ORPHANS of the EMPIRE

Chapter 7
The Prophet
Just then, trundling out the desperate murkiness of that wispy afternoon, a battered truck, of World War II vintage, tootled into view. Stripped of paint, minus a front number plate, it was somehow, so obviously, being driven by an Afrikaner.
“Oh, no!” thought Peter, “not another Dutchman.”
An old farmer-type, with a flowing white beard, peered short-sightedly at him across the steering wheel. “Waar na toe?” he called through the cracked windscreen, hand cupped around his mouth, as he slowly freewheeled by.
For a coarse backward boer he didn’t look too bad, so Peter waved and called ‘Durban’ and pointed down the road. The lorry chugged to a halt, like the early morning train from Muizenberg, in a cloud of belching steam and smoke.
“I can take you to Knysna,” offered the old man when Peter came panting up, wet and bedraggled and hungry, “if you like?” The ubiquitous air of poverty emanating from the cab made Peter feel both humble and quite at home. There was something about this man’s vibes that made him seem altogether old and wise. Peter relaxed.
“Thank you,” he sighed gratefully and piled into the passenger seat. The road could be seen through a rusty hole in the floor and the old man’s bony elbows protruding from his faded purple jersey. Around one shoe Peter noticed he’d tied a string to keep the sole from flapping.
“I saw a bull-calf coming from the south and a swarm of bees humming at his heels,” said the man and turned his sad blue eyes on Peter. “That mus’ be you?” It was as though he looked at Peter from an infinite depth, through him, as if he saw something, which brought sadness to his eyes.
“Um…”
“Are you one of those hippie people, hey?”
His calm face was virtually expressionless. His facial structure, clear eyes, long beard, well-formed forehead and serenity all had a bearing on his character. Here was someone who never lost his temper; who never got angry. Peter tried to curb his slowly creeping feelings of awe and respect.
“I... uh… believe in peace and love, yes.”
“Then you’ll know all about hunger?” the strange old man beamed and launched immediately into a lively discourse about materialism and hippie philosophies and the like. Finishing with the comment: “Hunger is a good teacher, nê?”
Oom Siener van der Merwe - “jus’ call me Oom” - came across as a very well informed and intelligent individual, indeed. The conversation between them became so animated that old Oom didn’t want to end it and wanted to take Peter further, to Jeffery’s Bay. However, with the advancing twilight, he explained his headlights weren’t too bright and suggested Peter stayed the night, instead, at his farm.
“I live alone… ha… so the place is a bit of a mess.”
“Tell me about it,” wheezed the younger man; they had much in common.
Oom turned off the main road and they bounced for miles along a rutted dirt track, finally arriving at his place up-river from the Knysna Heads. He lived as he said, alone, in a run-down homestead, without electricity, slap-bang in the middle of nowhere.
“What do you do for money?” Peter asked.
“Got a little gold mine in the hills here that no-one knows about.”
Two large Labradors roamed the grounds. The bush was rank and overgrown. Vervet monkeys howled from creepers lost in the chattering dusk.
“Oh. Real gold from the ground?” asked Peter clumsily.
They sat around Oom’s battered Jewel wood burning stove in his dilapidated kitchen and heated up a stew that, although it could’ve been monkey, was the very essence of nutrition.
“Food of the God’s,” Peter complimented Oom between mouthfuls. Later, over perky mugs of hand-ground coffee, Oom confided that he, as well, had a fearsome disdain for money.
“I’m proud of you young chaps, starving as you do for your principles.”
He took Peter to one side and opened a cupboard in his pantry. From floor to ceiling it was stuffed with wads of money - thousands and thousands of rands, literally falling out. They looked at each other and nodded. What could Peter say? The situation affected him so profoundly that he dug around and showed Oom his bag of acid.
“These capsules show us the way,” he explained. “They show us how to live in peace and love and harmony.”
“With a drug?”
“You can’t do it with money,” Peter pointed out.
“Fair enough,” said the old man. “What can it do for me, then?”
Peter turned and asked, “Why don’t you try one?”
“I think you can see that I don’ need it. What do I need of peace and love and harmony, in a pill, when my life is filled by it every day? I don’ need money or drugs. I’m happy jus’ as I am. A hermit. Far from the madding crowd.”
“You sure? It’ll change your perceptions...”
