The Art of Unpacking Your Life (32 page)

One of the assistants said, ‘Madam, please.' The other touched Connie's arm for extra emphasis.

Connie ignored them. ‘Bye, darling Luke.' She kissed him on the lips, willing as if he could be brought to life by the kiss of the one he profoundly loved.

Katherine squeezed Matt's hand tightly.

As they slid the flat bed of the hospital trolley into the vehicle, Matt wept. They were silent tears, anything else would somehow have been wrong. They all trailed through the orange dust after the slowly departing vehicle, until they had seen it curve twice and out beyond their horizon. Matt and Katherine stood together, lost in their own thoughts, unable to decide what to do next. Matt no longer had the energy to pack and rapidly leave. He wanted to lie on a sofa. ‘What are we going to do?' Matt felt desperate and lost.

Dan was the first to respond. ‘Let's go to the bar.'

Matt was thankful for the suggestion. It was a destination, a place to rest together away from their rooms, which eerily reminded him of Luke's wake. Matt and
Katherine led them on to the decked path and back inside. Katherine and Connie ordered a couple of pots of coffee. They settled close to each other, needing intimacy and a couple of throws, which they wrapped around themselves.

Katherine sighed, ‘Connie. It's crazy but I wonder if you and I might order something stronger?'

Matt was pleased to notice Sara smiled. He waited until they got their drinks.

‘To our dearest Luke. He was a great mate to us all,' Matt paused. ‘He was an eternal optimist, an eternal romantic, a lover of life.' He sighed. ‘To Luke,' clinking his glass against Dan's cup of tea. ‘And to seeing more of each other, before it's too late.'

He gulped the contents of his glass. It provided pain relief. Perhaps that was what drove Luke to drink so heavily. The desire to blank out the bits of his life that didn't match up to the perfection he so desperately wanted to believe in. Katherine got up from where she was sitting beside Dan and sat gently on Matt's lap.

‘Sweetie, you okay?' She murmured, her hair drifting over his face, ‘That was lovely.'

He wrapped his arms around her, drawing her to him. ‘Thank you, Katherine,' he squeezed her gently.

‘Matt, sweetie, listen, I am sorry about the things I have said in the past about Luke.' Her forehead wrinkled and her eyes were full of tears. ‘I have been thinking about it. I mean, how I could judge him? He had a family and friends.'

He hugged her. ‘Luke was my best mate, and the only thing I can do for him now is come back to South Africa and help Connie bring him home.'

Katherine was silent. She was probably thinking about Isobel. Their own grief, their own lives. He didn't know any more which was more important.

‘Let's both come back,' she said gently.

He felt her concern, her strength, her love. He wanted to weep.

Connie wandered up to them and perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘Am I interrupting?'

‘No.' Katherine was effusive in her concern, ‘Connie, please come sit with us.'

‘How was Lou?' Matt asked.

‘She put the phone down on me,' Connie bowed her head, ‘She blames me for Julian's baby. Apparently, I dropped the ball.'

‘Oh Connie, she's a teenager. Don't take it to heart,' Katherine clasped her hand.

Connie shrugged and shook her head. They would survive not having a child and move on. What about Connie? What was she going to do without Julian or Luke?

‘You know, I'm not rabid like Sara,' Katherine stated. ‘A career isn't the answer for everyone. But I do think, Connie, you could use a cause.'

Connie was silent. She looked deflated. And Matt was anxious for her.

‘Outside of your family,' Katherine insisted.

He touched Katherine's hand gently. ‘This is not the time, Katherine.'

‘No Matt, it's okay. She's right.'

John, the balloonist, wandered over to them. He adjusted his faded blue cap. Ridges of wrinkles landscaped his deeply tanned face. He looked like an old sailor found in some
random bar in Barbados. His ragged but ruddy health didn't fit with their grief. Sara eyed him with suspicion.

Once he reached the centre of the bar, John neutrally announced, ‘Wind's perfect this morning.'

Surely he had already been paid. Why couldn't he leave them alone?

No one said anything.

Gus coughed and folded his arms carefully across his body. ‘It's awful to lose Luke like this.' He made eye contact with them. ‘You are all hurting. If you want to rest here together and talk about Luke, it's absolutely okay.'

