Burke had said that to me sitting at a zinc-topped bar in Mawanza. I was drinking warm beer because the electricity supply had been cut and the ice box behind the bar wasn’t working, and he was at his eternal coffee, the only thing he would drink in those days. We were half-way through that first contract in Katanga, had lost half our men and were going to lose most of the rest before it was over.
Sitting there at the bar, a machine pistol at my elbow, my face staring back at me from a bullet-scarred mirror, the situation had all the ingredients to hand of every Hollywood adventure film ever made. I remem-ber there was gunfire in the streets, the thud of mortar bombs, and now and again, the steady rattle of a heavy machine gun as they tried to clear snipers from the government offices across the square.
By all the rules and because I was not quite twenty years of age, it should have been romantic and adven-turous, just like an old Bogart movie. It wasn’t. I was sick of killing, sick of the brutality, the total inhuman-ity of it all.
I was at the end of my tether, ready to go straight over the edge and Burke had sensed it instinctively.
He’d started to talk, quietly and calmly. He was enor-mously persuasive in those days or perhaps it was just that I wanted to believe that he was. For me then, re-member, there had to be no flaw in him.
Before he was finished, he had me believing we were on a kind of holy crusade to save the black man from the consequences of his own folly.
‘Always remember, Stacey boy, there are two kinds of people in this world. The pianos and the piano players.’
An unnecessarily complicated metaphor to suggest that there were those who let it happen and those who did something about it, but at the time I had believed him. In any case, the local police turned against us late that evening and I was too busy trying to save my skin during the week that followed to have time for any-thing else.
Now, standing there on the mountainside, those words floated up from the past to haunt me, and re-membering the incident so clearly I realised, with a kind of wonder, that he hadn’t given a damn about me personally; it had been himself he was thinking about as it had always been. He had to straighten me out to his way of thinking because he needed me. Because I had become as essential to him as a gun in his hand. A first-rate deadly weapon. That’s what I was-all I had ever been.
I plodded on, the donkey trailing behind, my brain still filled with the past, which meant Burke. His re-lationship with Piet Jaeger had obviously been different in kind and he had certainly never put a foot wrong that way with me, presumably because his instincts had warned him off.
As I have said, in the beginning he barely tolerated my need for women and my propensity for hard liquor. Now, looking back and remembering how his attitude had changed to a kind of good-humoured acceptance where those things were concerned, I wondered to what extent he had come to realise that their existence made it much easier for him to mould me to his purpose.
Who was I, then, Stacey Wyatt or Sean Burke’s creature? No! To hell with that. I was myself alone, another kind of piano player, a man who played for himself and no one else.
We had been on the move now for the best part of four hours and when I stopped to check on the girl’s condition she looked exactly the same, but she was still breathing, the only important thing.
For myself, I had moved past pain, floated beyond it as I had done so many times in the Hole. My shoulder existed only as a dull ache, I had forgotten that I had a right arm at all and when the sun clouded over and heavy raindrops spattered the rocks about me, I stumbled on quite cheerfully, Stacey Wyatt, the great survivor.