“No! I don’ need to change my perceptions,” said Oom and shook his head emphatically. “No, no, no, no. Listen to me, seuntjie, I’m an old man an’ I know all about this thing called perception.”
The old man leaned with his arm on the table and slowly and repeatedly prodded his forehead and rubbed his beard and now and again he would wipe the water from his eyes. It seemed as if what he wanted to say created a great mental exertion. “Do you know what Siener means?”
“Siener? Well, actually, yes. Does it mean... Looker?”
“Looker! Hell, no,” Oom allowed himself a twitch of a smile. “It means Seer. You know? As in psychic.”
“Oh!”
“I’m called Siener because I can see things in the future.”
“You can foretell things?”
“Correct. Dis reg! And I can see things in your future.”
“Mine?”
“Your future.”
“What can you see?”
“Do you know what a sout-pielie is?” asked Oom.
“Um... sout is salt but I don’t know what a pielie is.”
Oom chuckled. “A pielie is what you have hanging between your legs!”
Peter was confused. “So what’s a sout-pielie?”
“A sout-pielie is someone who has one foot in England and the other foot in Africa. And his pielie hangs in the ocean!” He waggled his finger to demonstrate. “Just as I see in your future.”
“Am I going to be a sout-pielie?”
“Ja, a soutie! But…” Oom paused to look inwards, “you’ll be many other things, too.”
“Doesn’t sound like a happy life.”
“Life!” Oom spat a gob of phlegm noisily into the fire. “One thing is for certain. We’re all going to die one day, my boy; you, me, everyone. When that day comes along, what do you suppose you’ll take with you?”
“Um.”
“The car? The wife? The kids, the dog?”
It was a hard question.
“The drugs?” pressed Oom.
“Well, I suppose. Nothing.”
“Exactly! Nothing!” Oom sat back on his stool. “All you take with you when you die is yourself. You came into this world alone and you’ll leave it alone. So it makes sense not to waste your life in the pursuit of wealth or status and other things you can’t take with you but to, rather, know yourself. Make yourself a better person. Take yourself with you. That is the secret to a happy life.”
He paused a moment.
There was much to consider in what he’d just expounded. Peter examined his fingernails while the quiet stirrings of embers in the firebox fell to ash about their ears.
Eventually, Oom broke the silence. “You have something gold on you?”
“Gold?” said Peter, “gosh, yes. This ankh.” He lifted off the thong and handed it to Oom for inspection. “My friend found it in Cape Town.”
Oom regarded it closely.
“Jurra, alle magtig,” he whispered. “This is old gold. I could feel this thing from here.” He closed his eyes and sifted the cross carefully through his gnarly sensitive hands. “This is ancient. By that I mean it’s very, very, very old.” Following another protracted internal struggle, he at length dreamily expressed himself: “Your friend is a soul brother but he doesn’t have the gift. This ankh is for you to keep. You need it to learn about the future.”
“Yeah? Me? Chuh. Learn about the future?”
“I mean it,” said Oom patiently. “Here, try an experiment. See this hole? Well, it’s also an eye. Hold it like this, with your thumb below the hole. Now hold it up against the light. It works like a crystal ball. See?”
Peter held the ankh up against the paraffin lamp and tried squinting into the blazing rays that shimmered through the golden oval.
“Use the fringes of your vision. Look for movement.”
Peter really tried.
“Use all your senses. Listen for that hidden sound and that taste, that rhythm. Get with it, man, be like a beatnik. Get yourself gone.”
Peter was thinking, instead, of sampling another cap of acid when a sudden pressure began building at the back of his head. He felt dizzy. Clouds whirled before his eyes. Then, without warning, a whump of phosphor flashed.
fwip
Something moved.
Peter got himself gone.
fwap
“Would you... em… ’n koppetjie tee?” asks the Afrikaans woman, in halting English.
“Oooh! Yes, please.”
An enamel mug appears.
“En, kos?”
She places a plateful of snacks on the coffee table. Cubes of Vienna sausages, gherkins and cheese have been carefully skewered onto toothpicks to form a circular pile of a dozen, or more.
“Thank you,” says Peter.
Two more platefuls arrive. It becomes obvious that everything set on the plate is for him and no one else. “Why, thank you. That’s lovely.”
With a tight smile, under their watchful glances, he politely finishes the stack of hors d’oeuvres and drinks his mug of rooibos tea.
“How about a bikkie, hey, Marie?” suggests her husband.