Gus seemed to be gauging the mood of the group, trying to be sensitive to their reaction.

‘Or you can rise up into the sky, over the Kalahari, over the wildebeest, over the land, where you have been happy together with him, and say a proper farewell to Luke.'

Sara looked at John again in a new light. Less beggar and more saviour.

‘The choice is yours, eh?'

Sara looked to Connie. Whatever she wanted, Sara would make happen. Connie didn't say anything. Sara was worried that Gus's thoughtful speech would go unrecognised.

‘I don't know about everyone else, but I don't think that it makes much difference.' Dan stared at John, as if he were expecting the answers to be buried in the crevasses in his face. ‘Everything has already changed.'

Sara waited for him to continue. He didn't.

Connie spoke. ‘Luke would have wanted us to go. Shall we?'

The sky filled the space. It was that unblemished blue that Connie remembered on the day they arrived. Two solitary acacia trees marked the horizon. Otherwise it was bountiful grassland, which whistled to greet them.

Her grandfather wrote about his balloon trip over the Kalahari soon after he bought the hunting lodge. The worn red and plain wicker basket jolting along on the trailer in front of them might have been the one he flew in. It was faded, yet solid. It couldn't be further from high-performance ballooning. John swerved his white truck off the road across a wide, grassy plain. Despite the apparently perfect wind conditions, there appeared to be no rush. John and his son Graeme, a teenage Jimmy Carter before the sawdust was airbrushed off him, and Dominick, a chunky black helper in his mid-thirties, slowly unhooked the basket, pushing and pulling in hushed tones, before sliding it off the trailer and lifting it down on to the ground. They surveyed the basket and the ground around them like a family faced with IKEA instructions. John inched the vehicle further forward, before they all moved the basket twenty feet in front of the truck's bonnet. A four-cornered metal frame was assembled over the basket to support the propane gas cylinders. They tied one end of a grey karate-style belt around the front bumper and the other to the bar in the basket.

Connie watched carefully. Focusing on their preparations was reassuring. Life and its tiny details were happening around her. She was alive, if numb.

He grinned. ‘Our umbilical cord in case the balloon takes off too soon. With only one of you on board.'

‘Right,' she nodded.

She thought about what that would feel like. Alone in a balloon crossing Africa. The way to go. If only Luke had known that this was it. If only she had known.

As John laboriously unscrewed a Thermos flask of tea and slowly sipped from the metal cup, Graeme and Dominick started to unroll the balloon. If it were possible, it looked more worn than the basket. The wide blue stripe, bordered by red, green, yellow and black, had lost its lustre long ago. Stretched out on the grass, it looked similar to a parachute paraded for toddler entertainment. John slowly placed his cup on the bonnet of his truck and wandered over to the basket. Graeme helped him tip it on its side. The balloon was dragged towards it and attached to the basket. Then the gas canisters were lit.

The whooshing sound burst into the stillness. The others, who were hovering round their safari vehicle, moved forward, drawn to the noise that marked the real start of their balloon trip.

The fabric started to billow off the ground. It got slowly fuller and fuller. It was mesmerising. A flame tore through the fabric, leaving a charred hole in the material. John looked up at the flame, before nodding and waving an arm towards her. ‘It's okay. Not a risk, eh.'

She couldn't explain why, but she trusted him and the balloon, which was this vast half cuboid starting to rise off the ground. John, Graeme and Dominick moved
with surprising speed and energy to right the basket. The flames were visible. John shouted and waved frantically for them to come.

They ran, even Matt. They jostled, trying to get into the basket. The tall sides forced them into high leg lifts. Katherine pulled Matt's arm as he nearly ripped his trousers getting in and then landed on Katherine. Gus and Ben climbed in, as they had two spare spaces. The balloon was tipping a few inches off the ground. John firmly instructed them to crouch down below the height of the basket, in a contorted brace position. She looked across the small space at Sara, who was squashed on the opposite side with Gus. Matt was holding Katherine; Alan and Dan were wedged in the other corner. They felt every jolt. Her legs were shaking. The physical exertion released the tight grip of Connie's grief. She was forced to breathe properly and in that breath found some energy that had eluded her since Luke's death.

