Susie had a brother
His name was Tiny Tim
She put him in the bath tub
To see if he could swim
He drank up all the water
He ate up all the soap
He tried to eat the bath plug
But it wouldn’t go down his throat.
It shocked her that Julie had not fenced her pool, or drained it for the winter.
‘Ali-pie,’ Julie said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘What do you mean by bringing your son here in bermuda shorts and a poove’s hat? It’s unpatriotic. Why don’t you get his hair cut?’ She drove with a masterful know-how through the complex erosion of highways where Johannesburg’s mining magnates had once held sway in graceful pilastered houses. ‘You must see many changes,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I mean with regard to concrete and steel. All our significant changes here have to do with concrete and steel. For the rest we jog along as always. One step backwards; one step forwards; two steps sideways. Funny place.’
‘Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?’ Ali asked gloomily. Julie, though Ali loved her, was proving a little abrasive.
‘Both,’ Julie said.
‘I’m told that my ex-husband has made money in concrete.’
‘Oh yes,’ Julie said. ‘He’s a pillar of society. And rather good-looking. Shapely, bald cranium, peppered with freckles. He gets interviewed on the television sometimes, sandwiched between the interminable nature programmes. Cranes heaving in the background and teams of blacks striding about in boiler suits. Would you like to meet him?’
‘Not particularly,’ said Ali. ‘He was never really my type. I think I’d rather watch the nature programmes.’
Julie laughed. ‘That’s what you say,’ she said. ‘After you’ve seen the umpteenth antelope leaping gracefully across the screen you’ll eat your words. The television here is afflicted by a glut of witless nature. That edifice presently impeding your sightlines, by the way, is the Rand Afrikaans University – speaking of changes as we were. The “Volk” are changing their class accoutrements, Ali, but not their voting habits.’
Time and distance had allowed Ali to forget until now that Julie, like many English-speaking South Africans, was capable, when referring to Afrikaaners, of sounding a bit like Goebbels on the Jews. ‘Time was when they were just a bunch of Dutch white trash,’ Julie was saying. ‘Just a bunch of proles. They slept in their underclothes; they tapped wheels on the railways all week and revved their Harley-Davidsons at weekends. Nine barefoot, snot-nosed kids at every doorway scratching at flea-bites and veld-sores. Do you remember how we used to say an Afrikaaner was someone who was always tinkering with his brake-linings?’
‘Not really,’ Ali said.
‘Well these bloody jumped-up Boers in there have mechanics to fix their motor cars,’ Julie said. ‘They wear cuff-links; they play cricket. They also play the stock market.’ She nodded backwards with a lively venom towards the retreating edifice of the Rand Afrikaans University. ‘Afrikaners in Park Town,’ she said. ‘Jesus doesn’t it rankle! The “Volk” are into capitalism, Ali. They cleaned up cheap after Sharpeville and look at them sitting pretty now. Do you remember when “capitalism’ along with all the other “isms” was a Jewish conspiracy cooked up to undermine the moral fibre of the race? Even Cubism was suspect.’
‘You sound a wee bit like an inverted Nazi,’ Ali said. ‘Do you realise that?’
Julie laughed. ‘Nazi? I’m a Jew. But as to these buggers, one used to believe that the Final Solution lay in importing three million Harley-Davidsons. In that respect, times have got more complex. I have to collect my post on campus,’ she said. ‘We’ll have lunch in the student caff, if that’s okay with your children. It’s early days, however. What are we doing? Do you fancy a little urban anthropology before we nosh? Let’s make a pre-prandial foray into the Rosebank Shopping Centre. It will amuse your children.’
At the shopping centre where she parked the car Julie purposefully brushed aside a collection of maimed beggars and blind basket-sellers to guide her visitors into the air-conditioned opulence within. The place was a hymn to conspicuous consumption where Persian carpets spilled from shop doorways and gold jewellery twinkled abundantly from behind electronically guarded plate glass. At the Bendy Babes clothing boutique Hattie pressed her nose to a window display of gold lame bikinis and diminutive disco-clobber for pre-pubertal females, and found that covetousness overcame her.
‘Please, Mummy,’ she said. ’Please, let’s go in. It’s all so fantastic! Only to try on. Not to buy anything.’
‘Your father would have a fit,’ Ali said, feebly, whose own idea of pre-teen party dress was still the Liberty lawn smock worn with sash and ankle socks. Julie pushed open the door.
