Despite the Darkness, page 29
‘Sideburns. Thanks very much, that’s very helpful,’ Cameron said as he turned to leave, ‘I know who it will have been.’
Chapter 22
When Cameron reached the front door of the hotel he saw that the rain was still sheeting down. He had left this folding umbrella in his room, but it wouldn’t have coped with what was going on outside anyway. Spotting an umbrella-stand just inside the front door with a bunch of golf-umbrellas sporting the hotel logo, Cameron took one and waved it enquiringly towards the receptionist who smiled and nodded her permission.
Sideburns was standing under a portico fifty yards along the sea-front in a dark rain-slicked raincoat looking profoundly miserable under a sodden trilby hat. He probably had no more idea than Cameron did about what his tailing efforts on a rain-swept autumn day on the South coast were supposed to be going to achieve. He had positioned himself where he could see Cameron leaving the hotel so that he could follow him as he walked to catch the bus back to the campus. But the promise of breakfast lay in the other direction and took Cameron past where Sideburns was standing. It seemed a pity not to carry on the tradition of making the acquaintance of the men – Cameron assumed it had always been men – who were paid to waste their lives following him.
As Cameron approached him, Sideburns fished a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and turned away from the wind to light one, his face averted so that Cameron couldn’t see it as he walked past.
‘Good morning, sorry to keep you waiting out in the rain,’ Cameron said, stopping alongside Sideburns’ half-turned shoulder.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Sideburns said, swivelling round to face him. ‘I don’t think I know you.’
There was a trace of an Afrikaans accent but Sideburns sounded as if he had been living in England quite some time. At close quarters you could see that the sideburns were flecked with grey. It wasn’t impossible that Sideburns had originally been posted to Brighton to follow Thabo Mbeki around when he was at the university in the late 1960s, although he might have been a bit young then for such an important job. If so, Cameron considered himself to be keeping good company when it came to having followers.
‘I’m sure you know very well who I am,’ Cameron replied. ‘But it was remiss of me not to introduce myself. I’m Dr Cameron Beaumont.’
‘What do you want with me?’ came the truculent response.
‘I just thought it would be polite to pass the time of day,’ responded Cameron. ‘
‘I have no idea who you are or what you want,’ Sideburns said. ‘Now please leave me alone. You are bothering me and if you don’t stop I will call the police.’
‘You are the police,’ said Cameron, ‘even if you don’t wear a Mr Plod helmet when you follow people around. Please yourself – you are wasting your time but if that is what you want to do, or have been paid to do, feel free. But don’t try to pretend that you aren’t following me – I’m not stupid.’
Cameron was acutely aware of Sideburns walking behind him in the rain up to the main street and into a tearoom that advertised Full English Breakfasts. So much for being able to get away from them, even just for a fortnight. The return of the feeling of claustrophobia that came with knowing that he was perpetually under a blanket of surveillance was all the more intense for the sense of release he had had as the plane left the State of Emergency behind.
Cameron instinctively chose a seat with his back to the wall in the darkest corner at the back of the tearoom near the kitchen, and watched as Sideburns sat himself down at a table near the door. Having ordered a not-quite-Full English breakfast – neither baked beans nor black pudding held any appeal – Cameron sat back. He should have thought of buying a newspaper before sitting down.
Watching the rain falling outside, Cameron noticed that there was a W.H Smith on the other side of the street. It wouldn’t take more than a minute to pick up a newspaper, so Cameron got up and walked to the door, assuring the woman on the till near the door that he would be back to eat his breakfast when he had bought a newspaper. She looked straight through him, giving no indication that she had heard what he said, so he repeated the announcement to Sideburns on his way past.
‘Don’t bother to follow me,’ Cameron added. ‘I’m only going to walk across the road and back. There is no point in your getting even wetter than you are already.’
