The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  Somewhere in an illegal’s few possessions was something she didn’t know existed: a suit. Perhaps it had been kept hanging in its plastic bag in the garage shed. He dressed in it to go to Motsamai’s colleague lawyer. He had said he should go alone, and clearly was confident to do this. He looked at ease in this fashionable loose-jacketed version of the outfit that marks the category of respectable citizen as the black robe marks the category of the judge, and as he did in grease-monkey overalls. She sees that an illegal has to be some sort of chameleon, along with all the other subterfuges to be resorted to. She accompanied him, after all. There might be difficulties with language.

  When they were in the lawyer’s rooms, he did all the talking, the manner an insistent alternation of rapidity and groping, at once frustrated and forceful. He found the words: the lawyer understood them, their gist was another language between the two men. Some papers were produced to sign. The man had a fold of pink loose skin that settled from under thick tabby eyebrows halfway down over his upper eyelids; there was something hypnotic about this feature. There would be an application for the 14 days’ grace to be extended, there were particular persons in certain departments to be approached, all this would be done forthwith. Then the real process of obtaining permanent residence status could begin. All considerations were perfectly understood and noted. The client would be kept informed.

  Five days, four days, left of the fourteen. Then there was the reprieve—the hypnotist informed his client of an extension of another fourteen days granted on grounds of the legal representative’s further investigation of the case to be presented. They didn’t appear at The Table. In grease-monkey guise he still went every morning to the garage in a ritual that had lost its purpose. They didn’t go out at night. They lay in their bed or sat on the step warm from the day’s sun, and talked into the dark of the night garden. They had lived with nothing but the present and now they talked about the future that would come or never come. It was there, theirs, existed for them.

  What’s it you’d really like to do?

  Computer science. Study some more.

  We could run a project together, while you prepare …

  Cape Town would be a nice place.

  While you study, there could be a small project, I’ve thought of it vaguely sometimes, copyright agency on Internet, website not office, so many people I know in the arts and entertainment don’t know how copyright works, they’re conned every day. I’m fairly familiar with these things through the PR contacts I’ve had.

  Cape Town … beautiful place, they say.

  Yes, maybe; we could. We should go somewhere away from everything here. Holidays there, of course, all my life—but I’ve never lived there. Wonderful holidays, as a kid—the sea.

  You like it. To live.

  Always wanted to live at the sea, I don’t know why I didn’t find the energy to take myself off somewhere. And you? The sea.

  I don’t know it. Not at all.

  She squeezes his hand that is palm-to-palm with hers: the sand, dust. The sea is the ultimate oasis of the dry world, its depths various with life, its surface free, with crossings that have no frontier, the tides rising on this coastline, then that.

  On the seventh day of the reprieve the lawyer leaves a message on her voice-mail. They are to come to him at three-thirty.

  He absents himself from the garage without explanation—that doesn’t matter now. She drives him to the cottage to change; she doesn’t like to tell him it’s not necessary to get into the suit, his elegant jeans will do. They both have that strange constriction of the gullet, as if some drawn breath has lodged there. The expression beneath the flap of flesh, the half-hood, is unchanged. The lawyer shakes their hands; hers, his, and they all sit. When he speaks it is only to the foreigner because it is to him that what he has to say applies—the girl is Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ daughter, Motsamai informed—there is no threat to her, she belongs. All possible avenues have been explored. Up to the highest level, he might add. Motsamai had been most helpful. There is no possibility that permanent residence will be granted. He greatly regrets to say: nothing further can be done, by himself or anyone else. He must tell the client this in order to save vain hopes and useless expenditure. —To be frank—even if you were to consider it as a desperate measure, not even money could find the right hand. As you must have read in the papers, there is a big exposure of corruption in that very area, that very Department, right now.—

  What is left to ask; but they wait.

  First the lawyer repeats what he has told; clients often don’t want to hear, don’t take in bad news, they’ve believed in him beyond professional fallibility, beyond circumstances of their own making, beyond repair.

  Now suddenly he talks to the girl as if what he has to say needs to be broken to the client through someone close to him—too blunt to be borne directly. —He will have to leave the country within ten days. I was able to extend that from a week, for him.—

  Chapter 13

  They go back—are back—at the EL-AY Café. Where else is there to go, for her? And for him, there never was anywhere, anyone.

  She tells their story to her friends over and over, as this one and that joins The Table at different points in the recounting. They want all the details, it’s their way of showing concern; they repeat them, weighing them over, asking the same questions, a part-song. All around, the coming-and-going, the laughter, scraping of chairs, winding of tape-music, tossing back of hair, flamboyant greetings, murmurs, is unabated: The Table might just as well be having a birthday party.