Marie bustles into her kitchen and returns with a mountain of homemade rusks.
“Why, thank you, again,” Peter says. They’re certainly generous. Their hospitality is such that it doesn’t seem right to refuse their offerings. He chooses a rusk, slightly smaller than a brick, and dunks it into his second mug of tea.
“You still look hungry,” says the husband suspiciously and shakes his jowls.
“Koeksister, anyone?” enquires Marie, brightly.
It’s just too impolite to refuse. “Only if you’re having...”
Twisted coils of deep-fried dough, covered in syrup, are placed on the table. Peter pushes one grimly into his mouth. “Great!” he nods between superhuman bites and swallows. Thankfully, there’s a break while they listen to Jim Reeves on the radio. Peter surreptitiously unzips his trousers to relieve the strain around his waistline.
The programme ends.
“Dinner,” announces Marie gaily. She dunks a steaming platter, heaped with pap and boerewors, from the piggery behind their house, onto the coffee table.
“Ooooh! Dinner!”
Peter attempts to finish the meal but it’s mission impossible. Boulders of pap and several yards of wors remain. It’s too much. Finally, with many apologies, he rises unsteadily to his feet. “I have to lie down,” he says. His stomach has distended and his trousers droop, unzipped, beneath a pendulous girth. An involuntary fart escapes as he totters from the room.
fwop
“Did you see that?” asked Oom.
“What?” The farmhouse walls are glowing.
“The crystal ball thing.”
“I did. Yes, I did see something. What the flipping heck was that?”
“Is that, not was that,” said Oom, solemnly. Carefully he creaked to his feet and wished Peter well. “That is your future,” he said and went mumbling off to bed by candlelight. “See you bright and early, then?”
It occurred to Peter, in the pregnant silence following this exchange, that, actually yes, it was possible. Somehow, unbelievably possible, that some day he could, somehow, be a guest of an Afrikaner couple. But it was hardly likely. For one thing, Oom aside, he couldn’t stand them. Also, another thing, what Oom was suggesting - psychic abilities from a hole in an ankh - was illogical. Despite the evidence of his own eyes, or mind - or whatever it was - Peter spent an uneasy night trying to make sense of it all. Gradually, it began to dawn on him that he was as guilty of prejudice against Afrikaners as Afrikaners were guilty of prejudice against him.
This awareness disturbed him deeply.

Flags in the wind
Livingstone was ecstatic. “What’s happening in the world?”
Stanley said, “Well, I believe they’ve found diamonds at a place in West Griqualand, known as Colesburg Kopje, which they now call New Rush. However, Lord Kimberley, being the Colonial Secretary, considers the name too vulgar and will probably name the fields after himself.”
“I’ve passed through that area,” said Livingstone.
“Too bad you missed the diamonds,” reflected Stanley. “They’re going to make some rough people extremely rich.”
“It won’t buy them love.”
“Very droll. Well, what else? The Spanish have just had a civil war. I covered that for my newspaper, ah, and the opening of the Suez canal, on my way here.”
“What of Queen Victoria?”
“My dear chap I’ve been a bit out of touch from gossip these past two years. Like you, I’m also seeking some important news. I’ve been via the Black Sea and the Caucasus all the way to Bombay following the trail of some ancient gold that was looted during the 1868 British invasion of Ethiopia.”
“The British invaded Ethiopia?”
“Didn’t you know? Emperor Theodore imprisoned the British diplomat for four years and General Napier went to his rescue. I made my reputation as a reporter covering that story. Got my despatches out before anyone else did, accurate, too. That’s how I heard that the other missionary prisoners had looted the treasures in the palace. The Magdala Church has asked me to retrieve the gold for them, hence my journey to India the long way round. Now, where was I? Oh yes. In Bombay the gold was melted down and made into two ankhs and then sold to a slaver from these parts. I reached Zanzibar in January this year, hot on their trail. It’s taken me eight months to walk inland from the coast to find you here.”
“You came looking for me?”
“Well, the ankhs really. When I was in Bombay, my information was that they’d come to Africa. My boss, Mr Bennet, thought you might assist. He thought, also, it’d be a good idea to find you, alive of course – for the publicity value - but to bring back your bones if you were dead.”
“I fear I nearly am.”
“You are, at least, alive and here you are. I’ve done what the Royal Geographical Society and the British Government have failed to do. Indeed, what they apparently have not been particularly interested in doing.”
