We drank all day and I still wasn’t properly drunk when I went to bed. I told Watson Grace’s story, and we talked about Pat, and the people we had known who were no longer around. I put Watson to bed at about eleven, and then just walked around the camp for hours in the dark. Drunk but not drunk. I was challenged twice.
Each time I was challenged I stopped, and my phantom lioness pacing alongside me also stopped, and sat down in the dust. Once I rested my hand on her head. Silky. Warm. Nobody else saw her, so she wasn’t really there of course.
Eventually I looked up, and it was dawn. Someone was standing in front of me. It was Pat’s man who looked like Bud Abbott. He looked how Bud Abbott would have looked if he had been crying. He was the man who had promised to look after me because I was a comrade. I remembered that now. He said, ‘Why don’t I take you back to your hut, Mr Bassett?’
‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’
He didn’t notice the lioness, even though she walked between us, right up to the wooden steps.
I don’t think you need to know any more. Nothing is neat at the end. The things that you do and the people you know . . . they all unravel. All you are left with are the hollow spaces they made inside you.
A month later I kicked along a beach with Carly. The sea was a deep dark blue, with heavy rollers which had come all the way from Brazil or Argentina. A large sailing ship bent its white sails on the horizon. The darkness of the blue made the caps of the long waves gleam and flash sharp in the sun. Steve and her mother had taken Dieter off to visit a Zulu kraal. The Zulu women were beautiful. They were bound to make fun of him, and turn his head. Steve’s father had brought Carly and me out in his car, and was sitting in it at the head of the beach, reading the Cape Times. Carly put his hand in mine. He was small for his age. A pocket battleship, like me. We had talked about Grace for an hour.
‘You’re sure she’s dead? She was pretty adventurous, wasn’t she? Maybe it wasn’t her.’
‘I’m sure, son. She was good at getting into scrapes, and getting out of them. But this time she didn’t get out. I think there were too many men against her. It was her last fight.’
‘That was unfair.’ I felt his hand tighten.
‘Yes. It was unfair.’
‘When I’m older I’m going to find the men responsible, and kill them all.’ He had that vehemence which kids can find from somewhere inside them.
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. I promise.’
I glanced over my shoulder. Our barefoot tracks in the sand bridged the line between wet and dry golden sand. Not another soul. Seabirds. He said, ‘When Dieter goes to college we’ll miss him.’
‘Yes. We will.’
He picked up a piece of seaweed shaped like a lion’s tail, and flicked it at the sand.
‘Just me, you and Miss Stephanie then?’
It wasn’t that bad a prospect.
‘Hang on – I haven’t asked her father yet.’
‘Let’s ask him now. He’s sitting in the car waiting for you to do it . . . I’ll ask him, if you’re scared. He can only say no.’
Epilogue
Last Words . . .
I am an old man, and old men doze in the garden when the sun is high. Yesterday I was disturbed by the sound of an aircraft. No matter what I am doing, I always stir and turn to an aircraft. It was the Twin Otter on its way to landfall at the airstrip on the beach at Barra at low tide. It’s good to know that somewhere in the country real flying is still going on.
The lioness was sitting on her haunches beneath the old copper beech tree. Autumn again: my life never seems to get further than autumn. The leaves on the tree are starting to curl, and crisp to that thick gingery brown which smells of woodsmoke.
Grace was sitting alongside the lioness with her arm looped around its shoulders, and she wore that same old mocking smile which said she’d won after all. Even though she’s been gone for thirty years or more she can still reach right inside my chest and give my heart a squeeze. I see her around more often than I see the others. Sometimes she walks right up and touches me, and her touch feels as real as that of a living person. She always looks the same – just as she was in 1947. She must have been thirty or thirty-one then. Like my other ghosts she speaks occasionally – or I hear her voice inside my head, which is the same thing. Last week she came up behind me when I was sitting on this very bench, lightly touched my scalp and observed that I was balding. She sounded amused, light hearted – but I know her well enough to know she still holds a grudge. Maybe we can sort it out when we meet for good.
Anyway, the lioness lifted herself onto her four legs, stretched the way cats do, and stalked off into the shrubbery. Grace pulled up one knee and hugged it, and we sat there smiling at each other, watching each other until dusk. Maybe twenty feet between us. When the old lady switched on the lights in the kitchen I knew it was time to go in.
The Watsons came to stay last week, and one night he and
