‘Women drivers.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Frik hung his jacket on the peg and strapped himself in. ‘We all ready?’
Vernon nodded. ‘I did the walk-around and went through workups with Toby.’
Vernon Langeholm and Toby Marais were both experienced pilots and Frik trusted they’d done the pre-flight work-up and done it well.
‘Souls on board?’
‘Hundred and twenty-four – now you’re here.’
Frik told Air Traffic Control they were clear for pushback.
Flight SA77 to Johannesburg lifted off safely, then banked away from the city and the sea, made a lazy hairpin and climbed northeast towards the Karoo desert.
*
Harold Robbins Mhleli had been named for an author whose books he’d never be able to read. He had managed pretty well up to Grade Three, enjoying comics like Mutant Ninja Turtles and Richie Rich, then things had got away from him and suddenly the four-mile walk to school without shoes had seemed a high price to pay when his days were increasingly spent standing outside the hot, fly-blown classroom with palms stinging from the strap. Not that Harold really minded standing outside. He had a well-developed imagination, and spent hours being a soccer star or a cattle rancher while his more industrious friends were just children labouring over nouns and verbs and the value of x.
After the third bad report in a row, his father announced that Harold needed to leave school and get a job. His mother, who’d named him more in hope than expectation, sadly had to agree, and instead they put all their hopes for a child/pension-plan into Harold’s younger brother, Sofiso.
Harold was twelve and had been working on the ostrich farm for two years. He liked it. After his first week – when he’d been kicked so hard he couldn’t breathe for what seemed like ever – he’d learned to respect the big, fluffy-looking birds, and he got along fine with the half-dozen other boys who worked on the farm, turning eggs, feeding and cleaning out.
But his favourite thing was to ride the birds. Tourists came three times a week to see the ostrich races and, more often than not, stick-thin Harold was one of the jockeys. He loved walking out into the makeshift paddock in a brightly coloured nylon blouse, the way the tourists clapped and laughed, and the rich white children watched him, wide-eyed, wishing they could be like him – a jockey on an ostrich about to pound across the Karoo. For Harold, this part was almost better than winning the race, because if he won he was too excited to care and to see what anyone else was thinking or doing. No, he liked this as much – this complete awareness of himself and his brief appearance in the spotlight, looking grown-up and professional and courageous.
Today he was on Lemon, the ostrich that had kicked him that first week. Harold didn’t hold it against Lemon. After all, the bird was named because he was so sour, so he should have seen it coming. But Lemon was also fast so Harold would have forgiven him almost anything.
Harold and five other boys got changed in the baking, buzzing air behind the thatched toilets, where black-widow spiders hung shinily under the eaves, protecting the unhatched offspring of murdered fathers. Harold’s shirt today was sunshine yellow, which made his dark skin look exotic. The boys all wore proper riding helmets, and Harold adjusted the straps because Jonty had worn it yesterday and Jonty had the biggest head of any boy his age Harold had ever seen. The boys were always laughing at Jonty’s head.
Harold loved the helmets almost as much as he loved the dazzling blouses. One day he imagined he would be walking out into a grass paddock, and getting on a horse instead of a bird, and thousands of people would watch him win races. Or maybe he’d just take Lemon up to Durban and enter him in the July Handicap and see how those thoroughbreds liked taking on the fastest ostrich in the Karoo.
The boys walked out into the desert sunshine and the thirty or forty tourists who’d braved the hot, dusty coach ride from Oudtshoorn broke into applause. Harold tried not to grin. He didn’t want to look as if this was special to him. He wanted to look like an old hand.
Lemon’s head twisted and darted under the canvas bag as Limping Andy jacked Harold onto the ostrich’s back. With his knees, Harold clamped the bird’s wings where they met the body, and took hold of the single rein, which led to Lemon’s beak and enabled Harold to steer a vaguely circular path. At the familiar jerking, rolling movement of the big bird under him, Harold let his body go loose and roll with it, while his knees gripped like iron. He looked down at the tourist children gazing up at him and felt such pride that he thought his chest would burst with it. He scowled to show this was all in a day’s work to him.
‘OH!’
It wasn’t the ‘Oh’ of a father whose child has just dropped ice cream down his pants; it wasn’t the ‘Oh’ of a woman whose heel has broken.
It was an ‘Oh!’ so forceful and loud and startled that people turned away from the ostriches to look. What they saw was a young man squinting up into the sky, with a look of not-understanding on his face.
Everybody looked up. Even Harold.
A plane was falling out of the sky over their heads.
That was Harold’s first thought, quickly followed by one that insisted such a thing was impossible.
‘Shit!’
Harold glanced down as Limping Andy left his side – yanking the canvas bag from Lemon’s head – and ran.
And suddenly that was what everybody was doing. Running and screaming. Harold looked back up – and the plane that had been picture-book bits of glittering silver was huge now and filled the air above him and he screamed at Lemon and kicked him so hard that he almost fell off, but the bird took off fast, faster than he’d ever run before.
Harold just clung on – he had no idea of steering Lemon: he just wanted to stay on and get away from where he’d been when the plane was right over his head. Lemon’s mighty feet hit the ground concussively, shooting pulses up Harold’s spine. There was a noise in his head like a bomb and the heat from the sun on his back seemed to increase impossibly as a wave of pressure propelled Lemon forward at an even greater pace. Harold buried his face in the black feathers and screamed and kicked and screamed and kicked until it slowly dawned on him that if he wasn’t safe by now it would have been too late.
Almost a mile from the farm, Harold put his head up and started to turn Lemon in a wide circle to slow him down.
Something the size of a motorcycle hit the ground so hard in front of them that it bounced several feet into the air. Lemon skittered sideways and Harold fell off. The bird hammered away across the scrubby desert, leaving a comical trail of Roadrunner dust behind it.
‘Lemon!’
He knew it was pointless. They never came back when they were called, and Lemon had the look of a bird that wasn’t coming back, period.
Harold got up slowly and turned to find what he first took to be some kind of Ninja Turtle with a hi-tech shell. But as he walked round it he could see that it was actually Captain Frik Venter, still strapped into his seat, his staring eye-whites pricked with blood, his shirt ripped from his body, leaving only a Yogi-bear collar and tie, and with one arm cut off above the elbow as cleanly as if Harold’s mother had been preparing him for dinner.
Harold got sick, but was careful to bend well forward so he wouldn’t ruin his sunshine-yellow shirt.
*
South African jet crash kills 138
AP – A passenger jet crashed in South Africa yesterday, killing all 124 passengers and crew on board and 14 people on the ground.
Although the Boeing 737 came down in the remote Karoo desert, debris fell on a farm where tourists had gathered to watch the popular ostrich races.
None of the dead are believed to be US Citizens.
