Get A Life (10 page)

There was the possibility he might be ready to go with his team on another field research at present in its planning stage. When the wilderness received him he would believe the oncologists' guarded edict that he was all clear, belonged among humankind, animals, birds, reptiles, insects, trees and plants without taint or threat. The project was one for which Thapelo piled more and more documentation, including tape recordings of contesting opinions on feasibility from chemical engineers, social scientists, anyone and everyone concerned with environmental management, the professionals along with the Greens, Save The Earth, Earthlife, International Rivers Network – campaigners of all titles and acronyms.

A dam. Ten dams.

A conventional developmental concept this time. Old as when the earliest agriculturists rolled stones into a stream to block its flow for themselves. Not the pebble-bed experiment descended from deadly alchemy of atoms that can achieve space-fiction in reality. But as the nuclear plant is promised to light vast areas of powerless darkness, the great dams are promised to gather water to slake the thirst of human populations and the industries which employ and feed them.

The Okavango is an inland delta in Botswana, the country of desert and swamp landlocked in the middle of the breadth of South West, South and South East Africa. That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology. The consequences of what happens to the inland delta affect the region. How far?

The surveyors' sheets, both actual and speculative, represent the phenomena; as they are now.

Maze of waterways remembered as the glide of a narrow boat through passages between skyscraper reeds made by hippopotami, their local streets and lanes. Berenice was in the boat; not what she dubs with some due acknowledgement in her throwaway laughter, a macho bushboys' assignment. He thought he was fairly familiar with the ecosystem, at the time, had read up a bit to refresh this colloquially so she could share something of the wilderness he was fortunate to experience completely; while she had only her terrain of a city. But no – no reminiscent holiday snapshot album – a compilation of dossiers overlapping, having to be held down against the riffling of garden breeze by a stone on the bamboo-legged table: he realised he knew too abstractly, himself limited by professionalism itself, too little of the grandeur and delicacy, cosmic and infinitesimal complexity of an ecosystem complete as this. The Okavango could never have been planned on a drawing-board by the human brain. Its transformations, spontaneous, self-generated, could not have been conceived. And this is no evidence to be claimed by religious or other creational mysticism, either. The innovation of matter is greater than that of any collective of minds, faiths. As Thapelo would say, Yona ke yona – this is it! The capacity to visualise this complex, let alone create it, as a
project
of a multinational team of genius hydrologist engineers is as limited in scale as taking the hippo's part in maintaining the system as something that can be understood without the to-and-fro, in-and-out, problem-solving of the infinite whole. The Okavango delta in co-existence with a desert is a system of elements contained, maintained – by the phenomenon itself, unbelievably, inconceivably. The Okavango is a primal feature of creation, so vast it can be seen by astronauts from Outer Space. This is an excitement that must be confirmed – he has to leave the garden of isolation to go into the house and dial Thapelo.

Where to begin understanding what we've only got a computer-speak label for,
ecosystem?
Where to decide it begins. Let's say, the known point at which we grasp its formation is where the rivers and streams converge and the patterns of their flow – meeting, opposing – create islands out of the sand they carry, landscapes within the waterscape. Trees grow; where do the seeds come from to germinate them, does the water bring detritus roots which find new foothold? If we identify the tree species, you'll learn from how far and from where water journeys have brought them? What journeys! They have brought sand and it's leached from along its routes, salt. Six hundred and sixty tons a year! That's the figure! In that calm delta disturbed only by the hippos and crocodiles, evaporation in an area bordering on a desert is extreme. The salt content becomes high; contamination problem, ay. Yebo! But no. Managed by matter itself. Trees suck up the water to the islands for growth. Salt comes with it. The sand filters the brackish stuff: clean water flows back, supports fish and the predators offish, the crocs, hippos, fish eagles.

