Blood Safari

26

Dr Eleanor Taljaard came and chased me out just after twelve. She looked rested and professional. ‘I have work to do here and it’s lunchtime. Koos is waiting for you in the restaurant. Maggie left a message. It’s in your room. You can come back at two.’

‘OK, Eleanor.’

‘You did well.’

Had I?

The restaurant was full. ‘Sunday,’ said Dr Koos Taljaard. ‘Conscience day. They visit the sick.’

Over a meal of tasteless chicken schnitzel with cheese sauce he told me they had been in Nelspruit for sixteen years – at the Provincial Hospital first, then the SouthMed Clinic.

‘In all those years we never had a patient falling off a train because of a bullet wound.’

I just looked at him and carried on chewing.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘Someone was angry with us.’

‘But why? What could make someone so angry?’

‘I don’t know.’

He looked at me in disbelief. ‘It’s true,’ I said.

‘People don’t usually react like that,’ he said.

‘I know.’ The question was: who did? And why?

In my room there was another typed letter from Maggie T. Padayachee. And a car key.

Dear Mr Lemmer

Budget Car Rental has delivered a silver Audi A4 for you. It is parked near the gate.

Also, a Ms Jeanette Louw called and requested that you kindly return her call at your convenience – on her cellular phone.

Very best wishes

Maggie T. Padayachee

Client Services Manager

I phoned Jeanette. ‘Thanks for the car.’

‘A pleasure. They tell me her condition has improved.’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘And you? How do you feel today?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘The flights are full, Lemmer. The entire country is flying off somewhere for New Year. We can only come tomorrow.’

‘We?’

‘I’m bringing Fikter and Minnaar.’

‘Oh.’ Not usual for her to come. She heard my surprise.

‘You know what the Cape is like in the holidays. Full of Gautengers and foreigners. I haven’t been to the Lowveld for a long time.’

‘What time are you coming?’

‘We’ll be there by lunchtime. I’m bringing your Christmas present. I hope it’s what you wanted.’

‘Thanks.’

‘It’s the least I can do.’

Strange thing to say, I thought.

‘She’s stable enough to do the scans this afternoon,’ Eleanor Taljaard said when I was back at the intensive care unit by two o’clock. ‘You’re on duty until four.’

I sat down. Emma was still pale and wan under the sheets.

‘Hello, Emma.’

They had replaced the bag of fluid dripping into her vein. It hung fat and transparent above her bed.

‘I went for lunch. Chicken schnitzel. It wasn’t Mohlolobe’s standard. Then I phoned Jeanette Louw. They’ll be here tomorrow, she and two bodyguards. They will look after you here, Emma. Until I’ve finished.’

Finished. Finished what? I hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin. Sitting here beside a woman I barely knew, with the urge to smash someone’s head in, and I had no idea how I was going to do it.

I wanted to go and lie on my bed, shut my eyes and think about where Emma and I had been, about every little thing that had happened. I hadn’t believed her when I should have. Not listened, not looked, nor paid attention. Now there were things in my head, things that didn’t quite make sense, but I couldn’t get a grip on them. Like soap in the bath, they slipped out of my grasp when I closed my hand on them. I must think. The whole thing just didn’t make sense. Not enough to kill Emma le Roux. What had she done to cause that? What evil had she interfered in?

Gloves? In summer? In the Lowveld? Gloves and balaclavas, but the sniper had not worn them.

In Cape Town there had been three, but all three were covered then. Had they also worn gloves? Understandable, since they didn’t want to leave fingerprints. But in the veld?

Why only yesterday? Why had they waited? Did they have to come up from the Cape first?

I tried to arrange the events in sequence. Emma said the news report about Cobie de Villiers had been two days before they attacked her in the Cape. Three days before Christmas. The twenty-second. Saturday, 22 December.

Two days. Why the delay between the call to Phatudi and the attack in the Cape? What did it mean?

We had arrived here on 26 December. One, two, three, four days before the ambush.

Did it mean anything?

I must talk to Emma. I couldn’t just sit here and think. She must hear my voice.

Where was I last? Jeanette. On her way.

‘Jeanette …’ I said.

‘I had been in Loxton for two months when the phone rang. It was Jeanette Louw asking if I was looking for work.

‘I hadn’t much in the bank. I had sold the flat in Seapoint for a big profit, but my legal fees and buying the AI Qaeda house ate up most of it. So I asked, “What kind of work?” and she explained.

‘I asked her how she knew about me and she said, “There are one or two of your old colleagues who speak well of you.”

‘“I’ve just come out of jail.”

‘“I don’t want to marry you, I want to offer you a job.” Then she explained how it worked, how much she paid and, “You should know, I’m a lesbian and I don’t take shit from anyone. When I call, you come. Immediately. If you get up to shit, I’ll fire your butt. Immediately. But I never drop my people. Are you interested?”

‘So I accepted, because I looked around my house and I knew how much needed to be done. I hadn’t even begun to break down and rebuild. The place was empty. I had a bed and a table in the kitchen with two chairs. I bought the table in Victoria West at an auction and I got the two chairs from Antjie Barnard as a present.