“You mean I’ve only been found because you’re looking for two old ankhs?”
“Oh, these aren’t normal ankhs. They’re deeply magical. According to my information they’re from the Ark of the Covenant.”
“Pish, posh and pollywaddle,” said Livingstone, “You’re as bad as that artist laddie Thomas Baines who was with me on the Zambesi. Always daydreaming. The Ark of the Covenant contains only the broken tablets of the ten commandments.”
“In a shittum box, surmounted by two golden sphinx with wings?”
“According to the Bible. Yes.”
“Well,” said Stanley quietly. “I’ve seen that box. The Ethiopian guardians who protect it are insistent that a Dr Dillon stole it during the chaos but that they had managed to retrieve it. However, the gold filagree work covering the Ark was missing and they want it back.”
“So who has this filagree... er... these ankhs?”
“Do you know the slaver Tippu Tib?”
“I’ve met the old devil a few times.”
“He apparently has them. He’s been trying to sell them for the gold value but so far no one’s been brave enough to take up the offer. They’ve heard tales as to their origin. Talk is that he’s somewhere in these parts. Don’t suppose you could help me find him, could you?”
“Yes, I s’pose I could. Last I heard he was up at the top end of this Lake. We could search up there? But first, please, tell me a little more about yourself.”
Stanley paused. “I’ve had a helluva life and I’ve battled for all of it. I’m an orphan brought up in a workhouse in north Wales. First opportunity I had I went to America where I ended up being captured at Shiloh, fighting for the Confederate army. From prison I volunteered for the Union army.”
“You changed sides?”
“They discharged me as being medically unfit, so I joined the Navy.”
“The Navy?”
“Yes, I know,” shrugged Stanley. “Later, I deserted and became a journalist. Made a name for myself getting reports home before anyone else, as I told you, about the British invasion of Ethiopia. That’s where I heard about the looting of the Templar church and Mr Bennet, at the New York Herald, then hired me to find the lost gold. Oh, and in Bombay, you, of course.”
“I thought God had sent you.”
“Either way, here I am.”


Peter shrank inside. It was as though his life and all his lessons were derived from the school of hard knocks. He is checked into the prison and left alone to sit, mournfully, in a waiting room where walls are covered in graffiti. ‘My wife’s got two cunts and I’m one of them,’ reads one, which brightens his face. ‘Say it with flowers, send her a triffid,’ reads another.
Somewhere in the clutter two words catch his eye. Pamberi Shamwari. It’s a Shona expression, which translates as onward, friend. Another Rhodesian has been through before him! Peter is strangely comforted by this fact and no longer feels so alone. Soon, a bearded guard, in his smartly dressed navy-blue uniform, leads him through to a changing room. Two prisoners inside, on duty, regard him curiously. He’s dressed in his stretch sasperilla jeans and alligator skin boots.
“Tak thas trousers off then son,” drawls the crinkly old bat-faced one. Apparently, or so the guard advises him when he reads the panic on Peter’s face, he has a choice of what to wear: His own clothes, or prison-issue clothes.
“Because yer on remand, awaiting trial.”
It doesn’t seem a good idea to go into the cells dressed this way and, so, Peter changes into the clothes they give him. A white and blue striped shirt, grey flannel trousers, socks and slippers.
“Give us that cross around your neck, too, please.”
His stuff is placed into a neatly labelled cardboard box.
“This way, son.”
A giant wooden door, stencilled ‘F’ Wing, is flung open. The view beyond is something out of a Dickens novel. Steel catwalks stretch skywards for three full storeys. Tottering backwards, Peter strains his neck to gape upwards and spittle dribbles slowly from the corner of his mouth. Serried ranks of doors, each with an oval spy-hole, grace the left-hand wall. The place is spotlessly clean with not a soul in sight, save for another bearded guard who stares down from the top skywalk. His arms firmly braced on the railings, guarding against vertigo.
“Incoming!”
Peter is noisily led clang-clang up the stairs to the very top walkway. They pause in front of a cell door. It’s rounded on top, painted bird-shit green and has monster studs around the frame. It looks like something that even a burly shoulder could not open.
Kachang
The guard shoves a giant iron key into the slot
Kachong
The door is prised open and Peter is motioned inside.