‘Let’s stir things up a bit,’ she said wickedly. ‘It sounds to me as though your father is in receipt of too much deference, what with him sixty and all. Come on, Harriet, I’ll treat you.’
‘Please,’ Ali said. ‘You oughtn’t to.’
‘I’m rich, remember,’ Julie said. ‘Don’t get your knickers twisted, sweet Ali-pie. You keep out of this.’
Ali and Daniel idled awkwardly in the air-conditioned arcade, until Hattie emerged ten minutes later, the radiant owner of a fake leopard-skin two-piece comprising footless tights and matching sloppy Joe.
‘Isn’t it hideous?’ Julie said amiably. ‘You could suppose that the entire stock had been made for child prostitutes.’
‘If you’re so rich,’ Ali said, ‘Why do you pass up maimed beggars in the streets?’
‘Oh them,’ Julie said. ‘To give alms is merely to prop the system. Furthermore, you don’t in your innocence suppose that they’re freelance beggars, do you? They’re just front-men, Ali. Behind every one of them lies a big-time crook who’s lining his coffers with the bulk of the proceeds.’
‘Rubbish,’ Ali said. ‘You’re just too jolly tight-fisted to make a few hand-outs to blind cripples. Confine your paranoia to rich Afrikaaners. Why worry about rich blacks?’
Julie laughed. She barged unrepentant through the same half-dozen limbless paralytics on her way out to the motor car and set off hell-bent upon a winding whistle-stop tour of the city which caused Daniel to throw up into the crown of the straw hat. In Yeoville Julie pointed with puzzling gratification to tyre marks scorched into the tarmac, as evidence of proletarian Afrikaner youth – as yet untouched by cuff-links and the Rand Afrikaans University – who had executed wheelies in the meaner streets on motor bikes. Outside the Fontana Bakery in Hillbrow, the paving slabs moderately thick with off-beat amorous couples, Ali saw the first and only Rastafarian of her stay.
‘You see before you the five square yards in South Africa where amorous clutchings are proportionately gay and proportionately multi-racial,’ Julie said. ‘It is also probably the only five square yards in the country where whites are likely to mug blacks.’
‘How was Paris?’ Ali said. ‘Tell me something nice.’
‘Far away,’ Julie said. ‘Let’s not talk about it. I’m like whatshisname in Great Expectations. Jagger’s clerk. I won’t talk Weymouth in the courts of Chancery. If you want to stay sane in this place you cling to the cliches. “Europe’s okay, but it’s nice to be back in SA.” Ali-pie, the sun shines here, even in the winter. Not like in Paris. Nothing but drizzle and bloody dog-shit all over the streets. God, Ali, but it’s nice to see you again!’
In Fordsburg Julie drove with a perverse but holy anger past the empty, eyeless houses standing as testimony to the State’s recent removal of Asian shopkeepers.
‘Lunch, people,’ she said suddenly. ‘My stomach tells me it’s grub time. Let’s go and see what’s cooking.’
In the campus caff where they lined up for pastries and fruit juice the student population, predominantly white and glossy beyond Ali’s local rememberings, was scattered about among transglobal melamine-topped tables and Duralex glassware. A graceful young man, lounging like a young Athenian in a kitchen-boy suit, made s
tartling elegant haute-camp of that badge of black subjection. The female rump before Ali in the queue was clad in pressed white baggies, sexily brand-labelled ‘Bang-Bang’. Ali found it pleasing, but not so Julie.
‘Prudery and titillation have always made fond bed-fellows,’ she said. ‘If some local factory were to brand-name their jeans “Fuck-Fuck”, it would bring the place to a standstill. The double-entendre is precisely what makes it so acceptable.’
A significant minority of students clustered around the cash desk were wearing sweatshirts emblazened with computer printout portraits of Steve Biko.
‘But doesn’t it make you nervous?’ Ali said. ‘All this wearing of hearts on sleeves in what is generally considered to be a police state. All this standing up to be counted. What happens to them all when the tanks roll?’
‘When the tanks roll, I predict that most of this crew will be sitting behind desks in Houghton and getting on the ‘phone to their stockbrokers,’ Julie said viciously. ‘It’s a familiar process called mellowing. It happens to us all.’
‘Not all,’ Ali said. ‘It doesn’t happen to all. You may be right about some.’
