The Shouting in the Dark (14 page)

She doesn't reply, doesn't want to. She keeps her eyes fixed on the bird.

Moments later there's a skittering sound on the rocks, Bogey's paws scrambling for traction. Powered by some overwhelming force, the dog comes driving up the ravine slope. His dash brings him along the dry waterfall path, up over its lip, his tongue lolling, foam on his muzzle. He falls upon the mother, covering her face with the pink handkerchief of his tongue.

The mother is the first to scramble upright. Crouching low to the ground, her hand on her dog's collar, she sprints to the car, jams the key into the lock, throws the door open, bundles them both inside. Next the father rises creakily. Keeping his back bent, he takes a moment to rub at his dusty knees. He plucks at Ella's sleeve, ‘Come,' but she pulls back, shakes her head. Then he runs.

Ella stays on her stomach. The lammergeyer is still perched on its needle of rock. In the dust in front of her nose she sees one of the strange overgrown insects that infest the surrounding hunchbacked hills.
Goggas
, the Bushmen called them. This one's something between a beetle and a locust. She watches as it lurches over the small stones in its path. From where she's lying, it is as if it's crawling towards the horizon of the ravine edge, straight to where the hooked beak of the lammergeyer is etched against the air.

Ella feels suddenly dizzy, disoriented, as if her parents and the dog in the car had been transported a distance away, to the other side of the ravine. They're smalled by the distance and she's here on her own, flush with the dust, lined up in a straight row with the lammergeyer and the
gogga
, both African natives, hardy and unkillable, just the same as she.

The lammergeyer's talons grip the rock. Ella slowly stands up. The bird disappears. It's not in the ravine below. It's nowhere in the sky. Then her parents begin to yell from behind the closed windows of the car.

‘What kind of
idioot
are you?' the father roars as she opens the car door. He grabs her arm and pulls her into the back seat. ‘Why didn't you come? We called you. You weren't watching out. That beast could've taken you off, in place of Bogey. It swooped that low over you before it went off.'

‘Drive, Har, just drive,' says the mother, Bogey curled in her lap. ‘Let's never come to this horrible place again.'

But the father is set in his rage. ‘
Idioot
, stupid
idioot
,' he continues as he steps on the accelerator, jumps the car into reverse.

Ella presses her hands over her ears. She doesn't want to hear him. She doesn't want to smell the strong smell of her mother's pee. She thinks of mouthing
We are too loud, so very, very loud
. She wishes she could place her hand across the father's mouth and choke up his voice, the same as he did back then to her mother. Where to escape from here? she asks herself. There must be an escape better than lying flush in the dust with a
gogga
, or being swept away by a lammergeyer? For years there has been the Netherlands, with its zoo and puppet theatre. But after the recent flight through the storm, its dove-grey refuge feels suddenly out of reach. As for the rhymes in her notebook, right now, her father's shouts clanging in her ears, she can't even bring them to mind.

Television is a new arrival in Ella's house as well as everywhere else in the country. Till now, to get the news, the father has switched on the dark-veneer Philips radiogram in the dining room six times a day like clockwork, beginning at zero six hundred hours, ending at twenty-two hundred. The family's meals fit around these news bulletins. But now they have television. Its coming coincides almost exactly with Ella's thirteenth birthday. Our local buffoons, the father says, decided in the end it was better to control white people's view of the wider world than to block it completely.
Local buffoons
is his pet name for the Afrikaner nationalist government when he thinks they're getting their job more or less right. He's concerned they get their job more or less right. Didn't he, after all, choose to live in this happiest police state in the world, to quote Prime Minister B J Vorster, this orderly white republic that, after the war, South Africans both English and Afrikaans promised to forge together?

So far, South African televisions come in black and white only. European South Africans, the joke at Ella's school is, can only see in black and white. The joke's lost on the mother. She's against television whatever the colour. TV, she tells Ella, fries the young imagination. She doesn't like Ella watching it, not at any time, no, certainly not in the daytime, she can protest all she wants, not even if it's Wimbledon and that Arthur Ashe she so likes once again going for the title . . . The mother switches off the set. Almost immediately the father switches it on again.

The father loves television. If electricity were free he'd have it on all the time, especially during the news programmes. As soon as he finishes his dinner, he walks over to the set and stands close by watching, haranguing the screen. Can't deny it, he tells the mother and Ella, there's something about the sick saga of African politics that drags me in.

‘Yes, it's a God-forsaken rubbish pile, this bloody continent,' he turns and spits at the news-reader, ‘Why d'ye look that dismayed? If Europe's a heap of ruins, Africa's a dump, we all knew that. The Cold War has shifted here only because Europe is laid low, the West's appetite for war is exhausted, its dream of a free world trashed. Here in Africa, all around, are the creeping worms upon which the world's remaining predators can feed. South Africa, in my view' – he plants a fist on the set and it hisses sympathetically – ‘South Africa is a success story
in spite of
Africa. South Africa is like an isthmus attached to the mainland by a thin thread.'

