Читать книгу The Courier - Ava McCarthy - Страница 15

‘Diamonds, they come from stardust, did you know that, Mani?’

Mani grunted, his arm throbbing as he helped Takata to his feet. The sun grilled his face as he followed the queue along the barbed-wire corridor.

‘Asha, she explained it to me.’ Takata sounded surprised that his daughter knew such things. ‘Diamonds are older than the sun.’

Mani shook his head at the old man’s poetry. Behind him, the last of the hydraulic excavators clanked to a halt. The pit was now a graveyard of dust-covered machinery, abandoned for the day.

Mani’s face twisted in pain as a hard lump in his chest ground further into his gut. Takata’s voice dropped to a whisper.

‘The diamonds, they come from outer space.’

Mani managed a shrug, the lump a jagged fireball inside him. ‘It’s only a theory.’

He’d explained it to Asha himself the day before he left. He’d sat with her on the ground outside the shack, watching her weave brooms from the grasses she collected. As always, there was a contented stillness about her. He’d wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Instead, he’d snatched up a stick and drawn a circle in the dirt.

‘Do you know where diamonds come from?’ he’d said.

She smiled. ‘From the ground.’

A pack of shrieking children swooped in front of them, their faces gritty with dust. Asha laughed and waved them away. Mani jabbed at the centre of his circle.

‘They come from grains of carbon deep inside the Earth,’ he said. ‘In the mantle. A hundred miles below the surface.’

He avoided her gaze. He was showing off, and he knew it. Educated student returns to his home village. But he couldn’t help it. Keeping his eyes low, he scored a line from the centre of his circle to the edge.

‘Volcanoes carried the diamonds upwards, punching lava through the crust.’ He pointed, teacher-like, at the line he’d drawn. ‘These volcanic pipes, they hardened into kimberlite.’

He glanced at Asha’s face. She was watching him with her serene, almond-shaped eyes.

‘I know,’ she said.

He tightened his grip on the stick. How could she know? How could she know anything, living in this shantytown of metal huts, with its goat-kraals and chicken coops and rusty hubcaps salvaged from wrecked cars? He glared at her. He could tell her things, things she couldn’t learn in this godforsaken place. He stabbed at the centre of his circle.

‘Yes, but where did the grains of carbon come from?’ he said. ‘How did they find their way into the Earth’s mantle?’

Her shoulders lifted in a gentle shrug. ‘They grew there.’

He shook his head, smiling. She didn’t know. ‘That’s what we used to think. That they came from plants or animals. A bit of plankton, maybe, or an insect, dragged around by the continental plates.’ He sneaked a glance at her. ‘But now we scientists know better.’

Her eyes were on the swatch of grasses in her hand. She made no comment on his claims to be a scientist. He turned away, his cheeks burning in the sun.

‘Go on,’ Asha said.

He shook his head, tossing the stick aside. ‘I’m talking too much.’

She retrieved the stick, and held it out to him. ‘But I want to know.’

Her gaze was steady, the smile gone. He cleared his throat, took the stick, then carved a second circle into the dirt.

‘They found a meteor in Antarctica. It broke up a sawblade when they tried to cut through it.’ He filled his circle with dots. ‘That’s because it was seeded with diamonds.’

Asha plucked at her grasses. Mani roughed out a five-pointed star above his circles.

‘Then astronomers discovered diamonds in a super-nova,’ he said.

‘A super-nova?’ She stumbled on the English word. He looked at his feet. Suddenly, his urge to impress her seemed unkind.

‘It’s an explosion of dying stars,’ he said gently. ‘They viewed it through a powerful telescope and saw diamonds. Now they say the grains of carbon were planted in the Earth by meteorites and stardust.’

Her hands went still, and her eyes drifted away from him. Mani kicked at his crude drawing, obliterating it in the dust.

‘It’s only a theory,’ he said.

Asha was silent. He followed her gaze to the settlement clearing where the children always played, even in the dust storms. Beyond it, the metal huts looked like water tanks with roofs. Van Wycks provided them. In winter they were ice-cold; in summer, sizzling hot. Mostly, families gathered outdoors, unprotected from the kimberlite dust that blew in from the Van Wycks mines.

His eyes came to rest on the grassland beyond the shantytown, where his mother had died the year before. Ezra had got word to him that migrating Congolese rebels, high on cocaine, had stumbled across her and slit her throat open.

He swallowed and looked back at Asha. She had wrapped her arms around her waist, one hand stroking her side. Mani knew she had scars there, and more on her back, from where they’d operated to remove part of her lungs.

‘All this because of stardust,’ she whispered, shaking her head.

Mani dropped his gaze. Then he leaned closer to her, his fists clenched on the stick.

‘You should have come with me when I asked. To Cape Town.’ He was whispering now, too. ‘You still can. I won’t go to the mine, we can leave today. Ezra got himself into this mess, he can get himself out of it.’

Asha shot a hand out and gripped his wrist. Her eyes bored into his.

‘You must help your brother – you must.’ Her breath was hot on his face. ‘If you don’t, they will kill us.’

A uniformed guard jabbed the butt of his submachine gun hard into Mani’s shoulder. He winced, quickening his pace. Sweat oozed from him as the lump in his gullet tore at his insides, the pain now worse than anything in his arm. He knew he’d feel no relief until the diamond settled deep inside his belly.

The queue wound its way through the barbed-wire corridor. Mani’s eyes swept the horizon, taking in the watchtower with its armed guards, and the double electric fence surrounding the compound. The fences were spaced far apart to stop diamonds being thrown out to confederates. Some of the men used catapults to shoot the stones out. Their accomplices were usually savaged by the Alsatians that patrolled the other side.

