More recently, in this same tavern, ol’ Chicken King, one night two guys – grown-up versions of the Sibusiso gang – got brave as the tavern emptied. Except for the barman, me, a girl and two other guys, no one was left. I got up to put a coin in the jukebox. One of these guys slipped in behind me and got me in a choke grip, while the other got down on his knees and emptied my pocket. They knew exactly where my money was. R50 in my back pocket. They must have been watching me. They also took my dark-blue windbreaker, which I favoured in summer when it’s too hot for the leather jacket.
If they had looked a little more carefully and searched a little deeper they would have found more. Notes rolled thin as ever around the elastic of my underpant. Money I have dedicatively put away, earned from sometimes parking cars, but mostly selling street stories for the homeless newspaper. This is not like The Big Issue, which is written by famous journalists. Homeless Talk is written and sold by the homeless. In Homeless Talk, we, the bone fide homeless, pen the stories. Like I said, they pay R50 a poem, R100 a full feature, and we can also do the selling of the paper itself at traffic lights. But actually I hate that. It feels too much like begging.
When a new edition comes out, especially with my poems in it, for a short while I feel okay standing at the traffic light hawking it, thinking this is better than standing here with a gun or rattling a tin can with some coins in it. Here I am standing selling a paper with my own poems on the inside. But I am having to smile and show gratitude when they say, “Keep the change.” No matter if the change is R1 or R10 or even R50 I am still left feeling like I am a charity case. By the fourth or the fifth day I can’t take it any more. Seeing the same people drive past me day after day is the worst. Having to pause and avoid eye contact, waiting for the traffic light to change. And by the end of the week it’s time to throw the remaining papers in the dustbin… till the next edition comes along.
The money I had saved almost came to R600 because I do not buy food with my earnings but go to church feeding schemes to stem my hunger. What is it with that term ‘feeding schemes’? Are we animals? A man cannot live off solid food alone, we also have to drink. And it used to be only four or five beers once a week but now I don’t like to count. My money has survived the onslaught, but for how long?
But I am rambling. I was telling you why I need to do some shopping. Last night, on my way home from Chicken King, I found myself ducking and diving through the streets of Hillbrow, trying to shake off another hungry pack of violent streetkids. When I took a left they were there. When I took a right they were there. A reckless sprint through the traffic and still they were there. I’ll fuck them up also, I’ll kick their asses, even if I am unarmed, I kept telling myself in beery repetitions. But in the end it never came to that. I managed to shake them and I arrived panting like a dog but in one piece at my sleeping place. But I’ve had enough of this. Always running, feeling that I am hunted, and fed up with this watching-my-back business and being taken for an easy target.
I come from a city where the Honorouble Mr Knife is most respected. It is a city, too, where a man dies only four kinds of deaths. First, a natural death in old age, which is most unusual. Better to live fast and furiously, go out with a bang, and die young and beautiful.
Second, death by accident. If Mr Knife has not caught you by then, then maybe a car will. Or maybe, just maybe, you believe you can swim when you are too drunk to know the difference, and who are we to argue?
Number three, the unexplainable death. Whispers of magic, spells and witchcraft.
And then, finally, the unwavering Mr Knife. Yes, my city is another kind of fella. Where the fastest with the knife is the most respected. Where the young kids mould their aspirations around the present heroes. Where names are spoken in low tones and awe behind their backs. In dark alleys, school yards and shebeens, somewhere the next wannabe is going to challenge for the title of Mr Knife. Or die trying. This city is a place where the weekend’s alcohol flows freely and Mr Knife speaks swiftly.
It was my own father’s brother, Hendrik, who was Mr Knife. Till another guy took the title. But before Hendrik died he taught me a thing or two. How to come in close, rather than keep your distance. So close that you don’t allow the other guy to hardly move his arms at all. How to hold the knife sticking up not down. To bend your legs, not your arms, to get the knife horizontal. How to make an obvious move, then reverse it once the guy has responded. And to finish him off with a stab to an organ. And how to cut where lots of blood will gush. Or where there is the most pain that can finish the fight without you having to kill and go to jail.
Respected throughout the width and breadth of Kimberley, the challenges would not stop. Hendrik was never convicted of murder. Those who got slashed and survived were too scared to press charges.
Actually, there is a line of Mr Knife’s running in my very blood. My great-grandfather, Oupa, was a hard man. He’d sooner knife you through than say a bad word or quarrel. It came as no surprise that Hendrik and him would sooner or later lock horns. Especially since it was Oupa who taught Hendrik the art of the knife in the first place.
