Chapter 23

Charlotte stayed submerged in the bath for almost an hour, until, on Eugene’s third request, she got out and dried herself and changed. She found a musty pair of running shoes in a cupboard and they fitted close to perfectly.

They set out for Upington along the river bank, taking with them a few liquid rations in a backpack that Eugene had found. An eighteen-year-old Irish whisky was among the precious spoils. If they were to spend another night outdoors, a good whisky was as good as a sleeping bag, and easier to carry.

“Was there no one you wanted to call?” asked Charlotte as they made their way slowly along the rocky river bank.

“No,” replied Eugene.

“No one?”

“Niemand,” repeated Eugene in Afrikaans.

They walked on for some time before Eugene spoke again.

“The Afrikaner Space Programme didn’t employ people with too many connections. They said it was so that we’d be less likely to tell anyone about it.”

“And there’d be less people to ask questions when they killed all of you.”

“Ja. It’s the reason Johan was buying cigarettes in Kimberley – ’cause in Upington there were too many eyes watching, making sure that we remained friendless and dateless. In Kimberley he could live a normal life – date waitresses, have a game of pool with the guys, that sort of thing, even if it was just for half an hour. He always used to say that he knew a place in Kimberley that sold cheap cigarettes and that’s why he always drove there, but what’s a few cents per box compared to the petrol he burnt getting there? He was lonely as hell. We all were.”

Charlotte noted Eugene’s use of the past tense “were”. Had things changed? Was Eugene no longer lonely? Was he referring to her? After a long silence, she spoke, reverting back to the original topic.

“My mom died of cancer and my dad of a heart attack. I was just trying to call my sister. She’s all I have now.”

“No husband?” asked Eugene.

“An ex-boyfriend who was afraid of commitment. Well, he was afraid to commit to me. He’s married now. If I were to call him it’d only be to tell him to go shark diving in a seal suit.”

“Sounds like a real doos,” said Eugene.

Charlotte smiled, but said nothing.

They walked on, weaving between the bank and the farmland. Occasionally they had to scale rusted fences that ran right down to the river and disappeared into the lazy green water. River crabs sunbathed on the muddy sections of bank, holding their red claws up to the sky. They scuttled back to their holes as soon as Charlotte and Eugene approached. Some though, caught too far from home, would dart around in a panic looking for refuge with a neighbour before slipping into the river.

The farmlands ended as arid, rocky cliffs rose on either side of the river. They walked along in their shade, crossing plateaus of dry cement-like mud. The river was breaking up into tributaries now and there were islands midstream, their banks lined with herons.

They stopped near midday and sat on the edge of a rotting wooden jetty, dangling their feet in the water. Eugene pulled a bottle of water from the bag and offered it to Charlotte. She drank more than half, then apologised. He drank the rest and returned the bottle to his backpack. They sat in the sun, resting and taking in the view and the sounds, the water lapping at the shore and the noisy chatter of birds in the reeds. Soon they retreated from the river to the shade of the scrubby desert trees and lay on the grass – each of them with one arm across their face shading their eyes.

After twenty minutes, Eugene got up and put the backpack on and they set out again for Upington.

“What was your job at Vastrap?” asked Charlotte. She’d been wary of approaching the topic because of the way Eugene had reacted in the car. She realised that the whole thing was an open wound. But now he was less of a stranger than he had been before – and so was she.

“Head of Navigation Engineering,” he replied.

“Which means what?” asked Charlotte.

“Which means I was a nerd at school. I was in charge of getting my head around all the factors that could stop the ship from reaching its destination. When you launch things into space, you don’t aim for where the destination is. You aim for where it will be. Orbits, gravity, asteroids, solar flares, trajectories – those were all up to me and my team to consider. Plus I worked with the explosives engineers to figure out how to manage directional propulsion.”

“The nuclear guys?”

“Ja. I can explain the whole thing to you if you’d like. I can talk for days about it. Though up till now I’ve been contractually bound not to.”