– Cho! Ayeye! You're forgetting something. Chief. Didn't you read? Eventually the salt kills the trees, there's nothing to hold the island, it disintegrates, back into the water -

– Yes, but there's some formation of peat, and with the next rainy season the rivers come down again -

– From Angola from -

– The sand blocks channels in the reeds and papyrus, there're islands forming again, saplings sprouting again, it's been happening who knows how long? -

– Tuka! The salt? So what happened to the salt. -

– Exactly, we don't know how the salt is managed.
It is
. Probably seeps down through underground watercourses with increasing dilution and is widely dispersed in acceptable levels way through other areas of the region, part of the whole Southern Continental system. We drink that water! This's what we should work on, how with the Okavango the balance between positive and negative is achieved… -

– You think that'll change their minds about building the dams. Eish! -

– My brother – the dams are total negations. All this beautifully managed balance will be wrecked. Forever. There should be a category. Destructive Development, closed corporation of disaster. We're chronically short of water and it's not understood that this – what, phenomenon, marvel, much, much more than that – this intelligence of matter, receives, contains, processes, finally distributes the stuff God knows how far, linking up with other systems. If you and I decide now, how it begins, how it works, it still has no end, no dam walls, it's living. And some fucking consortium's going to drain, block and kill what's been
given
, no contracts. -

The blurt of laughter is the colleague's welcome at hearing a man at least sounding restored from the stricken substitute for himself found in the garden.

– Phambili! Top form! We're not going to let them get away with it. Woza! -

Forever.

The receiver replaced, the laughter silenced. Adrenalin that (like that other bodily signal) hadn't risen for so long, sinks normally. Still addressing – Thapelo or self – something slowly enters as a third voice, insistent to be heard. Follows, to the garden. And then back to the telephone; is the machine staring mute, or being gazed at, unseeing. But it's not picked up. There are areas of thought not meant to be shared, they question certainties held in common. Neither of you could go on pursuing what you do, being what you are, without them.

Forever.

How long is forever. How old is the delta that is part of the cosmos visible from Outer Space? Astronauts report it. Will ten dams be visible, the scale of ponds, like all man-made scratchings and gougings in comparison with the planet's own design.

Maybe we see the disaster and don't, can't live long enough (that is, through centuries) to see the survival solution Matter with infinite innovation has found, finds, will find, to renew its principle – life: in new forms, what we think is gone
forever
. In millennia, what does it count that the white rhino becomes extinct, the dinosaur's extinct, the mastodon, the mammoth, but we have the ingenuity of the evolved design of the giraffe, the elephant with its massive hulk standing vestigially web-footed with the memory of the fish. The first fish that dragged itself out of the amniotic element.

So, what is this kind of stuff, thinking… Heresy, how can it come to one who when asked, And what is your line, answers, What am I, I'm a conservationist, I'm one of the new missionaries here not to save souls but to save the earth.

This heresy is born of the garden, as Evil was – like those other thoughts, to be forgotten, the garden engendered – it belongs to this state of existence that's about to cease to be. Whatever 'forever' means, irrevocably lost, or surviving eternally, himself in this garden is part of the complexity, the necessity. As a spider's web is the most fragile example of organisation, and the delta is the grandest. Return home; that's his loop in the thread from the spider's web to the Okavango system: Benni/ Berenice, small boy, Daddy! Paul! all the waterways and shifting sand islands of contradiction: a condition of living. Like another heresy, knowledge of what it is he came from into this state of existence, and what – if he survived – he would be returned to – the relationships of that home were not what he might have had; knows that. Doubt had come to him in the garden where he had begun to apprehend life as a boy. Biodiversity;
Chief
, say to yourself: professional jargon stuff. But it's within that term your place is,
Chief
, say it: I'm going home at the weekend. Always find the self calling on the terminology of the wilderness, so unjudgmental, to bring to circumstances the balm of calm acceptance. The inevitable grace, zest, in being a microcosm of the macrocosm's marvel.

Doubt is part of it; the salt content.

They are there at the gate. Berenice – but he must correct himself, Benni again – and the small boy, Nicholas, his son.