Cameron had his umbrella – Sideburns didn’t have an umbrella and his raincoat and hat had been hung up for him at the far end of the tearoom. He really would get wet if he followed Cameron across the street. But Sideburns was nothing if not conscientious. As Cameron stood on the pavement opening his golf umbrella, he looked back and saw Sideburns getting up from his table and walking to the door. So be it – if he wanted to get wet, he could get wet.
There was a pedestrian crossing a hundred yards or so along the pavement. Cameron’s instinctive rebelliousness when it came to regulations of any kind normally ensured that he was a prince among jaywalkers. Today he felt obliged to abide by the Highway Code, which necessitated walking first to the zebra-crossing and then the hundred yards back to W.H. Smith. One walk in the teeming rain would have to do if he was to get back to his table before his breakfast got cold. A minute or two in the shop would be enough time in which to overcome any scruples about jaywalking.
Once he had established that Sideburns really was going to follow him through the rain, Cameron found that he was in no hurry. When he got back down the other side of the street to W.H Smith, he quickly found a copy of the Guardian and also spotted a copy of the Times Higher Education Supplement. Scanning the job advertisements out of casual interest had become a weekly ritual – now there might need to be some serious intent.
Cameron paid for the papers, waved to a dripping Sideburns, who was pretending to look at a magazine taken from the stand near the till, and dodged the traffic as he walked quickly back across the road. He needn’t have worried about his breakfast getting cold – there was no sign of it.
As Cameron sat down at his table, Sideburns walked past, soaking wet, on his way to the toilets, presumably to dry the exposed bits of himself off. The nondescript dark jacket he was wearing looked to be reasonably absorbent,but his trousers were sticking to his legs and his shoes were squelching.
‘I told you not to bother following me,’ Cameron said to the sodden back.
Sideburns swung round, the fury in his eyes unquenched by the rainwater trickling down his face.
‘You red-neck commie bastard,’ he spat, ‘that wasn’t necessary. We’ll get you, you bastard.’
Sideburns’ Afrikaans origins were more evident when he was angry.
‘It wasn’t necessary to follow me either, I told you where I was going,’ Cameron retorted. ‘And as for “getting” me, as you so elegantly put it, your SB colleagues at home haven’t managed that yet.’
‘They haven’t tried yet,’ Sideburns muttered as he turned back towards the toilets.
There still being no sign of breakfast, there was time to page through the THES on the way to the job advertisements. The shock came early. They hadn’t wasted much time – someone had got the story onto page three already. He wasn’t quite front-page news but pretty damn nearly. The headline crowed ‘Anti-Apartheid Success: South African Academic Humiliated.’ It was all there – the rumour that he was a police agent, the allegation that he had betrayed his research student to the police, the audience of one for his presentation, the ANC’s original approval that had subsequently been withdrawn. ‘Humiliated’ seemed an appropriate word.
At a guess, half the academics and virtually all the senior managers at the English-language universities in South Africa looked at the THES every week. The story would be the main topic of gossip in every staff common room in the country by the weekend. Every academic historian in the country would soon know about the boycott of his presentation. There was no point in thinking about applying for a job at another South African university for the foreseeable future. The same would probably apply to the entire English-speaking world.
Cameron’s breakfast, when it finally arrived, was uniformly tasteless. The pot of tea was almost cold, and the little stainless-steel milk jug that came with it was impossible to pour without half the milk slopping into the saucer or onto the table. Why would anyone ever produce something designed to perform so elementary a function that couldn’t be made to work properly? The hours until he could talk to Jules again stretched emptily and drearily ahead. This was probably what it would be like to be unemployed.
When the teapot had been emptied he might as well go back to the hotel and try to book a flight back to Durban. He could fly down to Cape Town from there to see Jules and the children instead of going home. There really wasn’t any point in staying on in England. Once he had sorted out his flight back he could go into Brighton and find a movie.
On his way back to the hotel Cameron was barely conscious of Sideburns following him. He had become part of the street furniture – if one could talk about mobile street furniture – much as his counterparts at home had. A very cold part, no doubt, by the time he got moving again when Cameron headed off to catch the bus into Brighton ninety minutes later. Rebooking his flight back had been more complicated, and cost more, than Cameron had expected.
