The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers

Author:Douglas Rogers [Rogers, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907595110
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2010-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

The supermarkets weren’t completely empty. Mom had given me a shopping list, and I bought a bottle of brandy and a cucumber at Spar. Cucumbers were one of the few vegetables my parents didn’t grow or buy from the roadside traders. It was the last one left. I paid half a million for it and walked onto the street in triumph, holding it aloft like a bat, as if I’d just scored a century at Lord’s. Sadly, Dad wasn’t watching. He was distracted in the parking lot, haggling with a street vendor over the price of a bag of sugar and some rice. They came to a compromise and Dad handed the kid a brick of cash. Then the kid ran off down an alley without handing over the goods.

‘Jeez, what now?’ I blurted out. ‘He’s taken your bloody money!’

‘Watch this,’ Dad said calmly, and we drove slowly away. Suddenly the boy appeared, jogging by the side of the car in the face of oncoming traffic, innocently tossing bags of sugar and rice through the open window onto the back seat. Once the goods were safely in the back, Dad hooted and sped off, and the kid, acknowledging the hoot with a quick thumbs-up, wheeled away. This was a well-practised method of not getting caught dealing. ‘Really,’ said Dad, ‘you’d think I was buying crack.’ Outlaw characters rolled forth like a scene from a mad Western. Mutare once had been a town for newlyweds and nearly deads; now only the nearly deads remained. Most of my school friends had long gone, but their parents were still here. It was astonishing to see how many friends Mom and Dad still had left. Spending most of my time on the farm, I was under the impression that they and their few refugee tenants were the last, the diehards. But now I found others popping up all over town, the last of the bittereinders, forgotten by history.

Outside Frank Meglic’s plumbing shop Dad hooted at a demure white lady crossing the street, an old friend who was also in the backpacker business.

She grinned. ‘How are your prossies, Lyn?’

Everyone seemed to know about Drifters and its prostitutes. Dad quite liked the notoriety it gave him.

‘Ah, Anne, why don’t you join the game? It’s the way forward!’

‘I’m leaving that to you, Lyn. It’s my own house we’re talking about.’

They gossiped for a while about the backpacker lodge at the top of the main street that was now a full-time brothel, doing a booming lunchtime trade.

‘Wall-to-wall prossies,’ said Anne. ‘He’s raking it in.’

‘I told you, my dear. Join us! Give it a go!’

My parents really admired Anne Bruce. They told me she helped bereaved people arrange cremations for the newly dead nearly deads. Zimbabwe’s crematoriums no longer functioned because there was no gas to fire the furnaces, and the cemeteries in Mutare were too full because so many people had died of AIDS. But Anne had made friends among the Hindu community in the Indian quarter, and she had learned how to use their traditional wood pyre.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.