‘Antjie. Now there’s a character. I called her “Tannie”, “Aunt”, showing respect for one’s elders, and she threatened to hit me with her walking stick.

‘That’s another story. Antjie Barnard came knocking on my door in Loxton, four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. She was wearing big walking boots and a wide-brimmed hat. She said, “I’m Antjie Barnard and I want to know who you are.” She was sixty-seven then and you could see she was a lovely woman, beautiful perhaps when she was young, green eyes of an unusual shade, like the sea at the South Pole. She put out her hand and I shook it and said, “Lemmer. Pleased to meet you, Tannie.”

‘“Tannie? Tannie? Am I married to your uncle?” The walking stick lifted ready to beat me. “My name is Antjie.”

‘“Antjie.”

‘“That’s right. What do I call you?”’

“Lemmer.”

‘“Right then, Lemmer, stand aside so I can come in. You have coffee, I expect.”

‘I told her, “I don’t have chairs.”

‘“Then we will sit on the floor.”

‘And we did, coffee mugs in hand. She pulled out a packet of long cigarettes, offered one to me and asked, “What is a man like you doing in Loxton?”

‘“Not for me, I don’t smoke.”

‘“I hope to God you drink,” she said, and lit one for herself with a slender electronic lighter.’

‘“Not really.”

“Not really?”

‘“Actually, I don’t drink at all.”

‘“Sex?”

‘“I like sex.”

‘“Thank God. A person must have a sin. Not bad sins, Lemmer. Good sins. Otherwise you don’t live. Life is too short.”’

“What are the good sins?”

‘“Gossip. Eating. Smoking. Drinking. Sex. What do I do with this ash?”

‘I fetched her a saucer. When I came back she asked, “Was it a good sin that brought you to Loxton?”’

“No.”

‘“Was there a woman involved? Children?”’

“No.”

‘“Then it doesn’t matter. We all have our secrets and that’s fine.”

‘I wondered what her secret was.

‘Two weeks later she came knocking again, this time late on a Tuesday. “Bring your pick-up, I’ve got some chairs for your table.” We drove to her house, a perfectly restored Victorian Karoo house with white walls and a green roof. The furniture inside was tastefully antique. Down the passage was a row of black-and-white photographs of Antjie Barnard and her life. I looked at them and she said, “I was a cellist.” An understatement, because the images in frames told a story of an international career.

‘The same afternoon we initiated the chairs in my kitchen over coffee – and a cigarette for her.

‘“And this ashtray, Lemmer? Have you taken up smoking?”’

“No.”

‘“You bought it for me.”’

“I did.”

‘“That’s my trouble.”’

“What?”

‘“Men. They can’t leave me alone.”

‘I laughed. Then I saw she was serious.

‘She looked at me with those clear, piercing eyes and said, “Can you keep a secret, Lemmer?”’

‘“I can.”

‘Those eyes measured me again.

‘“Do you know why I’m here? In Loxton?”

‘“No.”

‘“Sex.”

‘“Here?”

‘“No, you idiot. Not here.” Then she told me how she grew up in Bethlehem in the Free State in a typical conservative Afrikaans home, how her talent for music quickly outgrew the coaching available in that town. She was sent to the Oranje Meisieskool in Bloemfontein so she could take cello lessons at the university. At seventeen she won an international bursary and studied in Vienna. At twenty she married an Austrian, at twenty-eight an Italian, at thirty-six a German, but concert tours were no good for marriage.

‘“Men liked me too much, and I liked men too much.”

‘At fifty-five she had had enough. Enough money, enough memories, enough strange cities and hotel rooms and fair-weather friends. So she came back to the Free State and bought herself a house in Rosendal near Bethlehem.

‘“Then I met Willem of Wonderkop. A farmer. Sixty years old, married, but a Man with a capital ‘M’. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. One Wednesday evening he told his wife he had to go to a church council meeting, but instead he came to me and we made love like a pair of twenty-year-olds, wild and abandoned. We fell off the bed and I broke my arm and he broke his hip and there we lay, naked, guilty and in big trouble.

‘“What could I do? I couldn’t carry him and he couldn’t stand up. I had to get help. I had to choose between the preacher and the two gays who ran the coffee shop. Either way we were done for because nobody gossips like gays and ministers. So I chose the gays, to save him his place on the church council.

‘“When my arm came out of plaster, I got in my car and went looking for a place where the people wouldn’t know the story. That’s how I ended up in Loxton.”

‘She never asked me about my past. I told her I had been a bodyguard for the government. When I had to be away for two or three weeks I would tell her where I would be. Of course, then the whole town knew. They never say so, but there is some pride that someone from Loxton was guarding important and famous people from the evils of this world.

‘But I am not yet truly one of them. There is hope. At Easter this year I was having tea with Oom Joe and all his children and grandchildren were there when Antjie came in. Oom Joe introduced her to his children, “And this is our Antjie Barnard.”

‘Maybe, in four or five years, if nobody finds out why I went to prison, they will introduce me as “our Lemmer”.’