The Tin Heart Gold Mine Read online

  “Why did she say that?” Tim gives Lara an annoyed glance.

  “Oh ages ago, Dad. Before you decided to go away. She says you didn’t use a computer when you were in Africa first – you used phones – then you got a fax machine, then a computer with a GPS and now you use email. She also says that when you first started being a reporter – reporters only got killed by accident – like – if they got between different armies. Now she says that people are always trying to kill journalists because they don’t want anyone to know the truth.”

  Tim is somewhat mollified but he frowns.

  “That’s partly true, Adam – but not where I’m going. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Mum worries. I know. She said you are a truth collector – no – a truth gatherer – it’s your nature – you don’t like editing so much because sometimes,” Adam puts his head on one side and squeezes his eyes shut as he grapples with the concept Lara has attempted to explain to him, “you have to change things a little bit because of the people who own the newspaper.”

  Lara listens to Adam’s version of her conversations about Tim with her eyebrows raised but her eyes fixed on her food. Once she would have given Tim a complicit smile but now she daren’t.

  “And so what does Lara say about her own work, Adam?” Tim, ever the impartial, questioning journalist, includes Lara with a swift glance.

  “Mum says that she invents – no, remakes the truth.” Adam shuts an eye and squints down his knife’s imagined cross-hairs at a potato on his plate. She paints the truth so that people can see it again – like for the first time. She says otherwise they forget what they really know.”

  “Wow, Adam!” Lara smiles. “You make what I do sound as useful as Tim’s job.”

  Tim also smiles. They relax again.

  “Your mum – Lara – is a special person, Adam – d’you know she’s a champion driver when things get dangerous?”

  “I’ve been driving in the bush since I was at school.” Lara says. “We had a Land Rover – it was tough, slow and dusty.”

  Adam considers Lara briefly. Tim and Lara share an old battered car which they keep parked in a back street nearby. Adam doesn’t often see his parents drive unless they are going outside London. Traffic features in his life rather than cars.

  “I know Mum misses the wild animals and the bush – don’t you, Mum?”

  “I think it’s safer to walk down a track in the veld near a herd of elephants than through traffic in London,” agrees Lara.

  “Can we visit Chambeshi sometime Mum – Dad? Inonge’s invited us to stay with her at the Tin Heart Camp Safari Lodge. Can we, Dad?”

  “Perhaps – well we should – yes.”

  Tim steers the conversation away from Chambeshi.

  “What kind of job do you want to have when you grow up, Adam?”

  “Dunno Dad. I like history at school – I want to explain things – like how we got here – like how things work in the world like with people – society and – um – in like political stuff.”

  Adam bats the potato with his knife and it bounces onto the table.

  “Sounds interesting” Tim smiles and returns the potato to Adam’s plate.

  “Finish your food, Adam. Then we’ll get out your school atlas out and look at where I am going again.”

  Chapter Five

  Brendan 1997

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  It’s Lara’s second session with Brendan, the therapist recommended by her old friend Liseli.

  “Start wherever you like.” he suggests, “Say what comes most easily and naturally – perhaps you would like to tell me about how you grew up in Africa – what first made you want to be a painter – an artist?”

  Lara, with dry humour, will later tell Liseli that her first session was a complete ‘washout’. She had been certain that she would be in control and her common sense and personal insight would shine out. She would be once again the charming Lara, socially confident, and a successful artist. She would give away the secrets she chose and no others. To her horror as soon as she is ensconced in Brendan’s embracing sofa, looking at the cup of tea in front of her on which a wavering feather of steam is lightly balanced, she cries and cries. Not loudly but wetly. A waterfall of tears runs down her cheeks. All she does is collect balls of soggy tissues in her lap while Brendan waits quietly. At the end of that first session, Brendan says simply, “I will see you again. When would you like to come?”