“Okay, how about just a summarised version then. I did have half a bottle of Kaapse Vonkel with breakfast.”

“We’re using Nuclear Pulse Propulsion – which basically means that when we’re in space we detonate a series of small nuclear explosions in a chamber on the back of the craft. The force of the explosion pushes out the back of the ship and the craft is propelled forward.”

“Seems easy enough to understand,” said Charlotte.

“Ja, it’s not brain surgery or anything.”

Charlotte laughed.

“In space there’s no friction – so if I push something one way it will just keep going at that speed forever. After the first explosion gets the craft moving, we do another and another and another explosion, until we’re going really bladdy fast. If we continually accelerate, we could be at Earth Two in about four months.”

“Earth Two, is that what it’s called?”

“No. They want to call it something grander and more Afrikaans. There was a whole creative team working on the name, and to my knowledge they still haven’t settled on one. Last I heard they were considering calling it ‘Heaven’, as in ‘Heaven and Earth’.”

“That’s a bit bloody self-righteous.”

“Just a bit.”

“And the ship itself? What’s that like?”

“It’s a really long cylinder, about sixty metres, with stabilising fins and a huge blast plate at the back – that’s the part that the explosion pushes on.”

“Where was it? I didn’t see it at Vastrap.”

“It’s there. It was built inside one of the two nuclear testing shafts. The one hangar that you saw rolls away on tracks and the ship launches from underground – which will maximise the energy from the initial blast.”

“Wow!” said Charlotte. She’d hardly paid any attention to where she was stepping since Eugene started talking, and the running shoes she’d found at the farmhouse were now soaked with muddy water.

“But even though it’s a huge craft it can only take four people,” added Eugene.

“What? I thought it was like a Noah’s ark for Afrikaner nationalists.”

“It is. Two by two remember – only a pair of every animal. We’re sending the minimum number of people to establish a genetically diverse population.”

“It’s all just so mad. Straight out of science fiction,” said Charlotte.

“Ja, I suppose it is.”

Once they’d hiked past the barren cliffs, the farmlands began again. Most didn’t have farmhouses on them, just sheds and silos and hadedas. It wasn’t until just after lunchtime that they reached Upington. They were both aching and hungry as they left the river bank and joined up with the network of roads that formed the town.

“There’s a payphone outside a corner café somewhere up here,” said Eugene. They were in the suburbs – small houses, each with glazed pottery Mexicans fastened to the walls of their entrance ways. They’d been popular in the nineties, and unfortunately also extremely durable.

At the café they bought six soft rolls, two bags of salt-and-vinegar chips, a couple of Bar Ones and a litre of Coke. Charlotte paid with a hundred-rand note and got some of her change in two-rand coins for the payphone. Outside she took a swig from the Coke bottle and fed the coins into the grime-covered phone. She could see Eugene through the scratched plastic hood of the booth, splitting the rolls with his fingers and filling them with chips, crushing them down and adding more until they were as heavy as hamburgers. He bit into one, showering the pavement with a fine rain of potato-chip flakes and chewed the saliva-sapping mouthful, chasing it down with a swig of Coke.

Lindy’s phone rang just a couple of times before she answered.

It startled her in her hiding place behind the dumpster. Lindy expected it to be Stefan again, saying, “Look what you made me do to that nice man,” or something to that effect, but it wasn’t him. It was another Upington number.

“Hello?”

“Lindy, it’s Charlotte.”

“Oh, thank God you’re alive!”

“I’m okay. Look, I can’t talk long, I’m in a bit of trouble. But I’m hoping things will calm down in a couple of days and I’ll be back ...”

“There’s a man trying to kill me,” sobbed Lindy over the phone. “He killed a policeman and another man. He wants to know where you are.”

“Shit, really? Are you okay?”

“Ja, kind of,” said Lindy, pushing an egg-stained nappy away from her with her shoe and feeling the lump on her cheek with her free hand.

