“Feel the weight of that. It’s mushe hey?” says Jess, crowing, pushing the ginormous trophy into my hands. It’s silver with a black base like a drum, very curly, twisty handles and has impressive depth. She lets me peer at my own face on the side of the bowl and then into it for all of five seconds before she starts tugging it out of my hands.
“All right, all right. Give it back. There’s no champagne in it so stop looking so hopeful.”
The stretched out image of my face is broken up by the words Victrix Ludorum. The silver shields fixed to the base are engraved with names and dates: Cheryl Harvey 1975, Elise van Tonder 1976, Sue Tredgold 1977 and a blank one. There are more round the other side but Jess has retaken possession and tucked the monstrosity protectively into her arms.
“That blank shield’s for you, look. ‘Jess Marsh, Inter-house Gala 1978, Best Diver The School Has Ever Known’. I can see it now. Although there isn’t room for all those words.”
I was so proud of her, standing up there in front of the entire school and telling us how she’d be honoured to eventually be a part of a national diving team and represent Rhodesia. I even got a bit teared up. Pride for my friend, yes, but also with this flat, damp sadness that’s still lapping around the edges of what’s been a celebratory day. She represents the school, she’ll undoubtedly represent Mashonaland, and she may well be good enough to get into a national team, but she knows as well as I do that there’ll be no-one to challenge except, maybe, South Africa. The politicians have made damned sure that Rhodesians will never play sport against the rest of the world. They nibble away in this manner at our pleasures and our dreams and hopes. They make us all optimistic with small forward steps, congratulate themselves, and then promptly take a massive leap backwards. Look how they officially abolish racial discrimination across the board – okay, admittedly not everyone’s optimistic about that but maybe those people should think about leaving – and so now black men are eligible for call up, when they’ve only ever been voluntarily involved in this before. What a sick irony, or was it a ploy to obtain more manpower to fight their war? Look how they talk about referendums and elections and a ceasefire and in reality the death toll rises, they impose martial law and then scrabble desperately for more men to join up.
Enough of this. I grab Jess’s elbow as she turns to inch her way along to the end of the row of seats.
“Hey! Celebration required. How about you guys come out with me and Danny tonight? Why don’t we go to Ice Bowl?”
Prizegiving over, the crowd is shuffling, babbling, gathering up belongings, beckoning to family members located across aisles or several rows away. Jess is glowing and still admiring her prize, although she’s trying to pretend she isn’t.
“So what are you going to buy with your book tokens?” she asks. “A tome on advanced mathematics? Or physics? The History of the World in one volume? Or maybe The Canterbury Tales?”
I sigh and say, “Horse books, Jess. What else?”
“Ha ha. Well okay, let’s go out to celebrate. I guess we’d both better clear it with our folks though. Speak later, hey?” and she’s gone, arms wrapped around her trophy, the sash trailing behind her.
*
It’s quarter to twelve when we pull up at the gate. The house is in darkness, but the patio light flicks on as I turn over the gate latch.
“Hah!” I nudge Danny in the ribs. “See, it works. Dad had the system rigged up last week but it’s the first time I’ve seen it put to the test. Look, their bedroom light is out. Does that mean they’ve developed a total trust in my boyfriend’s integrity?”
“Well I hope so. It’s important to me that they like and trust me.” His squeeze around my waist lasts a little longer than usual and we’re there for several moments, still, me with one hand on the gate and the other over his hand across my belly. An intimate moment that’s broken by the distraction of a barely detectable twitch of the curtains at my parents’ bedroom window. There’s a fleeting glimpse of what looks like a face in the gap, then they close and might never have moved. It’s the sudden flood of light from outside that’s alerted them – as intended – but I’m not so sure it’ll have the same effect if they’re very sound asleep. How often have we said that only a cattle prod would wake Dad once he’s out of it?
“Make sure you call out or something to let us know it’s you,” he instructed me before I went out, so now, with Danny following, I march with confident footfalls up the path, wiggle my key into the front door lock and clack it open, push the handle down with a clunk, scrape my shoes on the coir mat, call “It’s Tessa!”, and switch on the hallway light. Danny envelopes me from behind, turns me, kisses me lightly on the lips and I’m over-brimming with contentment. The kisses, his commitment to my happiness and well-being and his arm around my shoulders in the cinema is all I need to make me queen of the world with everything I should have. There’s a very odd side-effect of his presence in my life though – I’ve taken to helping myself to a bit of Mum’s eye-shadow and lipstick and perfume and I’m conscious of the scent now. Charlie.
I pull my face back, smiling. His green eyes are not quite focussed.
“Remember I’m giving you a riding lesson on Sunday. Perhaps pick me up at two o’clock?”
He’s reluctant to let me withdraw from the embrace.
“You have a one-track mind, Babe. Horse track all the way. I do remember, my Tess, and I’m finding myself looking forward to it more than I expected.”
Breathing in the faint smokiness of a kaya cooking fire, I wait till the sound of his car has faded into the warm, starry night then lock the door and delve into my delicious fantasy that he’ll turn out to be a talented, natural horseman who’s never realised his own ability to form a rapport with horses. He’ll get his own horse and we’ll go to shows together. We’ll be together a long time.
Then, as I’m heading down the passage to the sanctity of my room, trying to make my footfalls soft this time, the fantasy evaporates to leave a hollow with which there is nothing to fill. In just over a year he’ll be out of school and then what? Not Varsity. Not the path to his career in accountancy. Not a normal start to the rest of his life – our lives. He’ll get called up.
The war isn’t going to end any time soon, in spite of all these supposed settlements and fruitful (fruitless) negotiations. You can’t plan things like life in these shifting, changeable, uncertain times. Not so long ago we were reluctantly imagining that Joshua Nkomo would be our next, and first black, Prime Minister. Dad went on more than once about how much more reasonable he was than all the other Nationalists, internal and external. He even showed some acceptance of the inevitable, deciding that Nkomo was probably trustworthy, and if it’s got to happen, he said, if it’s got to happen, then I guess he should be the one. Well, of course back in September Nkomo went and tore up and threw away forever any shreds of faith the likes of Dad may have had in him. All he did was convince any doubters that the fight must go on and that deaths must be avenged.
How does a mood swing so drastically from contentment and fantasies and lovely ideas to this hopelessness, to this regurgitation of my ghastly premonition all over again? Gill thinks she succeeded in convincing me I’m not some kind of freak or witch.
“Come on, Tess,” she told me, “be honest with yourself. Loads of people probably thought the same thing. The plane was obviously shot down. I doubt there were many who didn’t guess that. We’re at war. It’s not weird to speculate that a missile of some sort was involved long before it was confirmed.”
“Okay,” I challenged her, “so why did I know they were going to be found by the terrs and murdered?”
“You didn’t know. You couldn’t possibly know. Your brain sussed out that it was a distinct possibility, that’s all. If you shoot a plane out of the sky, you watch it go down. You can follow it and find it, even if it takes several hours. You know full well there may be survivors and if you’re a killer… well…”
Whatever, it still frightens the shit out of me.
Rosie’s door opens a fraction and her face appears, whitely visible against the darkness of her room.
“Hi,” she whispers. “Has Lover Boy gone? Did you fall off your skates again?”
I give her the thumbs-down sign.
“The Ice Bowl was heaving. We went to the cinema instead, but it was trash.”
“’Night, ’night.” She withdraws and the door clicks shut.