  It feels odd to Lara to confide in a strange man, even one who acts in a professional role. Besides, Brendan, perhaps a few years younger than Lara, is slightly built, even skinny. He slumps rather than sits in his armchair. Lara is aware of the boniness of his hips and that his physical presence is minimal.

  Nevertheless here she is again, sitting on the cosy sofa with the tea in front of her. Lara avoids giving an account of the really difficult problems of her life by recounting stories of her adolescence. She is chatting, trying to enchant Brendan with her wit, to make him laugh. Lara is used to making her friends laugh but now she is acting a part. She feels shallow and deceitful.

  Lara had smiled when her parents or her friends were complimentary about her talent for drawing. It was after all a gift, not something she had earned. She had understood that, even before she had learnt how much hard work it would take for her gift to amount to much. It’s always seemed to her that her particular ability is too uncomplicated to be worthy of praise. Her gift is an artist’s eye co-ordinated with an artist’s hand. Lara can draw. Lara has always been able to make paintings which are so realistic that people who say they ‘don’t understand art’ can still admire them.

  This is Lara, named by her romantic mother after the heroine in Boris Pasternak’s novel, ‘Doctor Zhivago’. This is Lara, born and brought up to be the sunshiny girl who wins people’s hearts as easily as she delights them with her art.

  Ah – but that was Lara once.

  This Lara is no longer the golden girl. That Lara has gone.

  That Lara would give her heart to any man who possessed some form of gold, an element valued in its purest form for both malleability and durability.

  The “gold” that belongs to Lara today remains as stone cold as the vault in which it hides.

  Lara’s session with Brendan made her nostalgic for her untroubled childhood.

  So much luck and happiness, no wonder I’m self-centred – yes and selfish too. Mum and Dad did their best I suppose to stop me being a total prima donna. Let’s face it – I wasn’t that talented at ballet or gymkhanas. Just as well I suppose, not to be good at everything else. Mum always said I had a stubborn streak. Dad quite liked that in me but it irritated the hell out of Mum. She said I always wanted explanations and reasons before doing what I was told. I daydreamed a lot – it’s an only child thing I suppose – or playacted – made Mum and Dad my audience.

  Lara’s charmed youth first glowed in the African Republic of Chambeshi in one of those small enclosed expatriate communities that appear to provide everything essential for its mostly white members to have a full and perfect life.

  Lara’s father, Brian Kingston, had been recruited by an international mining company in the early 70s and arrived in central Africa when Lara was almost 10 years old. They stayed longer than most of their fellow expatriates because Lara’s mother, Jane, had grown up in southern Africa and felt at home there and Brian liked to go camping and fishing. To compensate Lara for being educated away from home they chose an expensive boarding school in England paid for by Brian’s company. It had surprisingly ramshackle old classrooms in unfenced fields near the sea and was famous for being very progressive and libertarian as well as having an excellent art department. So Lara went to high school at Summerdales and so did her best friend from her junior school days, Liseli Ngoma Dawkins.

  Part Two

/>   Beginnings 1970 – 1980

  Chapter One

  Liseli and Lara

  “Harry’s got no sense of humour.’ said Brian of Liseli’s Welsh father, a left-wing academic and historian at the Chambeshi University. “But his wife is an exile and one of her brothers is in prison; the other’s fighting in the bush war. Life’s not secure for them.”

  Lara’s parents, Brian and Jane, never discussed politics at home. Neither did they think the bush war amusing. It worried them both. Liseli’s mother, Safina, a black Zimbabwean, made Lara’s mother, Jane, uncomfortable. She felt Safina had a chip on her shoulder. In spite of their parents’ opinions, Lara and Liseli had been close friends since they first went to the Chambeshi International Primary School.

