That is Julie Foster. I’m absolutely certain now. I wasn’t, at first, but I’ve been watching her all afternoon.
I’d probably never have spotted her if she hadn’t been with the Girls’ High School team. They’re making such a racket it’s impossible to ignore them. So I saw her sitting halfway up the stand in the middle of all her noisy team-mates and wondered, idly at the time, why this girl wasn’t joining in all the hysterical war cries and arm waving, and then I noticed Lisa Donovan in the row above her. Lisa spoke to her a few times, over her shoulder, and that’s when some of her gestures and head movements started distant bells ringing.
It’s exceptionally irritating when you realise that someone who’s effectively a complete stranger is actually familiar, and you know you’ve seen them before, but you can’t think where. Around three o’clock, just after GHS had won yet another race, a cog clicked over inside my head and that Kariba holiday from eons ago popped up. 1973, it was. Five years ago. Julie Foster. Dad’s colleague’s daughter who introduced Rosie to tennis. I’ve seen her maybe three, four times since? Dad did say both Julie and Catherine go to Girls’ High School.
What on earth’s happened to her? My remembered image of her is cheeky and precocious, with a round, rosy face and glossy, bouncy gold hair. It is her though. And now I want to know why she looks like death warmed up.
God, I don’t want to be here. We’ve got no chance now and I’m bored stiff watching these endless relays. I don’t know how much chlorine they’ve been putting in this pool but the smell is so overpowering I’m amazed the competitors aren’t coming out green. I’m not sure what’s caused this delay in the proceedings, but I don’t care. It’s a perfect excuse to sneak off. I can always say I’ve been to the toilet.
Jess has her back to me and is giving our diving team a pep talk. Brilliant. I wriggle off the end of the stand and nip round the back, then make my way to where the GHS team and supporters are wetly and noisily waving banners to make sure everyone knows they’re winning, even when nothing’s happening. Lisa’s on the end of the second row up and she looks as bored as I am.
She wants to talk horses but for once I won’t let myself be tempted. I say, “Mmm. Yes, it was a good show, wasn’t it? Tell me, isn’t that Julie Foster?”
I tilt my head towards the girl with the ashen and vacant face.
Lisa nods. “Ja. You know her?”
“Kind of. My father works with hers. I haven’t seen her in a long while so I wasn’t sure. She looks ill. Is she all right?”
Lisa leans into me conspiratorially and whispers, “Well no. Not really. It’s the first time in over a month she’s joined in any kind of group activity. Her boyfriend, Tommy, was killed over near Cashel on a weekend home. His folks manage one of the tea estates up there and he drove over a land mine in one of their roads. He was seventeen, Tessa! It’s horrible. He was at Prince Edward School. She’d known him for about five years and had been going out with him for two, and it’s absolutely destroyed her. She doesn’t know what’s hit her. They were like two peas in a pod, as they say. We’ve got to try and get her on her feet again.”
Lisa’s quite a loud and tactless girl as a rule, but her stricken concern is infectious and it’s making me feel slightly nauseous. The ugly fingers of this liberation campaign are reaching for all of us now. Not just servicemen in battle, but civilians too. Direct attacks – missiles and mortars – and now a schoolboy has died at the hands of a murderer who had planted his container of death and been long gone.
*
Six o’clock, and this melancholy is still simmering away. It’s changed shape, or rather identity, at times, especially since I got home and have had nothing in particular to distract me. It’s been fear, it’s been despair, it’s even been anger. I’ve never felt so pointlessly angry before. I’m not even sure I’ve known real anger, if that’s what this is. I’ve had annoyance, with a reason I can identify or a person I can blame, but this is more akin to helplessness, like an inability to change the course of a future I no longer want to experience. It can’t go on, but it is going to go on.
Halfway through my dinner I stop eating and continue to stare at the remains, unable to keep my imagination from attempting to visualise Julie Foster at her boyfriend’s funeral, inwardly cursing myself for being morbid. I’m damned lucky I haven’t had to attend one.
