Simi’s head is full of images. They paper her fitful mind, collaging a path out of the billiard room, away from the storm, and back to the wedding. To the sunshine. The heat. The singing – sort of singing – and a hymn that goes on and on, round and round. Bright and beautiful … all things … bright and beautiful … all things … wise and wonderful … all things … On and on, round and round, little marshmallows of sound, slower and slower, soft and pink, on and on and on …

Simi’s head drops lower and lower, and finally on to her chest. Soothed at last into sleep, her fretting stills while the helicopter hums on and on towards Harare.

“If you … down … shortly will be … “

She jolts awake.

That voice again. The pilot.

She misses the words but lifts her head, turning her neck up and around to ease the stiffness. As she does so, she sees Dr Miriam watching her, and smiles. Dr Miriam sits back again.

Simi looks out the window. The land below looks different. It is the pale yellow of tall grass and dusty trees. And it is flat. No mountains. No deep green tea fields. No lakes. There are some fields. Some farms. An occasional cluster of homes.

The looking tires her. Her headache starts to tighten again, and her eyes to ache. She wonders how much further they have to go. Leaning back, she tries to sleep, but feels too awake. Too disturbed. Too in-between. Too full of headache. Her mind wallows. Helpless as a raft caught in a riptide it is dragged back into the billiard room. She sees a big table. A girl trapped. Fallen trees everywhere. And bricks. Piles of bricks. Her breathing becomes shallow and fast. She wants to help. She needs to help. To save that Girl. And those children. But she can’t. She can’t reach them. Something is holding her back. Holding her by the shoulder. Shaking her.

Simi opens her eyes. A hand is on her shoulder. Then it is on her forehead. Soft and cool. She turns, surfacing slowly. It is Dr Miriam’s hand. Her arm is outstretched, her face worried.

“Simi? How are you feeling?” The doctor lifts off her own headphones, and then Simi’s.

Simi tries to respond but has no strength. She feels too heavy, and the helicopter is spinning too fast, slipping around her, out of focus.

“Simi!” Dr Miriam’s voice again. “Simi. You need to wake up. We need to get you off here and to the hospital.”

“Off?”

“Yes. We’ve arrived. We’re in Harare.”

Simi nods, her mouth dry. She listens. The whine of the engines is gone. She looks out of the window, out at tarmac and low buildings, hazy in the sunshine. As she stares, she feels hands reach around in front of her, and click open her seatbelt.

“You okay to stand?”

She gets to her feet slowly. Her kaftan sticks to her in sweaty clumps, but she is too sore to care.

“We’re going straight to the hospital.”

The door of the helicopter swings open, and Simi, blinking against the bright light, lets Dr Miriam help her out into the dry Harare day.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

This time Simi does not fall asleep. Her mind is too troubled to let her, too full of fresh wounds and the guilt of being distanced from them. She forces herself back to the window, to witness what has happened. Leaning over, she locks on to the helicopter’s shadow as it skims above the damage, now highlighting the red gash of a landslide. She feels the tear of it, imagines it ripping down through the soil and boulders, before crushing to a standstill with its skin in its fist, and the earth flayed open behind it. She follows the scar, tracking its length, down, down, down to what had once been a village below.

“Terrible. Terrible.”

Through her headphones she hears the pilot, his words distant, like echoes from her own soul. As he swoops the helicopter lower Simi sees a man try to pull a tree off a pile off bricks. There is a small child sitting on a rock not far behind him. Neither look up, their silent bodies punctuating the ruins. A little further on she sees other adults scattered, digging, searching, desperation in every barehanded movement. And she thinks of Tonderai. Of Tonderai trying to reach his brother. Of Jacobus and Tim with Tonderai. All searching for his family. His village. His relatives. The wives and children. In their houses, brick built and new. All in a valley. Close to a river. Simi hopes that it is not this valley. She hopes that Marybelle’s prayers will keep them safe.

She leans forward, yearning for her looking to help in some miraculous way. But it doesn’t. And she knows it doesn’t. All it does is spool the nightmare on and on, fogging her with hopelessness, as the helicopter thuds away from the river, and on over the hills. But even so she does not look away. She cannot. Deeply anguished, and fogged with pent up fever, she knows the looking is the least she can do.

At last, and gradually, the miles beneath begin to dry out, allowing her some respite from the constant watching, but not from the pain. That is back, whirring between hand and head, tight and constant as the whipping whine of the blades. She tries to sit stone still – no leaning, no looking, nothing that will aggravate anything.

When Katania turns around in her seat, to give her a cheery thumbs up, she is not able to even attempt a response, and realises there is no need, for Katania does not wait for one before turning back to her view. Simi closes her eyes. She tries to steady her breathing, to force her body to relax. She slows each breath deep into her lungs, again and again, loosening the freshest of the images, but others take their place.

There, in the centre of her darkness, is the fire drum, its glow shifting between light and smoke, and beside it is Tonderai, the storyteller. And there are Jacobus and Tim. She sees them in the distance struggling beyond the thumping door. Searching. Searching. Digging through villages. Searching for children. Stepping over bones. Searching for Girl.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Simi angles her head against the window as she tries to look back and up towards the lodge. She sees most of it still standing, walls complete, but everywhere it is compromised by debris and broken trees. She tries to tip her head a little further to catch a last glimpse of her own room, but the bulk of her hairwrap, and protests from her neck, pull her back to the verandah’s torn roof, and the stubborn stand of the billiard room.

She wonders again who will pay for the repairs, and briefly wishes she could see into the future, then changes her mind.

I would never have come in the first place if I’d known.

She leans the top of her head against the window and closes her eyes. The heavy plod of sleep tugs at her, drifts her away. Then the rotor blades change their pitch, and her eyes flick open again. She struggles to hold them wide, but they droop, floppy as sunhats, and she lets herself doze in their shade, deeper and deeper. Next time it is the quickening speed of the tiny vibrations in the window that wake her, as the whole craft starts to hum, reaching for lift. She looks up. This is it. She places her good hand flat on the window, fingers splayed in farewell, and tries to memorise each of the windrushed faces outside. Then they are gone, pushed backwards by the acceleration of the bunker-flooded golf course below.

Simi drops her hand back into her lap and turns away from the window, wiping her tears. She knows, and understands, but still cannot quite believe, that Marybelle, bright as a never dimming bulb, is gone.

The pilot’s voice floats into Simi’s headset.

“I’m going to take you as low as possible for as long as possible so we can get a good assessment of the damage.”

Simi straightens her back, and tries to see down between Katania and the pilot to the world limping beneath them, but the effort curdles her stomach. She leans back, hoping that the sensation will pass. Slowly it does.

“That’s the tea factory below us now.”

She peers down and sees the jagged edges of a large roof, fractured as a jigsaw, with bits of machinery sticking through at odd angles. Fencing lies around it, tangled in fallen trees, and littered here and there with bits of roof and the occasional car. They fly on beyond the factory, above their own shadow, darting black beneath them, as they follow a washed away road down towards a brown and angry river. On one bank, half a bridge, its end ripped, sticks out towards its other half on the opposite bank, where a small group of people stands beside a lone blue truck.

Simi watches them for as long as the turmoil in her body will let her, then she leans back, suddenly overwhelmed by the fallen trees, and wounded buildings, by the sight of those trapped and waiting, and by her own sadness.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023