When yet another African coup or arms heist or civil outburst is announced, he shouts his excitement out loud: ‘What a pity we can't hire a team of strong Zulus to dig a moat all the way around the country! Cut ourselves off from that useless hinterland to the north.'

On winter nights, when it's too chilly to sit out on the verandah, the father watches the history programmes that come after the late news, flickering newsreel footage of the World Wars, of Vietnam bombers landing and taking off, wrecked cities, clouds of billowing smoke, cannons juddering. For no reason Ella can see, he invites her to join him. They also follow a more contemporary documentary series. It runs for several weeks. In it, the Union Jack repeatedly makes a limp descent down a grainy flagpole. The flag runs down, the flag runs down, though each time the backdrop, the sports field or stadium, is different.

‘Mark my words,' the father says, watching from his armchair, fists planted on his stubby knees. ‘When our B J Vorster and his police boys outdo the blacks at African buffoonery, they keep hold of their cunning. They have the cunning of the lion. They'll never let the flag run down the mast here. What I say to them is, don't forget who the Puppet-master is, who really wants to be Big Boss.'

They haven't had the television long before he shifts the set into the dining area, pushed up against the Philips radiogram, to be able to watch it at mealtimes. When the news is lively, with several hotspots around the continent flaring up, he has both the television and the radio on at the same time, the volume high.

In response to the mother's protests, he holds up his hand. ‘So what about the cost? It's nothing compared to your pathetic European pilgrimages. This is something I want and for a change I'm going to get it.'

He turns to the screen, begins to bellow, ‘Don't you just adore it, this puppet show of African politics black
and
white? Yes, I really do mean white politics too, those white Afrikaner politicians imitating the crazy moves of the black ghouls and then bettering them, excelling at the dictatorship of one tribe by another. Especially now, with these jumped-up countries trying to survive their so-called independence – and by that,' he smashes his fist into his thigh, his face bright red, his nose purple, ‘I include that pig-headed Ian Smith in Rhodesia. Our men in power know what to do, Irene. They know law and order, the iron fist in the gauntlet of steel.'

Ella trains herself to lay the table blind, watching the news. She and her father look out for similar things on television, she can tell, though they have different words for what they see. To her, far from being an old rubbish heap, Africa is teeming with goings-on, as she knows for a fact from her cross-continent trips. If there were any doubt in the matter, see this report on Soviet insurgents and Cuban saboteurs popping up somewhere soon in South African cities, infiltrating markets and department stores in their battle fatigues, places where people would least expect them. ‘South Africa is a Cold War front line,' the newsreader is saying. The Prime Minister B J Vorster sagely nods in agreement: ‘This country is leading the free world in the struggle against the Soviet threat. We have the Terrorism Act my government implemented that safeguards our law and order – puts saboteurs in prison for sixty days, renewable.'

At the end of the six o'clock news every evening the newsreader works through a roll-call of the soldiers who have recently fallen in the wars South Africa is heroically helping to fight on distant borders: the Caprivi strip, the Rhodesian low lands, wherever the Cold War is riding piggyback on local wars.

‘Michael Darling, 19 years of age; Graham Jones, 19 years of age; Simon Marais, 20; Angus Rathbone, 18; Nigel Raubenheimer . . .' The roll-call is accompanied by a picture of a grainy grey sunset and the flag fluttering in silhouette.

As the reading of the list begins, the father goes to stand in his place in front of the television. He pushes his glasses up his nose as if to see more clearly. The mother leaves the room, murmurs about the washing-up.

What if, Ella wonders to herself, stacking plates, those communist saboteurs might ever pop up closer to home? She tidies onto the Philips radiogram the crystal butter dish, silver knife rests, glass coasters, all the European accoutrements of her mother's table. As Africa is on the front line of the Cold War, she thinks, it's not so crazy to imagine the front line erupting soon right here in their town. What if a soldier, a live soldier, a dark-haired Cuban maybe, were to parachute into Braemar one afternoon? She sees him landing in a neat crouch position on that bank of dirt ground at the end of their garden, then standing up, stretching, checking his kit . . .

Ella discovers a new sensation pricking her in the ribs, a proper grown-up sensation, is how it feels, to suit a nearly grown-up girl, tall as she'll ever be (or so she hopes). She likes the thought of the wide world bursting into Braemar, that's the nub of it. She begins to read the father's newspapers, at first surreptitiously. She fishes them out of his waste-paper bin when he's in the toilet. He spends a great deal of time reading the newspaper in the toilet. But then to her surprise he takes to leaving the paper in obvious places, spread on his armchair or the Philips radiogram, open to articles with an African focus, about the threat of the Russian Bear creeping south or Mobuto Sese Seko's ‘fabulous and criminal' wealth or – this one he pores over before leaving it for her – ‘Prime Minister Baltazar John Vorster's clear-sighted
realpolitik
. Worthy son of our late state architect Verwoerd.'