Takata dug an elbow into his ribs, nodding towards the man in front. It was Alfredo, Mani’s bunk-mate. He was Mani’s age, twenty-four, but already had five children to feed. He twisted towards them, his shoulders hunched and his face screwed up in pain.

Mani’s gut clenched. Instantly, he knew Alfredo was carrying.

He shot a look at the guards. The nearest one was only a few yards away. Mani whispered in Portuguese. Like him, Alfredo was Angolan.

‘Cuidado!’ Be careful!

Alfredo opened his eyes, tried to nod. He cradled his abdomen, shuffled a few steps. Mani’s heart raced. Another fifty yards and they’d be inside the x-ray unit.

What was Alfredo doing? No one escaped the x-rays at the end of every shift. Especially if you were black. He glanced at his friend’s sweating face, and suddenly understood. Alfredo was gambling the x-rays weren’t switched on.

Mani swallowed, the diamond punching through him like a fist. Alfredo was a fool.

Regulations limited the mine to three x-rays per week on any employee; the rest of the time, the machine was meant to shoot blanks. But what did Van Wycks care about regulations? Radiation overdose was like asbestosis or silicosis: just another black disease.

Mani knew from Ezra that there were no blanks. The machines shot full-power x-rays every day.

His gaze slid back over his shoulder. A tank-shaped figure had moved into view: Okker.

Mani spun round, his chest banging. He felt Okker’s eyes drilling the back of his neck. Like most of the guards, Okker was a mercenary. The worst kind of soldier. Thugs and criminals, dishonourable discharges shipped in from foreign armies. But even the other mercenaries were afraid of Okker.

Suddenly, Alfredo yelled, clutching his belly. Then he doubled over and thudded to the ground. Weapons snapped, guards sprinted. In seconds, three submachine guns pointed at Alfredo’s head. Mani froze.

Okker lumbered over. ‘Take him straight to x-ray. Today he can jump the queue.’

The guards hauled Alfredo up by the arms, ignoring his screams. Mani jerked forward, but Takata’s bony fingers were like a vice on his arm. He stopped, but not before Okker had seen him.

‘Well, well, kaffir boy.’ He slapped his club into the palm of his hand. ‘Friend of yours?’

Mani’s intestines knotted around the stone. He gritted his teeth, trying to keep the pain from his face. Okker jabbed the club into Mani’s chest, clicked his fingers at the guards.

‘This one, too,’ he said. ‘Do both of them now.’

Two more guards appeared at Mani’s side and dragged him to the head of the queue. They shoved him through the entrance to the x-ray unit, flinging him through a set of double doors into the waiting room. Alfredo’s guards were hauling him into the mini-theatre beyond. Mani stumbled after him.

‘Wait! Let me go first!’

A fist punched him in the side of the head, slamming him to the ground. Three savage kicks crunched into his lower back. He curled, foetal-like, to protect his abdomen, but the taller guard yanked him up and hurled him against the wall. Mani slid to the ground, panting. The guard raised his weapon, took aim.

‘Just stay still, college boy.’

Mani squinted up at his face. It was large and square, like a slab of cement. His name was Janvier, a Belgian mercenary. Rumour had it that he practised his sniper aim from the watchtower by shooting passing miners in the back. Behind him, the other guard looked young and pale.

Mani pressed himself into the wall, his skull pounding. By now, Alfredo was locked inside the x-ray room. Mani checked the warning light over the door. Flashing red would mean the x-rays were on. The light was still green.

He thought of the black specks they’d find in Alfredo’s stomach. He closed his eyes. There was nothing he could do.

A buzzer sounded. The light flashed red. Mani began to count. Twenty-five seconds was all it took to scan someone head to toe. Another fifteen to check the results.

Eight, nine, ten.

Van Wycks had every angle covered. Daily x-rays at the end of every shift. More x-rays and searches when your contract ended and you left the compound for good. Sometimes they fed you laxatives the day before just to purge any diamonds out.

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

Nothing was allowed to leave the mine. Any vehicles that came in never went out, in case they carried diamonds through the gate. And if a mine worker died, his family never got his body back. Instead, he was buried inside the compound, so that no one could smuggle diamonds in his corpse.

Mani opened his eyes. Twenty-five seconds. The light turned green.

He listened. All he could hear was his own ragged breathing. He couldn’t bring himself to count any more.

Then he heard a yell. Something in the other room crashed to the floor. A door slammed. Mani stiffened, snapping his eyes to the window. Alfredo stumbled into view, crouching. He lurched across the compound, heading for the electric fence. A shot cracked into the air. Alfredo buckled at the knees, sagged to the ground. Blood seeped from his thigh. He clawed at the dirt, trying to drag himself on.

Okker strolled up behind him, swinging a rifle in one hand. Mani swallowed.

Okker laughed. ‘Look, he’s going for the fence.’

Alfredo stopped crawling and lay trembling in the dust. Okker bent over him.

‘What are you going to do, tunnel under it?’

He guffawed again, looking around for an audience. Then he turned back to Alfredo, took casual aim and shot him in the face.

Mani gasped. He shook his head, couldn’t breathe. Okker was still laughing. Mani wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. Okker snapped open a knife and sliced through Alfredo’s shirt, baring his scrawny abdomen. Then he touched his blade to the dusky skin.

‘Let’s slit him open, see what we’ve got.’

Mani jerked back against the wall. His limbs twitched, pulsing with shock. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to listen to the ripping sounds from outside. The diamond in his own gut scorched through him.

Something clicked near his ear. Mani opened his eyes and stared into the bore of a gun. Janvier smiled. Behind him, the younger guard looked sick.

‘You’re up next, college boy.’