The Courier

He lifted his head. In front of him, the x-ray cubicle stood open, waiting for him like a giant, Perspex capsule. To his right was the conveyor belt that scanned outgoing luggage and to his left was another guard in a white coat, watching from behind a screened-off booth. His name was Volker, and he’d worked the x-ray unit for the last two years. He rapped on the reinforced glass.

‘Stand up!’

Mani struggled to his feet, the diamond slicing through his gut. Volker tapped the keyboard in front of him.

‘Name?’

‘Mani…’ His voice cracked. Then he cleared his throat and lifted his chin. ‘Mani Eduardo Tavares Villa dos Santos.’

Volker’s eyes narrowed at the full Portuguese name. Mani kept his chin raised. He’d spent most of his life trying to live up to that name. His parents had been Angolans, living half their lives under Portuguese rule, the rest under bloody civil war. His surname followed the Portuguese pattern of combining both their names. But his maternal grandmother had been Congolese, a strong, raucous woman who’d lived in the shadow of the Blue Mountains close to the Congo River. She’d asked that her first grandson be given a Congolese name, so he became Mani, meaning ‘from the mountain’. He could still hear his father’s scornful voice: The man from the mountain, he should be a warrior with a gun, not a mouse with a book.

Mani squared his shoulders, trying to ignore the fiery pain in his belly.

Volker stepped out from behind the screen, his redrimmed eyes fixed on Mani’s face. Mani gritted his teeth, then rolled up his left sleeve to show the bandage on his upper arm. Slowly, he unravelled the filthy dressing to expose the knife wound underneath. He sucked in air at the sight of it. Red, raw flesh bulged out through a gaping rent in his skin. The puckered edges were too far apart to knit together, but so far there was no sign of infection. No oozing pus, no bad smell. He knew what to look for because that was what had happened to Ezra.

He took a deep breath. Then he pressed the misshapen folds of flesh. Pain blazed a trail up his arm and he felt himself sway. Fighting the dizziness, he kneaded the wound until two silvery-white stones worked their way out, each the size of a large pea. He picked them up with trembling fingers and dropped them with a clatter into the metal dish that Volker was holding out.

Mani closed his eyes, the hot stabbing in his arm starting to recede. He could hear the whoosh of running water and the rattle of stones against metal. When he opened his eyes, Volker was back in his booth. Mani fumbled with his bandage, binding up his wound.

Volker flicked a switch on his console. ‘Into the cubicle.’

Mani shuffled into the x-ray capsule, positioning himself in the centre of the circular platform. The door slid shut with a whunk. A motor hummed as the C-arm of the x-ray machine enclosed the base of the cubicle and began inching its way up along the walls. Mani felt his limbs relax, the pain in his arm now a dull throb. He closed his eyes. Thank God tomorrow was his last day at the mine.

He had only come back because Ezra had begged him to, saying that he was ill. At first, Mani had refused. He had exams to sit, a scholarship to honour. He didn’t have time to return to his home village where children coughed in their sleep, and where Asha now lived as Ezra’s wife. So he sent money instead. But Ezra pleaded with him, saying that he might die. Blood poisoning from a knife wound, he’d said. He didn’t explain till later that the knife wound was self-inflicted.

So Mani had gone to see him, bracing himself for the crushing misery of the shantytown he’d managed to escape. His was a family of diamond diggers. His grandfather had crawled along the Angolan sand dunes, scrabbling for diamonds by hand, carrying them in the tin can that hung around his neck. The mine owners had stuffed a gag in his mouth to stop him from swallowing any stones. Mani’s father had washed gravel by the riverbeds, gripped by a gambler’s conviction that the next stone would change his life. When Mani was ten, his father moved them to the Northern Cape in South Africa, where he swapped riverbed mining for the underground pits. He’d been killed in a fight over a diamond the size of a sunflower seed.

‘You must take my place in the mine,’ Ezra had said when Mani went home. ‘Until I am well.’

Mani had looked away. The shack was dark, filled with the oily smell of the Primus stove. He shook his head.

‘I will send you more money, I will find another job in Cape Town.’ He already worked two jobs between his studies, sending most of his money home, but anything was better than the incarceration of the mines.

Ezra sighed. ‘Money, it will not be enough.’

Mani squinted at his brother’s face. Ezra’s eyes were feverish, his voice weak. What trouble had he got himself into now? Mani knelt beside the bed, the mud floor warm from the heat of the day.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘The Van Wycks mine.’ Ezra licked his parched lips. ‘There is something about it you need to know.’

