I must have fallen asleep within minutes. Now I have a moment of wild, disorientated confusion. Seconds ago I was in the midst of one of my typically complex dreams that are nothing more than a string of unrelated images. I’d been in the main grandstand at the races for a bit and then I was inside a bus, kneeling on a seat and leaning out of a window to explain to Dad that no, this bus belongs to the Salisbury United Omnibus Company. Can’t he see that? If he wants the Express Motorways coach, it’s over there on that far stand. He argues with me. In this weird half-awake state I’m becoming incredulously aware that Dad is really talking to me, crouched by my bedside, tugging urgently at my shoulder.
“What?” I sit bolt upright.
“I said, get onto the floor, now, Tessa, and come into the passage. Close your bedroom door and stay on the floor. On the floor, okay? Come on now, quickly!”
He’s gone, the door open. Still suspecting that this is just another disjointed chapter of the dream, I roll out of bed and follow him on hands and knees and am further confounded to find Mum, sitting propped against the corridor wall and holding onto Skellum’s collar, and Rosie, cuddling a piqued Cleopatra in her arms. Dad closes my bedroom door. All the other doors are closed. No-one speaks. I guess we’re all looking at each other but it’s too dark to tell.
“Will somebody please tell me why we are sitting on the floor, in the dark, in the passage, at this hour – whatever it is?” My whisper comes out hoarse and cracked. If I get no reply, and this is a dream, it doesn’t matter because the scene will change just now with no notice.
I do get a reply. An unidentifiable, coughing thump from somewhere in the distance, but close enough that I feel it as well as hear it. My brain starts reluctantly trying to tell me I might really be awake. With eyes now accustomed to the dim light, I stare at Dad. My stare speaks. It says, okay, now for the explanation please?
“Mortar.” I swear there are beads of moisture glinting on his forehead. “Three so far. Or three that I’ve heard anyway.”
Maybe I’m the one who needs the cattle prod. And he’s only had eleven weeks of military training to hone his reactions and enable him to identify things like this in his sleep.
“You must sleep with one ear open Dad,” Rosie sighs, like she’s tuned right into my thoughts. “I didn’t hear a bloody thing.”
“Rosie!” Mum squeaks. “You are absolutely not to use language like that.”
Clinging to the last shreds of hope for my dream, I visualise a mortar rocket arching overhead and wonder when the detonation will come. A sickness washes over me and turns my limbs to jelly. Rosie is the one who asks, “Why haven’t we heard them go off then? Aren’t they supposed to explode?”
Nothing happens. In the ensuing silence I hear the muffled sound of a car in the road outside.
“What are we going to do?” Mum’s voice breaks a little more. “Shall I phone the police?”
The telephone trills loudly, raucously, and I swear my heart’s just leapt clean out of my body. Skellum gives a joyous bark, his feathery tail sweeping Mum’s face. Rosie shrieks and the cat springs from her clutch in disgust, vanishing into the darkness at the end of the passage.
“Shit!”
No-one chastises Dad for his language. For a brief second he leans his head against the wall, eyes closed, then catapults himself forward onto hands and knees and crawls towards the intersection of the passage with the main hallway. He disappears around the corner; the ringing stops and there’s a violent plastic clatter.
“Hello!” he shouts. “Oh, it’s you Allan. Sorry. I dropped the bastard phone. What? Yes of course I heard them. Started at about half-past two. What the fuck are they shooting at?”
He pauses. Rosie inches off down the corridor cooing, “Cleo? Cleo? Come, come, kitty.”
“Funny thing is, I can’t hear any explosions.” Dad is still shouting, as though he and our neighbour are not connected by a telephone line but are rather calling to each other across the hills.
“Mortars explode when they hit something. That’s the whole idea. Yes. Ja. Yes, okay Allan. You let me know what they say, hey? ’Bye.”
We hear the sound of the front door being unlocked.
“What are you doing?” Mum yells, pushing Skellum aside and getting to her feet. “Bob! Where are you going?”
There’s no reply and, filled with a morbid curiosity, I’m compelled to abandon all common sense and follow. The others feel it too. Rosie and I lead the way with Skellum, who probably thinks this unusual night-time activity has been arranged specifically for his enjoyment. Mum trails behind.
The sky is still completely cloudless. A three-quarter moon hangs in space among the winking stars and the Milky Way lays a faint trail like a pathway across the blackness. Everything is bathed in the faint white moonlight that is so peaceful and silent at three o’clock in the morning. Well, it should be peaceful and silent, but it’s not.
Dogs are barking and howling. Human voices are drifting through the canine ones, male and female pitches. Car doors slam and engines start. The broad sweep of the valley up into the hills southwards, usually showing only a few strings of street lights at this hour, is speckled with electric light.
