The river widens and slows, islands of reeds appear, and we navigate braided channels to find our way through. On either side of the water, the bare hills recede, leaving shallow, rocky screes behind the pampas grass. The weaver bird nests strung from the blades have become unremarkable now. I barely watch the males as they dart in and out, thrusting their beaks to add new strips of green to their walls.
We’ve been on the river for three days, a convoy of canoes paddling toward the ocean. Some days we’ve been thrust forward where the river has narrowed and been forced through impassive granite boulders. I’ve gripped the ropes on the sides of the canoe as we bounced and lurched, spray in my face and a scream in my throat, and thankful for my commitment to regular medication. Other days we’ve battled the afternoon sea breeze, unexpectedly fierce this far inland, and arrived at the campsite arm-sore and weary. And there have been days when we’ve just drifted, letting the current move us downstream. I’ve leaned against my pack, sapped by the heat, and stared at the green thicket that lines the banks. I’ve seen vervet monkeys looking back at me with their black faces, hundreds of the ubiquitous weaver birds, and even a fish eagle. Sometimes I’ve closed my eyes, my lids heating up under the sun, and startled myself awake to the same repeating green and orange panorama.
In the evenings, we’ve made camp under a sky that turns from Southern Hemisphere blue to pink, to purple, to sequins that rival even the skies over Weymouth. I’ve seen a shooting star that was so big, so bright, so enduring that I was convinced it was military, a contribution to some conflict farther north. As tents have been erected and sausages turned in frying pans, I’ve watched baboon families on sun-warmed rock faces across the water. Rock dassies have frowned at me in turn. Other paddlers with energy left after a day on the water have strolled back upstream to leap off cliffs and float back to camp. I’ve listened to their screams and splashes, content to bathe only in the cooling air.
I drove up here from Cape Town in a hire car that I left in Springbok before catching a bus to the border. The safari company met me there and took me to the camp in the back of their troop carrier. There, I slept in a mud and thatch hut, ate barbequed game and burned citronella candles next to my bed while I waited for the canoes to arrive.
I got to South Africa on a superyacht. It was built in Perth, sold to a buyer in Dubai and delivered via Weymouth. The van took me straight to the docks. Unlike he did with Eric, Vince didn’t let me stop for iced coffee on the way.
‘This should have been done weeks ago,’ he told me as he drove north in the dark, ‘straight after the shooting. Two days after you first logged into that damn database.’ He glanced in the rear-view mirror. Clocked my blank face. ‘Didn’t Helen tell you it was her house? The papers made it out to be a bunch of redneck locals but the note in the letterbox was for Graham. It was a warning from Tallent to back off. He thought Graham had given you the tip-off, like he did with Eric.’
Vince opened the rear doors only when he had Ray and Jack in sight. Ray patted my back and passed me a document folder, the type that middle-aged couples are always opening at airports when they’re looking for their passports.
‘You have everything you need in here. If you must get in touch, do it through Vince. Someone at the other end will show you how.’ He laid a hand on Vince’s shoulder, a paternal gesture that his son leaned into before catching my eye and, to his credit, turning a deep shade of red.
‘You’re Graham Griffiths’ tax accountant.’
Ray shakes his head. ‘Was, not anymore.’
‘So, you knew about the drugs.’
‘That’s client privilege, Frances, you should know about that.’ He saw my sideways glance at the boat. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only you and Jack, no merchandise.’
‘Does Dad know?’
‘Not about the drugs, but he knows that we’re arranging for you to take a sabbatical. Medical leave, I believe they’ve called it at your office. And it’s probably best that you don’t contact him. Not for a while, anyway. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the old boy. And he’ll be well looked after in the retirement village.’ He put his other hand on my shoulder, paternal but there was pressure behind it, guiding me toward Jack. ‘And we’ll have a quiet word to the others too. This time everyone who needs to know will know.
