The Prey (39 page)

‘I’ll sort it when we get back.’

They travelled in an awkward silence for a few minutes.

‘This place was a real dump when we were here last,’ Cameron said, pointing out the window of the van. ‘None of these shops were here. The place was rundown, businesses were closed and the roads were
kak
.’

‘It seems pretty prosperous now.’

‘Yes. But a lot of Zambia’s prosperity has come at Zimbabwe’s expense. A lot of tourist business from Zimbabwe, particularly the town of Victoria Falls just across the river, moved over to this side.’

‘Last night …’ Kylie began, changing the subject.

He held a hand up. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean anything, Kylie, and I apologise if I offended you.’

‘No, not at all. In fact, what I was going to say was that I apologise, for overreacting. I know you wouldn’t have tried anything. Besides, you were too drunk.’

He laughed, though it was short-lived. He went back to gazing out the window, where the scenery changed from chaotic African cityscape to the dusty coloured bush. Through breaks in the vegetation, though, she started to catch glimpses of the river, its surface dark and rippled as it raced towards the sheer drop-off downstream. On its verges was a belt of thicker, greener trees and reeds.

‘The Zambezi.’

Cameron had said it matter-of-factly, but the word was nonetheless laden with exoticism. She felt a frisson of excitement at the prospect of seeing the Victoria Falls. A one-line addendum in Sandy’s itinerary had mentioned that the hotel they were staying
at was inside the Mosi oi Tunya National Park – the name meant ‘smoke that thunders’ – and that it would be possible to walk to the edge of the falls. She wasn’t in Zambia for a holiday, but she couldn’t come all this way, stay in Livingstone, and not see its famous natural wonder.

They passed a roadside picnic spot where people were drinking beers from cooler boxes and taking in the increasingly breathtaking view of the river.

‘What are we going to do about Wellington?’ Cameron asked.

‘I called our government relations people in Johannesburg this morning and they put me in touch with the National Prosecuting Authority. They’re sending someone to Barberton the day after we get back, so we can brief them on Wellington’s crimes. I asked that the local police be left out and the agent I spoke to said that wouldn’t be a problem.’

Cameron nodded in agreement. ‘Our Colonel Sindisiwe Radebe is rotten to the core. We need to bring her down or, at worst, get her replaced.’

‘I want him, Cameron.’

‘You’re talking like an African now,’ he said.

*

Luis sat with his mother, on the sandy bluff overlooking the Indian Ocean. Behind them was the Ponta da Barra Lighthouse, which only worked for a couple of hours a night because its solar panel was faulty.

Lights were beginning to twinkle out on the greying waters, as the squid fishermen set out for their night’s work. A young man in mismatching wetsuit top and pants carried his spear gun and flippers down to the water’s edge. He would be hunting crayfish, bound for the
braais
of the South African tourists camped with their off-road trailers in the nearby campground.

‘How is my son?’

‘He is asleep,’ his mother said. ‘He will cry more tomorrow.’

‘Jose is lucky to have you, Mother.’

‘He would be luckier to have a father. He is growing up too fast. He keeps company with bad boys.’

Luis ploughed the sand with his toes. It was dirty beneath the fine, pale surface layer. The tourists thought of this place as paradise, but it had also seen sorrow and death during the bad years. He had fought and he had studied in order to escape the inevitability that he might end up out at sea rowing a flimsy
lula
boat made of driftwood and polystyrene foam, or diving for crayfish. His mother cleaned holiday lodges owned by foreigners. She barely earned enough to survive, yet she sent his son to school each morning in a freshly cleaned and pressed uniform.

‘I only ever wanted the best for you, Luis.’ She gestured out to the twinkling lights. ‘You do not belong out there. You are an engineer, a geologist, a metallurgist.’

