Rage - Smith Wilbur - Страница 39

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However, this evening Sean was hanging backwards over his bed, heels propped on the wall and the back of his head almost touching the floor, a Superman comic book held at arm's length above his face.

'Goodnight, Sean,' Garry said.

'Shazam!" said Sean without lowering the comic book.

Garrick retreated thankfully to his own room and locked the door.

Then he went to stand before the mirror and regard the reflection of his new horn-rimmed spectacles.

'I hate them,' he whispered bitterly, and when he removed them they left red indentations on the bridge of his nose. He went down on his knees, removed the skirting board under the built-in wardrobe and reached into the secret recess beyond. Nobody, not even Sean, had discovered this hiding place.

Carefully he withdrew the precious package. It had cost him eight weeks of his accumulated pocket money, but was worth every penny.

It had arrived in a plain wrapper with a personal letter from Mr Charles Atlas himself. 'Dear Garrick,' the letter had begun, and Garry had been overcome with the great man's condescension.

He laid out the course on his bed and stripped to his pyjama pants as he revised the lessons.

'Dynamic tension,' he whispered aloud, and he took up his stance before the mirror. As he began the sequence of exercises he kept time with the soft chant of, 'More and more in every way, I'm getting better every day." When he finished he was sweating heavily but he made an arm and studied it minutely.

'They are bigger,' he tried to put aside his doubts as he poked the little walnut of muscle that popped out of his straining biceps, 'they really are!" He stowed the course back in its hidy-hole and replaced the skirting board. Then he took his raincoat from the wardrobe and spread it on the bare boards..

Garrick had read with admiration how Frederick Selous, the famous African hunter, had toughened himself as a boy by sleeping uncovered on the floor in winter. He switched out the light and settled down on the raincoat. It was going to be a long uncomfortable night, he knew from experience, already the floor boards were like iron, but the raincoat would prevent Sean detecting any nocturnal spillage when he made his morning inspection, and Garrick was certain that his asthma had improved since he had stopped sleeping on a soft mattress with a warm eiderdown over him.

'I'm getting better every day,' he whispered, closing his eyes tightly and willing himself to ignore the cold and the hardness of the floor.

'And then one day Dad will be proud of me -just like he is of Sean." 'I thought your speech this evening was very good, even for you,' Tara told him, and Shasa glanced at her with surprise. She had not paid him a compliment for a long time now. 'Thank you, my dear." 'I sometimes forget what a gifted person you are,' she went on.

'It's just that you make it seem so easy and natural." He was so moved that he might have reached across to caress her, but she was leaning away from him and the Hooper coachwork of the Rolls was too wide for him to reach her.

'I must say, you look absolutely stunning this evening,' he compromised with a matching compliment, but as he had expected, she dismissed it with a grimace.

'Are you really going to take the boys on safari?" 'My dear, we have to let them make up their own minds aboul life. Sean will love it, but I'm not too sure about Mickey." Shas replied, and she noticed that he hadn't mentioned Garrick.

'Well, if you are determined, then I'm going to take advantage all the boys' absence. I have been invited to join the archaeological dig at the Sundi caves." 'But you are a novice,' he was surprised. 'That's an important site.

Why would they invite you?" 'Because I offered to contribute two thousand pounds to the cost of the dig, that's why." 'I see, this is straight blackmail." He chuckled sardonically as he saw the reason for her flattery. 'All right, it's a deal. I'll give you a cheque tomorrow. How long will you be away?" 'I'm not sure." But she thought, 'as long as I can be close to Moses Oama." The site at Sundi Caves was only an hour's drive from the house at Rivonia. She reached under the fur coat and touched her stomach.

It would begin to show soon - she had to find excuses to keep away from the eyes of the family. Her father and Shasa would not notice, she was sure of that, but Centaine de Thiry Courtney-Malcomess had eyes like a hawk.

'I presume that my mother has agreed to care for Isabella while you are away,' Shasa was saying, and while she nodded, her heart was singing.

'Moses, I'm coming back to you - both of us are coming back, to you, my darling." Whenever Moses Gama came to Drake's Farm it was like a king returning to his own realm after a successful crusade. Within minutes of his arrival, the word was flashed almost telepathically through the vast sprawling black township, and a sense of expectancy hung over it, as palpable as the smoke from ten thousand cooking fires.

Moses usually arrived with his half brother, Hendrick Tabaka, in the butcher's delivery van. Hendrick owned a chain of a dozen butcher shops in the black townships along the Witwatersrand, so the signwriting on the side of the van was authentic. In sky blue and crimson, it declared: PHUZA MUHLE BUTCHERY BEST MEAT AT BEST PRICES

From the vernacular 'Phuza Muhle' translated as 'Eat Well' and the van provided a perfect cover for Hendrick Tabaka wherever he went. Whether he was genuinely delivering slaughtered carcasses to his butcheries or goods to his general dealer stores, or was engaged in less conventional business: the distribution of illicitly brewed liquor, the notorious skokiaan or township dynamite, or ferrying his girls to their places of business nearer the compounds that housed the thousands of black contract workers of the gold-mines so that they could briefly assist them in relieving their monastic existence, or whether he was on the business of the African Mineworkers Union, that close-knit and powerful brotherhood whose existence the white government refused to acknowledge - the blue and red van was the perfect vehicle. When he was at the wheel, Hendrick wore a peaked driver's cap and a khaki tunic with cheap brass buttons. He drove sedately and with meticulous attention to all the rules of the road, so that in twenty years he had never been stopped by the police.

When he drove the van into Drake's Farm, with Moses Gama sitting in the passenger seat beside him, they were entering their own stronghold. This was where they: had established themselves when together they had arrived from the wastelands of the Kalahari twenty years before. Although they were sons of the same father, they had been different in almost every way. Moses had been young and tall and marvellously handsome, while Hendrick was years older, a great bull of a man with a bald, scarred head and gapped and broken teeth.

Moses was clever and quick, self-educated to a high standard, charismatic and a leader of men, while Hendrick was the faithful lieutenant, accepting his younger brother's authority and carrying out his orders swiftly and ruthlessly. Though Moses Gama had conceived the idea of building up a business empire, it was Hendrick who had made the dream a reality. Once he was shown what to do, Hendrick Tabaka was as much a bulldog in tenacity as he was in appearance.

For Hendrick, what they had built between them, the business enterprises both illicit and legitimate, the trade union and its private army of enforcers known and dreaded throughout the compounds where the mineworkers lived and through the black townships as 'The Buffaloes', all these were an end in themselves. But for Moses Gama it was different. What they had achieved thus far was only the first stage on his quest for something so much greater that although he had explained it many times to Hendrick, his brother could not truly grasp the enormity of Moses Gama's vision.

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