The Shouting in the Dark Read Online Free

corner of his lips, as if trying to coax the story to step out from behind a screen and come forwards to greet him.
    What a life you have out here in Africa, Har! the friends musingly say late at night, the father growing hoarse. What a terrific berth you’ve found after the many years of graft. Bah, the father rumbles back, Put your sunshine where it belongs, up your gat . Sunshine gives poor Irene migraines, reduces even lusty Zulus to zombies. Look, Ko, Henk, Africa is a shit-hole. It drives white people mad, even the Soviets. If they arrive sane, their senses all too soon go into reverse. I’ve survived in Africa because I’ve lived exclusively on this civilized southernmost edge. Here alone we old colonials can rebuild the white republic.
    Most Braemar nights, though, the father is by himself, yet still talks out loud, beats his knee for emphasis, slaps the glass-topped rattan table with its chipped under-layer of mustard-yellow paint, walks to the verandah edge to heave gobs of mucus onto the lawn. He’s a lipless mouth throwing out hoicking noises, only, when he’s alone, Ella notices, he doesn’t speak so much about the good life strung between the clubs, warehouses and docks of the Far East. In these other stories he’s not onshore but at sea and at war, on a Royal Netherlands Navy N-class destroyer called the Tjerk Hiddes , stalked by enemy frigates. Among the group of old makkers he’s the only one who doesn’t return to the Far Eastern haunts on Once-in-a-Lifetime tours. ‘Who’d want to see it? Whole place was shot to hell.’ He’s also the only one who saw combat during the War. He alone, he says, Ella listening, was fool enough to give ear to Queen Wilhelmina’s call, brace up for the beleaguered fatherland’s defence.
    â€˜People think the Royal Navy was all British,’ he tells the night sky. ‘They forget the plucky ships of the Netherlands and Norwegian navies, among others, how we mucked in, made our way to Scapa Flow, skirted round the side of the galvanized-steel lid Adolf Hitler had laid over the Continent. How we, too, said be buggered to the Nazis.’
    The father’s war stories begin in the middle of nowhere, break off suddenly, turn like boomerangs and hit Ella, peeping, with surprises. Is it the war, she wonders, that makes him shout like he does? Is he just a cross old seaman missing the good days in the East? What presses him to hurl those angry words at the night? Back in Durban, before she began eavesdropping in earnest, she had no idea he was in the war. Though he’s old, fifty-nine last birthday, she hadn’t thought that old. The war, she’d thought, was ages and ages ago. Hard a-port, he suddenly yells, clanging his sherry tumbler on the table, Emergency front! That’s the ticket. Ach waarom nou, waarom? he sobs. Verdomme, Godverdomme , those dear chaps and lovely girls, and the storms and strafing and busy quays, and remember that consignment of crazy Australian horses for the Sultan of Johore, when they ran amok?
    Some nights he calls out so loud that Ella thinks he must be hailing someone. He wouldn’t sit and shout at nothing, would he? Could he be waiting for a secret visitor to arrive, she asks herself, someone to recognize at last all that he fought for? We Europeans, we remade the world with our hard work, he spits, and then we gave it up again as if it cost us nothing.
    At first now and again, then by the time of her ninth birthday on most Braemar evenings, the father’s night watches draw Ella from her bed to the window. She slips into the gap in the curtains, puts her ear to the glass, till he himself gets up, switches off the outside light and goes to bed. If she were ever to quit peeping and lie down, she wonders, would the long-expected secret visitor finally appear? Would he get the message at last that till now he’s been refused?
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    International trunk calls come once in