Lyndsay and Adrian are his entourage as he emerges from the family house, with Primrose helping to carry some of the things – folders of papers accumulated recently – that wouldn't fit into the suitcase Adrian insists on carrying. (The hospital hold-all Lyndsay has quietly disposed of.) They call out to one another across the length of the drive as if it were the length of time of the separation. Even Primrose, with her old-fashioned servitude, pre-liberation sense of propriety that you could be familiar with white kids as you should not with adults, shouted to the child joyfully – So now soon you'll come to play with me, like always, Nickie! – But there can be nothing ordinary about this approach to the gate. It's Benni who's clinging, arms lifted, to the bars this time. Smiling and cajoling – as if he needed any encouragement! He doesn't disappoint her, finds himself gathering the muscles, co-ordination.

She – Benni – sees coming towards her the long legs flung out sideways at the knees, the arms flailing like oars, the staggering gait, that of a child learning it can run.

As he gained the gate the electronic control in Adrian 's hand slid it open, Benni's image brought close-up to him with the pressure of her arms around his body: she was laughing, the lens of tears magnifying her eyes. She reached for his head and took his lips, mouth, into hers as a deep draft of something missing so long. But when he knelt to the small boy, his son stared at him a moment and turned away to hide behind his mother. Not forgotten, fingers prized from the bars of this gate,
Daddy! Paul!
, and the appeal terribly unheeded. Agitated, ashamed, his mother tried to urge him forward, he wriggled and struggled, ran back behind her.

It was understood: his son had suffered that state of existence, along with himself.

– No, leave him, it's all right. Give him time. -

iii
/ It Happens

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be. The pebble-bed reactor project has not been abandoned by the entrepreneurs but it hasn't gone further than being claimed safe enough to walk away from. In the meantime there had been the other experience of the phenomenon of these small natural formations during a return to the normal custom of a couple taking their child to enjoy a week paddling and dabbling on a beach.
Daddy! Paul!
showing him how to collect the colours of land and sea in the shining pebbles sucked over by rills of surf.

The direst of all threats in the world's collective fear – beyond terrorism, suicide bombings, introduction of deadly viruses, fatal chemical substances in innocent packaging, Mad Cow disease – is still 'nuclear capability'. Another catch-all: the possession as natural resources, in a country, of certain primary elements and the ability to mine and refine these for its own nuclear armament or for sale to that of others; the construction of a nuclear plant/reactor; the testing of a nuclear weapon. Forecast prelude to the apocalypse by what are known as Weapons of Mass Destruction. The proposed reactor based on the harmless pebble a small boy takes home from the beach is a component in the production of Weapons not likely to be overlooked by the inquiry into nuclear facilities that is becoming vigilant all over the world, far if not near, since the power with a foot on everyone's doorstep, the USA, is one that doesn't support the nuclear non-proliferation requirement of efforts towards nuclear disarmament, except when this suits USA ambitions. Thapelo drops in over a weekend on the pretext, just to check up on you (they're back working together at their organisation's offices during the week) but really to analyse Gaddafi's sudden decision to announce and renounce Libya 's possession of nuclear capability.

Tell all. Come clean, brother. Haai, ma-an!

Neither sees any mystery in the decision. They laugh at the 'amazement' on newspaper headlines. Gaddafi either doesn't want American guests like the ones who've visited Iraq or he wants the embargo, imposed after his countrymen exploded a passenger plane, lifted so he can sell his oil. Or both.

But under the laughter the mates now may have some expectation an example has been set – and received with fulsome emotion from the world – that might lead to the pebble-bed reactor project being taken off hold and abandoned, for State reasons of adopting moral high ground, or rather choosing to stay up there since South Africa is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. There's somehow always been little socialising with Paul's colleagues, by contrast with hers, so Berenice/Benni sees the animating Sunday visit of this colleague as part of Paul's new return to his life and takes the opportunity of inviting his apparently special friend to share lunch.