And then, in the smoky, stifling hut, Ezra had explained.

He’d been on a toilet break when he found the first stone. He’d wandered up to the waste pit behind the latrine, putting off going back to his shift, and the diamond had glowed at him from underneath the rubble.

Ezra’s eyes glazed over. ‘It was bigger than a sparrow-hawk’s egg.’

He’d hidden it again beneath a deeper pile of stones until he could figure out what to do with it. One thing was certain: if there was one diamond, there were others. But after several furtive visits to the pit, he still hadn’t found any more.

Then late one night, he’d thought about the waste rock. Most of it was debris, discarded by the crusher and the separation plant. But piled here and there were larger boulders, the kind Van Wycks had been dumping for years. The geologists had tested them but declared them uneconomical to mine. So they fell uncrushed out of the separation plant and ended up in the waste pits along with the rest of the rubble.

But what if the Van Wycks scientists were wrong?

The next time Ezra had visited the waste pit, he’d taken a lump hammer with him.

Mani stared at his brother in the smoke-filled hut, the crackle of the cooking fires starting up outside. ‘You broke up the boulders?’

‘Van Wycks, they were wrong.’ Ezra’s eyes were bright. ‘One boulder, it gave me three diamonds, over a hundred and fifty carats each.’

He went on to explain how he’d smuggled the diamonds out. A cousin of theirs supplied cocaine to many of the mercenaries guarding the mine, and according to him, the x-ray operator was in deeper than most. Volker, it turned out, was more than willing to take payment in diamonds in exchange for clearing Ezra’s x-rays.

Ezra had brought his first stones out of the mine over a year ago and sold them on the local black market.

‘For a day, I was rich.’ Ezra closed his eyes and smiled, his gums a ghostly grey around his missing tooth.

Mani groaned. Like his father, Ezra never held on to money for long. Drink and gambling usually soaked up most of it. ‘What happened?’

Ezra dragged his eyes open, the smile gone. ‘Stones that big, it is hard to keep them a secret.’

Avoiding Mani’s gaze, he explained how he’d woken up in the dark, after several days of celebrating. His drunken friends were gone, and so was all his money. But he wasn’t completely alone. Kneeling over him was a man in dark clothes, his white face smeared with mud. The blade of his knife was pricking Ezra’s throat.

Three other men had crept out of the shadows and held Ezra down while the first man wielded his knife. First he carved it along Ezra’s chin, then sliced it into his shoulder, then worked his way down into the softer areas of flesh, until finally Ezra gave them what they wanted. From now on, he was to act as their courier, funnelling large stones out of the mine and selling exclusively to them. He’d been following their orders now for almost a year.

Mani stared around the dingy shack. ‘But then, where is all the money?’

Ezra swallowed, his throat working hard. ‘He pays me next to nothing.’ His eyes slid over to the hanging sack that served as a door. On the other side of it, Asha was stoking the fire. ‘If I don’t do as he says, he will kill us.’

And then Ezra told him what the man with the knife had said, as he’d left him whimpering on the ground. Go home and see what I have done, just in case you feel like changing your mind.

And so Mani had learned the truth about how his mother had died.

The x-ray machine clanked to a halt. The cubicle door slid open and Mani stepped outside. Volker was still at his console. Mani didn’t know how the guard smuggled out his stones, but white workers weren’t subjected to as many searches as blacks.

Mani exhaled a long breath. His body felt warm and sluggish. Today was his last time. The last time he’d open his gullet to swallow a diamond so big it tore up his insides. The last time he’d cram stones into a seeping wound, tears burning his eyes. The last time he’d drink the foul mixture of water and spoiled milk that would purge his body out.

His brief contract with Van Wycks was up. Tomorrow Volker would clear him and the contraband in his luggage as he finally left the compound. And he was never coming back.

Volker raised his head. ‘You can go.’

Mani nodded, making his way towards the exit. ‘Tomorrow there will be more.’

Volker shrugged. ‘I won’t be here.’

Mani froze. He stared at the guard. ‘But I leave the compound. You must pass me through x-ray, my luggage—’

‘You’ll have to make other arrangements.’ Volker turned back to his console. ‘My time here is up, I leave this evening. It’s getting too risky, Okker’s asking questions. My replacement starts in the morning.’

Mani’s head swam. Heat washed over him as he thought of Ezra in his stinking shack, of Asha whom he’d loved since he was ten, of his mother who’d fought to keep him at school, of Alfredo, of Takata. But most of all, he thought of the killers waiting on the next shipment of stones.