Despite the Darkness, page 21
‘I’m not a police agent …’ Cameron started to say, but all three men stood up, and the UDF man screamed furiously at him.
‘Just get the fuck out of here. Now. We are not interested in your crap. Fuck off while you still can.’
There didn’t seem to be a lot of alternative. Cameron climbed back into the car and drove on up the road looking for somewhere he could turn round, feeling his hands trembling and damp on the steering wheel. The three men were all still standing on the verandah watching him as he drove back down the inaptly named Mayibuye Road. In spite of the car seat he could feel against his back, he had the same naked-back feeling of vulnerability and exposure he had had when he walked back across the road after his confrontation with Venter.
Where to now? The people who might have known where Mirambo had gone had obviously bought into the idea that he was a police agent. That seemed poor reward for putting his neck on the line, quite literally, to help Mirambo escape. But he couldn’t tell them about that, and even if he did they would no longer believe him. There was clearly no future in trying to follow the trail from this end – but it might still be worth trying to find out whether anyone had heard whether Mirambo had managed to escape across the border. He had had plenty of time to do so by now.
Cameron had drawn a blank with Peter Jones, but if there was anyone around who had good links into Lesotho it was Sammy Patel. Cameron had managed to borrow a car people wouldn’t recognise, which didn’t happen very often; he wasn’t being followed; and, give or take the remaining still unmarked essays, he had the time. So why not take a chance on finding Sammy at home in Northdale to see whether he had heard anything? Might as well get all the invective and humiliation over in one afternoon – not that Sammy would ever resort to invective, no matter how hostile he might feel.
It was still well before the rush-hour and driving through the city and out the other side onto the road up to Northdale didn’t take long. Cameron had been to the house in Bombay Road several times for meetings, liberally fuelled by Sammy’s wife Amina’s exceptional samoosas.
Sammy had reached retirement age long ago and had now retired from everything except politics in general and the UDF in particular, so there was a reasonable chance that he would be at home. He wouldn’t expect anyone to phone in advance to let him know they were planning a visit – his phone had probably been bugged ever since phone-tapping had been invented. He had been banned, served several terms in prison and spent years under house arrest, but to everyone’s surprise, not least his own, the current State of Emergency hadn’t seen him detained, re-arrested or banned again. If they thought he was too old to do them any damage they were wrong.
Sammy was at home and received Cameron with his usual courtesy, offering him a cup of tea from a freshly made pot on the table. Once greetings had been exchanged and families asked about, Sammy got down to business.
‘I don’t know why you have come here this afternoon Cameron, but you are very welcome. Before you tell me what you have come for, I think we need to clear the air with regard to the rumour that is circulating that you are a police agent. Otherwise it will hang like a cloud over our conversation. Speaking for myself, I have rehearsed all our past interactions in my mind, in so far as I can remember them, and I do not believe the rumour. I couldn’t put my finger on precisely why I don’t believe it, but my instincts tell me it isn’t true. I can think of no reason why you would collaborate with the apartheid government and the thugs like Venter it spawns. You would not be corrupted by money and I can’t see you being susceptible to blackmail.’
‘Thank you for that, it is a great comfort,’ Cameron replied, ‘but I can feel a “but” coming on.’
‘Indeed,’ Sammy said, smiling fleetingly but looking serious as he continued. ‘The “but” has to do with the formal structures. I am sure you will appreciate that the formal structures of the UDF won’t be able to take the risk that the rumour might be true. I don’t speak for the UDF, but for some time to come I suspect that you won’t be made welcome at meetings and won’t be asked to do anything on behalf of the local committee.’
‘You will also be aware,’ he went on, ‘that the ANC leadership in exile has to be paranoid about infiltration by agents of the apartheid state if they are going to remain alive. So the ANC will also have to work on the assumption that you may be a police agent until such time as evidence is available to the contrary. If Venter or anyone else in the Special Branch was responsible for circulating the rumour, which seems highly likely, it was a very clever way of neutralising your effectiveness.’
‘But what “evidence” could I, or anyone else, ever produce?’ Cameron asked.
‘Precisely – athough I suppose you could assassinate the President,’ Sammy said with a quiet smile, adding, as Cameron looked sharply up at him, ‘no, no, I’m not serious. I was only joking – but you may be quite sure I wouldn’t make a joke like that if I thought there was any possibility that you might be a police agent. You are right, of course. Once a rumour like that has been circulated, it is extremely difficult to provide evidence to the contrary – and it doesn’t help that up to now such rumours have almost always been shown to be true.’
There didn’t seem to be anything Cameron could say adequate to his thankfulness that Sammy was prepared to trust him in such circumstances. Cameron wasn’t sure that if their roles had been reversed he would have been equally trusting.