While he was about it, Cameron thought he should cover his bases by telling Patrick what he was proposing to do. His teaching had been rearranged to accommodate the fortnight’s absence so there wasn’t any point in his going back to the university prematurely. Whatever his other faults, Patrick would appreciate that the conference had been an ordeal and that it would be reasonable to allow a bit of recovery time. In the event, there was no answer from Patrick’s extension and the department secretary’s line was busy, so he couldn’t leave a message for Patrick with Michelle either.
Sideburns did catch the bus this time – he took a seat near the bottom of the stairs so as not to miss Cameron as he came down from the top-deck. An hour in the periodicals section of the library, and a pint of cider and a ploughman’s lunch, killed the time before the matinées started. The choice of movie was limited, but Out of Africa was still showing and Cameron had somehow missed seeing it. Jules, he remembered, had said she wanted to see it, but they hadn’t got there. He had probably been spending too much time trying to further an academic career that was now destined to go precisely nowhere.
The film was escapist enough to take Cameron’s mind off his conversation with Jules for a minute or two here and there, but he couldn’t escape his awareness of Sideburns sitting somewhere in the gloom behind him. He would be hoping that Cameron had come to meet Oliver Tambo or Mbeki or some other ANC high-up under cover of the darkness of the cinema. That would have lent more point to his day than watching Meryl Streep playing Meryl Streep in Africa.
Cameron timed his return to the hotel and his phone-call to Jules so that he could talk briefly to Hilton and Nicky before they went to bed. Being told by Hilton that he was loved to infinity plus a hundred was even more wrenching with the threat of separation, or even divorce, in the air than it had been at the airport. It was as much as Cameron could do to keep his voice steady when Jules took over at the other end of the line.
Cameron’s conversation with Jules was a repeat – at times it seemed very literally a repeat – of the morning’s conversation, save for a brief account of his one-person-audience plenary. The intervening hours had clearly done nothing to change Jules’s mind, and her obviously genuine sympathy for his humiliation sounded distant. He needed to get down to Cape Town as soon as possible to talk to her. When he told her he had rebooked his flight and would be with her in two or three days’ time, her ‘good’ sounded as though she thought she had won a round in an argument – if anything, she sounded pleased that he would be there in person to be convinced that she wasn’t going to change her mind. Cameron put the phone down unconvinced that being there in person would help to change it. Any time spent with the children would be shot through with portents of loss.
The hotel dinner menu looked unpromising but Cameron hadn’t seen anywhere nearby that looked much better, and he didn’t have the energy to go further afield for a meal. If all food was going to seem as tasteless as his breakfast, he might as well avoid having to go out in the rain to find it. The dinner lived up to its lack of promise very successfully, but the bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc he drank with it was better than most of its South African counterparts would have been. South African wines were notable by their absence from the wine-list.
While the hotel dinner had looked at first sight to be reasonably priced, the limited range of whiskies in the bar wasn’t, even by UK standards. Earlier in the day Cameron had spotted an inviting-looking pub called The Highwayman on the corner of the main street that looked a better bet. The rain had relented, although the weather forecast had promised a renewed assault around midnight, so another round of the golf umbrella was called for.
There was no sign of Sideburns – although it was still early, it was possible that his shift had come to an end. It was probably too soon for him to have been carted off with pneumonia, but, if he had been, Cameron decided he would feel less guilty than he would have if the out-of-condition Mr Fourie had collapsed with a heart-attack in the History stacks at the City Library.
A double Macallan to help him feel at home, followed by a couple of unfamiliar Speyside single-malts, also doubled, helped to dull the ache left by the phone-call.
The ground was rising and falling gently, almost as if it was breathing, as Cameron stood up to walk back to the hotel when the pub closed. It was raining quite hard again. There was still no sign of Sideburns, who hadn’t followed him into the pub and must have gone off-duty after all.
