Despite the Darkness Read online

  Copyright © 2019 David Maughan Brown

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1838599 317

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Susan

  Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

  Desmond Tutu

  Absence, the highest form of presence

  James Joyce

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Afterword

  1985 Historical Context

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Although the story told in Despite the Darkness is a fiction, and none of the characters is based on any real person, living or dead, the historical context of apartheid in South Africa in which the action is set was all too real. Reference is made in the novel to actual historical events and people, many of whom were murdered by agents of the South African State. For readers not familiar with the history, I have included a note at the end which provides a short account of the dark years of apartheid leading up to the State of Emergency in 1985 when the action takes place, as well as some very brief notes on the historical characters mentioned.

  Although readers may identify the Pietermaritzburg campus of what was then the University of Natal as the setting for part of the action of this novel, it is important to stress that the novel is in no way intended to reflect negatively on that university’s very active opposition to apartheid during the 1980s.

  My first acknowledgement must, then, be to the friends and colleagues in Pietermaritzburg and elsewhere in South Africa whose friendship, courage and shared commitment to a non-racial South Africa made those years endurable. Particular appreciation is due here to my wife, Susan, for her support, her stoicism in the face of surveillance and security police harassment similar to that experienced by Cameron and Jules in the novel, and her own courage and commitment to the struggle against apartheid, best exemplified by her involvement with the Black Sash.

  Where the novel itself is concerned, acknowledgement and grateful thanks are due to Susan, Brenda Gourley, Rajani Naidoo, Brendan and Becky, and Jacqui Ackurst for their encouragement and for reading and commenting on early drafts. Thanks also to Christopher Merrett for his comments on the historical note. More general thanks for their support in the writing endeavour are due to Anthony, Kate, Sarah and Andreas.

  Finally, damaging as it may be for his ‘street cred’, I need to record my warm appreciation to Professor Andy Smith for his encouragement and support in his capacity as the novel’s first reader. There can surely be no more rigorous a first reader for a novel than an empirical scientist inclined to skepticism towards the humanities in general and fiction in particular.

  Chapter 1

  The tap, tap, tapping rhythm on the glass was too regular. Surfacing reluctantly, Cameron realized it couldn’t, after all, be a bougainvillea branch blowing against the verandah window. It was too persistent, too urgent. The hot Berg wind was still blowing down from the Drakensberg, he could hear it buffeting the camphor tree, but there had to be someone at the back door.

  No lights. Never turn a light on until you have made sure the curtains are tightly closed. The enclosed verandah at the back of the house had no curtains.

  When was the last death threat? Three, maybe four, nights ago. No over-elaboration that time, just a pregnant pause during which Cameron could hear a snatch of Afrikaans dance music in the background, followed by: ‘You are going to die.’ He recognized the heavy accent and tobacco rasp from previous occasions. Almost always around 3am. The phone had been put down before he had time to finish reminding the caller that we are all going to die.

  But not, if possible, just yet. The alarm clock showed that it wasn’t 3am now, only just after midnight, which relieved the tension slightly. The 3am phone calls had convinced Cameron that when he died he would do it at three in the morning. He slid out of bed, felt between the mattresses for his Sig Sauer, cocked it under his pillows to muffle the noise, slipped on his dressing-gown and held the automatic in his pocket. Safety catch off. The dirty tricks brigade would be much better with guns than he was, and he doubted that he would get much chance to use it, but just holding it made him feel less helpless. Jules appeared still to be asleep under the sheet on the other side of the bed.

  The tapping was getting more urgent. Cameron, peeping through a chink in the bedroom curtains, could see the dark figure of a man through the verandah window, half obscured by one of the Ali Baba-pot bougainvilleas. The street light at the end of the drive extended just enough light for Cameron to make out that part of the reason for the figure being dark was that its owner was black.

  Where the hell was the bloody dog, and what did it think it was doing? Hadn’t it worked out its contract? It got fed on the understanding that it would bark when strangers tapped on the back door in the middle of the night.

  If the death threats were anything to go by it was white men with guns you had to worry about, but it wasn’t impossible that they could have sent a black man. An askari, perhaps – an ANC footsoldier captured and given graphic details about what could happen to his family while his finger nails were being pulled out or his teeth snapped off with a pair of pliers.

  But if anyone had come to carry out the death threats he wouldn’t, surely, have risked being seen standing out there tapping on the door for what must be the better part of a couple of minutes by now.