“What a wonderful target,” Dad says to all of us in general. “I would have thought a black-out would be more sensible.”
I turn to look at our own house, which is in darkness, and as I bring my head back round again a minute coloured movement attracts my attention. I have no idea what it is. In those few seconds it’s processed as the blossoming of a dull red tongue, like some evil flower, on one of the hills in the north.
“Dad…?” I break off, mouth open. There’s a whispering sound – a soft whuw whuw whuw – as a mortar shell etches out its trajectory above us. Only now do I hear the coughing retort of its launch. I duck and I see Dad do the same, and I’m thinking, don’t we have stupid reactions sometimes? Then the other sounds come back into focus, intensified, the shouted voices more urgent.
Fascination and fear in equal proportions freeze me. I’m vaguely aware of Mum screaming, “Get inside! Get back!”
It’s the sight of Cleopatra wandering out onto the lawn that releases me into a sinking realisation of the danger she’s in – that we’re all in. I grab her and bear her into the relative safety of the house. Rosie is dragging a reluctant Skellum towards the patio by his collar. Then the practical shuts down and fear has the upper hand. Cold, prickling-all-over fear and there’s no room in my head for anything other than a desire to cower behind something solid and a pure horror that any second – any particle of a second – could be when it happens.
It doesn’t.
The phone yells again and Dad makes a dive for it.
“Ja? What? Really? Ja. You’re kidding me? Ja. Sure. Well I wonder if… Okay. Thanks. Bye.”
He turns to face the three of us in our little huddle.
“Allan again. He got hold of the police and they reckon that new station, you know, down at the end of… oh what’s the road called?… never mind… east end of the valley… they reckon that’s the target. There’s cops out trying to locate the spent shells. In the meantime, all of you, back in the passageway. Come on.”
Herding us, he’s taller, more authoritative, and the fear I’d been terrified to see in his face has been replaced by an electric excitement. “Security Forces are out in active pursuit. They have several units deployed. I wonder if they’ll call out us Reservists? I’d better get my kit ready. May have to report to Depot. Right, you lot. Stay there and sit tight. The situation’s under control.”
“Bloody good show!” I whisper to Rosie, releasing Cleo, who promptly sits down and starts grooming herself. “Everything’s ticketty boo, what? It’s a good thing Elijah’s at home in the township tonight. He’d probably have been scrambled into doing guard duty or patrolling the fences or something.”
We giggle hysterically until Mum tells us to calm down.
There are no more mortars. Eventually all the lights go out, the dogs cease their barking and howling and although we wait up for a while, we only hear one burst of gunfire from the direction of the launching site. No-one calls for Dad’s services.
I lie awake, my mind buzzing, aware of Mum and Dad talking in the lounge for a very long time. On a visit to the toilet I try to hear what they’re saying without actually creeping down the corridor to eavesdrop. I can’t, but the gravity of their conversation is unmistakeable and disturbing. I go back to bed, but I still can’t sleep.
It’s the what-ifs. What if the shells had exploded, wreaking hell and havoc on tidy, safe residential lives, on us, on our neighbours, on friends? I don’t like that one and dismiss it. No point. What if there’d been more action? A bit of a shoot-up with the Security Forces, some helicopters or aircraft on a lethal mission and perhaps a few explosions in the hills? That one’s more palatable and I spend some time elaborating on it. Always with a good outcome of course – terrorist gang annihilated, Security Forces victorious.
As the dawn seeps its way across the sky, I watch it through my bedroom window and I itch to get out and quiz Gill, Jess and Danny about their take on the drama. I even compose an eloquent description of my version, testing phrases and turning them around in my mind. What’s Danny doing now? Why didn’t he phone? What did he do when he heard the rockets whispering overhead? Did his brother pray to ask God for deliverance from peril?
Oh yes, God. So, what if some of the terrorists (guerrillas/freedom fighters?) are Christians and they were praying that their mortar shells would hit the target (did they really have a target or were they just…?) to forward the fight against racial injustice and oppression? To be sure, their Christian targets (victims) would’ve been praying that they’ll remain unharmed in the fight against the evil forces of terrorism and communism. Whose prayers will be answered in the end? Whose prayers have been answered tonight? One thing’s for sure – if everyone believed in God, someone would always be disappointed.
It’s the 11th November. Independence Day. A celebration of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, signed at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1965. Look where it’s got us thirteen years down the line.
*
Mrs Marsh returns from town about quarter to twelve.