‘Okay,’ Julie said, conceding the point as if it made no difference. ‘It happens to some.’
They sat at a table already partially occupied by two coiffed undergrad starlets in backless glass slippers who, having eaten their fill of yoghurt and apples, were now retouching their mouths in turn, with a shared lip-brush.
‘If my Mom’s bloody maid hasn’t ironed my bloody jeans for tomorrow’s demo, I’ll bloody kill her, no kidding!’ announced one of the starlets, shutting her compact with a commanding snap. She rose promptly to her feet, having offered the grist to Julie’s mill. But it did not signify, Ali thought, that a handful of the affluent young sowed their oats in the furrows of protest politics and moved on. There would always be those, like Thomas, who were steady and true. ‘I’ll sight you, Sandra,’ said the starlet. ‘I’ve got Psycho II at two. Then I’ve got Socio. and Soc. Anth.’
‘This is a mad place,’ Ali said. ‘Julie, why do you live here?’
‘Why not?’ Julie said. ‘The blacks live here, don’t they? Most of them have no choice. To up and leave as we did – that was hardly a heroic gesture. It was merely to demonstrate that us white folks owned not only this country but the whole world.’
‘Yes,’ Ali said. But she wanted to say simply that being back there had seemed to burn Julie up inside.
‘Speaking of our respective domicile,’ Julie said, ‘there is somebody else here right now from Blauwildebeestfontein like you. Did you know that? A literary genius in residence. He hangs out here in the caff with a clutch of indigenous admirers.’ In the far corner, following the direction of Julie’s indicating arm, Ali observed with little surprise that Mervyn Bobrow was holding court.
‘He says that he’s writing a novel,’ Julie said. ‘South African writing is very chic right now, of course. He’ll stick around here in the Wits caff for two months and then he’ll go off and write some highbrow skiet-endonder, choc-full of dust and barbed wire, for which he’ll get a publisher’s advance and, following upon that, a sheaf of admiring British weeklies saying that he’s captured “the valid smell of the veld”. As if those poor uitlanders could tell the smell of the veld from the smell of frying chapatis.’ Mervyn Bobrow, accompanied by his delighted youthful coterie, had begun to make his way to the exit.
‘He’s asked us to dinner tonight,’ Julie said. ‘I told him I had a friend.’ So that was it, Ali thought. She had come six thousand miles to dine with the Bobrows!
‘And does he happen to know that the friend in question is me?’ Ali said.
‘Not a bit of it,’ Julie said. ‘But you’re coming with me. Have you met him then?’
‘I was married to him once,’ Ali said.
‘To him?’Julie said. ‘First a prospective prince of concrete, then a Jewish genius and then a Jewish doctor? Well done, Ali-pie! If my mother weren’t senile she’d be inflamed with envy on my behalf. I confess to a small twinge of it myself.’
‘Nonsense,’ Ali said. ‘Julie, you always had more men than I’d had hot breakfasts. They were like bees around hollyhocks with you.’
‘Maybe so,’ Julie said. ‘I never had the art of keeping them. I was always too much capable of looking after myself. It’s called “bossiness” in women. You’re lucky. Being vulnerable comes naturally to you. You may get knocked around, but you’ll never be alone. With me – only sissies ever wanted to stay with me. Who wants sissies?’
‘Daniel’s a sissy,’ Hattie said, trading loyalty in the hope of achieving a slice of the discourse, but all in vain.
‘I aren’t,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m a boy.’
‘Sissies are always boys, dumb-dumb,’ Hattie said.
‘How’s Thomas?’ Ali said. ‘Thomas Adderley.’ Julie laughed.
‘Lovely – and married,’ she said. ‘Thomas thrives. He grows straight and true in this place. God knows how. He used to teach school, do you know? The silly bugger took his Grade A mind and went teaching in a government school. Of course, most male schoolteachers go in straight lines to headships but not so Thomas. He got thrown out. He had some distinctly Cubist ideas where it came to the teaching of History, I believe. Anybody with sense knows that school History is a case of facing Mecca and chanting Blood River and The Great Trek five times a week. What do you suppose is the matter with our darling Mot?’
‘I heard tell that he wrote plays,’ Ali said. ‘You can’t eat plays, can you? How does he eat?’
‘I give him my salary,’ Julie said.
