not want to talk about that he could not comprehend. There were too few answers for someone who desperately wanted to know more about his father.

By the time he turned fifteen the desire to know more about his father had become overwhelming. The need to at least know what his father stood for persisted right through into his final year at school. He determined that he would do well enough in school to get into medicine, and then take time off to go to South Africa.

During study breaks, he would often Google the terrorist attack on the church in Cape Town, looking and hoping for a new blog site or updated information. Occasionally he caught his mother looking at him from the doorway of the study, unsure whether she was disapproving or was remembering certain things about his father. When he did ask her, she had always just turned her back and walked out of the room.

When he had exhausted gleaning information from the Internet, he resorted to eavesdropping to try to find out a little bit more about his father. When friends of his mother came over for dinner and he heard the conversation turn to his father, he stayed at the dinner table for as long as he could. That also was not very helpful, as they tended to talk mostly about the differences between himself and his father. His mother seemed to be much more delighted that there were differences than similarities. Not that he could stay at the table for long when the subject was his father; it was usually suggested that he should go and study. His mother would constantly remind him that if he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and study medicine, he needed to work harder. It seemed no one was really interested in giving him more information. He became convinced there was a conspiracy of silence going on, which made him even more determined to visit Cape Town.

Christian had almost given up but he still kept on checking the Internet in case one day there might be something new. Shortly after his graduation from Year 12, he was searching through all his favourite folders, aware that his mother was again standing at the study door where she could see over his shoulder. This time she did not turn and walk out of the room. He was going through the old YouTube clips of the terrorist attack on the church, partly wondering why his mother had not yet left. Turning to see if she was doing something else, he noticed she was staring intently at his computer screen. On the screen was a picture of his father, one that he had always liked, showing his strong jaw, high cheekbones and eyes not unlike his. He could see his father’s wavy hair, similar to his own. It was obviously the picture that caught his mother’s attention, but then he noticed that underneath it was a new blog site.

Looking more carefully, he noted that it announced that new documents had been revealed about the church massacre. The blog had been set up by an old anti-apartheid activist, Kurt Davies, who had suggested that the attack had been orchestrated by the apartheid government security services as a way of showing the world that blacks were not capable of governing South Africa. Then at the bottom, there was a footnote about Jannie de Villiers, his father, alleging his involvement with the security forces and the apartheid regime.

Christian was so shocked he did not notice that his mother had moved up close behind him. He read the footnote again uncertain as to whether he should believe what had been written
, ‘that the very well known transplant surgeon Professor Jannie de Villiers had been complicit in terrorism through his links with the Bureau of State Security.’ Christian sat looking at the screen stunned. Surely, that was not his father, he thought. It could not possibly suggest his father was involved in a terrorist attack. He turned slowly to face his mother.

‘
Mum, that’s not true, is it? Tell me that’s not true.’

‘
Christian,’ Renata said quietly, putting her hand on his shoulder, ‘it’s time we had a talk.’

Christian never liked sitting when he was talking to his mother, as she always seemed to stretch herself up to her full height to gain greater authority, something he assumed again came from her Flemish background. Although she was a tall woman, her aquiline features and rigid posture seemed to make her appear even taller. With her harsh hairstyle, she was the essence of efficiency and control, and when in a mood he knew from past experience was not to be messed with. Christian also had learnt that there were ways of dealing with her controlling inclinations—sitting down to address his mother gave her too much advantage, so he always stood up. He stood and looked at her, trying to contain his anger that she had kept this from him for so long.