Gunship Over Angola полностью

Our group grew larger as new members arrived and we booked tickets for the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which was banned in South Africa at the time as being ‘scandalous blasphemy’ of the worst kind. One of the new arrivals was Angie, who was from somewhere on the Gold Coast of Australia. She immediately attracted the close scrutiny and attention of every fellow in the group as she was built like a Playboy model (I didn’t know what that meant, but the other, less-hillbilly guys explained).

On the evening of the performance, she arrived in the foyer of our hotel, where we were gathering before leaving for the Odeon Theatre, dressed in the tightest-fitting pair of denim jeans in global history.

Quite innocently, I asked, ‘Jeez Angie, how in blazes name do you get into those jeans?’

‘Well, mate, you start by buying me a drink!’ she said.

The vacuum resulting from the instantaneous headlong rush to the bar by the tour’s masculine contingent nearly created a hole in the space-time continuum.

Four days later we flew to Munich and spent the day travelling from pub to pub quaffing significant quantities of Weissbier (wheat beer), as planned. Understandably, none of us recalled much of the three-hour coach journey from Munich to Neustift-im-Stubaital later that evening.

I woke up the next morning feeling thick-headed (more so than usual) in what turned out to be a delightfully cosy and hospitable little Gasthaus (inn) located right on the edge of the main square of Neustift. The town was situated at the bottom of the Stubaital. The valley floor appeared to rise gently before suddenly towering steeply upwards to where the Stubai glacier began its frozen tumble down from the top of its 4 000-metre-high Alpine source. The lower reaches of a renowned ski run called the Schlick wound their insanely precipitous way down through the trees on the mountainside directly opposite my vantage point. I could see the minute figures of expert skiers hurtling down its crazy slopes even though it was still early in the morning.

In the square below me, groups of novice skiers, carrying their skis on their shoulders, dressed in padded suits and multicoloured woollen beanies, were waiting for a bus to take them up the valley to the cableway station at the foot of the Stubai glacier for a day of carefree fun and frolicking in the snow and ice. It struck me that the most critical decision I would make that day would probably be related to what I was going to order to eat, and that the situation from which I’d been extracted just a week before could not have been more different from where I now found myself.

For the first few days, all of us novices attended a training course on the baby slopes within the confines of the village, designed specifically to equip beginners with sufficient skills to prevent us from falling on the icy paths between the various village pubs and our respective hotels. Only once those initial skills had been absorbed and demonstrated to the satisfaction of skiing instructors would we be let loose on the ski slopes proper. Part of the instruction was learning to fall without incurring crippling injuries.

I fell down.

I fell down a great deal, sometimes while skiing, and it is inarguable testimony to the expert tutelage of the skiing instructors that I am still alive today.

At the beginning of our stay in Neustift, our tour overlapped for two days with one run by the same company that was coming to an end after being based in the village for more than a fortnight. In the outgoing tour party were five Rhodesian chaps. I was told by reliable sources that the Rhodies had done everything in their power, 24 hours a day, for the past two weeks, to drink the Stubaital dry. They were quite easy to identify, as they always wore T-shirts over whatever else they’d donned that day. The T-shirts had ‘Advice to every terrorist’ on the front and ‘Go fuck yourself before we do!’ on the back.

Being the only person from Africa in my tour party, I felt duty-bound to introduce myself to these fellow southern Africans and to buy them all a beer. I also hoped to glean some important information from them regarding local conditions, such as the best pubs and clubs, dos and don’ts of a general nature, and where best to make contact with the ladies.

‘Fuck, man,’ slurred the first Rhodie, ‘even the fucking shithouses have fucking pubs in them! Go any-fucking-where, the bastard motherfuckers who created this shithole made sure that it’s fucking great!’

The second said something along the lines of ‘We have only fucking been arrested four fucking times by those cock-sucking Gestapo police pricks since we fucking got here, but I can’t fucking remember why so there aren’t that many fucking rules here, I think!’