“Guess what I heard?” she trills as she dumps her OK shopping bags on the kitchen table and reaches for the kettle. Her peaches-and-cream face, never usually affected by the highveld sun, is a bit flushed.
“What?” Danny, Gordon and I respond dutifully.
“Stupid question, Mother,” says Jess. “Go on, spit it out. We could be here all day guessing.”
“Heather Unwin told me her husband said those mortar rockets had not been primed – is that the right word? She said the terrs were aiming for the new police station but they overshot the target by – ooh – probably a kilometre, so the mortars all landed in that stretch of vlei down by the river. Isn’t that just so hilarious?”
“It’s a pity the ones who shot down the Viscount didn’t get it so wrong, hey?” Jess pushes herself away from the work top, opens a cupboard and extracts some mugs.
“They used a heat-seeking missile,” Gordon tells her. “They would’ve struggled to get it wrong unless they fired it in completely the opposite direction. Or would it’ve switched and come back?”
None of us knows the answer.
*
Dad’s already heard the story from Allan Parsons.
“Useless sods! Lucky for us they can’t use their equipment properly or shoot straight hey, don’t you think? Might as well have thrown the damned things by hand!”
His chuckles and his eyes invite us all to respond accordingly. Rosie goes, “Hmm,” and I ignore them.
“They might come back and shoot straight tonight,” Mum worries. “Or not, and hit some houses this time. With rockets that work.”
His eyebrows arch, the left slightly higher than the right.
“What? Nah! They wouldn’t dare. This area’s hot as far as they’re concerned now. It’ll be crawling with patrols. They’re all just cowards anyway.”
Is it all really such a farce to him? Cowards? They’re showing no signs of giving up and running away, are they? This is a whole new game now. New targets. They shoot down a civilian aircraft, so then we get our revenge with the air raid on Nkomo’s Zambian camp at Westlands Farm, and now we’re facing the possibility of being attacked within the capital city limits. Ian Smith talks settlement out of one side of his mouth and then insists we’re maintaining and escalating this stupid war to uphold standards and restore the peace out of the other. Well, a little peace wouldn’t go amiss.
Mum and I wash up. She piles up the dishes and pots, I run the water and squeeze in some Sunlight and my thoughts escape to horses, as always.
“I’m giving Danny a riding lesson tomorrow. I’ve never tried to teach anyone before.”
“Why don’t you ask Gill to give you some tips?”
It’s a good point. I never thought of that. She’s been teaching me for years and she’s damned good at it.
“Mmm. Yes, maybe. She was at a show today, but I’ll ask her in the morning.”
The telephone cuts across us and my adrenaline levels shoot sky high. Hangover from last night’s fun, I guess.
“I’ll get it!” Rosie hollers from somewhere. Moments later she appears in the kitchen.
“It’s Gill, for you Tess.”
I start to laugh at the coincidence, but the look on my sister’s face stops me.
“She wants to talk to you urgently. She sounds a bit… strange. Like, upset. Not like her.”
I pick up the receiver and manage to say “Hi!” before Gill starts to speak rapidly. I’m more surprised by this than what she’s saying. In fact, it’s a few moments before my brain clicks into gear and makes me realise what it is she’s telling me. It sorts through the snatches of words and the now familiar sensation that something is terribly wrong soaks through me.
“Have to tell you… Tess… I’m so sorry… heard early this morning… contact somewhere in the Hurricane area… injured… six dead in total… casevac’d out by chopper… this evening… the hospital… oh my God… all tubes and wires… unconscious… so many drugs… Tessa? Tessa? Are you there? Say something, Tess! I’d love to see you. Are you coming here tomorrow?”
Nathan.
Oh no. Not Nathan please.
It is, isn’t it? Oh dear God, why does it have to be you who finally drags this bloody war right up into my face?
I’ve had enough of this. I can’t take any more. I’ve learned to ignore the faceless statistics but now here is a face. A face and a name I know so well. A member of my friend’s family. A friend.
“Tess, please say something!”
I can’t. What do I say? Do I ask if he’s going to be all right or if… I have no more words. I take a breath. I can feel Mum behind me and I can sense the alarm radiating from her.
“Oh Gill,” is all I can manage.
“What’s happened?” Mum steps closer.
“Are you coming tomorrow?” Gill insists.
“Yes,” I whisper reluctantly. Danny’s riding lesson is suddenly of absolutely no importance.
“Well we might not be around. We might be at the hospital but I promise I’ll let you know more as soon as we do. Okay? Look, I have to go now. Dad wants me to go with him to the hospital.” Her voice takes on a stronger edge as if she’s trying to focus on this, a specific requirement, a need.
“Don’t worry, Tessa. We are trying not to too. I’ll be in touch, okay?”