  Cameron, heart pounding, knew he would be visible as a target as soon as he stepped through the door onto the verandah. The sweat on his palm was maki
ng the automatic feel oily.

  What if the tapper was just a student needing help of some kind? It was unlikely that any student, even a drunk one, would come looking for help with an essay on the Zulu kingdom at this time of night. As Cameron watched, stomach churning, the figure turned abruptly from the door, allowing Cameron to glimpse his profile against the streetlight. It was Mirambo.

  Apart from his height, Mirambo’s features – high domed forehead and aquiline nose, in particular – made him instantly recognizable among the relatively few black students the university had been allowed to admit.

  What on earth could Mirambo want at this time of night? Whatever it was meant trouble. Mirambo was too intelligent and articulate not to have drawn attention to himself as soon as he arrived on campus to start his research the year before. It wouldn’t have helped that he had recently been appointed Welfare Officer for the Students Representative Council.

  Cameron crossed the verandah, unbolted the back door – in the process letting in a blast of oven-hot Berg wind – and called ‘Mirambo’ at the retreating back just loud enough, he hoped, to be heard. He wasn’t, so he had to call again – too loudly for comfort. Mirambo turned and Cameron beckoned him in through the backdoor and into the dining room, closing the door and navigating the familiar few feet across the room in the dark before switching on the light in the kitchen.

  ‘Shit man, Cameron, I thought you weren’t going to let me in. Your car is in the garage so I knew you were here.’

  How did he know the car was in the garage? It couldn’t be seen from outside, unless he had pulled himself up to peer through the fanlight, which seemed unlikely. Had he been watching the house and seen them come in earlier? Had he been told they were back by whoever had been listening to Jules’s phone-call to her mother when they got in? Jules had heard the usual click and complained about never being able to have a private conversation. The Special Branch’s white Corolla hadn’t been parked round the corner in its usual spot when they came back, so that couldn’t be the source of the information.

  ‘How about some coffee?’ Cameron asked. As usual he felt guilty for allowing even the slightest doubt to creep in. One got that way – more so when one had children.

  ‘Yeah, that would be good if you don’t have anything stronger.’

  Cameron ignored the hint and, taking his time, checked and filled the kettle before switching it on.

  ‘How can I help?’ he asked.

  ‘I got information this morning that the Special Branch are looking for me, I’ve been holed-up in the library all day and now I need a safe house.’

  Cameron’s stomach seemed to be taking on a life of its own. This could end up being a lot worse than a midnight discussion about the Zulu kingdom.

  ‘But this isn’t a safe house. They are watching me all the time.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Mirambo replied. ‘They would never imagine that anyone, not even a black man, could be stupid enough to hole-up in a house he knew was being watched.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t being watched now and that you weren’t seen coming here?’

  ‘If I had been seen they would have broken down the door and been in here by now, wouldn’t they?’ Mirambo answered. ‘And anyway I checked very carefully. Venter’s car wasn’t around the corner. There’s no need to sound so edgy.’

  ‘I’m not edgy,’ Cameron said. ‘But if I were edgy it might be because I’ve just been woken up in the middle of the night by somebody who is on the run from the Special Branch. I don’t know what they think you have done, but whatever it is they will call it terrorism and if they find you here I will be arrested for harbouring a terrorist. That carries a minimum five-year jail term, and it did so even before they declared their State of Emergency last month. It would be hardly surprising if I sounded a bit edgy. Why now, anyway – what are they after you for now?’

  Cameron felt bad enough when a sobbing Nicky sometimes had to be peeled off him when he tried to drop her off at kindergarten in the morning, arms in a strangulation lock round his neck, legs clenched round his waist. She’d be able to stick on a horse well enough when she got a bit bigger – he wanted to be around to watch her get bigger. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like if they took him away from her in the middle of the night, and Hilton wouldn’t be much better.

  ‘If they catch a black man like me,’ Mirambo said, ‘they will lock me up and throw away the key – that is if they don’t decide to avoid legal irritation by just shooting me. That will be after they have stubbed their Texans out on me, saved me the trouble of cutting my fingernails by pulling them out, rearranged my dentistry and broken my toes. And that’s if I’m lucky. And you are worried about five years in prison. How committed to the struggle are you anyway?’

  None of this was an answer to Cameron’s question.

  ‘I don’t see how it would help the struggle for me to spend five years gazing at the walls of a cell in Pretoria,’ he said.