Inside is a coal cellar - or the nearest thing to it. A tiny window with vertical bars sits in the top section of the far wall. A drab light, recessed into the barrel ceiling, sheds a dim yellow nuance across the two narrow beds occupying each wall.
Kachung
The door whams shut behind him.
Peter is alone, again.
He sits on the bed and contemplates his situation. It is dire. He contemplates the walls. They’re equally dire. He stands and measures the space between them. Two paces. Alongside the door is a bell button. Above the button someone has written: ‘If you want sex, press the bell and a great big hairy cunt will appear.’
Peter guffaws and paces three measured steps to the far wall. Reaching up through the chute he grabs the thick iron bars and pull himself up to the window and hangs there, gazing into the inky night, with the smell of freedom and traffic noises and normal lives, only twenty metres away, seeping over the flinty boundary wall. Gaunt treetops and leafless branches poke above this barrier.
He ponders the events of the day until his arms grow tired. Then, with an oath, he flops down and crumples in a heap upon the bed. Without any ado, he starts crying. At first it’s quiet little sniffy whimpers, until he realises that the walls are solid thick and no one will actually hear him crying. Then they become great big blubbering sobs, which, in turn, are overtaken by huge heaving tsunamis of despair.
Fucketyfucketyfucketyfucketyfucketyfucketyfuckfuckfuck
kachang
A key goes in the door.
Kachong
A dishevelled wreck of a man, with crazy bloodshot eyes, is tossed inside.
“Another inmate,” announces the guard and, with another wild rumbling crash, the door slams shut.
Kachung
“Fuck you, screw,” shouts the new inmate. He spins to look Peter’s teary-eyed face over, spins again and leaps up to hang by hands and feet from the bars. Peter realises, to his terror, that he’s alone in a cell with a junkie.
”Orlrite then mate,” says the junkie. “Fucking screws wanted to search me. Fuck them. They can search themselves. Just got nicked mate. Bastards,” and he starts raving away like someone in a Jack Kerouac novel. Non-stop. On and on about the system and what’s wrong with it. He’s obviously well out of it on some sort of drug but he strikes Peter as being a decent sort of bloke when he does eventually start to slow down.
“Want some hash?” the junkie suddenly asks.
“In here?” Peter snorts, surprised at his question. The junkie reaches behind and withdraws a lump of red Lebanese hash from the waistband of his underpants.
“Got any snout?”
Peter doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.
“Tobacco, mate. Golden Virginia. Never mind. Got some Old Holborn here.” He produces some rolling paper and proceeds to fill it. “Name’s Matthew, mate. Wot you been done for then?”
“I’m not really here. Actually, I’m on an old farm in Knysna ten years ago.”
“Yeah mate. I’m a Hastings burglar y’see,” he expertly crumbles the hash into the tobacco and rolls a joint. “There’s this chemist, see, an’ I just knocked the alarm bell clean off the wall.” He demonstrates in the air the action of his ten-pound hammer on the alarm. “Then I climbed through this skylight in the roof and broke into the dangerous drugs cabinet heh... heh… helped meself and went home early.”
Peter eyes him; still a bit wary.
“Anyway,” he lights the joint, “I sample a few of the pills back at home. This is earlier this evening right? Pretty good gear, mate, so I thought I should go up to London and sell it there, see? But I don’ really know the dealers an’ I don’ wanna get ripped off and I thort wha’ would I take for protection?”
He passes the joint over.
“Now, I live in Hastings which is on the coast, see, and I fucking hate them seagulls. They always flying about an’ shitting all over me roof. So I has this .22 rifle, see, ‘cos I like to shoot the gulls, right?”
Peter takes a deep suck on the joint and keeps his eyes on the junkie burglar.
“So I... er... took the rifle with me to the station and some geezer called the filth, about me, on the platform. Doosh! The pigs come and find all these pills in me Sainsbury’s bag and put two and two together on the chemist job. Damn!” he mutters, “damn those seagulls!”
They sit and smoke the joint and laugh and cough until they regain their breath.
“Well, Matthew,” Peter asks like thousands have asked before, “what’s it like in Prison? Is it rough?”
“It’s orlright, mate. It’s orlrite.” Matthew crumbles his hash and starts to roll another joint. “It’s a doddle, really. Most of the people in here are in for some drug-related offence. There’re no nonces or thieves or murderers among us, in this wing. Most of them are just like you, mate. Got knicked at th’airport or at Dover, din ’ay. International smugglers the lotta yer,” and he grins widely. “People like me shouldna be in here, mate. Not wiv you lot about.”