‘Now we have got that out of the way,’ Sammy continued, ‘please tell me why you came to see me today. But, before that, would you like another cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please,’ Cameron answered. ‘You will know that my research student Mirambo disappeared on the day the bomb went off outside the Supreme Court. When the police raided my house a couple of nights later they were looking for him. I feel somehow responsible for him and have been trying to find out what has happened to him. He told me a few months ago that if things got too hot for him here he would try to get out to Lesotho. As far as I know, nobody has heard from him this end for ten days now. I know you manage to keep in touch with contacts in Lesotho and wondered whether you had heard from any of them that Mirambo has arrived safely in Maseru.’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Sammy replied, ‘and I would have heard. I very much liked what I saw of Mirambo – he has great potential. As soon as I heard he had disappeared I suspected that he would be heading for the border and asked my contacts to let me know if he arrived. I have heard nothing.’
‘Yes – great potential, and a very nice man with it,’ Cameron agreed. ‘He was happy to spend hours kicking a football around with my five-year-old son. He’s been gone ten days now – we should have heard something, one way or the other. I hope to God he hasn’t been permanently disappeared.’
‘It would be a different God,’ Sammy said, ‘but I hope so too.’
‘So what am I supposed to do now, Sammy?’ Cameron asked. ‘If people are going to doubt me to the point where I can’t carry on in the UDF structures, what can I do? Venter and his superiors will be delighted. They clearly think I am a nuisance and would like to see the back of me. Some of the students think I’m a police agent, and I’m worried that the more political ones are going to start boycotting my classes. My Head of Department and the Principal are both saying that I am bringing the University into disrepute. The police harassment, which you know about better than any of us, has intensified. Jules tore a strip off Venter in front of his gorillas during the raid and he has threatened to detain her and take a sjambok to her. That really frightens me, as I don’t have any doubt whatever that he means what he says. There are times I feel like giving up – but I don’t want to turn-tail and emigrate, however bleak the future seems. That would be to let them win, and I’m damned if I’m going to do that.’
‘It is Jules I would be most worried about,’ Sammy said thoughtfully, after a few moments silence. ‘You can still do your research and publish your articles, and newspaper editors aren’t going to stop publishing your letters. I am sure the students who know you will continue coming to your lectures – unless you are banned, of course, which seems entirely possible, in which case you wont be able to deliver any lectures or publish anything. Your friends will stand by you – but you are right to be concerned about Jules. I have encountered Venter on several occasions and know a number of comrades who have had the misfortune of being interrogated by him. He is very dangerous and there’s no question that Jules would be much safer out of his reach. Isn’t there anywhere she can go, at least until Venter gets over his immediate anger?’
‘I’m going to a conference in Brighton this weekend,’ Cameron said, ‘and she has agreed to take the children down to her mother in Cape Town while I am away – but I’m sure it will take Venter more than a couple of weeks to forget the way she humiliated him in front of his men.’
‘Her mother should have warned her,’ Sammy said, ‘that it is never a good idea to humiliate a psychopath. But getting away to Cape Town will at least be a good start. We would miss you here but couldn’t you try to get a post in Cape Town? That wouldn’t be turning your back on the struggle.’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ Cameron replied, ‘but, even supposing there were any vacant posts available, who is going to employ someone with a cloud of suspicion like this hanging over him?’
‘If it would be any help I would be happy to recommend you,’ Sammy said. ‘I could vouch for your integrity, even if I couldn’t claim any academic expertise in History.’
‘Thank you, Sammy – I really appreciate that,’ Cameron said. ‘I will think about it. Thank you for giving me your time and your advice – and most especially your trust. I need to get back now – the colleague I borrowed the car from will be getting anxious. If you hear that Mirambo has reached Lesotho, or anything else about him for that matter, please find a way of letting me know.’
‘I certainly will,’ Sammy said as he rose stiffly to his feet to show Cameron to the front door. ‘Good luck.’
As Cameron reversed Lynn’s car back into Bombay Road and drove back through the coagulating late afternoon traffic he wasn’t sure that any of this had much to do with luck. What had happened, what was happening, wasn’t just unlucky, it all fitted together too neatly. It had to be the working out of some plan – it felt as if he was a pawn in some new game whose rules nobody had bothered to explain to him.
Sammy’s trust was something to be grateful for, but, as he had acknowledged, it was based simply on instinct. He knew Cameron well enough, and had enough experience to trust his instincts – but many others wouldn’t. Even if their instincts told them the rumour was false, they wouldn’t feel confident enough just to ignore it. Sammy was right – Cameron’s active involvement with the UDF was at an end.
If he could no longer play an active role in the struggle, what was the point in trying to carry on? What could he possibly achieve by staying that would make up for the stress, and the very real risks, he was putting Jules and the children through? As if it wasn’t bad enough getting regular death threats from the police, his one achievement of the day had been to add three more to the chorus line of those who were threatening to kill him.
Lynn was waiting for him in her office when he went to return her keys. There seemed to be no good reason why he shouldn’t respond to her look of enquiry by telling her where he had been and recounting the gist of the two conversations – not that the Edendale encounter had been much of a conversation.
Lynn made soothing motherly noises as he spoke, suggesting in response to the despondent conclusion he had drawn from his meeting with Sammy that he shouldn’t jump the gun. The two weeks in England would be a change of scene and, provided Jules was safely out of the way, would be a welcome break from the stress that would give him a chance to think things through.