They shunted me onto the boat with a backpack filled with clothes from my own wardrobe. ‘If you don’t have sea legs already, you’ll have them by the time we get there,’ Jack told me. I tucked myself below deck, swallowed a sleeping pill and closed my eyes for thirteen hours. By the time I surfaced, the water was a deep, dark blue and the wind blowing from the west.
The canoes clear the reed islands and I see something I haven’t seen for days, the glint of corrugated-iron rooftops rising up the hill on the Namibian side. They are farther downstream, says my guide from the back of the canoe. We won’t go there; we’ll be stopping before the next bend. He points his paddle at a sandbank and dips it into the water to steer us to the right. He has been my navigator for the past three days, pointing out channels and turning our boat from the rear to get us through rapids. It was unnerving at first, sitting at the front of the boat facing into the rocks and the waves, anticipating disaster until the bow swayed sideways. I didn’t need to worry, he’d said. It was my job to paddle, his to be the rudder. Eventually I learned to let go, to trust his judgement and anticipate the turn and not the collision.
We pull onto the sandbank and suddenly I am leaving the canoes for the last time. We pull them out of the water and fresh guides in green safari shirts jog down to the water’s edge, motioning for us to leave our packs. They will bring them up. Our job is to wash our hands and eat lunch. At the top of the riverbank, we are greeted by waitstaff and picnic tables laid out with cold meats, fruits and fresh bread. We eat, drink wine, and the rest of the group friend each other on Facebook. I tell them I don’t do social media and they smile and say good for you. They dive online, desperate to catch up on news and check travel bookings. Some are continuing northwards, winding their way through the continent, and not intending to go home for another six months; others are returning home to jobs and university studies. Everyone but me opts for the first bus back. They have hire vehicles to collect, a border to cross, another bus to meet. I tell them I’ve booked an extra night at the camp so I can visit the gem mines and will catch a lift with one of the guides tomorrow. I wave them goodbye and head back to the river.
I check the mud map that Tim Steyn gave me on the docks in Cape Town and find the path that leads toward the town. I only have to walk a few paces before the pampas grass closes over my head and the camp has disappeared. After half an hour, the track bends to the left and down to the bank. A canoe similar to the one I have travelled in is pulled up on the sand. I sit and drink my water, pop a pill out of its blister pack and run a finger over the embossed oak tree logo on the side of my new medication bag. It was in the backpack that Vince prepared for me and is stocked with twelve months’ worth of betahistine, diuretics and rescue meds. All I need now is bananas, and I can get plenty of those here.
Bigfoot has everything she needs for Neil’s report to parliament, but if she can’t get it over the line, she has a back-up plan. We walked the long way to the bus stop that night, sheltering from the rain under shop awnings. It wasn’t a coincidence, Bigfoot being the common denominator in the two inquiries that involved Helen Stewart. She’d seen anomalies in residential addresses in the community health inquiry. The inquiry team had trouble tracking down patients who live in public housing. They’d be there one day and gone the next.
She let it go until Eric’s police inquiry was approved and she noticed the same names appearing in his working papers. Cameron, Meleshe, Stewart: they were all there, and they all had blood tests done in the months before they were evicted. She had added the missing column to the spreadsheet and was trying to link them all together when she was hit by the car.
‘No, I don’t know who the driver was. It crossed my mind, especially after the police inquiry was pulled and then Eric disappeared. But it could also just be a coincidence.’
‘I don’t know if I believe in coincidences anymore.’
‘No, coincidences are real. I admit I panicked for a moment and deleted the spreadsheet column with the pathology report numbers. That was a mistake. But don’t you go getting all conspiracy theory on me. Anyway, when Neil decided to relocate the office, I put the papers into Eric’s old folders, hoping you’d find a pattern that I couldn’t see.’
I remembered the night I vomited in Belinda’s wastepaper bin. ‘Were you in the office that night?’
Her lip twitched upwards in the closest approximation I’d ever seen her give to a smile. ‘I was leaving when I heard the commotion. You obviously didn’t notice that someone had cleaned up by the next morning, did you?’
