And the train ran on-through the sunlight towards the rain clouds in the north.
Presently Andre came out of the coach below him and picked his way forward through the men in the trucks until he reached Hendry. The two of them stood together, Andre’s face turned up towards the taller man and deadly earnest as he talked.
“Doll boy” Hendry had called him, and it was an accurate description of the effeminately pretty face with the big toffee eyes; the steel helmet he wore seemed too large for his shoulders to carry.
I wonder how old he is; Bruce watched him laugh suddenly, his face still turned upwards to Hendry; not much over twenty and I have never seen anything less like a hired killer.
“How the hell did anyone like de Surrier get mixed up in this?” His voice echoed the thought, and beside him Mike answered.
“He was working in Elisabethville when it started, and he couldn’t return to Belgium. I don’t know the reason but I guess it was something personal. When it started his firm closed down. I suppose this was the only employment he could find.”
“That Irishman, the one at the barrier, he called me a hired killer.” Thinking of Andre’s position in the scheme of things had turned Bruce’s thoughts back to his own status.
“I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but I suppose he’s right. That is what we are.” Mike Haig was silent for a moment, but when he spoke there was a stark quality in his voice.
“Look at these hands!” Involuntarily Bruce glanced down.
at them, and for the first time noticed that they were narrow with long moulded fingers, possessed of a functional beauty, the hands of an artist.
“Look at them,” Mike repeated, flexing them slightly; they were fashioned for a purpose, they were made to hold a scalpel, they were
made to save life.” Then he relaxed them and let them drop on to the rifle across his lap, the long delicate fingers incongruous upon the blue metal. “But look what they hold now!” Bruce stirred irritably.
He had not wanted to provoke another bout of Mike Haig’s soul-searching. Damn the old fool - why must he always start this, he knew as well as anyone that in the mercenary army of Katanga there was a taboo upon the past. It did not exist. “Ruffy,” Bruce snapped, aren’t you going to feed your boys?”
“Right now, boss.” Ruffy opened another beer and handed it to Bruce. “Hold that - it will keep your mind off food while I rustle it up.” He lumbered off along the root of
the coach still singing.
“Three years ago, it seems like all eternity,” Mike went on as though Bruce had not interrupted. “Three years ago I was a surgeon and now this.-The desolation had spread to his eyes, and Bruce felt his pity for the man deep down where he kept it imprisoned with all his other emotions.
“I was good. I was one of the best. Royal College.
Harley Street. Guy’s.” Mike laughed without humour, with bitterness. “Can you imagine my being driven in my Rolls to address the College on my advanced technique of cholecystectorny?”
“What happened?” The question was out before he could stop it, and Bruce realized how near to the surface he had let his pity rise. “No, don’t tell me. It’s your business. I don’t want to know.”
“But I’ll tell you, Bruce, I want to. It helps somehow, talking about it.” At first, thought Bruce, I wanted to talk also, to try and wash the pain away with words.
Mike was silent for a few seconds. Below them the singing rose
and fell, and the train ran on through the forest.
“It had taken me ten hard years to get there, but at last I had done it. A fine practice; doing the work I loved with skill, earning
the rewards I deserved. A wife that any man would have been proud of, a lovely home, many friends, too many friends perhaps; for success breeds friends the way a dirty kitchen breeds cockroaches.” Mike pulled out a handkerchief and dried the back of his neck where the wind could not reach.
“Those sort of friends mean parties,” he went on. “Parties when you’ve worked all day and you’re tired; when you need the lift that you
can get so easily from a bottle. You don’t know if you have the
weakness for the stuff until it’s too late; until you have a bottle in the drawer of your desk; until suddenly your practice isn’t so good any more.” Mike twisted the handkerchief around his fingers as he ploughed doggedly on. “Then you know it suddenly. You know it when your hands dance in the morning and all you want for breakfast is that, when you can’t wait until lunchtime because you have to operate and that’s the only way you can keep your hands steady. But you know it finally and
utterly when the knife turns in your hand and the artery starts to spurt and you watch it paralysed - you watch it hosing red over your gown and forming pools on the theatre floor.” Mike’s voice dried up then and he tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit it. His shoulders were hunched forward and his eyes were full of shadows of his guilt.
Then he straightened up and his voice was stronger.
“You must have read about it. I was headlines for a few days, all the papers But my name wasn” Haig in those days.
I got that name off a label on a bottle in a bar-room.
“Gladys stayed with me, of course, she was that type. We came out to Africa. I had enough saved from the wreck for a down payment on a tobacco farm in the Centenary block outside Salisbury. Two good seasons and I was off the bottle.
Gladys was having our first baby, we had both wanted one so badly.
It was all coming right again.” Mike stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket, and his voice lost its strength again, turned dry and husky.
“Then one day I took the truck into the village and on the way home I stopped at the club. I had been there often before, but this time they threw me out at closing time and when I got back to the farm
I had a case of Scotch on the seat beside me.” Bruce wanted to stop
him; he knew what was coming and he didn’t want to hear it.
“The first rains started that night and the rivers came down in
flood. The telephone lines were knocked out and we were cut off. In the morning—” Mike stopped again and turned to Bruce.
“I suppose it was the shock of seeing me like that again, but in the morning Gladys went into labour. It was her first, and she wasn’t so young any more. She was still in labour the
next day, but by then she was too weak to scream. I remember how peaceful it was without her screaming and pleading with me to help.
You see she knew I had all the instruments I needed. She begged me to help. I can remember that; her voice through the fog of whisky. I
think I hated her then. I think I remember hating her, it was all so confused, so mixed up with the screaming and the liquor.
But at last she was quiet. I don’t think I realized she was dead.
I was simply glad she was quiet and I could have peace.” He dropped his eyes from Bruce’s face.
“I was too drunk to go to the funeral. Then I met a man in a bar-room, I can’t remember how long after it was, I can’t even remember where. it must have been on the Copperbelt. He was recruiting for
Tshombe’s army and I signed up; there didn’t seem anything else to do.”
Neither of them spoke again until a gendarme brought food to them, hunks of brown bread spread with tinned butter and filled with bully beet and pickled onions. They ate in silence listening, to the singing, and Bruce said at last: “You needn’t have told me.”
“I know.”
“Mike-” Bruce paused.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, if that’s any comfort.”
“It is,” Mike said.
“It helps to have - not to be completely alone. I like you, Bruce.” He blurted out the last sentence and Bruce recoiled as though Mike had spat in his face.