‘I seem to do very little else apart from think things through these days,’ Cameron responded, ‘and jumping the gun seems a peculiarly unfortunate phrase in the circumstances. But thanks for your help with the car, Lynn, and thanks for mothering me. I need that right now.’
‘Incidentally, Patrick has been looking for you,’ Lynn said. ‘He asked me to tell you he needs to see you. I didn’t tell him I had lent you my car for the afternoon.’
‘Thanks again,’ Cameron responded.
As he turned to go Lynn got up from her chair and walked around the desk to him. She stood in front of him for a moment then leant forward and kissed him on the lips, lingering just long enough in doing so to make it quite clear that she was not feeling exclusively motherly.
‘Be careful,’ she said as he moved to the door, ‘please be very careful.’
‘I certainly will,’ Cameron replied as he opened the door, ‘I certainly will.’
Some might think, Cameron thought as he walked home, that clocking up death threats from both ends of the political spectrum must mean that he was doing something right. But he wasn’t. Although the threats from the SB were almost certainly a lot more dangerous than those from the ANC cadres, the latter were much more upsetting. And he didn’t know what being careful meant – he didn’t know the rules of that particular game. He shouldn’t have gone out to Edendale. What could he really have hoped to achieve? Even if they had known where Mirambo was, or where he had gone, they were never going to tell him. They wouldn’t have trusted him enough to tell him anything – even before hearing the rumour. But he couldn’t just sit and do nothing.
So now he would have to keep looking over both shoulders and the stress would just get worse. With Jules less hostile, but still distant, he would also need to be very careful to resist any temptation to seek solace from the stress by succumbing to any of the less motherly instincts that might have been lying behind Lynn’s not unwelcome kiss.
Chapter 17
On his way home Cameron was too busy contemplating the bleakness of the future, and rather less bleakly reflecting on the unexpectedness of Lynn’s kiss, to think through what he was going to tell Jules about the events of the afternoon. So he was caught off-guard by the question Jules met him with as he went through to the kitchen to tell her he was back.
‘Back from where exactly?’ Jules asked. ‘Patrick phoned just after I got home and said he’d been trying to get hold of you all afternoon but you weren’t on campus. Where have you been?’
Jules would not be at all happy that he had gone out to Edendale on a wild goose chase taking what she would see as a considerable risk in the process. She had never been comfortable about his going out there for meetings. A rumour that he might be a police agent would not have made him any less of an insurance risk. The visit to Sammy would be a different matter, but she would want to know how he had got there. He wouldn’t normally have had any difficulty in telling her that he had borrowed Lynn’s car, but that parting kiss made the telling feel awkward – it wasn’t as if it had been unwelcome.
‘I’ve been really worried about Mirambo and felt I needed to try to do something to find out what had happened to him,’ Cameron answered. ‘We had an address in Edendale on file from when he first applied. All his papers have been removed from his file in Student Records but Michelle had kept a note of it so I went out there to ask whether anyone had seen him.’
‘And I’m sure they welcomed you by slaughtering a beast and showering you with gifts,’ Jules replied. ‘Let me guess – they had heard the bloody fool rumour that you are a police agent and told you to fuck off in Zulu.’
‘No – in English,’ Cameron said. ‘They didn’t mince their words in telling me to get the hell out – it was a mistake going there.’
‘Now there’s a surprise – what did you expect?’ Jules asked. ‘If they knew where Mirambo was and knew the SB were after him they wouldn’t have told you where he was, even if they didn’t think you might be working for the police. What were you thinking of? How did you get there anyway, if you didn’t take the car?’
‘I wanted to make sure I wasn’t followed so I borrowed Lynn’s car,’ Cameron said. ‘What did Patrick want?’
‘I’ve no idea what he wanted, beyond wanting to talk to you – I didn’t ask. He asked me to tell you he needs to see you first thing in the morning. Is Lynn normally in the habit of lending her car out to all and sundry, or are you somehow special?’
‘No, of course I’m not special,’ Cameron said, ‘it’s just that Lynn wasn’t needing her car…’
‘Which she would have had to bring to campus specially to lend to you,’ interrupted Jules, ‘given that she lives close enough to campus to walk in every day.’
‘Yes,’ Cameron said. ‘I asked her to bring it in if she wasn’t needing it. She is also worried about Mirambo.’
‘Well I hope she insures her car against riot and disorder, or whatever the technical phrase is,’ Jules said, ‘before she lets sundry colleagues drive it into war zones. Anyway you can tell Patrick when you see him that I passed his message on for him.’
End of conversation.
Patrick was at his desk when, after another uneventful night, Cameron knocked on his office door first thing in the morning, as requested. Patrick gestured magisterially towards a chair in front of the desk. He might as well be the Principal – an office he no doubt aspired to.
‘Jules said you wanted to see me.’
‘Yes, you need to see this,’ Patrick replied, pushing a sheet of paper across the desk towards him, ‘it came in yesterday’s post. I tried to find you to show it to you yesterday afternoon.’