Before too long they’re as high as kites and Matthew lapses into a monologue about the system; about beaks and the filth and briefs and screws. Peter gathers he means judges and police, lawyers and warders all with a vested interest in keeping crime alive. “If there was no crime in society they’d all be out of work, mate. We, as criminals, keep a large percentage of people gainfully employed. Yeah, mate. Without us there’d be no jobs for them lot,” and his pinprick eyes grow smaller.
Peter’s mind expands. Together, they talk the night away.



The news comes in a phone call during Peter’s creative briefing, at his advertising agency, next morning.
“You may not remember me,” says the deep voice on the line. There’s a distinct Afrikaner edge to the accent. “I met you in Cape Town once, at the home of an American called Tom. Does the name Marthinus Geldenhuys ring a bell?”
“Not the one who saw flowers coming out the radio?”
“Twenty years ago to the day! Yes, that’s me, the very one. Could we meet somewhere? For lunch?”
“I usually go to Sandro’s Restaurant, he’s a good friend of mine. Shall we meet there at one o’clock?”
Peter arrives early and waits for him. To be honest, Geldenhuys would be the first Afrikaner he’s met for two decades and his curiosity is piqued. When the man does arrive he has a cool searching air about him, reminding Peter of Stanley’s comments concerning white people in Africa. The explorer was virtually dead, having travelled down the Congo River, when a runner he’d sent on ahead for help returned with two Europeans who possessed ‘…calm grey eyes and laundered white clothes. They looked like gods.’ This Dutchman looked like a god.
“You aren’t anything like I remember you to be,” Peter says.
Geldenhuys gives Peter a careful studied examination. “We’ve passed a lot of water and much has changed. You, however, don’t seem to have changed at all.”
He’s totally unlike other whites at the tables around them, those new to Africa. This guy has an old look, a look of experience. An essence distilled from centuries in Africa fighting the land, wild animals and the savages.
The British.
fwap
“Soon after dawn, the small party of Boers that Denys and I were camping with looked up and saw an amazing, unbelievable sight. Two figures stood on the summit, triumphantly waving their rifles and bush hats. Burghers! The hill was ours! Botha’s extraordinary optimism had proven true.
‘That’ll teach those Rooineks a lesson,’ whooped a jubilant Opperman.
‘Ja!’ we stood and shouted and shouted, ‘Don’t piss us off again!’
‘Or else!’”
fwip
“What’s this all about, then?”
“Just a talk. I need your help.”
“I’d prefer we simply got straight to the point.”
“Okay then,” says Geldenhuys and they sit and order lunch, sample wines, laugh over old times until, in an obstinate African way, he finally gets around to the point. “An old man in Knysna told me how to find you.”
“Old guy?”
“Old as Methusela. Seems like he was born old.”
“Oom Siener van der Merwe?”
Geldenhuys nods. “He says you can save Nelson Mandela”
“Save Mandela? Most people want to hang him.”
“He’s going to be released from prison soon. We have intelligence reports that someone is going to assassinate him at Victor Verster Prison. Mr van der Merwe says you know the identity of the assassin?”
“Are you with South African Intelligence? BOSS?”
“National Intelligence. My boss is Dr Niels Barnard.”
“Do you know a big fat guy called Craig Williamson?”
“Oh Ja. He’s now Captain Craig Williamson.”
“I knew it! I knew it!” Sometimes you don’t have to have psychic abilities to know things. “Have you checked him out?”
“Ja, it’s not him.” Geldenhuys reaches into his blazer and withdraws a couple of photographs. He points to one and passes it over. “Do you know this man?”
It’s a garish shot of two familiar figures posing before a Pool table, surrounded by partygoers. “That’s me in Green Lanes about ten years ago! With someone you’re very familiar with, ” exclaims Peter.
“What’s his name?”
“Eden Winters. Remember him? The one you and Neethling trained in chemical warfare with Wouter Basson? That poor bastard friend of mine you recruited from the loony bin in Pietermaritzburg.”
Geldenhuys closes his eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose. “So, old Siener must be right. It’s PN666?”
“He’s got a number? What’s the PN stand for?”
