Blood Rose

forty-nine

Clare was watching the fishermen, their rods sticking up like insects’ feelers above the shoreline, when the battered red bakkie drew up next to her. She got out, the sand blowing off the desert stinging her calves. Tertius Myburgh unlocked the door and she slid in next to him, holding the door against the wind.

‘Here,’ said Myburgh, pushing an envelope across the cracked seat. He was tense; his hands were shaking.

Dr Clare Harriet Hart. Her full name in black ink: like an accusation. Clare opened it. Five pages of Myburgh’s dense, looped cursive. Clare spread out the pollen report on her lap.

‘There’s the list,’ said Myburgh. ‘Tamarix. Trianthema hereroensis, Acanthosicyos horridus.’

‘What does that tell me?’ asked Clare.

‘The Tamarix and the Hereroensis grow in the Kuiseb River. This is where you’ll find them.’ He pulled out a map and sketched out two intersecting arcs. ‘This section is where they overlap.’

‘That’s a huge area,’ said Clare. The flicker of hope disappeared into the empty wastes that Myburgh’s long, tapering fingers indicated.

‘Well,’ said Myburgh, ‘you can cut out this bit. If they’d been near the mouth, you’d have found Sarcocornia, a stubby little succulent. You’ll have seen fields of it beyond the lagoon. Nothing on them. They didn’t even walk through it.’

‘So they could’ve been anywhere in this area, except for this two-kilometre sliver near the shore?’

‘No.’ Myburgh looked around the parking lot before continuing: ‘There’s the Acanthosicyos horridus, the!nara plants that the Topnaar harvest. These grow in restricted areas along the vegetative dunes. It looks like a melon. Sweet, nutritious, full of fluid. Just what you need in a desert, but they only grow a few kilometres inland.’

‘So that restricts us to this area, more or less?’ asked Clare, pointing to the area of the Kuiseb Delta and just beyond.

Myburgh nodded.

‘That’s still a huge area.’ Clare turned to look at the ocean of sand, rolling far beyond the horizon.

‘Your needle in a haystack,’ said Myburgh. ‘I’ve got it for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Myrtaceae: Eucalyptus.’ Myburgh’s dark eyes gleamed as he held out the branch to her: dark, pungent foliage, pale bark. ‘The ghost gum,’ he said. ‘An Australian, alien. It would’ve had to have been planted near a water source.’

‘How sure are you that you’re right?’ asked Clare.

‘There’ll only be a couple of spots in the Namib with this combination of plants.’

‘So where do I start?’ said Clare.

‘With the gum, anywhere where there was human habitation,’ said Myburgh, unfolding an aerial photograph. ‘I looked and the only places I could find gum trees were these: two tourist camps and this old military area.’

Clare thought of Riedwaan’s proposed destination. ‘That’s in the middle of nowhere,’ she said, the puzzle pieces in her hand; the composite they made as shifting as the mirage dancing on the desert.

‘It’s the best I can do, I’m afraid,’ Myburgh said, ‘but there’s more.’ He handed Clare a slim journal, dark blue with embossed initials on it: VM.

Clare opened it. ‘Whose is this?’

‘Virginia Meyer’s,’ said Myburgh. ‘It’s all that was left of her work.’

Clare flipped through the book, glancing at the pages filled with spidery notes, the whimsical drawings of plants, birds and dunescapes so like her mute son’s. Outside, the rising wind moaned around the car.

‘I don’t understand.’ Clare looked up at Myburgh.

‘I tested her diary for pollen,’ he said, ‘and it was a match. They were in the same place, Virginia and those boys.’

Clare’s face remained expressionless.

‘She was on her way to see me when the accident happened,’ Myburgh explained. ‘She’d been dead twelve hours when Spyt found them. Oscar couldn’t loosen his seatbelt, so he was trapped, covered in her blood and flies. Spyt managed to resuscitate the child and get him help. And he brought me this.’ Myburgh gestured to the journal. ‘It had been hidden under Oscar’s seat.’

‘Why?’ said Clare.

‘Virginia wasn’t where she should have been.’ Myburgh must have crossed his Rubicon of doubt. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. ‘It was the only bit of her work recovered after the accident. Everything else was gone. No one would’ve found them if Spyt hadn’t come across them. She was on a side road out of the Kuiseb.’

‘What was she doing there?’

‘Virginia loved the Namib,’ said Myburgh, ‘and was enraged with the South African army and what they’d done to it. I always thought she was paranoid, seeing conspiracies everywhere. She was obsessed, Dr Hart, convinced that her beloved desert had been contaminated by the army. She kept on trying to expose what had happened, what she was convinced was happening again. She would’ve done anything to stop it.’

‘Contaminated with what?’ asked Clare. ‘The South Africans left more than ten years ago.’

‘They took their hardware,’ said Myburgh, ‘but they left some damaged people behind, as scarred and littered as the desert.’

‘What had they been testing?’ asked Clare.

‘Overtly, the usual heavy weapons,’ said Myburgh. ‘Virginia was convinced there had been covert bio-chemical testing. Diseases, viruses, poisons that had leached into the underground water, and driven the Topnaars from their own land. Just before the accident, she phoned me to say there was something else, something much worse. She was afraid to tell me over the phone.’ Myburgh looked away before continuing: ‘She said the water table would be contaminated because of what they’d done.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Virginia was so paranoid, Dr Hart. It seemed easier at the time just to leave it.’

Clare thought of Fritz Woestyn, his lifeless body propped on the water pipeline, the artery pumping water into Walvis Bay, the lifeblood of the marooned town. ‘Contaminated with what?’ she asked.

‘It didn’t make sense to me then, still doesn’t, because she said it in Afrikaans, but it stuck because she never spoke Afrikaans. She said it was the language of oppression.’ Myburgh paused. ‘She told me she was vasgetrap. Trapped fast. At least that is what I thought she said.’

‘Vasgetrap, vasgetrap,’ Clare repeated the syllables to herself. The word conjured up the quiet house in McGregor, the den with the elephant’s foot. Mrs Hofmeyr with her iron-grey hair talking about her dead husband, her years as an army wife. ‘She didn’t say Vastrap, did she?’ Clare asked.

‘Vastrap, yes, that was it.’ Myburgh looked at her. ‘What is it?’

‘It was a military base in South Africa, a secret weaponstesting site in the middle of the Kalahari Desert.’

A horrible image was forming in Clare’s mind. She turned back to the last page of Virginia Meyer’s diary. The digits 2, 3 and 5 were ringed in red. Clare looked at Myburgh’s beaked profile.

‘Tertius,’ she asked, ‘what do the numbers 2, 3 and 5 mean?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Stop lying to me,’ said Clare.

‘Well, 235 is nothing on its own,’ said Myburgh, his voice a monotone, his eyes trained on the heaving sea. ‘Except with uranium. U-235 is an isotope. Highly enriched uranium. It’s what you use for a nuclear weapon.’

Myburgh looked Clare in the eye for the first time, his knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

‘That’s what she meant about the desert being contaminated, Dr Hart. Those boys and Virginia Meyer, they were in the same place and now they’re all dead.’