Waterloo carries me towards the front of the field, oblivious to my presence. I like to think I’m an effective rider but this isn’t a show jumper and I’m clearly no race jockey. The horse is doing it all himself. He takes the line closest to the inside of the track and the urgent drumming of hooves on earth is the only sound that fills my head.
The first-placed horse, the bay Anglo-Arab, pulls five lengths clear. For a time nothing changes and the whole world is dust and drumming and pounding movement. I get a brief moment of panic when my horse’s offside hooves cut too close to the small ridge of soil that marks the inner edge of the track. I jerk on the left rein and he does a surprised swerve, like he’s just realised he has someone crouched on his back.
We sweep into the home straight. I click my tongue experimentally and discover that, in contrast to poor Sapper in the C Division race, this horse has infinite power in reserve. The surge takes away what little breath I have left but by God, now I know what Nathan meant. That day he made me ride Encore on ten circuits of the ten-acre paddock with my stirrups shorter than they are now, and my thighs were burning and I was declaring I’d never actually wanted to do race riding, he told me, “You’ll probably get the biggest adrenaline rush of your life so far when you feel a horse literally sink slightly under you and go up several gears at once. Honestly, you’ll understand when it happens.”
Well, I do. The Anglo-Arab falls away to nowhere and my way to the finish line is clear.
Pushing the contact back and forth, back and forth like he taught me, I hear my own voice drowning out the hysterical roar from the spectators, “Go! Go! Go on! Good boy!” I should take one hand off to crack my whip like Sherrie did, but I can’t bring myself to do it for fear of unbalancing both myself and the horse.
We thunder past the red-painted iron circle mounted on a post.
He wants to keep going. Only when he realises he’s left all the other horses behind does he give in and come back to a walk and it’s a fair way back to the off-saddling enclosures. A groom rushes up to grab the bridle and Mick du Preez is hot on his heels, puffing more than I am. I can see Gill’s face in the crowded spectators and beside her Piet waving a small piece of paper. I’m on the ground stroking Waterloo’s slippery, lathered neck, with Mick undoing the girth, when you appear between us and put an arm round me and slap Mick on the back simultaneously.
“You did it! Did you bet on yourself?”
“No.”
“Your girl would give you a run for your money,” Mick says and I have a private embarrassed moment remembering the last race meeting and how I imagined I was fancying him. He is good looking and he’s wearing that Stetson again but I don’t need him now.
*
“See you in the bar,” Gill calls as I shoulder my sports bag.
The community centre washrooms here are posher than the ones at Eagle’s Down Farm. That other race meeting filled with jealousy and despair is in the distant past. Today everything is right with the world. All of the shower cubicles are free so I dump my bag outside one of them and dig for my soap and shampoo.
There are a few other women around, standing talking in the washbasin area. One of them, watching me, asks, “Are you a professional jockey?”
I’m wearing my cream jodhpurs and black show-jumping boots – not kitted out in real jockey gear like Sherrie was. I have to laugh.
“No, not me. I’m just pretending.”
When I get back to the others where they’re seated at a table in the corner of the hall, there’s a bottle of Moet on the table and between you and Piet is a man I’ve never seen before. He’s probably thirty-ish – I’m not very good at judging age. Plain black T-shirt and jeans, dark, curly hair and a lop-sided smile.
“Champers in plastic glasses. But who cares?” Gill snatches up the bottle and hands it to Piet. “Do the honours please, my darling. We need to celebrate Tessa’s win here.”
“I should maybe take it outside to pop the cork,” he says, frowning. “Do it in here and everyone’ll hit the deck.”
The stranger turns his smile into a wide, toothy grin and punches you on the shoulder. “Remind you of something, Rifleman Owen?”
I lean over to drop my bag behind the table, deliberately close to you, and get a noseful of the tantalising, spicy odour of your after-shave. Another flashback to that race meeting evening in a past life.
“Here, Kitten,” you say, “I’d like you to meet Scott Romford. I’ve mentioned him somewhere along the line, I know. Scotty, this is Tessa.”
Scott Romford half stands and bows. “Delighted! So you’re the one who got him in the end? We were always amazed that he didn’t have a girl back home to send him soppy messages on the radio shows.”
Piet and Gill have taken the Moet away. You call after them, “Oi! Don’t drink it out there!” then pull me down on the edge of your chair, shifting to give me space.
“Scotty served with me – Rhodesia Regiment, 2 Independent Company. In fact, he was the leader of our last patrol and the Florence Nightingale who nearly cut my leg off with a tourniquet and then tenderly placed a pack under my head and a hat over my face. Bless you, Scotty.”
