It started in a small bare cement-walled room somewhere in the bowels of the city police station. There were two of them. The room had no ceiling, just bare rafters and I was hanging by my arms from one of the rafters. They had started with me seated on a chair. They even asked nicely where my father was. I answered politely that I didn’t know. The nice treatment lasted for less than an hour and then they strung me up and started to beat me. They beat me with a wet towel. Somebody had misinformed them that a wet towel leaves no marks. Hit often enough with a wet towel and marks do appear. This didn’t seem to worry them as they hit me more and more, all the time asking where my father was. I didn’t tell. I needed to give my father enough time to get out of the country.
My father was a journalist who made the fatal mistake of thinking he could offer the truth for publication in the dying days of apartheid. He went into hiding to start with, but, when the truth about Steve Biko came to light, he feared for his life and decided he was more useful telling the truth in the UK than buried in a secret grave in South Africa. He made arrangements to go into exile.
The short fat captain with a pencil slim moustache and a double chin did not touch me. He sat in the chair in front of me and gave orders to the young constable who wielded the wet towel. He was blonde and had the palest blue eyes I had ever seen on anybody. What I also noticed was a scar under his one eye. As he beat me, I tried to take my mind away from the pain that traversed my whole body with every stroke of the towel, and I imagined that the scar was a dueling scar. The constable never said a word, but just took orders, shouted in Afrikaans by the captain. The room had one small window with bars, and I could see when the light turned to dark and then light again as the beating continued. I seem to remember the light was fading when I could take no more and to my eternal shame told them where they might find my father.
The physical pain eventually ended, but not the mental pain. That I was to feel all my life. My body healed in a prison sick ward. My father was never seen again. My mother and I eventually got to England, the land of her birth. I was a qualified doctor and had no problem in getting a job with a country practice in North Wales. My mother died soon after. She just didn’t want to live without my father. I met a lot of nice women, but could not relate to anybody who could not understand the pain that existed, day after day, in the recesses of my mind; that is until I met Lynn, who had grown up in apartheid South Africa. She understood the guilt and pain that I carried. She let me talk and cry and comforted me. It was no surprise to me, at least, when we got married.
Life was good except on the occasions that I dreamt of the room and the man with the scar and the lifeless eyes. We had three children and we lived in a beautiful old house in a shady lane on the outskirts of the village. I became a partner in the practice. Our children grew up and went to university and all three became doctors like myself. Life was as good as it could get until a particular day almost thirty years after I arrived in the UK. I was in the village chemist during my lunch hour to collect a prescription for Lynn. I was standing just behind a large man with scraggly blonde hair. As he got his prescription and turned round, I saw pale blue eyes and a still visible scar below his one eye. My blood ran cold as I watched the fat middle aged man depart.
The chemist assistant asked me if I was all right, as I looked very pale. I replied that I was fine but thought that I recognised the man she had just served.
“Quite likely, Doc. He comes from your part of the world. He’s a Mr. de Jong and lives in Elm Cottage only a street away from you,” she said.
The chemist assistant had to remind me to take Lynn’s prescription. As I walked back to the surgery I retreated into the mental fog of hatred, as I had some thirty years before. I wanted revenge for my father and also for the suffering I had endured. That afternoon the stream of patients that came into my office and left, were just a dream. I went to the files on my computer and sure enough a Tinus de Jong of Elm cottage was a patient of ours, but our paths had never crossed. He seemed to always see Martin, one of my partners. Once home I told Lynn about de Jong. As always, she listened and when I had finished, she asked me what I was going to do.
“You are going to have to do something or his presence here is going to eat you up. You can stew and get yourself mentally ill or you can face him.”
“Or I can kill him,” I said. Lynn did not answer.
I did not tell Lynn that I had decided to do something about de Jong. I prepared for what I was going to do and bided my time. It had to happen eventually. Martin was away at a conference and a call came to the surgery for a house call to Mr. de Jong who was having chest pains. I felt elated as I drove the short distance to his house. As he lived alone, it was de Jong who answered the door. I felt good looking at this fat slug of a man with the cruel eyes and scar. It felt good because revenge would soon be mine. I made him sit in a chair and told him I was going to give him an injection for the pain. I injected a ketone derivative that, within a minute, had paralysed him, but he was still conscious. I stood over him. “Do you remember beating the son of a journalist until he betrayed his father. That is me and my revenge is going to be short and sweet,” I said.
He looked at me with fear in his eyes. He tried to plead, but words failed to come from his lips. I filled another syringe with Brucine from an unmarked bottle.
“I am now going to inject Brucine into you. It will first of all increase your heart pain and then it will stop your heart,” I said.
I depressed the syringe. I saw horrible fear in his eyes, far worse than that I had experienced at his hand. He started shaking and then he was still. His pale blue eyes still had fear in them. It was good to see. I stayed with the body long enough for the ketone to break down. I wasn’t worried about the Brucine as it never showed up in post mortem tests. I phoned the surgery to arrange for the body to be collected, went back to the surgery and filled in a death certificate.
I felt quite calm when I went home to Lynn that evening and told her what happened. When I had finished, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “You didn’t kill him. I couldn’t let you do it. I looked in your bag and saw a little unmarked bottle and guessed what you were going to do. I emptied it and put in distilled water. You did get your revenge. He died of fright and now you can purge your mind of the bad memories. We can now get on with our lives happier than we have ever been, my darling!”
I can’t visualize those cold blue eyes anymore and the nightmares have gone.
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Image: Hasan Almasi on Unsplash remixed