“Port Natal,” says Geldenhuys and continues. “Your friend Eden is a renegade agent and, as will become apparent, he’s gone off the rails. Sure, we trained him in assassination but now he’s turning into his own assassin. If our prophet is right, he’s determined to murder Mr Mandela when he’s released from prison next year. Do you have any idea where he may be?”
Peter isn’t going to turn Eden in, even if this is the perfect opportunity.
“If I did, what would I have to do? Murder him?”
“It would help.”

32
Cecil
Rattled beyond the telling of it, Peter drives his restored Toyota through the Orange Free State and on down van Reenen’s Pass into Natal. The very first bridge extending across the highway has the words Fuck you Dutchmen spray-painted, two feet high, along its entire length. It brings a wan smile to his face. It’s obvious that the English people of the province haven’t forgiven those who took them into apartheid.
“Now it feels more like coming home.”
In Durban he finds the collapsing pre-war block of flats on upper West Street. It overlooks the new freeway, not far from where the Art College had once been. A derelict foyer is occupied by an ancient Waygood-Otis elevator, which creaks alarmingly to the ninth floor. He finds the number that Geldenhuys gave him on a rickety, paint-blistered old door and knocks. There’s a movement behind the peephole.
“One moment.”
The door opens and an alpha-male hobbit presents itself. The hobbit’s nose has been punched sometime, as it hangs to one side. He doesn’t look too healthy. Hair all mussed about, but, otherwise, his sagging features are unmistakably familiar.
“Dad!”
“Son! I was told you’d be coming.”
“Where’ve you been for forty-five years?”
“Where angels fear to tread, young man. But let’s not dwell on that now. Please, come in.”
They enter his one-room flat. A single mattress and a broken wooden cupboard fill the room, with the walls all barren and dirty.
“It wasn’t always like this,” says Cecil. “When Violet was alive we had...”
“Violet?” Peter interrupts.
“Yes, Violet, my wife. I’ve got some shots here of the family and my other children.” He rummages in his cupboard and pulls out a plastic shopping bag filled with photographs. “That’s her, with Candice and Magnolia. Your... um... half-sisters.”
Peter peers at the faded black and white photo, filled with a creeping sense of dismay. Two young girls with freckled noses peer back. The afternoon sun slants across their faces. Behind them stands their mother, her features shaded by an austere hat.
“You mean I’ve got sisters?”
“Yes! There’s also another older boy from another woman in Kimberley.”
The world stops.
“Uhuh,” whispers Peter, “and where are they?”
“Don’t know,” says Cecil, “They don’t keep in touch. Candice married and left the country. Magnolia is in the Cape, I think.”
“Is your son from Kimberley called Eden?”
“Don’t know. Maybe.”
Peter pauses to digest this news and a tic develops in his smoky eye.
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Look, um, son. They don’t want anything to do with me.”
Peter gives his newfound dad a long, twitchy look.
“I’ve never been one for being tied down,” continues Cecil. “All my life! Most of the money I made I spent on women and booze and the rest I just squandered.”
He coughs a hacking cough and shows Peter some more photographs.
“That’s my mother and father, your grandparents, outside our home in Stamford Hill. We owned the dairy that supplied milk for Durban. Look! Here’s me and my brother on a ’bike.”
A motorbike, with its sidecar in the air, careens around a corner. Two young men smile exuberantly for the camera. One steering while the other, Cecil, is happily airborne in the sidecar.
“That old Enfield was one of the first ’bikes in the city. During the war we were in North Africa, with the motorised division, and learned to ride in the desert.”
Another greying and creased photo shows cows being herded by Cecil’s father, riding a zebra. “So the suburb of Stamford Hill used to be a dairy farm?” Peter asks, “and your family owned it?”
“Sure. My parents later moved to a farm in Mooi River but, when everyone died, things just fell apart.”
“Everyone died?”
“Car crash,” says Cecil. “The entire family wiped out by a bus, near Hilton. I wasn’t there, luckily. I was with your mother in Durban at the time,” he coughs again and reaches under the bed. “Fancy a drink?”
A bottle of brandy is produced.
“Bit early, isn’t it?”
“Come now, young man. We’ve something to celebrate, haven’t we? Go on, have a dop!”
“Well... do you have a coke to go with it?”
“Nah. But we can get from the shop over the road.”