He jabs two fingers up in front of your face.
“Do you remember that? Tell you what, Owen, you were lucky we managed to get the chopper in so quickly. You were running out of the red stuff pretty rapidly.”
“You wouldn’t give me any morphine, you bastard.”
He blinks and turns his very well affected hurt and dismay on me.
“He’s so ungrateful, Tessa. We had no idea where he was, then we found a blood trail to follow and he was in amongst the rocks convinced the battle was still on and surrounded by a pile of doppies. I got him on the ground and he was wriggling about all over the place whilst I was trying to work out how best to make sure we didn’t lose him. You kept telling me you were fine, you stupid git. ‘I can walk’ you said. ‘It doesn’t fucking hurt’ you said. ‘Fucking leave me alone’ you said. Then you promptly passed out.”
“You have no idea how determined I was to make sure I could wriggle about, boet. I couldn’t really feel much. At the time. In fact, that’s what worried me when all I could see when I looked down was blood.”
You squeeze me around the waist and your face against mine is inviting me to join in the fun. The two of you are acting like you’re sharing a recollection of some ludicrous predicament in a Carry On film.
Scotty sits back and looks us both over with a somewhat appraising eye. “I heard you’d recovered fully and I’m glad. We came out pretty much unscathed, didn’t we? You remember Neil Fenton, who was with us? And Edmund Tshuma?”
You have this way of making me feel everything you do. I can sense your mood switching down now and although I quite like Scotty I wish he’d go away. You say to me, “Edmund took a bullet in the head about three months later. And Neil got himself blown up by a landmine.”
You have told me about this Corporal Romford, who did a lot to try and save your life. And also about this guy Neil. Not that he’d died, but how you’d watched him take out four of the eight ZIPRA soldiers with the MAG. You told me how, after you’d watched another of them go down under your own fire, you got hit and lay there within touching distance of the rocks but didn’t dare move in case one of them saw you and came back to finish the job. You wondered if you might be dead at one point but realised you could feel the heat from your rifle barrel so figured you weren’t, and then you crawled in amongst the rocks to try and carry on the fight. I’ve lived through all this on your behalf many more times than I’ve wanted to, but you don’t know this. You laugh it off nowadays anyway and I would never dream of upsetting you by telling you how much pain it causes me. It’s a thing of the past.
“You weren’t in the saddle today then?” Scotty asks. “I seem to remember you were hankering after getting transferred to the Grey’s Scouts. That you’d always been a rider.”
“I still am,” you tell him. “And I did end up in the Grey’s as an instructor. I’ve done a couple of these amateur things, but the trainer I usually ride for only had two horses running today and my Tess needed a chance to try this.”
The toothy grin encompasses me. “And she won! Obviously as good as you then.”
The return of the champagne bottle saves me from having to get all coy and make denials. You lean across me to take it from Piet and carry out a thorough check of its contents by holding it up to the light.
“It’s all there. Come on, Nath,” says Piet, lining up the plastic cups. “You have to share. Scott, have some with us.”
Scotty holds up his hands.
“You’re very kind, but I won’t, thanks. I need to get back to Kara and her folks anyway or I’ll be in the shit. Very nice to meet you two, good to see you again Nathan, and delighted to meet you, Tessa.”
You do the African handshake with him.
“Go well, Corporal. Take care of yourself.”
Scotty bows and takes his leave. You start pouring, tilting each cup, waiting for the bubbles to subside and then topping up.
We toast each other and Gill remarks, “He’s a nice guy. Does he live around here?”
You give us Scotty’s backstory. His wife’s folks have a farm. He’s not from farming stock but he works together with his father-in-law now. A good bloke but, in spite of what he said, he hasn’t exactly come out of the war unscathed; never physically wounded but mentally affected. It’s not uncommon and it’s not a new thing.
“Shell shock,” says Piet.
“Yes, but that implies trauma as a result of having been fired on, mortared, exposed to mortal danger in some way and that doesn’t cover it. A lot of guys dealt with all that okay and ended up badly traumatised by the horrific massacres and torture of civilians. We got more than our fair share of scenes of unspeakable violence and cruelty.”
Piet stares down into his champagne. “And the Rhodesian Army wasn’t squeaky clean.”
“No.”
“He looks quite normal.” I can see him now, over on the far side of the hall, at a table with a pretty blonde woman, an older couple and a dark-haired boy of about four.