  ‘No. But there’s no reason to think they would catch us. It’s Thursday today,’ Mirambo said, glancing at the kitchen clock. ‘Friday in fact. If I could stay here for the rest of the night, lie up tomorrow when you go to varsity, and sleep here another night, then you could take me up to Bushman’s Neck in the boot of your car when you go fishing on Saturday. I need to get out to Lesotho.’

  ‘You’ve got this all planned out haven’t you?’ Cameron said.

  With a sharp eye for detail too – the Renault 16’s boot would be just about big enough for someone tall and thin, even someone as tall as Mirambo, to curl up in. How did Mirambo know that there wasn’t anyone living in the room at the back, originally intended for the white South African family’s regulation ‘maid’ but converted by Jules into a room to be let to a student?

  ‘No,’ Mirambo replied. ‘I haven’t had time to plan anything. It only occurred to me that the fishing might provide a good smokescreen as I was walking round from John’s house. I wanted…’

  A sudden knocking startled them. This time it was from the front door.

  ‘Sssh,’ hissed Cameron, pointing to the pantry door.

  Opening the door released a soup of smells – curry spices, banana and cabbage prominent among them. Cameron signalled to Mirambo to go in and, when he had done so, closed the door to a slit through which Mirambo should, with luck, be able to hear something of what was going on.

  Sweet Jesus, Cameron thought, if that is the Special Branch they haven’t wasted any time. The knocking didn’t sound like the overture to a police raid. It wasn’t loud enough and it wasn’t incessant – in fact it was oddly tentative. Whoever was out there certainly wasn’t trying to break the door down – at least not yet. Cameron’s mouth was dry and he felt sick. He froze for an instant, having difficulty believing that this was happening, then moved quickly through the dining room to the lounge, keeping the lights off, relying on the slivers of light from the street lamps that came through the curtains. One spent a lot of one’s life in the dark.

  ‘Who is it? What do you want?’

  He spoke loudly enough, he hoped, to be heard but not to wake Jules or the children.

  ‘Whiskers,’ came a parched-sounding voice, ‘have you seen Whiskers? He didn’t come in for his supper tonight and I don’t know where he is.’

  Cameron unlocked and opened the front door. The pink dressing-gowned and slippered figure, grey hair imprecisely trapped in random multi-coloured rollers, was an unlikely advance party of the Special Branch.

  ‘Whiskers,’ she repeated, ‘have you seen my Whiskers?’

  Relief washed over Cameron. He had to suppress an untimely giggle – even without the verandah light on it was not at all difficult to see Mrs Scheepers’ whiskers.

  ‘Have you any idea what the time is, Mrs Scheepers?’

  ‘Of course I have, just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m stupid. It’s just after midnig
ht. But I was in the garden looking for Whiskers, I saw him on your wall this afternoon, I saw your kitchen light was on, so I came to ask you if you had seen him. I can’t go to sleep for worry. Have you seen Whiskers? I hope that dog of yours hasn’t done anything to him.’

  This midnight doorstep conversation was beyond bizarre.

  ‘Border collies don’t eat cats, Mrs Scheepers. As it happens, I don’t know where he is, but I assure you that he is not out somewhere chasing Whiskers.’

  Cameron refrained from adding that border collies have better things to do with their lives than chasing cats – like guarding the house and barking at midnight intruders.

  ‘Agh, true as God that dog of yours will be up to mischief – and my Whiskers is lost.’

  Mrs Scheepers appeared to notice for the first time that Cameron was in his dressing gown and pyjamas.

  ‘Go back inside, young man. You should be in bed.’

  Cameron thought she had something there. She turned away and shuffled her slippers down the path towards the gate. Cameron closed the door, locked it, and this time slid the bolts home, top and bottom. He slipped through to the kitchen and found Mirambo had already broken pantry cover.

  ‘What the hell was that about?’ Mirambo asked. ‘I couldn’t hear properly but it sounded like a woman.’

  ‘It was – it was Mrs Scheepers, our nextdoor neighbour. She was looking for her cat – she thinks Kali might have eaten it.’

  ‘Holy shit, Cameron, she gave me a fright. I have never understood the priority white people give to animals. Most of you feed your dogs better than your gardeners and worry more about cruelty to animals than about black kids starving to death in the townships. But your dog is a lay-about, so she need not worry.’

  ‘That is what I told her,’ Cameron said, ‘though not in those exact words.’