Lying on the moss-green carpet under the dining table, Ella reads that B J Vorster is meeting his Zambian counterpart Kenneth Kaunda to talk about the problem of Rhodesia, on the railway bridge at Victoria Falls. She's aware of the father standing in the doorway but doesn't shove the paper under her belly as she would if it was the mother, seeing as he's left it out for her at exactly this article.

‘The two leaders are playing for time.' She pats the photograph of the train suspended in its no-man's-land in the sky. Just reading the words aloud gives her a sense of importance. ‘Why part with power when you've fought hard for it?' she asks.

Privately she thinks that Mr B J Vorster is the ugliest man she's ever seen. Even her father's not so ugly. His nose isn't quite so shapeless, his hair not as thin.

Her father harrumphs, half to himself. Was that a sound of approval? It may have been. He pulls out a chair and sits down, scrapes at his stubble.

‘Politics is not just about getting power,' he talks to the wall. ‘It's about holding onto power once you have it, it's about the wheeling, dealing and scheming. It's about looking like a buffoon, if you have to, or a tightrope artiste, like our B J here, or even Uncle Kenneth, but then reasoning like a Russian as you do so. Reasoning like Kasparov.'

Ella thinks of the Cuban spy who will drop into their garden by parachute. She imagines him crawling out of the hiding place he will make for himself in the hydrangea bushes at the gate, stooping his way out of his den just as she's setting out for school. Brushing off the dead leaves clinging to his uniform, he will step into her path to ask for her help, his musky Spanish mixed with halting English. She feels her legs jolting to a halt. The sunshine glances off his copper-smooth forehead.

Would she be able at that moment to rise to her responsibilities? she asks herself. Stand tall and call calmly over her shoulder, ‘Dad, we have an intruder. Please phone the police.'

She glances up at the father but his speech is at an end. His eyes rest on the photograph of the train under her elbows.

Or would something different happen? she wonders. Isn't that the effect dangerous spies and saboteurs have? When she sees the Cuban's gallant bow, his gentlemanly stance there by the hydrangea bushes, legs at ease but arms stiffly by his sides, won't her voice falter and her breath drain away, her hands descend helplessly to her satchel? She imagines giving him her lunch box, her juice bottle, everything useful she has – supplies to get him onto the highway to Johannesburg. Johannesburg, everyone knows, teems with communist insurgents.

In the black and white photo-comics Ella and her classmates swap at school, hunky Cubans and Russians are forever teaming up with low-browed black terrorists in battle fatigues, to the point where Ella wonders what they see in the Africans, square-shouldered though they may be. The communist leader Mr Brezhnev – the mop-haired history teacher Mr Donovan McDonald tells the class – has built his country's strategic nuclear arsenal so that it exceeds that of the United States in its number of weapons. The Cold War foe has power in spades.

In Ella's picture of the gallant Cuban standing beside the hydrangea bushes, his sign language is clear though his English is halting. She gets his meaning perfectly. Assist me or I die, he'll say, and she will feel her insides cave in. She won't be able to hold back. She'll give him what he needs. Kindness will have nothing to do with it.

In her picture she gives in to the Cuban totally because the dark power inside him reaches out its octopus tentacles to grasp the badness inside her. Like copies like, Mr McDonald says: it's a rule of nature, in politics as in life.

Ella doesn't betray her communist susceptibilities to a soul. In fact she enjoys hugging them close. But then she stumbles on a surprise fellow-thinker. One hot summer's day the father announces from the dining-room door that he's been pondering things, this damned mess in the world, these
kut
politicians everywhere. Ella under the table looks up from her photo-comic. He has come to an important conclusion he'd like his daughter to hear, he says, which is this – his regard for South Africa notwithstanding, he nowadays has time for the Soviet Union. He wipes the sweat off his shapeless purple nose so like B J Vorster's. Yes, though he resents how the Russian Bear is the Puppet-master in Africa, he admires the cunning way they go about pulling the strings. In truth, it's his regard for South Africa that leads him to embrace the Soviets.

Ella watches the father's polished shoes march across the floor and come to stand beside her head, planted on either side of her photo-comic.

‘Things have come to a limit,
meid
, a bloody limit,' he says, a high-pitched note whistling through his loose front teeth. Usually, when he finds her photo-comics lying around the house, he puts them in the bin. Today he takes no notice of what's at his feet.

‘That slime Henry Kissinger, that insect-faced David Owen,' he goes on. ‘They're coming over here yet again to slap B J Vorster's wrists, bloody boss us about, the cunts, tell us how to run the place. I just read it in the paper. I say, let's show them what we're made of. Let's be the strongmen of the world for a change, the real strongmen who bring about real solid effects. Let's stand up to them. I'd as soon as support Brezhnev's Russia as the rotten West, as long as it enforced law and order, which it does. What do you say we write direct to the Russians, appeal to Mr Brezhnev the Soviet leader, ask him to give us a hand?'

Write to Mr Brezhnev
. . . ? Ella has to twist her neck round to look up at him. Can he be serious? Has he peeped into her thoughts and found the picture of the Cuban insurgent lurking there?