  —Told you before, my Brother, disappear. That’s the only way. Like the Mozambiquans, Congolese, Kenyans, what-not.—

  —But he’d better make it somewhere else. Durban, Cape Town, clear out of here.—

  —Absolutely not! This’s the only one big enough, it’s the labyrinth to get lost in.—

  —Of course, else how do all these others get away with it? Tell me. Tripping over their carvings and schmuck on every pavement—you find them everywhere gabbling happily in their Swahili or French or whatever. So many of them no-one can get a hold. Sheer numbers. They can’t be caught.—

  —It’s night in there, man. They’re black like me. This guy here, Abdu, he’s not one of them, his face and everything—it tells the story.—

  —Schmuck—what’s that—

  —Not some kind of dope, I can tell you—kitsch, if you’re able to recognize it when you see it.—

  —I still think you had the wrong lawyer. You’re just too well-brought-up, Julie, Northern Suburbs clean-hands stuff, God-on-Sundays only sees a sparrow fall, girl, he doesn’t deliver thou-shalt-not to corporate fixings but he ordains it isn’t nice to use crooked lawyers. You can’t tell me something couldn’t be fixed. Christ, the top man down at Home Affairs here has just been relieved of his job, grounds of corruption …—

  Julie is sounding the wood of The Table with spread fingers. —I’m not so innocent, not of what’s done where I come from or at Home Affairs. It’s just what you’ve suggested that’s the problem. When it comes to fixing. No fancy scruples. We’ve got it on good authority that everyone down there is scared stiff to open a hand, now. He’d only find himself arrested for offering bribes, in addition to everything else—

  —Naa-arh … the higher you go the less chance you have of being reached. You can’t tell me that with the right connections …—

  Thinking of her father, yes; there’s always been an undercurrent of keen awareness of her father’s money The Table concealed from Julie, in contrast with the lack of vintage Rovers in the background of this speaker and others among the friends. The exceptions—her fellow escapees from the Northern Suburbs—know that Nigel Ackroyd Summers would not approach a cabinet minister with whom he dines to ask that this illegal alien from a backward country should continue to sleep with his daughter. From one of them, a quick dismissal: —That’s just not on, Andy.—

  —But you can’t tell me …—


  —If all those hundreds—thousands—get away with it, there must be a solution. You have to ask around. Everywhere.—

  Where is there?

  She waits for answers that do not come; the friends have always huddled together with solutions for everything that happens to any one of them. The alternative solutions of alternative lives?

  Even if it were only, in the life of the one sitting among them every day under life-sentence of AIDS, to transform the news from unbearable to the solace of laughter, that time.

  —Disappear, my Brother. Like I say.—

  Their old hanger-on, the poet, has been present, silent through repetitions of the story. He folds a sheet torn from his chap-book on which he’s just written something and pushes it into her hand.

  Back at the cottage she comes upon a crackling in the shirt pocket over her left breast. She feels about the pocket everywhere, ask everywhere takes out a bit of paper, distrait, he is drinking water, one glass, two glasses, deep swallows over the sink, he gasps with the last and slowly shakes his head. She unfolds the paper and reads what is there.

  ‘This isn’t all but it’s the first part and it’s by someone called William Plomer you wouldn’t know of.

  Let us go to another country

  Not yours or mine

  And start again.

  To another country? Which?

  One without fires, where fever

  Lurks under leaves, and water

  Is sold to those who thirst?

  And carry dope or papers

  In our shoes to save us starving?

  Hope would be our passport,

  The rest is understood

  Just say the word.

  (Sorry, don’t remember how it ends.)’

  She has read it aloud to him, but it is meant for her.

  Chapter 14

  Dumb.

  Might as well be. When they are talking about matters you know better than they do or ever will. You are dumb if you can’t speak—speak their language as they do. You have to use your lips and tongue for the other purpose, your penis and even the soles of your feet, caressing hers in the bed, in place of your opinions, convictions.

  What use is that, now?

  He can’t make love. She has never experienced this with any other of her lovers. Without saying anything to her he takes the car—where has he gone? He comes back with the belongings he had left in his grease-monkey outhouse at the garage. The canvas bag with frayed labels addressed in that unfamiliar script sags on the floor of the room where they have eaten and slept, together.

  He asks her if she knows where he can get a cheap air ticket. Of course she knows; her work with those pop groups and conference personnel means she has contacts with travel agencies and airlines. And then she’s looking at him, into him, in disbelief, as he speaks.

  You’ll do it for me? Or find where I must do it.

  Her breasts are rising and falling under the sweater and the nostrils of her fine nose (he has never thought her beautiful but has always, since the first day when he came out from under a car, thought it so) are stiffened and flared. Something will happen, tears, an outburst—he must come quickly over to avert whatever it may be, he has his arms around her as you might resort to putting a hand over someone’s mouth.

  What she is struggling with, not only in this moment of practical confrontation but all the time, the days that are crossed off with every coming of the light through the gap in the curtains above the bed where they lie, cannot be discussed with him. Not yet.

  Disappear. Like I say.

  Either way. He disappears into another city, another identity, keeps clear; or he disappears into deportation.

  They go back again at night to the EL-AY Café, away from the silence in the cottage and the slumped canvas bag, because there’s usually likely to be there someone to whom she has always felt closest, among the friends.

  The struggle stays clenched tightly inside her. It possesses her, alien to them, even to those she thought close; and makes them alien to her. She feels she never knew them, any of them, in the real sense of knowing that she has now with him, the man foreign to her who came to her one day from under the belly of a car, frugal with his beautiful smile granted, dignified in a way learnt in a life hidden from her, like his name. Her crowd, Mates, Brothers and Sisters. They are the strangers and he is the known.