“Come on Tessa,” says Dad, waving his fork at me. “Try and look happier. What’s wrong with the food?”
“Did you know about Julie Foster’s boyfriend?” I challenge him, stirring my peas with my own fork as if they are to blame. “I saw her at the gala today. She looks ghastly. One of my friends from the horse society told me the story.”
He did know, he confesses. He’d said nothing because he hadn’t wanted to upset us. His demeanour is crestfallen, caught-out.
Should I be furious with him or sympathise with his predicament? He thinks it’s his duty to rinse our minds of any nightmarish worries about bodily harm and mortal danger. He’s a father, a protector – who can blame him for that? The knowledge that Nathan’s just come within milliseconds of losing his life has shaken me to depths I never knew existed and my reaction to this has upset Rosie and undoubtedly heightened Mum’s awareness of the perils Dad is facing on military duty. At every opportunity he’s been stressing that he’s never in any danger of coming into close contact with the enemy. His role in Dad’s Army, he’s told us over and over, is mainly that of the ‘bright light’ – a live-in guard to an absent farmer’s family or to the more elderly farming couples attempting to produce crops and manage livestock with some semblance of normality. Plied with good farm food and fresh air, it’s a bit like having a holiday at the government’s expense, he says. He thinks I believe him, but his unsubtle attempts at propaganda cannot not undo what’s been done.
He changes the subject. Well, sort of.
“Hey, well, sounds like, um… whatsisname… um… Gill’s brother… is going to be all right anyway? Will he be going to Tsanga Lodge for rehab?”
Rosie jumps on this opportunity to throw a Teenage Moment. She pouts and folds her arms across her chest.
“Ja. Tsanga Lodge. I might have gone there, to Tsanga, or to Mushandike like Tee did. But of course that’s all spoilt now. They had to stop it before I got to go there, didn’t they?”
“Oh don’t be so petulant, Rosie,” Mum chips in. She laughs because she thinks it’s the best way to deal with Teenage Moments and Dad laughs because he’s being cheery. I feel like there’s a rubber band inside my head that’s being strained to breaking point.
“Count yourself lucky, you silly little girl. You lot may have gone to Mushandike and been shot to bits, or all murdered in your beds by gooks. Or blown up. Then you might have needed rehab. Or a wooden box. Nathan’s not that badly injured anyway Dad. He just needs time to get better.”
Gill’s been telling me what it’s like at the hospital; her world has been centred around her daily visits, either alone or with Charles and Moira. I’ve never once asked if I can tag along. I know I should, but I keep shying away from asking the question and then cursing myself for doing it, and then justifying it because it’s such a personal mission for her. Nathan is, in all respects, her little brother. She’s seen him through the usual variety of childhood ailments and a broken collar bone, when he fell out of their treehouse, but there’s always been life and a future after these minor hiccups. Now, when he got sent out to kill or be killed for his country, another soldier, acting for someone else but under similar instructions, has deliberately tried to rob him of that life.
Rosie’s shut up and is scraping her knife across her plate to gather up morsels onto her fork. I’m in trouble now for snapping at my sister and for being petulant myself. To be honest though, I’m just a coward who really has no desire to visit any hospital to view at first hand the damage done by war. I can’t face young men, not much older than myself, whose lives have been cruelly altered by what is considered to be their duty. Can’t face their anger and frustration and terror. My petulant anger that my life is being disrupted is nothing in comparison. What is one supposed to say and how is one supposed to react? I’ve stayed away. Nathan wouldn’t want me there at his bedside anyway.
I can kid myself that I’d been there when he was still drugged and plugged into drips and Gill was reading to him (“I finished reading him Airport today. He started it when he was home the last time on RNR. Do you know, he asked me to bring in Great Expectations! Dickens! Miracles never cease. I know reading to him is stupid, but I used to do that when we were kids and he always loved the way I tried different voices. Not sure how I’ll cope with being Magwitch though!”). I picture this and then wonder if I can imagine the two of them together, Gill aged, say, ten, reading to Nathan, seven or eight. It’s intriguing.