He nodded, but sighed. The letters after his name would not feed his son, or save his mother from the backbreaking work she would do until she could crawl on her knees no longer in a tourist’s bathroom. A man with woolly, unkempt dreadlocks and dressed in layer upon layer of tattered rags walked along the beach waving his arms in the air. Snippets of his incoherent shouts reached Luis on the wind and spoiled the travel-brochure illusion of paradise spread out below him. He was envious, in a way, of the madman. He wanted to rant and shout and curse heaven and earth and cry out for the wife he’d lost, but he was tied to the real world by his memories, his dreams and his ambitions. Perhaps God had cursed him for being vain, for wanting more than he had a right to dream of. Luis had lusted for prestige and wealth and the trappings of a modern, peaceful society. It had almost been in his reach, in the early days in South Africa, but he had been dragged down into the hell of the country’s deadly criminal underworld. He had been punished for his greed.

‘You cannot go back to South Africa, can you?’

He looked at his mother. How could she know?

‘Your wife, God rest her soul, believed you, Luis, because she wanted to. I know you. You would have come home to your family if you still had a proper job. You would have been like the others who come streaming home across the border at Christmas time if you had a job that paid for an annual vacation. Even when your father worked for the Boers, in the bad days, he was still allowed home for Christmas. If it was just that your papers were not legal you would have still come, like the
mahambane
, walking through the bush. Yet you stayed. Was the criminals’ money worth it, Luis? Was it worth your son drifting into a life of crime, too, because he lacks a father’s discipline?’

He looked at her and blinked. He felt the tears sting his eyes and turned away from his mother’s gaze.

‘Look at me, my son.’

He kept his gaze fixed on the lights on the water. Maybe he should use his money to buy a boat, and accept his fate. He could learn again the lessons of childhood. At least he could feed his son and his mother with honest work.

She grabbed his chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned his face to her. ‘I have kept your school work, your papers from university, your thesis. I know you like no one else, my son. You are like your father. He went down into their mines and he came back and he fought for his country’s freedom. He would not have been happy as a fisherman, Luis. He longed for more, but not for himself, for his children. For you. I want you to stay here and be a father to your boy.’

He looked into his mother’s eyes and saw the strength of a woman who had endured so much loss – far more than he had. She did not question her fate. She cared only for her remaining son and her only grandchild.

Something she had said, just then, came back to him.

‘You kept everything? My thesis?’

She nodded. As the realisation began to show on his own face she allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction.

*

Wellington Shumba smoked a cigar as he reclined on a sun lounge, in the dark, near the pool bar in the grounds of the Kingdom Hotel in the Zimbabwean holiday town of Victoria Falls.

His cousin wore his best clothes – a nylon shirt decorated with little balls of worn fibres, shiny grey slacks and scuffed vinyl shoes. Wellington’s clothes all carried brand-name labels, none of them knock-offs. Wellington exhaled and regarded Albert through the fug of smoke and the perspective of success.

This man, and the other lazy, greedy idiots above him, had ruined Zimbabwe for all of them, but in a funny way they had spurred others on to greatness. Without the inmates who’d been given the key to the asylum, Wellington might still have been drilling holes in the ore seam beneath Bindura, earning his pay and blowing it on
chibuku
beer and whores. He would never have lost his job and he would have died without achieving very much.

But no, Albert, and his fearless leader, the comrade president, and every ZANU-PF fat cat and lackey in between had screwed his beautiful country and forced the hard workers to leave and set up somewhere else. The xenophobic resentment, official and unofficial, that Wellington had encountered in South Africa had pushed him into a life of crime and, eventually, the netherworld of the
zama zamas
. It was fate. It was a life he was destined for. There, he was able to combine the mining knowledge he had learned in Zimbabwe and the criminal skills he had developed on the streets of Alexandra and Soweto to deadly, lucrative effect.

‘The fishing gear is in the bag,’ Albert whispered conspiratorially.

Wellington looked down at the striped bag and nodded. He inhaled again, savouring the aromatic flavour, adding to it with the expensive cognac. He felt the warm, giddy head spin of victory, which danced enticingly in front of him through the smoke, personified in the ample bottom of the waitress who sashayed past them, caught his eye and smiled. ‘Thank you, Albert.’

Albert raised his eyebrows. ‘What are you going to do with it?’

Wellington raised his guard, as he would if he was anticipating the first blow in a shebeen fight. ‘Why do you ask?’