To this day we in the family still don’t know what happened. We were busy on a Sunday. There was a sheep that had been stolen from over a boer’s fence. There was fire and there was beer. We would only remember my great-grandfather in his white shirt standing on the other side of the fire, and the red stain on his chest that came to cover a patch as big as his head before Hendrik’s okapi was folded and back in his pocket.
Hendrik turned around and walked away out of Kimberley in the direction of Jo’burg. I always guessed he’d got lost in the big city. It wasn’t so much the law that made him an outlaw, it was the family. No way he could show his face again. Oupa nearly died that day, but he didn’t. He died many years later in his sleep, probably dreaming of the souls he had sent to the happy hunting grounds in the sky. But even before my uncle had left for Jozi he had taught me a thing or two about using a knife.
Kimberley, edges ragged, the diamonds it spewed out for the rest of the world long gone. Harsh as the semi-desert expanses that encompass it. Home to all tribes but predominantly coloureds and Tswanas as common as sand. Where every boy and man has a knife.
But me, I moved on to Jo’burg with my pen. It has been more than two years since I left my hometown. I came to Jo’burg on 23 February 1997 to be exact. Just six days before end of the month. Now it is already August 1999. Just shows how time flies when you are having fun. Have not run into Hendrik. Maybe he died on the wrong side of a knife. I have begun to drink the spirit of the city but now I hear Hendrik’s and Oupa’s voices before I fall into sleep where I find myself heavy on my toes, grasping for an okapi knife that is not there.
Me not having a knife, that feeling of helplessness is old I tell you. At times like this I think of Mlamba, the cunt who straddled and beat and even stabbed my mother aplenty in the street with a fish knife. I was just four years old and had no knife of my own to stick into his back, not even a stone in sight on the sandy street.
Enough! A battle cry on my heart. To Park Station to do some shopping.
Bodies are falling out of my path like dominoes – some with far more abrupt jerks than others. I do not know if it is because, at my hurried pace, I look like a hoodlum, or that I appear to be homeless. Or do I smell? If it is the last, I swallow it like bile.
“The Naledi train number 976 has arrived,” comes the female electrical voice over the intercom. “Will all the passengers for the Translux – crackle – bus to Maputo Mozambique go to their departing points. The bus has arrived and will be leaving – crackle – shortly stopping – crackle – Mpumalanga. Nelspruit. Thabazimbi.”
I hear, yet do not listen. My face set in a determined mask. I shove my hands deeper into the pouches of my now-dirty trousers, arms obstructed by the sides of my red-brown leather jacket. I shrug them back into a comfortable position without losing my stride. Back bowed, the green beanie pulled firmly over my head to
my eyebrows, rounded off by the thin knife scar that runs through half of my face and the rest of my cheek. People used to say that I am handsome but they don’t any more. Funny, I wonder why that is. My eyes scan the interior. From the fluorescent lights I can see gift shops, travelling agencies, butcheries, bakeries, restaurants, all sitting side by side – basking in the white glow of what is called Park Station, the poor man’s shopping Mecca of Africa right here on my doorstep.
Colourful people, solitary, paired and quadrupled figures all moving at a different pace in the neon interior of Park Station. Matured and young ladies in thigh-hugging jean, gxebezanis, the mini, you name them. Dreadlocks plaited to orange hair so ‘in fashion’ as to be almost outrageous. My feet scissor out in front of me, one gorgeous young lady – deep chocolate complexion, bottleneck figure tapering into a broadside curveous brown jean – also gives me a wide berth.
If I look down and out, I can’t blame anyone for shunning me. Life is hard here in Jo’burg. It does not give a penny and takes all in return. I stride through the interior, here and there I can glimpse one or two people in West African long-dress attire. A few white bodies can be glimpsed through the crowds. Some pushing or dragging a suitcase behind them. Are they wanting to emigrate? Or are they just getting a taste of what it means to be poor in Africa?
I pass the butchery, which looks like an alien dissecting room. Chunk upon chunk of meat, hanging from huge steel hooks, against white tiles. Overhead a huge flat-screen TV plays the thousandth rerun of the 1994 World Cup. Bafana Bafana. Mark Fish running again with the squad’s T-shirt stringed across his head. I know it so well I can see it in my mind in my drain.