I can kid myself that I was there when he started to feel up to moving about. (“He’s sitting up now! The doc’s delighted with his recovery. Put on a bit more flesh in his face. Much better. I’m going to take some board games from now on. I’ll have to dig them out of the spare room cupboard. We can put them on his bed table.”) I picture this and then guess at a scene in which they’re sitting at the kitchen table together engrossed in Monopoly or Scrabble.
I can kid myself that I was there when he walked up and down the ward and then the corridor for the first time. (“They gave him a stick, which he’s unimpressed about – you know him – but I said it’s only for now, and it will help, so at least you can keep your muscles toned. Silly boy’s saying he can’t wait to get back in the saddle. Well, we’ll have to see about that hey? We took Amai along today so she was there too. She cried all over him and he was patting her head and saying come on Amai, stop blubbering, I’m fine, can’t you see? Brought tears to all of us, I can tell you!”)
That’s the phone. I bolt from the family and my uneaten food to answer it.
“He’s due to come home on the sixteenth, Tess!” she tells me with her triumph oozing down the line. “Home in time for Christmas! Hey, but you won’t be here will you? When are you going to Cape Town?”
I’d like to kid myself that I’ll be there for his homecoming, but no, I won’t.
“Thursday, then back late on the twenty-sixth. I get to miss the last day of school.”
“Oh that’s right. Christmas in the Cape – you lucky thing! Oh, I can’t describe to you the… what’s the word?… euphoria almost, that I got when he told us the news today. Like the light at the end of the tunnel has suddenly really turned into a way out, you know? I’m so lucky, so blessed. He was so nearly taken from us but we got him back.”
“Danny’s brother’s got a mate who says Nathan’s life was spared so that he could spend the rest of it serving God. This guy’s his pastor or something. He evidently thought it would be of great comfort to me to know this.”
She breaks into peals of delight. “What? Really? I’ll tell him. Should he be honoured?”
“Terry Archer. This is the bloke who also said that the missionaries up at Elim were slaughtered because God wanted them returned to his services. He wanted them back and we must rejoice in this. We must remember that God knows what is best for us and that he has plans for us all, so we mustn’t question his motives.”
I can see the newspaper images hovering before me now, as I listen to her expletives. The splayed bodies, slightly out of focus, in such gruesome, unnatural positions. Those poor sodding missionaries had been liberals, followers of Christianity and its associated doctrine of peace, and they got rewarded for their sentiments and for trying to help and educate rural communities by being raped and bayonetted to death. Including that baby girl. They must have prayed, begged and pleaded, but it was no good and they suffered unimaginably horrible deaths. Their God was away doing more fun things like setting up a complex chain of events that would lead to me hooking up with Danny so that I could meet Brian, and then Terry and Nina, and be saved.
Man’s inhumanity to man, it’s becoming apparent, knows no limits. I’m learning this, but it’s not something I want to learn. Danny insists on calling the terrorists animals, but they’re only displaying human characteristics. Which other animals are known to kill others of their kind out of vindictiveness, or for the hell of it? Chimpanzees. Our closest relatives. What does that tell you?
Gill sighs.
“Sorry. Excuse the language. I don’t understand these people who resign themselves to what they say is God’s will, Tess. It’s actually a complete abdication of responsibility isn’t it? Anyway, look, gotta go, but I just couldn’t wait till tomorrow to update you. See ya – byeee!”
They’d welcome me at Nathan’s homecoming because I have no doubt that to them I’m part of the furniture. As I only realised barely three weeks ago, I’m part of the family. But I’ll be in South Africa and anyway, he wouldn’t care.
If there’s one good thing going to come out of this though, it’s that he’ll be out of danger for a while. They can’t take him back until he’s fixed.