Albert spread his hands wide and smiled. ‘Just curious, cousin. Perhaps it is a task that you might need some assistance with. Things have been tough on the farm, and I am always looking to diversify.’

Wellington held back the laugh that rose in his throat. He didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to himself. ‘
Things have been tough on the farm
.’ If Wellington had been given a mine he, even as a lowly miner, would have known how to run it and make a billion US dollars. Albert had been given a profitable cattle ranch and turned it into a useless sprawling patch of thorn trees.

Albert ran a finger around the collar of his shirt. ‘The offices of our party were bombed in Gweru last month. It was said to be the work of reactionaries from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. These lapdogs of the British will do anything to undermine the revolution.’

Wellington laid his cigar in the ashtray and fixed his cousin with his eyes. The man was a moron. Wellington raised his right hand in a clenched fist. ‘
Pamberi ne
revolution, comrade.’

‘
Pamberi
,’ his cousin smiled with relief, also raising his hand in the black power salute.

The idiot thinks I’m serious
, Wellington thought. ‘It is late, cousin, and I have work to do.’

Albert winked and nodded. ‘I understand. It was good seeing you again, cousin.’

Wellington stood and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You too.
Fambai zvakanaka
.’
Go well, my arse
, Wellington thought as his cousin shook his hand. ‘I will take care of the bill.’

Wellington took a final puff of his cigar before he stubbed it out, drained the last of his cognac and left a fistful of greenbacks on the bar for the barman. He did, indeed, have work to do in the privacy of his room.

*

Cameron sent Jessica an SMS from his room in the Royal Livingstone. He had been chauffeured there in a golf buggy driven by an
African man in white shorts and safari jacket and a matching pith helmet. The luxurious room overlooked a manicured lawn that rolled gently to the Zambezi River. He could see the spray rising from the falls, just beyond the bar.
You would love this place
.

Gee, thanks
, she messaged back.

At least she hadn’t lost her sense of humour.
Heard from Mom?

The reply pinged back a few moments later. She was faster with her slender, nimble fingers than he was with his miner’s stubs.
Hectic, Dad. She phoned all afternoon. I’m meeting her for coffee after school
.

Cameron shook his head. What had happened to their family that mother and daughter had to schedule an appointment for coffee? He wished Tania had never come back and, at the same time, suddenly felt guilty for running away and leaving them to sort things out. His room phone chirped.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Kylie. I’m going for a drink before dinner. Do you want to come along?’

He had hardly slept the night before – apart from lying all over her – and he had been sick as a dog that morning. What he should do was have a shower and go to bed, but right now it seemed like a cold beer was the only thing that would save him. ‘Sure, thanks.’

‘OK. See you at the bar.’ She hung up, abrupt as ever.

Cameron checked himself in the mirror. His face was stubbled and his shirt creased from the flight, but he couldn’t be bothered changing and assumed Kylie wouldn’t either. He walked out and hailed a passing golf buggy. The driver took him back to reception. Off to his right was a colonial-themed bar: slow-turning overhead fans, dark wooden panelling and matching furnishing. The long, polished bar looked inviting, but even more so was the view he glimpsed outside, beyond the lawn. He walked past the pool, where a couple of blonde European tourists were treading water in each other’s arms, and down to another bar set on a wide wooden deck overhanging the Zambezi. An African man was playing show tunes on a flute, but not even that could distract from the magnificence
of the Zambezi and the curtain of spray that hung over the point where the river disappeared into the gorge.

‘Mosi, please,’ he said to the waiter as he sat down in a deep armchair. He’d beaten Kylie to the bar. A dark-haired woman walked past him and smiled. He smiled back. He hadn’t even had time to think of himself as single before his wife had come back into his life. Self-consciously, he looked over his shoulder, checking to see if Kylie was in sight yet. She wasn’t, and he wondered why he’d felt strangely guilty making eye contact with the brunette. The waiter brought his chilled Mosi lager, named after the waterfall.

The sun was melting into a haze of oranges and reds beyond the spray and the Mosi worked its soothing magic. For a minute it was almost possible to forget Tania, the mine, Wellington and the horrors they had been through. He wondered if Kylie would ever bother to come back here once she returned to the safety of predictable Australia.