Smokescreen

Chapter Fifteen

Danilo had suggested to Nerissa that I go to South Africa because there, far from home, he could take or make any opportunity that offered to bring me to an accidental looking death. He had lured me to the killing ground with a bait he knew I would take — a near-dying request from a woman I liked and was grateful to.

A death which was clearly a murder would have left him too dangerously exposed as a suspect. An obvious accident would be less suspiciously investigated... like a live microphone.

Danilo hadn’t been there, in Randfontein House.

Roderick had been there, and Clifford Wenkins, and Conrad. And fifty others besides. If Danilo had provided the live mike, someone at the press interview must have steered it into my hands. Luck alone had taken it out again.

Down the mine, at the suddenly opportune moment... Bash.

Except for the steadfastness of a checker called Nyembezi, that attempt would have come off.

This wouldn’t look like a natural accident, though. The handcuffs couldn’t be called accidental.

Perhaps Danilo intended to come back, after I was dead, and take them away. Perhaps people would believe then that I had lost my way in the park and had died in the car rather than risk walking.

But the time span was tight. He couldn’t wait a week to make sure I was dead before coming back, because by then everyone would be searching for me, and someone might have reached me before he did.

I sighed dispiritedly.

None of it made any sense.

The day proved an inferno compared with the one before. Much worse even than Spain. The scorching fury of the heat stunned me to the point where thought became impossible, and cramps wracked my shoulders, arms and stomach.

I tucked my hands into my sleeves and rolled my head back out of the direct rays and just sat there enduring it, because there was nothing else to do.

So much for my pathetic little attempts at water management. The brutal sun was shrivelling me minute by minute, and I knew that a week was wildly optimistic. In this heat, a day or two would be enough.

My throat burned with thirst and saliva was a thing of the past.

A gallon of water in the car’s radiator... as out of reach as a mirage.

When I couldn’t swallow without wincing or breathe without feeling the intaken air cut like a knife, I untied the plastic bag and poured the contents into my mouth. I made the divine H₂O last as long as possible; rolled it round my teeth and gums, and under my tongue. There was hardly enough left to swallow, and when it was gone I felt wretched. There was nothing, now, between me and nightfall.

I turned the bag inside out and sucked it, and held it against my mouth until the heat had dried it entirely, and then I filled it again with hot air, and with trembling fingers fumbled it back into the rubber band on the steering wheel.

I remembered that the boot of the car still held, as far as I knew, a lot of oddments of Conrad’s equipment. Surely he would need it, would come looking for that, if not for me.

Evan, I thought, for God’s sake come and find me.

But Evan had gone north in the park which stretched two hundred miles to the boundary on the great grey green greasy Limpopo river. Evan was searching there for his Elephant’s Child.

And I... I was sitting in a car, dying for a gold mine I didn’t want.

Night came, and hunger.

People paid to be starved in Health Farms, and people went on hunger strikes to protest about this or that, so what was so special about hunger?

Nothing. It was just a pain.

The night was cool, was blessed. In the morning, when I had licked as much of the window as I could reach, I went on with the writing. I wrote every thing I could think of which would help an investigation into my death.

The heat started up before I had finished. I wrote ‘give my love to Charlie’, and signed my name, because I wasn’t certain that by that evening I would be able to write any more. Then I slid the written papers under my left thigh so that they wouldn’t slip out of reach on the floor, and tucked the little pencil under my watch strap, and collapsed the air out of the plastic bag to keep the next teaspoonful safe, and wondered how long, how long I would last.

By midday I didn’t want to last.

I held out until then for my sip of water, but when it was gone I would have been happy to die. After the bag had dried against my face it took a very long time, and a great effort of will, for me to balloon it out and fix it again to the steering wheel. Tomorrow, I thought, the thimbleful would form again, but I would be past drinking it.

We had been wrong in the film, I thought. We had focused on the mental state of the Man too much, to the neglect of the physical. We hadn’t known about legs like lead and ankles swollen to giant puffballs. I had long ago shed my socks, and would have had as much chance of forcing my shoes on again as of flying.

We hadn’t known the abdomen would become agonisingly distended with gas or that the seat belts would strain across it like hawsers. We hadn’t guessed that the eyes would feel like sand paper when the lachrymal glands dried up. We had underestimated what dehydration did to the throat.

The overwhelming heat battered all emotion into numbness. There was nothing anywhere but pain, and no prospect that it would stop.

Except, of course, in death.

In the late afternoon an elephant came and uprooted the tree the giraffe had browsed from.

That should be allegorical enough for Evan, I thought confusedly. Elephants were the indestructible destroyers of the wilderness.

But Evan was miles away.

Evan, I thought, Evan... Oh God, Evan... come... and find me.

The elephant ate a few succulent leaves off the tree and went away and left it with its roots in the air, dying for lack of water.

Before dark I did write a few more sentences. My hands trembled continually, and folded into tight cramps, and were in the end too weak to hold the pencil.

It fell down on the floor and rolled beneath my seat. I couldn’t see it, or pick it up with my swollen toes.

Weeping would have been a waste of water.

Night came again and time began to blur.

I couldn’t remember how long I had been there, or how long it was until Wednesday.

Wednesday was as far away as Charlie and I wouldn’t see either of them. I had a vision of the pool in the garden with the kids splashing in it, and it was the car that seemed unreal, not the pool.

Tremors shook my limbs for hours on end.

The night was cold. Muscles stiffened. Teeth chattered. Stomach shrieked to be fed.

In the morning, the condensation on the windows was so heavy that water trickled in rivulets down the glass. I could only, as ever, reach the small area near my head. I licked it weakly. It wasn’t enough.

I hadn’t the energy any more to open the window for a change of air: but cars were never entirely airtight, and it wouldn’t be asphyxiation which saw me off.

The inevitable sun came back in an innocent rosy dawn, gentle prelude to the terrifying day ahead.

I no longer believed that anyone would come.

All that remained was to suffer into unconsciousness, because after that there would be peace. Even delirium would be a sort of peace, because the worst torment was to be aware, to understand. I would welcome a clouded mind, when it came. That, for me, would be the real death. The only one that mattered. I wouldn’t know or care when my heart finally stopped.

Heat bullied into the car like a battering ram.

I burned.

I burned.