LUNCH WITH MY PARENTS the next day should have been a return to normality after a difficult couple of weeks. Mum is a good cook, and in honour of my birthday she had cooked a fillet, along with chips (a nod to Mike there) and a salad of rocket and asparagus. For pudding, there was a perfect tarte tatin, something I know how to make, but have never been confident enough to tackle. Life with Simon taught me that culinary flops cannot be written off to experimentation – they are a sign of incompetence, and I have never really got my head round trying again since he left.
But escape from the murder could not be for long: what I had said to Thabo Mchunu hammered away in my mind and, inevitably I suppose, Mum and Dad wanted to know more about Daniel. I repeated what I had told them the day before, and confessed that I had been in contact with the dead man’s son in an effort to get to the bottom of what his father had been doing, whether he had enemies. My parents looked unenthusiastic as I explained, but I could see Mike thinking it was all quite cool. He, of course, hadn’t seen the corpse.
I mentioned the apparent quarrel between Phineas Ndzoyiya and Thabo Mchunu, though I didn’t say anything about my telephone conversation with the latter. I said I was wondering whether their argument could have had something to do with Ndzoyiya’s death. I left out the threats to Paul, and the odd phone calls: there had been another one that morning – also from a “Private number”. Of course, they could have been wrong numbers, or anything, but they could also have been someone trying to frighten me – and succeeding. Mike interrupted to ask about the Mendi. He had heard of it, but anything more than the name seemed to have passed him by. History was not one of his matric subjects.
My father, something of an amateur military historian, was immediately in his element, and began to explain the whole story: how the Mendi had been carrying members of the South African Native Labour Corps to France from Cape Town. After calling in at Plymouth, the ship had sailed for France where the men were due to join the war as support troops, digging trenches and the like.
“In the fog, she was struck by a merchant ship, and sank very quickly,” explained my father. “More than 600 of the soldiers, as well as several of the crew, were drowned. Most of the troops had come from the Pondoland area, on the Wild Coast, and most of them couldn’t swim. Not that it would have helped much. It was winter, and the water would have been very cold. The story goes that the chaplain to the troops gathered the men around him on the ship as she was sinking and calmed them, telling them to ‘drill the death drill’.” Dad got up from the table and went off to find a reference book, coming back and reading to Mike what it was Reverend Isaac Dyobha was supposed to have said.
“‘Be quiet and calm, my countrymen. What is happening now is what you came to do … you are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers, we are drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers … Swazis, Pondos, Basotho … so let us die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our assegais in the kraal, our voices are left with our bodies’.”
Mike looked suitably impressed. It is a moving speech, and one that deserves to be remembered, though perhaps more as an example of the utter futility of war than anything else. Dad went on to explain how the captain of the merchant ship didn’t stop to pick up survivors. “Maybe he was frightened, though some people have said he didn’t stop because the majority of the victims were black. So, like so much else, it’s a political football as well as a human tragedy.”
He explained that, post 1994, the previously forgotten, or at least ignored, story of the Mendi had come back into the public eye. Dad looked over the top of his reading glasses at Mike, who nodded. He was very fond of his grandfather, and enjoyed Dad’s moments of didacticism. As a teenager, I had objected to them, moaning about being bored when Dad took us to places of what he considered educational value. But as a small child, and now as an adult, I actually rather liked it. It struck me that if I tried to tell Mike the story, he would have fidgeted and his eyes would have glazed over. Grandparents can get away with a lot.
But as my father was talking, I found myself becoming more and more convinced that this tale, almost a century old, had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of Phineas Ndzoyiya. There had to be more to it than that. He had quarrelled about it with Thabo Mchunu, sure, and after his reaction to my stupid remark to Mchunu yesterday, I was beginning to think he really was involved in some way: otherwise, why react to the name of Flash Funerals by hanging up on me? But the Mendi must surely be a red herring?
When we got home, Mike went off with his mates, presumably for the previous evening’s postponed activities. Beyond a passing admonition to be careful of his stitches, I said nothing. Following lunch with Mum and Dad, I was feeling full and lazy, and the idea of passing out on the sofa, allowing myself to sink into its sagging, oblivion-inducing comfort, was irresistible. Telling Grumpy, and my conscience, that I would kip for just 20 minutes and then head out for some exercise, I collapsed in a heap.
My 20 minutes turned out to be an hour and a half, and I only woke because Grumpy, his patience wearing thin, pushed his large, clammy nose into my ear. I rolled over, and penitently foregoing my longed-for cup of tea, pulled on my trainers, picked up the dog lead and headed up the road. We took the path past the spot where the body had been. I knew that, unless I was going to risk losing all pleasure in what bloody Sergeant Dhlomo had called my amenities, I was going to have to get used to it. And once it was behind us, I made a concerted effort to put the murder and all its ramifications out of my mind. I walked fast: I needed to shake Mum’s lunch off, and I owed Grumpy a decent outing before it got dark.
The shadows of the trees were long and solid across the road by the time I got home and, even though the walk had been brisk, the air was fresh enough to make me wish I had picked up a jersey on the way out. I fed the dog before I turned the kettle on and, from the kitchen, heard a car pulling up. One of Mike’s friends had recently passed his driving test and, aware that I couldn’t reasonably forbid my son to travel with anyone under the age of 40, I had reluctantly agreed that Stephen could drive him, at least in the hours of daylight. Stephen had obviously borrowed his father’s car to bring Mike home, and I strolled out to meet them, trying not to look too relieved to see them in one piece.
“Was someone here, Ma?” Mike asked. “There was a car parked just outside, but it pulled off when we arrived.”
Anxiety came sweeping back, like clouds obscuring the light. “No, no one. What sort of car?”
“Oh, just a bakkie. Isuzu, I think. I didn’t really notice,” said Stephen.
In an attempt to distract myself and avoid answering Mike’s question, I offered the boys tea and chocolate cake. My appetite, even for the tea, had vanished. The two of them fooled around in the kitchen for a while, and then went off to look at something on Mike’s computer. I told myself there could be a thousand and one reasons why a car was parked in the street. If it was behind the wall, I couldn’t have seen it unless I walked out to the gate: it was where Dan had parked his Golf that day. There was no reason to assume it was anything to do with the murder, or that someone was spying on me. The road along the front of the house was busy enough, with a filling station and a couple of small shops less than a hundred metres away.
I shook myself: I was getting paranoid. The police were investigating. I had merely asked Mr Mchunu about his dealings with Dan and Mr Ndzoyiya, presenting myself, genuinely, as a concerned friend of Dan’s. Surely no one would come and park outside my house for that? And, anyway, didn’t Mchunu live in Gauteng? It struck me that I didn’t really know where he was based.
If it had been Mchunu, and if he had wanted to confront me, what better opportunity than when I was walking my dog in the plantations? No. The bakkie outside the house had to be a coincidence. I almost succeeded in convincing myself. Almost. My stupid Flash Funerals remark hammered away at my feebly constructed comfort.