  Politics and the liberation wars weren’t mentioned at the Chambeshi International School even though many of the parents worked with refugees or with aid agencies, or in diplomatic services and medical organisations. Whatever trouble was brewing up in Chambeshi, these children would spend their lives in large gardens behind high security fences. The photos of Lara’s classmates in her yearbook included the children of freedom fighters and of American, Russian, British and Yugoslav diplomats. There were also the children of Cypriot and Asian shopkeepers from the city, English expatriate children like herself and a number of well-to-do black kids, mostly boys. They all were intelligent, seemed well-adjusted and friendly with each other even while their families’ interests and commitments in Chambeshi were both varied and on occasion at variance with each other.

  Then there was Chimunya Mbewe.

  Chimunya wore ill-fitting unsuitable shoes with broken high heels and her cheap market-made crimplene dress was fastened at the back with a safety pin instead of a zip. She never did any homework and always lost her school books. Somebody must have paid her expensive school fees but her home life apparently did not allow her to sit at a table and study. As she did not have a television she had no idea what serials and dramas her classmates watched. The American girls would not sit next to her because she smelt of sweat and dust after walking miles to school in the summer heat. It didn’t occur to Lara that one of her fellow pupils might be poor or find life troubling but Liseli went out of her way to include Chimunya and spoke to her every day. Chimunya didn’t respond to Liseli’s overtures with much enthusiasm. Proud and shy, she continued to keep to herself.

  Lara and Liseli were at the vegetable market with Safina, Liseli’s mother, when Lara saw Chimunya sitting next to a tailor’s dress stall. She waved and called but Chimunya gave her startled look, made a quick crouching movement and vanished from sight below the counter top.

  “What was that about?” Lara said peeved.

  Liseli looked thoughtful.

  “Chimunya lives here,” she said, “in the shanty town behind the market. She doesn’t want anyone to see her. She’s embarrassed.”

  Lara frowned mystified. “How come?”

  Liseli shrugged but Safina explained,

  “Her parents are rich. They are diplomats who work in England but Chimunya has to live with her mother’s sister who has no money or education. Chimunya’s schooling is paid for but I reckon her aunt takes all the money that is sent for her clothes and books. Chimunya’s brothers go to school in England of course. Girls don’t count as much as boys in Chambeshi.” Liseli grinned. “Not a problem that would bother you, Lara.”

  Lara was silent for a while but, as Liseli said, she didn’t let Chimunya’s situation trouble her for long.

  Liseli was an excellent student who was admired and tolerated in spite of her rather acid comments about her peers and her teachers. She also had to find a boarding school in England and the two girls decided their parents must agree to send them to the same one. The boarding school question came up on one of the few occasions when both families met at a parents’ evening. Liseli and Lara hung around listening in the hope of influencing their choices. Fortunately Liseli’s parents thought Brian and Jane’s choice of Summerdales for Lara was one that would suit Liseli too. Not only was it progressive but it had a positive policy towards students of different ethnicities. Liseli, was, in fact, awarded a Summerdales scholarship though Lara did not find out about until their last year there when the Principal mentioned it in his valediction to the graduating students.

  She was annoyed. “Liseli – you bitch! Why didn’t you tell me?”.

  But Lara was not angry with Liseli for long. Liseli could be quite strange and contrary on occasions, but she was Lara’s most loyal and dearest friend.

  Chapter Two

  Boarding School

  Roger, Lara’s art teacher at Summerdales, was proud of her. Lara knew that. At sixteen she guessed that she attracted him sexually. She daydreamed about accidentally meeting up with him in her first year at art school and letting him seduce her. He hadn’t been a highly motivated artist himself, but he was kind. Later Lara wondered if he had let her down by insufficiently preparing her for hard work and disappointment and by not informing her of the latest trends in the art world. Nobody wanted to make life hard for Lara.

  It changed.

  Liseli wasn’t going to art school. She was going to do something useful with her life. She would study something that would make the world, or at least the country of her mother’s birth, Zimbabwe, a better place.

