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

Simi presses her face as close to the window of the helicopter as she can. She feels dazed and numb, her whole being still clinging to the sun as it burns off the early morning cloud, its blue lifting her up from the pale bruise of dawn. It is the first dry morning she’s seen since the day of the wedding, and it gives her hope. So does the lack of pain, thanks to whatever the doctors dosed her with the night before.

Outside the helicopter, close to the palm trees where the wedding service was, she sees Marybelle, hair fluffed by the wind. Next to her is Rudd, and beside him Father Norman. The three are laughing and chatting, occasionally looking across at the helicopter. As the blades start to rotate a little faster, the pools of water on the ground begin to swirl, and the grass around their edges to flatten. Simi notices Father Norman’s trousers blowing tight against his legs. Like scaffolding poles she thinks.

She raises her good hand and waves, unsure as to whether or not anyone will be able to see her, but she is desperate to connect for one last time. As the blades circle faster and faster, a pit of longing, of deep emptiness, opens up inside her. The feeling gets worse as Marybelle begins to wave, one of her hands sweeping rainbows, the other trying to calm her hair. And then Rudd joins in, both arms wide above his head.

Eyes flooding, Simi looks away from the small group, to further along the green where the doctors and their pilot, Douglas Makanda, are gathered by the remaining helicopter, its blades drooped like a wilted flower. As she watches a voice tins through her headphones.

 “Everyone okay?”

Simi turns in her seat. Beside her Dr Miriam gives the pilot a thumbs up, while Katania, seated in the front, does the same. Simi copies the gesture, then turns back to the window. She sees Marybelle now has both hands clamped to either side of her head, holding down her hair as the thumping whine of the blades gets faster and faster. Simi smiles, a salty, tearful smile.

She’s been in helicopters before, once or twice, tourist trips, but she’s never felt as alone as she does now. Alone, and weak, all energy gone, all confidence vanished as though the core of her being has dissolved. There is no-one to distract her from her sadness, or her guilt at leaving. There is nothing to cling on to as she says goodbye to the battered lodge. She leans her forehead on the stiff Perspex window, tears dripping on to her kaftan.

What is wrong with you Simidele? You must be so ill to be snivelling over some irritating white woman.

She sniffs as quietly as she can, her good hand searching for a tissue in one of her kaftan pockets. She finds the tissue, wipes her eyes and turns her gaze back to the window. That’s what I’ll miss she thinks. All this green. And touching the earth – every day touching the earth. And feeling the weather. Smelling it. Fearing it. Tasting it. She sniffs again.

Nearly killed me, but I was there. Really, really there.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023