  So what’s happening?

  —A bloody shame. They glide in and out of immigration at the airports with cocaine stuck up their arse, ecstasy in their vagina—and I don’t mean the kind that makes them come—but he gets turned down and kicked out.—

  Neither the indignation nor the sympathy count; these are simply tonight’s subjects for the usual animation and display. Let’s get some more wine, you need a drink, Julie, come on Abdu, you too. Someone passes a joint, that’s probably more like what an oriental prince needs. The poet is not there. There is no-one. There will be no-one, for her, in this city, this country.

  The two don’t drink or smoke and they leave early. The empty space they occupied at The Table is a silence; broken: —It’s not the end of the world. Our girl’s been in love a few times, as we’re well aware.—

  —This pickup of hers’s been a disaster from the beginning.—

  —Come on, he’s not a bad guy, he just needed a meal ticket. A bed. And he obviously knew how to occupy it.—

  —I’ve never seen her like this. Bad, man.—

  A recent addition to The Table passes a hand over his shaven head, staring as if to follow the path The Table’s intimate and the foreigner are making through Saturday night partying that buffets them.

  —Julie should chill out.—

  As there is no longer any sense in playing the grease-monkey he spends these, his last few days, in the cottage. He has no appetite but is constantly thirsty; lies on that bed that has also outlived its usefulness, with a big plastic container full of cold water on the floor beside him.

  So he was there when she came home from her work with the envelope from the travel agency. She handed it to him where he lay. He delayed a moment, reading the name of the agency, with its logo of some great bird in flight, as if to convince himself of its portent. He made a slit in the top of the envelope with his nail and slid a forefinger along to open it. Inside, there were two airline tickets.

  She stood before him with her hands linked behind her back, like a schoolgirl.

  And now’s the time: there has been no description of this Julie, little indication of what she looks like, unless an individual’s actions and words conjure a face and body. There is, anyway, no description that is the description. Everyone who sees a face sees a different face—her father, Nigel Ackroyd Summers, his wife Danielle, her mother in California, remembering her, her contemporaries of The Table, the old unpublished poet; her lover. The face he sees is the definitive face for the present situation. The two air tickets he holds in his hands, turns over, unfolds, verifies, materialize a face, her face for him, that didn’t exist before, the face of what is impossible, can’t be. So what she was, and now is—what the woman Julie looks like comes through his eyes.

  They always want to be told what is beautiful about them—women, anywhere—but I suppose I never did this because I couldn’t consider how I should phrase it as I can think of it in my own language now. We also have our poets she wouldn’t have heard of, Imru’ al-Qays, Antara. Have to understand now what I’m seeing, when I look at this girl, this woman—how old, twenty-nine, one year older than I am. But it’s not the days and years, it’s the living that calculates the age! She’s a child, they’re all children, and what she wants to do now is not something for her, the living she’s totally innocent of, hasn’t any real idea of, innocence is ignorance, with them.

  She came into the garage like any of their women who have a car husband or father has given them, and the freedom they’re not even aware of to go about wherever they please and talk to a strange man, giving orders while I get myself out from under
a car and stand up, a dirty fool in those overalls, to follow her through the streets. Does she realize that a girl like her couldn’t go out alone, where I’m being sent back to. I don’t think I really looked at her. That day. Well: European—but they don’t call themselves that, they are not in Europe—they belong here. So—white, young, not smart but dressed in the style they think disguises the difference between rich and poor, the way my overalls outfit was supposed to disguise that I’m an illegal on the run. But she looked at me. I don’t know what it was she thought she saw, there was that invitation to take coffee. And there she was in that rowdy café, with a strange man, a nobody she found if not in the street then in a place not much better. I suppose I saw her as a woman, then. She was not a blonde—I was told by my uncle and cousins about how attractive blondes were, for them—hair a no-colour brown, and smooth and straight falling behind the ears. Later, sometimes in bed with her I noticed that the ear close to me on the pillow was small and set flat to the head. Pretty. Eyes water-grey and not large, always looking at me directly. What else; eyebrows much darker than her hair, not plucked to the thin line, like the girls who flirt them at you, lifting, lowering frowning, at my home. Dark paint on the mouth whose muscles always move slightly, unconsciously, while she follows what someone is saying to her. As if she’s learning a language. Trying to. As if she knows, all right, she knows nothing. Nothing!

  It’s impossible, this idea of hers. What could she do there. What’m I expected to do with her. There. Responsible to her father, she thinks he doesn’t matter but he’s somebody in this city and I’ll be the filthy wicked foreigner who’s taken her to a run-down depraved strip of a country Europeans didn’t even want to hold on to any longer, were glad to get rid of, even the oil is over the border. Abducted her; that is what it would be called in my country. What use will she be. To herself, to me. She’s not for me, can’t she realize that? Too indulged and pampered to understand that’s what she is, she thinks she can have everything, she doesn’t know that the one thing she can’t have is to survive what she’s decided she wants to do now. Madness. Madness. I thought she was intelligent. Stupidity. That’s it. That’s final.