Rudd, Tonderai and Innocence stand in the entrance to the lodge. Shoulder to shoulder they look out in silence, their torches picking over the mud-filled chaos beyond. They find rocks, branches, damaged cars, tangled wires, and gate posts.

Rudd feels sick. It’s Tonderai who speaks first, his head shaking slowly from side to side.

“Eish! The gomo … we are lucky, very lucky.”

“Maiwe!” whispers Innocence.

 “Digging too much. Always clearing, cutting. These young trees, they don’t hold the soil.” Tonderai’s anger tails away.

“Umhmm,” Innocence nods.

Rudd’s failing torch reaches as far as it can. “The kopje is gone?” It’s a question but his eyes already know the answer.

“Yes.” Tonderai swings his light across the carpark again. “It is here. In front of us. We were very lucky … the kitchen … the garage …”

Rudd circles his torch slowly over the debris. Large rocks are tumbled together, and even larger ones have bounced further. Amongst them two tree trunks stand snapped and sharp, with their branches like nets on the ground, soil piling against them and through them.

A long, high whistle slips through Rudd’s teeth, but it is barely out before it is snatched away by a sudden gust of wind that slams the lodge door closed behind them, shaking them all from their shock. He swings around, and his eye is caught instantly by a yellow gleam. He lifts his torch beam towards it.

The hat!

Somehow the hat, tight into the corner by the front door, still clings to its post on the head of the wooden giraffe, the one Rudd’s godfather gave him when he was five. The flare of yellow draws him towards it. He walks over, unable to resist, not noticing that Tonderai and Innocence have headed off in the opposite direction.

He lifts the hat off the giraffe and memories fall out of its thick oilskin. He sees his uncle, just back from his sailing trip around Norway, presenting it to his brother. He remembers his father laughing, properly happy, when he tried it on – his new ‘lucky’ hat. Rudd loved the hat for making his father laugh. Now here it was. Still surviving. Standing in the spot he’d taken it back to when he returned. The place where the hat and the giraffe had been when he’d last seen them as a child.

Years ago now. He’d been kneeling up on the truck seat, peering through the back window as they lurched out over the culverts and away from the lodge, his father in one of his violent, unpredictable rages. He’d slammed the lodge door and flung the hat on to the giraffe in the corner, and then dragged the heartbroken Rudd away from them both and into the truck. Rudd remembers his tears. Hot. Silent. Private. He’d cried until the lodge had disappeared behind their dustcloud, and he’d promised he’d come back. He’d promised. And he had. And when he did, he’d found the hat and the giraffe in a cupboard, and he’d moved them straight back to the entrance. Markers to a promise kept.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Simi follows Marybelle into the dark, and tries to ignore the throb in her hand. She keeps her eyes fixed on the torch beam ahead, willing it to swing back and find her. Occasionally it does.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” she shouts, the lie bigger than the word. She feels wilted by storm, strangers, dark and the hurt in her palm.

They are halfway across the verandah when the wind smashes back. It comes up sharp and sudden, sending the torches on the terrace below bobbing for cover.

“…. the games room … there …” Marybelle shouts, turning back, and pointing her torch off to the right. Simi follows the beam and sees that it has found a door she has never seen before.

They hurry towards it, and pull it wide enough to step through, blocking its slam. In the middle of the room is a billiard table. Their beam of light runs over its solid green, and then around the walls, each lined with raised, padded benches.

“Wow!” says Simi. “Did you know this was here?”

But Marybelle does not answer. Her torch is frozen on a spot on the far side of the room, and her hand is reaching back to find Simi.

“There’s someone here.”

“Where?” Simi sees a bundled shape across the room.

“Fred?” Marybelle calls.

“Marybelle?”

“Jambee?”

“Can you put the torch down?”

“Sorry,” says Marybelle lowering the light to the floor.

“Come. I’ve just arrived. Fred and Bernard are here.”

“Hello,” a deep voice calls out to them. “Fred’s okay but he needs his muti and blankets. Can you stay with him while we go to the room?”

 “Of course,” says Marybelle, hurrying over with Simi close behind. “Hello Fred.”

As Jambee and Bernard head off, Fred begins to cough. His struggle for breath alarms Simi. The last time she’d heard such a cough, she’d had to call for help. The ambulance crew had arrived quickly, and that old man had been taken to hospital. Hypothermia they’d said. Too long in the cold on the park bench. She places her good hand on Fred’s shoulder, and feels the damp in his jacket.

“He’s wet. Can we get him out of the wind?”

Even as she asks, Simi knows it is hopeless. The floor is covered in water, and the wind is everywhere. The only dry is the green of the billiard table, and there is no way she and Marybelle can lift Fred on to that.

“Perhaps we should just sit either side of him. Block some of the wind,” Marybelle suggests. 

“That could work.” Simi sits down on the bench, angling her body to absorb as much of the gale as she can. As she lifts the soggy hem of her kaftan off her feet, Fred raises his right hand shakily towards her. She takes it, smiling at him, alarmed by the pale, puffiness of his face.

 “We’ll get you warm,” she says. “They’ll be back …”

Before Simi can finish the door flings open, and someone else thuds into the room.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023