It was moving but not straight upwards. The balloon seemed to curve rather than lift. When John instructed them to get up a few minutes later, Connie didn't realise that they were off the ground. Then they moved quickly up like a puppet controlled by strings on high. They rose and rose.

Sara stared down. Already the scene was bleaching out, the vehicles were shrinking. Sara had never seen the earth from this perspective. She let out an exhalation, ‘Oh.' It wasn't a word, rather a feeling. Gus reached for her hand.

The vehicle shrank first, then the acacia trees, before the land itself seemed to separate from them. The horizon elongated, as the ground became less familiar, more lunar. A suggestion of elands came into sight and quickly disappeared. The mountains rose to greet them and then vanished beneath them.

‘There's Mozambique,' Gus pointed beyond the hills.

John grinned. ‘We have ended up there, when the wind's changed.'

Connie felt she could end up anywhere.

Dan could only watch the tracks, now faint pencil lines, turn from orange to yellow; the grasses faded from familiar green to invisible beige. The odd tree or bush looked like a tiny pom pom on a hat. The sun flooded the scene with a yellow wash, leaving dark stripy shadows. He was drunk on its beauty.

Matt held Katherine close, as they both stared out of the balloon. It was absolutely silent as if someone had pressed the pause button on human life. Matt daren't speak. It would destroy this moment of utter peace.

Connie felt as if she were in a space capsule looking down on the earth. A herd of wildebeest dotted the scene, mere scratch marks across the burnished landscape. The reality of existence was here, not the knotted ball of her own pain. She remembered what had happened to her grandfather. Up here, he had seen the majesty of this beautiful land. He had written with certainty that the Kalahari would give purpose to the rest of his life. It must have made his wife's betrayal petty and insignificant. There was no greater healer than Mother Nature. All she needs is time and space. To restore you.

‘Connie, thank you.' Lizzie was the first to speak.

Sara spoke quietly, ‘Thank you to Gus for persuading us to come up here. We needed it.'

Matt added, ‘It's a fitting goodbye to Luke.'

Connie couldn't speak. She would never be ready to say goodbye to him. He would always be with her.

They were silent for the next ten minutes, which seem to pass too quickly, before John explained that they would need to crouch down in the basket to land. It could be quite rough, they might ride over trees and land in a bush. Connie bent her knees as far as she could and placed her arms over her head. They hit the ground fast. They tore through trees, which scrapped the basket, covered the balloon and poked through the gap in between. The balloon was moving rapidly, tearing through every bush in its path. Connie's legs knocked together against Lizzie, Matt, Dan and Sara's. They were a jumble of shaken limbs. Finally, it stopped moving. They were miraculously on the ground.

Connie, Dan, Matt, Katherine and Alan had already boarded. After blowing her a kiss, Lizzie disappeared into the plane. Staring at the desolate airstrip, Sara wondered if she had made a mistake extending her trip, even by twenty-four hours. She wasn't ready to face Charles, Pete and the others yet. What would she say to John? Her junior would be appalled, immediately concerned for his own safe passage far away from her. She needed to prepare to face them. Yet she was already lonely without the group and feeling low about Luke again.

‘Sara, shall we be getting back, eh?' Gus wrapped his arm gently around her.

She considered his touch for a moment. She wished that she had flown home with the others. She needed to be with her friends. Since Ben wasn't there, she sat in the front passenger seat. It was rude to sit in the back like the bloody Queen. She heard a text ping through from Connie. She opened it, eager to hear from her.

Gus is in love with you, Sara. Be honest, be true to yourself. It's all I ask. xxx

She tried to hide her excruciating embarrassment. ‘The whole world has gone mad, Gus. Homeward, eh?'

She felt him, before she saw him coming. It was a swift sidewards lean. He didn't touch her anywhere except her lips. She was an observer no longer in control: her mind was still and her body active. She felt the deep tenderness in his kiss and she knew in her gut and in her groin that she wanted him. As she shifted forwards, kissing
him back, he pulled away. Without a comment, he turned on the ignition and started driving.