  “Economics.” Liseli said to Lara, “Though my father thinks I should study law.” She grimaced. “He says I can be awkward and pedantic’”

  It was Lara’s last few weeks in the last term of the last year at Summerdales. Lately Liseli had been a drag. She seemed always in a bad mood. Lara had finished swotting for exams and only had an art practical to complete. She had been warned by a friend that Liseli was being ‘morbid’. At a loose end, partly out of concern, partly from boredom, she wandered down the dormitory corridor to Liseli’s study-bedroom hoping for a chat. Liseli was still wearing the faded purple T-shirt that she slept in, even though it was mid-afternoon. It was that dead time during the weekend after exams. Liseli sat with her legs folded up under her on her desk chair scribbling at her school rough-work book. Page after page was covered with swirling patterns in black ballpoint. Lara hesitated; from the study bedroom doorway she could see that Liseli was concentrated on obliterating every white gap in the paper and hadn’t noticed her arrival. Undecided as to whether to go or stay, Lara’s attention was caught by a familiar children’s comic book open on Liseli’s pillow.

  “I love Tintin!”

  Lara flopped on Liseli’s unmade bed and grabbed at the book. She and Liseli had long been fans of the red-haired boy reporter. Liseli looked round at Lara. For a moment she was sharp-eyed, her face alive, then she went back to her robotic drawing. Lara said with disgust, ‘It’s in French!’

  “Hergé is Belgian,” Liseli said with flat sarcasm.

  “Sure he is. I’m not sure my French is good enough…”

  Already Lara was engrossed in the story. Liseli was definitely in ‘one of her moods’. It was easier to concentrate on the book instead of cheering her up.

  “God! When was this written?”

  Lara flicked the cover from inside to outside looking for clues.

  “It’s so ugly! Everyone is so horrible! The Africans are drawn in such a gross way. Tintin is an idiot who kills every living animal! It’s…” Lara searched for the right words. “It’s racist!”

  “Hmm.” Liseli barely shrugged. “It’s so unfair to the whites – they are all villains except Tintin – but the Africans are all silly jokes.”

  Lara glanced at Liseli. It occurred to her that it might be an odd book for a mixed race girl like Liseli to own. Lara didn’t think of Liseli as mixed race or as anything really because the school had pupils from so many cultures and countries that no one person stood out. They all were different.

  “The dog’s okay – Milou – Snowy �
�� he doesn’t approve of the slaughter of wild animals.” Liseli contributed without turning. “Self-interest, of course.”

  Lara wasn’t sure if Liseli was serious or ironic. “Who gave it to you? I mean – where did you get it?”

  “Oh I bought it on our last French trip.” Liseli replied. “It’s not published in England – obviously for being racist, but I wanted to see it for myself. I read that Hergé had been a Nazi collaborator in the Second World War so I had to find out about him and his books for myself. His American books all had to be redrawn because of their racial stereotypes.”

  Lara was mystified. “Racial stereotypes? Hergé a Nazi collaborator?” That was a new concept for Lara. She decided on a smart and cynical answer. “I bet nearly everybody collaborated once they were conquered?”

  “Don’t forget about the Resistance Movements,” Liseli said.

  “Oh yeah?” muttered Lara.

  She turned the pages again reading and thinking. Why did it matter to Liseli that a comic book published in 1946 was racist and written by a collaborator? That was all over now, wasn’t it? Lara was, she admitted to herself, uncomfortable in her history class when they studied colonial history or the Slave Trade but then if she looked around her class at her friends who came from all over the world – she could say with confidence, couldn’t she? – that it was all history and it was all different and okay now.

  “Why does it bother you so much?” she asked slowly; for the first time she was really curious about Liseli. She turned to look at her friend.

  “It doesn’t bother me.” Liseli said with infuriating and contradictory calm. “But Tintin is just not my hero anymore and Hergé is only another person like anybody else. It’s just what happens.”

  “Well – there’s the gold and diamond smuggling too.” Liseli said a moment later but still enigmatic and terse.

  “What do you mean, exactly?” said Lara, irritated.