“I think he’s probably got it under control. I had news about him around eighteen months or so ago that he got very violent, especially when drunk – something he never used to do apparently – and that his wife left him for a period. He was encouraged to take up karate to focus and channel the aggression and it seems he’s done very well. He told me just now he’s aiming to become an instructor.”
You’re also watching him, and you raise the small white plastic cup into the air towards him. He’s unaware, facing the other way.
“Cheers, Scotty man. You all might’ve thought he refused the champagne out of politeness, but he doesn’t touch alcohol now. Hasn’t in about a year.”
I raise my cup to him as well in a silent toast. He’s my hero. He made sure you came back.
*
You send me on my way with a probing kiss and a “See ya tomorrow” and I float up the drive, reliving how we danced to anything that came along and how, when it became too hot inside the hall, we wandered out into the darkness of the early winter night, then when the coolness started to creep under our skins we slipped back into the noisy, throbbing light to continue where we’d left off. My feet are decidedly tender.
I’m already turning my thoughts to next weekend and the work do with our sub contractors at the Meikles Hotel. The sound of Piet’s car’s fades away and I spend a few pleasant moments imagining your face when you see me in the turquoise silk cocktail dress. Sweet. I hop up the steps onto the patio into the glare of the security light.
Once in the hallway I realise that the dining room light is on. It’s gone midnight. It must be Rosie, although she’s normally in the lounge watching TV in darkness.
But no, the rumble I can hear is Dad’s voice. No words, just the sound. Don’t tell me they’re waiting up for me? Nathan’s ticked a lot of their boxes but they still haven’t quite got over Danny. Mum did have a go at lodging an objection that he’s a bit more than three and a half years older than me, until I pointed out that Dad’s four years older than her.
“That you Tessa?”
Mum’s face appears in the archway. She fumbles for the switch and I blink and turn back to re-lock the door to avoid the flood of bright light.
“Did you have a good day?”
“I won, Mum. I won a race.”
This is odd and I’m starting to not like it. Now my eyes have adjusted a bit I see the dining room table behind her is littered with papers and soft cover files.
She starts to say something but then thinks better of it. Good. I don’t need another lecture on the dangers of race riding. Keeping me away from extreme sports is one category in which poor Nathan has failed to gain any points so far.
But then I take in her expression and feel guilty. She’s a mother; of course she’s going to worry. I’m thinking I’ll give her a hug, but as I approach her I see the hefty elephant-hide briefcase in which Dad keeps all the Important Papers. It’s always kept on the top shelf of the linen cupboard but there it is, open on the floor, its contents in disarray. On the top are our four passports.
A few seconds pass. They’re both watching me. Perhaps, just perhaps, they’re planning a holiday?
“Dad’s been offered a job in Southampton.”
Of course. Here we go again. I have myself an amazing day and my life is just going as I want it and I come home and…
She starts to babble on – the name of the company, the position he’s been offered, the fact that one of his former colleagues who left eighteen months ago had sent him the advertisement. I barely hear her. A voice inside my head is screaming at her to stop acting like she thinks I’m interested.
She smiles at me but her eyes are fixed beyond me somewhere. “We’ll all talk about it together tomorrow.”
I find my voice. A voice, anyway. I’m not sure it’s mine.
“I don’t want to talk about it tomorrow. I don’t want to talk about it ever, for that matter. I’m going to Makuti Park tomorrow morning anyway. Good night.”
It’s okay. I’ll just walk away and go to bed. I’ll think about what work I’ll do with Encore in the morning. Nathan and I will probably hack out in the afternoon. I might get a chance to ride Bravo again.
“We will discuss it tomorrow and you will be there.”
I stop in my tracks towards the passageway, blood thudding in my ears, a knot in my stomach. I’ve never heard that tone in him before. This is really happening. I don’t turn back.
Close the door. Don’t put the light on. Creep to the bed. Kick off my trainers. Crawl, fully dressed, under the eiderdown. Put pillow over head.
*
At three o’clock the house is silent and dark. The other bedroom doors are shut and the cold of the parquet floor seeps through my socks as I tiptoe to the bathroom. Good. It’s here. I thought I remembered there being a half-used pack on the bottom shelf of the cabinet. Cupping my hand under the running tap, I down four of them. It’s not so easy swallowing them with my head tipped downwards but I manage to do it without choking and making a noise. So it’s technically a mild overdose. So what? I really do have a thumping headache but I also have no intention of lying awake all night chasing options around in my brain.