I hadn’t and muttered my thanks, keeping my eyes on the footpath.
‘I’d just about given it up for a lost cause, especially when the government announced Come Clean and you had to abandon the investigation, when I saw you talking with Helen Stewart in the building foyer. I recognised her from the photo in her tenancy file, and it all fell into place.’
But Bigfoot didn’t know the Graham Griffiths connection; I filled her in as we walked. About how Helen was his half-sister and how he discovered, through Eric, that she’d been evicted from her public housing tenancy for no apparent reason. And removed from the waiting list. With thirty thousand people in front of her, she’d never live in publicly funded housing again. Graham found her and Tahnee squatting in an abandoned kombi in the Kwinana bush camp, too ashamed to tell family. He put them both up in a house in the hills. It was what gave Eric the idea to check the tenancy histories of other evictees. The three percenters and people not from around here.
‘Is that why Griffiths invested in Banksia Apartments? To have somewhere that wasn’t caught up in the purge?’
‘That’s what Vince told me. It makes a good story, but I don’t know how much of it I believe.’
‘And the Minister for Housing had someone plant the drugs in his apartment when he didn’t toe the line.’
‘Who knows?’
Personally, I think the drugs were Griffiths’. I’m not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who trades in misery, even if he’s probably just saved my life. Vince also told me that when he went to pack a bag for me, he found a gas leak in my apartment. Just a small one. Not enough to blow up your kitchen when you cooked dinner, but probably enough to turn you blue by morning. He’d called Alice and she told him to make sure I got plenty of oxygen. Keep all the windows down in the van on the drive north.
‘But it’s not about coming clean from drugs,’ I told Bigfoot, ‘it’s about race and religion. Christianising public housing, forcing everyone else onto the streets and into the bush camps. God wants Christians to prosper. Isn’t that what the Minister for Housing’s church says? He might not sign the termination notices, but he makes sure the Department of Housing knows who is godly and deserving and who isn’t.’
We reached the end of another city block, avoiding puddles and hugging the shopfronts, before Bigfoot replied. She narrowed her eyes, staring down the sandstone block of Parliament House at the other end of the Terrace. I knew from experience not to interrupt.
‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s not about race or religion. It’s about money. It’s always about money. This government wants to outsource public housing, but the private sector is interested only as far as it can make a profit. And that’s easier to do if you’ve got tenants who stay put, pay their rent on time and maintain their properties.’ She draws a Venn diagram in the air with her hands. ‘It shouldn’t come as any surprise that it’s quicker and cheaper for people in power to decide for themselves which classes of people make good tenants, instead of giving every person a fair go.’
‘Which is why they got rid of the three strikes rule.’
‘Exactly.’
‘That sucks.’
‘Yes, Frances, it does.’
Dust rises at the foot of the hills on the South African side of the river. The sea breeze is in and carries away any sound that might have travelled across the water. I’m glad I’ll be crossing with the wind. My arms are still sore from the battle two days ago and I doubt I’d get far against it on my own. I watch the dust cloud grow as a vehicle crosses the river plain. It heads toward the bank and the windscreen catches the sun.
I strap my bag into the centre of the canoe and climb into the rear seat. It’s more difficult on my own, without a guide to hold the craft while I find my balance. I plant my feet, strap the paddle to my wrist, and push off, wobbling like a kid on a bicycle. Bigfoot – I make a mental note to think of her as Catherine from now on – has the recording of my supermarket conversation with the honourable minister. She will have passed it to Jaelyn Worner, and Jaelyn will be waiting for the right time to pass it to the press. I’m guessing the right time will be one month out from the next state election.
The wind catches me, and I float away from the bank. I risk a glance back over my shoulder. Tim was right: this section of the river is invisible to anyone at the camp. On the other side, the four-wheel drive has pulled up to the water. The driver is standing on the foot plate. He’s seen me and is signalling with one arm. I can see the camera slung across his chest, the curve of his cyclist’s legs, and his blond hair. I point the bow back across the river and dip my oar into the water.