The wind had got up to the point where it was a struggle to open the golf umbrella. Cameron could hear the tinny rattle of an empty can of some sort being blown around in the street. He was a couple of hundred yards from the hotel, wrestling with the umbrella against a particularly savage gust of wind, when something hit the side of his head above his right ear very hard. Knocked to his knees by the force of the blow, Cameron let the umbrella go as he put both hands down on the wet pavement to steady himself. He was vaguely conscious of the umbrella being blown into a doorway a few yards away and being held there by the force of the wind – he must have been hit by flying debris, something blown off one of the buildings.
It must just have been the force of the blow that had knocked him over, there wasn’t much pain – it wasn’t because he was drunk … he wasn’t that drunk. Then the pain came, and, as it did, something hit him very hard in the stomach, even though he was on his hands and knees. He heard two grunts, only one of which came from him as the wind was knocked out of him. It wasn’t debris from a building – someone was kicking him. In fact there had to be more than one of them – one blow landed just below his left shoulder blade and another almost simultaneously on his right buttock. It wasn’t possible for the same person to be responsible for both kicks. All he could do as he gasped desperately for breath was curl himself into the foetal position trying to protect his head and face as they kicked him.
Nobody was saying anything – he could hear himself gasping for air and groaning, but, apart from the slithering scuffle of their shoes on the wet pavement, they were silent. He must be in a state of shock of some sort – he could feel the jarring impacts but the pain wasn’t proportionate – that would come later.
Another kick slammed into his head just behind his left ear. There was a flash of light and then darkness. He must have lost consciousness for a few seconds. They had stopped kicking him. He could just hear a smashing, crunching sound a few yards away. He was still alive and had managed to protect his face and eyes – they couldn’t have wanted to injure him too badly. He could move his head far enough to see a dark figure, with its back turned, systematically smashing the umbrella against a lamppost. There was no light coming from the globe, which would be why they had chosen to attack him just there. He could feel the rain on his face and hear the wind – the kick in the head hadn’t made him deaf. In fact it seemed, oddly, to have cleared his head – at least for now. He closed his eyes again – better to be unconscious if they had decided to leave him like that. After a few seconds he heard two pairs of footsteps walking rapidly away, still without a word being said.
There was no point in trying to see who they were. If ever there was a clear signature on anything, it was Sideburns signing-off by taking the time to destroy the umbrella. Sideburns had clearly meant it when he said that they would get him. Provided they didn’t beat Cameron up so badly that he would have to be hospitalized, no questions were likely to be asked. Cameron wasn’t about to go off to the police station and initiate an inquiry that might delay him from getting to Cape Town. Their informers in the airline booking offices would have let them know when Cameron was due to fly back, even if they hadn’t yet got round to tapping Jules’s mother’s phone. Sideburns had enlisted a little help from his friends, or at least one friend, to exact his revenge. Jules had often warned Cameron that being gratuitously provocative would get him into trouble one day.
Lying on the pavement with the rain pouring down on him was not restful, and it was getting very cold. Cameron could feel himself starting to shiver – probably as much from the shock as the cold – and knew he needed to move. It was odd that nobody, even just after closing time, had come down the street and seen them. But it was a night for staying indoors, and Hove seemed to be largely populated by geriatrics who were probably in bed by nine. Levering himself painfully up from the pavement onto his knees, Cameron realized he was soaked through – wetter even than Sideburns had been earlier.
Getting to his feet was difficult, and would have been so even if the ground hadn’t still been moving slightly. One of the kicks had caught him at the top of his thigh and given him a dead leg – walking was going to be difficult. Conducting any kind of systematic inventory of where he was hurting was impossible when his head was hurting worst of all. Lying with your head in a pool of water on a pavement in the rain was another good way of encouraging whisky fumes to clear. Tentative attempts to test the damage with wet fingers were inconclusive. There was a lump above his right ear and another behind his left one, but there was too much general wetness around to be able to tell how much of it was blood. The shivering was getting out of control – he needed to cover the last couple of hundred yards to the hotel as soon as he could.