“Okay, tell me exactly what happened,” said Charlotte. “I need to know details.”

Lindy started at the beginning, right from waking up, to finding the Corolla in the river, to the hungry policeman and the man in her house, to the police station and the call from Detective Hendriks about the missing evidence, and about Stefan and then the whole ordeal with the hawkers who’d tried to help her.

“Shit,” said Charlotte. “So the cops are in on this – some of them at least. I’m glad I called you first. We need to meet somewhere.”

“Where are you?” asked Lindy.

When Charlotte heard the news about the man looking for her, she tapped on the plastic hood for Eugene’s attention and called him over with a hand gesture and a look of alarm. He leant in to try to hear what Lindy was saying, but with the passing cars and the air-conditioner unit of the corner café rattling and humming directly above them, he only caught the odd word.

“I’m at a payphone in Upington. Can you get here?” said Charlotte. Then she turned to Eugene and, holding her hand over the receiver, asked, “Where can we meet her?”

“How about the Wimpy in Odendaal Road?” he said.

“Can you get to the Wimpy in Odendaal Road late this afternoon?”

“I can try,” said Lindy.

When Charlotte hung up, she didn’t reach for the Coke. Instead, she opened the backpack and took a swig from the whisky.

“Shit!” she said. “I can’t believe my sister is caught up in all this too. And the cops are involved.”

“Are you sure they are?” asked Eugene.

Charlotte told him about the sniper bullet that Detective Hendriks had submitted as evidence.

“There goes our plan,” said Eugene.

“What now?” asked Charlotte.

“We skip across the border into Namibia and lay low for a few years, I suppose?” suggested Eugene with a sneer.

Charlotte looked at him as though he were mad.

“I’m not saying that’s what we should do, but I really can’t think of another plan right now.”

“Me neither,” said Charlotte, taking one of the chip rolls from Eugene. “This whole thing isn’t going to blow over, is it?”

“No. No it’s not. It’s a fokken baobab in a summer breeze.”

They sat together on the pavement, their feet in the gutter, eating their rolls and sipping on the iced Coke.

“What are we going to do until we meet up with my sister?” asked Charlotte.

Eugene took a long time to answer. He just stared across the street to where some kids were playing cricket in a garden.

“I’m not meeting your sister,” said Eugene finally.

Charlotte stood up and glared down at him. “What? Why not?”

“Think about it, Charlotte – what leads do they have in finding us? None at all. If I were them, I’d scare your sister and then follow her right to you. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s obvious. Feel free to meet her at the Wimpy, but I’m not going anywhere near it. By the time those mad Voortrekker henchmen are crouching behind the tills, I’m going to be on my way to ... I don’t know. Far away.”

“And what’s going to happen to my sister?” asked Charlotte.

“Bad things probably.”

“You’re a real spineless shit,” said Charlotte.

“I’m just using common sense, Charlotte, there’s no point in winding up dead. And in a Wimpy of all places.”

“It was your fucking idea!”

Charlotte turned and started off along the pavement, then turned back and grabbed Eugene’s backpack from beside him. She pulled the whisky out, drank as close to half as she could manage and put it back in the bag. She held back a cough.

“I thought we were friends,” said Charlotte. “I can see why the Afrikaner Space Programme hired you. If you want friends, you have to be a friend – and you’re just a shit. A friendless shit.”

“Charlotte wait,” said Eugene. But she didn’t stop. Her stomach burnt with a mix of anger and alcohol – and also the fear that perhaps Eugene was right. Perhaps today was the day the Opperman family would be extinguished altogether. But there was no way she was going with Eugene. No way she was going to leave Lindy alone in a Wimpy booth on the border of the desert.

Eugene got to his feet and followed after her and then stopped and watched her turn right at a four-way stop. He expected that she’d turn the corner and wait there behind the face-brick wall to make her point – then in a while she’d come back. He waited fifteen minutes for her. Then he headed west.