They go downstairs and cross the road to the off-licence below the Berea Centre. Peter pays for a couple of litres of Coca-Cola and they retrace their route to Cecil’s flat. Once there, Cecil pulls another bottle of brandy from beneath his jacket.
“I didn’t see you buy that,” says Peter.
“Nor did the owner!” chuckles Cecil.
Peter has to smile. His biological father is obviously the incorrigible old rogue he’s been told to expect.
“Bottom’s up!” says Cecil and bumps him with his shoulder. He pours two stiff drinks into plastic cups and they knock them back. He pours two more.
“What about your family?” Peter asks.
“Have a look at those photo’s, they’re all there.”
Peter shuffles through the pile. A grainy photograph catches his eye. “Who’re these Dutchmen?”
Taken at the turn of the century, it’s a posed picture of women in Victorian clothes seated on chairs surrounded by heavily bearded men in slouch hats - Boer war eyes glittering at the camera.
“That’s Ouma and Oupa. Those are my uncles and aunts. That’s my mother.”
“Your mother! Are those people her relatives?”
“Yes.”
“Gosh. That must mean I’m... I must be...” Peter gargles at the knowledge, “I must also be a Dutchman?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“That I’m a bastard Dutchman?”
An orphan bastard Dutchman
The revelation is traumatic for Peter. It’s a hairy thing to know there is Afrikaner blood coursing through his body.
“Fucking hell. Let’s have another drink.”
By ten o’clock that morning, both Cecil and son are as drunk as burghers at a rugby match in Kokstad. Peter, naturally, more so.
“Washido for aliving?” he burbles.
“Help my chinas fix cars over the road. Bit of this, bit of that. The Salvation Army helps with the flat, and things.”
“Lesh go shee ’em.”
“Who?”
“Yer frensh.”
They stagger downstairs and weave once more across Berea Road, swearing harshly at impatient drivers. They totter down an alleyway to a small backyard gypsy camp that looks like a bomb once hit it. Amongst the scrap-yard rubble, burnt tyres and the stench of piss they stumble into Cecil’s friends.
“Howzit?”
Covered in scabs and scars, they’re huddled together smoking marijuana in a pipe made from a broken bottleneck. They are, without doubt, the lowest bunch of derelicts in all Durban society. They are the white-trash bog rats of Berea.
“Lesh havva puff!”
Surrounded by rubbish and rusting cars, Peter feels incongruous standing in amongst them. He is dressed in his best to meet his long-lost dad and, now, inebriated he’s meeting with these other aggressive ageing misfits of society.
“Dad,” he says, “gorra go. Allah shee yas tomorrah mornag. We beach? Kay?”
“Sure, son. Shay... uh... you wouldn’t happen to have... uh... fifty rand to spare?”
Near Hillcrest, on the manicured verges of the four-lane highway weaving up to Maritzburg, Peter pulls the car over and vomits wretchedly into the gutter.
fwip
“That’s it, boy. Vomit it all up,” wheezes the calm voice of Oom Siener.
Peter is on his knees in the kitchen, hurling up the dregs of an evil broth. His stomach is in spasms and a dribble of green slime hangs from his mouth in beaded droplets to the bowl in his hands.
“Yyyoooorrgh.”
“Lovely, isn’t it? I mean, lovely to have you back here in reality with us,” the old man says and indicates Grasshopper and Zita at the kitchen table.
“Oh hi!” smiles Peter, weakly. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “I’ve just met my biological father.”
“Izzit?”
“No good, how was it?”
Peter retches again. “The good news is that we got pissed and smoked a joint together,” he heaves again. “We were like family,” and again, “the bad news is that it was at nine o’clock in the morning.”
“He’s no good?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Izzit?”
“I’ll never get anything out of that guy. He’s a pauper living off the streets of Durban and, to make matters worse, I’ve discovered I’m a Dutchman!”
“You’re an Afrikaner?”
“Yeah, hey but... don’t tell anyone, okay.”
“Why not?”
“I think I’m ashamed.”
Oom rolled his eyes and carefully swatted away a troublesome midge, quite unfazed by Peter’s faux pas.
“Sorry,” said Peter, “I forgot where I was.”
“It’s January, 1971 and you are at my house in Knysna, upriver from the Heads. I found you on the road the other day, don’t you remember?”
“That’s right! You showed me how to use this ankh.”
“Not that one. That one’s a different one.”
“Uh? Oh, damn it. What’s this all about?”