you work tomorrow?’
‘If you don’t mind one-eyed engineers.’ He lifted the bandage. His eyelid was black and swollen and stitched, his slit of eyeball murderously bloodshot.
‘Who was it?’
‘I couldn’t see because somebody stuck their finger in my eye.’
Mahoney was grinning. ‘What did they sat at the hospital?’
‘Caused a bit of bovver at the hospital,’ Pomeroy admitted. ‘Old Olga, you know, you should have been there.’
‘What did Olga do?’
‘Naked as the day she was born under that blanket,’ Pomeroy said, ‘and chocolate mousse. Raised a bit of a bovver. She didn’t know the black doctor was a doctor, you should have been there. He said, “Medem, is this a case of the pot-i calling the kettle black?”’
Mahoney laughed and it hurt his head. Pomeroy sighed, ‘Isn’t that Fullbright a prick?’
‘You better leave the Fullbrights out of your chocolate mousse parties.’
I’m going to leave you out, an’ all,’ Pomeroy said. ‘Here I go to this enormous expense and pain to cheer you up …’ He glared with his good eye. ‘But no, you’re still brooding about her.’ He got up. ‘I’m goin’ to the loo,’ he said.
The rest is legend. Pomeroy goes to the lavatory, sits down, lights a cigarette, and drops the match into the lavatory bowl. And in that bowl unbeknown to him is the wad of cotton wool with which Vulgar Olga cleaned up the chocolate mousse, all soaked in benzene. And, sitting in the kitchen, all Mahoney heard was a mighty whooshing bang and then Pomeroy howls and comes bursting out of the toilet with his arse on fire. There’s Pomeroy running around hollering, ‘My arse is blown off,’ and Olga coming running stark naked screaming, ‘Oh darling, I forgot to flush it!’ – and Dolores yelling,’ What’s wrong now?’ – and Pomeroy hollering, ‘Call the ambulance – my arse is burnt off!’ And the women chasing him, yelling, cornering him, trying to inspect his arse while he hopped around hollering.
Then the wailing of the ambulance above Pomeroy’s wailing, and in burst the stretcher-bearers, and they’re the same guys who came for him earlier. And they load him on to the stretcher, and out the front door Pomeroy goes, red raw arse up and his bandage round his eye, still covered in dried chocolate mousse. And the ambulance boys were laughing so much that one trips down the front steps. All Mahoney saw was a sudden mass of crashing arms and legs and Pomeroy’s arse. Then Pomeroy was wailing ‘My shoulder!’, and his collar bone was broken.
Mahoney helped Dolores tidy up the house while Olga and Pomeroy were back at the hospital getting his arse and collar bone fixed; then he left. He drove slowly home, trying not to think about bloody Sunday. He was flying at midnight so he had to sleep off his hangover this afternoon. He could have a nice pub-lunch at The Rabbit, then get Danish Erika or Val or Beatrice to sleep it off with him, so what did he have to complain about? What’s so tough about being a bachelor? And tomorrow he’d be in Uganda, would you rather be in court tomorrow, worrying about all that Law you never learned? He took a deep breath, trying to stop thinking about Sunday and Cathy, and stopped to buy a newspaper.
He looked at the front page for news of Rhodesia.
SMITH ANNOUNCES ‘INTERNAL SETTLEMENT’
The Rhodesian Prime Minister announced in Salisbury today that his government was setting out to seek an ‘internal settlement’ with the country’s moderate African leaders, in terms of which a ‘Transitional Co-alition Government would be formed with them, pending a new one-man-one-vote constitution …
Mahoney read the piece with stumbling speed: and for a minute he felt confused elation. Then he slumped. He thought: Big Deal …
Big deal, Mr Smith … You should have done this years ago when I told you to! … You think a coalition government now will get you international recognition so economic sanctions and the war will end? Well you’re too bloody late, Mr Smith …
Mahoney took a deep, bitter breath. Because it was too bloody late for such a compromise, because now the Rhodesians were fighting with their backs to the wall, and no way were Moscow and Peking going to rejoice in a nice moderate settlement and let their boys in the bush lay down their arms – Moscow and Peking didn’t want a nice moderate black government in Rhodesia, they wanted a communist one. You did not have to be a clairvoyant to see that the war would go on.
And the news of the war was shocking. The next headline made his guts turn over:
TERRORISTS SHOOT DOWN RHODESIAN TOURIST PLANE
A Rhodesian Airways plane carrying over fifty civilian holiday-makers, mostly women and children, from the Zambesi Valley to Salisbury, was shot down yesterday by terrorists using a heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile of Russian manufacture …
He felt sick in his guts. He could almost hear the screams as the plane came tearing down out of the sky, the smashing and crashing. Miraculously, ten survivors had crawled out of the terrible wreckage, hysterical, astonished to be alive, and four of them had gone off to find help: then the terrorists had arrived, raped the women, then shot them all. The Selous Scouts were now tracking the terrorists. Meanwhile, another mission station was attacked yesterday, all the missionaries butchered, two of them women, two babies bayoneted …
Jesus! He started the car furiously. What do you say about a war like that? You want to bellow to the world, ‘What the hell are you supporting communist murderers like that for?’ And he wanted to grab Ian Smith by the scruff of neck and shake him.
He drove angrily home. Through the cow-meadow, through the woods, to the empty house. He thought, And what are you doing about it, coming home hungover from a drunken orgy while the communists close in on your country – with your daughter in it?
He got out of his car, slammed the door. No, he did not believe that Catherine was in danger: the terrorists would never get the towns; they would only ravage the countryside like roving packs of wild dogs. But that would be enough to win the war.
He went inside, put the radio on loud to stop himself thinking about it. He went upstairs, changed into fresh clothes, to go to work at Malcolm Todd’s cottage.
By law he was only allowed to work ninety hours a month, to be in good condition to fly aeroplanes; but he could not stay in the empty cottage, so usually he went to Redcoat House and did his paperwork, then worked on drafting the new Civil Aviation Authority’s Airship Regulations. The best place for that was the Todds’ cottage, so that Malcolm could explain everything, the technicalities, the importance of each part, and Mahoney tried to put it into the legal language that civil servants like to hear.
‘Those heaters won’t go wrong,’ Malcolm said.
‘What minimum dimensions must they be to heat all that helium? And snow and ice?’
‘Snow and ice will not collect during flight,’ Malcolm said, ‘because of the slipstream of air around the hull. Snow collects while the ship is stationary, but the heating system will warm the hull