‘Jesus!’ Ali said, and it crossed her mind that she probably owed Julie the price of a hotel room in Paddington. ‘I’m sorry, Julie. And I said you were tight-fisted.’
‘So I am on the whole,’ Julie said. ‘But I believe in his talent and I have considerable shares in gold. I have strong vested interests here in a system which Thomas would like to see in sackcloth. Do you enjoy these contradictions, Ali-pie?’
‘Only when I’m with you,’ Ali said.
‘These two small persons, here,’ Julie said abruptly, changing the subject. ‘Were they got upon you by the genius or the medic?’
‘The medic,’ Ali said. ‘I have a grown-up daughter by the genius who is at Cambridge right now.’
‘I see,’ Julie said.
‘And you?’ Ali said. ‘You never had any?’
‘Not me,’ Julie said. ‘Not even a pussy cat. I don’t like nurturing, remember.’ Ali wondered whether it was altogether idiotic to hope that some wonderful, aberrant Afrikaner from the Rand Afrikaans University would fall in love with Julie at a cricket match and dazzle her with the brightness of his cuff-links. She decided that it was.
Mrs Bobrow glanced anxiously around the dining room that evening. The anonymity of the place, with its standard campus-issue furniture, was disturbing to her confidence. Teak veneer and plastic foam did not justly reflect one’s personality. Since the evening’s menu was, she flattered herself, ‘exotic’, she had given time and effort to getting the extending table as much as possible into line. Two miniature ‘table forests’ and a box of moss and pebbles stood equidistant from two glass carafes containing reeds and green bamboo stalks, and yet the suspicion remained with her that the thing looked set for a Rotary Club lunch. At home one’s dining table had Jacobean legs, even if there was some doubt about the authenticity of the top. In short one had an infrastructure supportive to one’s projection of self. Yet it was ludicrous to be anxious. Being a ‘woman-in-one’s-own-right’ as one was – and God only knew there were few enough of the species in these hallowed groves of bridge-club and coffee-morning wives – this ought surely to expunge one’s unease about the unacceptability of paper table napkins, for example. For the paper table napkins Mervyn was wholly to blame. She had sent him out expressly to buy cloth napkins that morning, but he had returned without them. He had passed the time instead dazzling undergraduates in the stu
dent cafe. And even now he was not yet home. Mervyn had not been himself lately, she thought. He had been snappish and unpredictable. He had begun to cut corners in the scrupulous division of domestic labour which they had always upheld and had had the effrontery to use as his excuse that the flat ‘came’ with a servant. A hopelessly decadent black woman who coated the bathroom fixtures each morning with a half-inch layer of scouring powder before going on to monopolise the Bobrows’ telephone for the best part of the day. Eva had been obliged to play the ‘White Madam’ and buy a padlock for the telephone dial. The woman used Fairy Liquid as though it grew on trees and pinched the Bobrows’ gin. It piqued Eva that so much of her creative energy was consumed these days in watching the housemaid in a place where Mervyn appeared to be thriving. It compromised her progressive credentials. Mervyn was becoming chronically manic. He had shirked on his commitment to supervise Lucy’s holiday project-work. She had begun to suspect him of being a little sweet on the Horowitz woman and for this reason she had played matchmaker for the evening and had invited along a charming Norwegian expert in police repression whom she had met during the course of her researches into black women’s self-help groups. Now Mervyn had once again upset her plans by inviting Ms Horowitz with a female friend. A person from Europe, to be sure, but one for all that who would effectively upset the symmetry of the seating arrangements.
The self-help groups, to say true, had begun to get Eva down. She had found them a great disappointment. False-consciousness was everywhere and Methodism, along with a variety of more extreme manifestations of patriarchal Victorian evangelism, appeared to be rife among black woman machinists and garment workers. She had made the observation recently to Thomas Adderley, who had been unsuitably sanguine in reply. He had quoted to her what he called an old local adage, that whereas once in South Africa the whites had got the Bible and the blacks had got the land, the thing was now reversed: the blacks had the Bible and the whites had the land. But Eva, as she had put him down for his levity, had reminded him that the thing was no laughing matter. As far as the women’s movement was concerned, a preoccupation with the after-life was a severe impediment to the way forward. Thomas could not see why. Christianity, like all religions, he said, contained the inspiration for advance as well as retreat. In the context, salvationism lifted people up. It gave them dignity, unity and hope.
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