Next I enter this Indian shop, next to the entrance of Park Station. No Pick n Pay here. Pick n Pay, owned by Mr Raymond Ackerman, seems an obvious name for a supermarket chain where the rich man rules. We have no choice but to obey and pay as we make him and the Indian richer buying our staples. I feel the security cameras, visible and hidden. Electronic goods upon electric goods heaped in the window. Electric fans next to radios next to kettles. Near the door at the corner stands a young sheik with a roundish face in a flowing white robe with a turban to match. His face creases into an automatic smile, with eyes that do not really see me. As if I’m a shack, in a street of shacks, in a township of shacks, in a world of shacks, that all look the same.
“Hallo, baba!” He shoots it off like a doorman at The Ritz. I pass him stiffly. I do not return the favour. Today I am a no-nonsense guy with an attitude to boot.
A warm tinkling of excitement begins at the base of my spine and spreads over my ribs to my stomach as I go straight to the glass cabinet in front of the Indian. I go and stand over it, my lips pursed into concentration like a kid at a candy stall. Big is next to small. Long next to short. Thin-edged next to wide-edged. Hunting knives, fish knives, flick knives, okapis, stars, switchblades and Rambos. You name it and it is here.
I once had a Rambo, black round handle, on top transparent with green markings round an inlaid compass. I also knew an SADF army knife. Inside it was a fishing wire and hooks. The blade rough-edged and toothed on one side, razor-sharp and smooth on the other side, coming in its own black sheath with a bar of flintstone thrown in for good measure. The perfect survival knife – just a pity we ain’t in the bush but in a concrete jungle.
The homeless seem a legitimate target for the homed to vent frustrations and anger and go hobo bashing – the very young and very old bearing the brunt of these attacks. If the glue-sniffing street kids live long enough we become wizened hobos, but along the way, when our bones are still strong, we have a phase where we become what our persecutors want us to be. Slippery, lithe, armed criminals, but mostly for survival. Add rich white men and also not-so-rich ones using young homeless boys for sex, sometimes bought, more often forced.
I have come in here many times before, just to glance over the knives but mostly to look at the cameras. Single-Lens Reflex, disposable, digital, they all feed my not-so-secret ambition to become a journalist. And just as many times I have exited empty-handed after realising it would be next to impossible to stay on the street, dragging around a big or even a small camera – I might just draw unnecessary attention.
The Indian keeps his eyes on me but need not worry, the cabinet is locked, I can only pick up the knives in my mind. My eyes trail down the wooden brown-handled knives with shining inlaid steel patterns. Seven stars, three stars, okapis. These are the knives I know. These are the knives of home.
The practised moves of Mr Knife dance through my brain, sending the messages to my hands and feet, feint this way, pretend you’re making the obvious move, retract, slash at this one’s ear, at that one’s thigh. The brown-and-chrome okapi is still under the glass but I feel the round end in my palm and prise it open, feeling the blade against my thumb. My eyes slip to the slimmer ones, green, red and blue lines crisscrossed across the body, R24.99. Expensive. Jissus! Everything over R20 is expensive to me. The black one is broad but looks blunt. I shrug them off one by one. I do not want a flippant knife, I just want one that can do the job but, more important, one I can hide, have on me at all times.
I leave the shop, lock myself in the public toilet near the railway line and extract one rolled-up hundred-rand note from the elastic in my underpant. I re-enter the shop, call the Indian, show him the colour of my money and point at the smallest, thinnest okapi that can be slipped into the sole of my shoe but that has enough length in the blade to go deeper than skin deep. With a wooden handle I can get a grip on, it can be twisted to do some damage.
Later, as I cross the bridge, I feel the knife in one pocket and my blunt pencil in the other. I scramble down the bank behind the railway, sit down with my back against a pylon, and my mind goes back to the writing group. To return or not to return. I take out the knife, flick it open with my thumb and begin to shave the tip of the pencil, which flakes away in curly pieces. Dammit, let me go spend the change from my knife and let the questions settle themselves.
The knife is sitting snuggly at the base of my foot. It is now about 6 pm and an hour ago I cancelled going to the Universal Church in the centre of town to get my evening food. Instead I have decided to go straight to the Writers’ Workshop at Longsbank, here in town, which will start any time soon. But at the last minute, deep inside my drain, I say what the heck and make Poor Man’s Pub my destination.
I pull on my red-brown leather jacket, a real beauty, one that even fashionable white kids would love to own. It has become a part of me. It’s not just a good-looker, but a raincoat and warm too. And my yellow slacks. Yellow is a stupid colour for a homeless boy, but I wash them in the university fountain with Cold Water Omo, apartheid’s super detergent, a must for shack-dwellers and the hot-water-geyserless. I may be homeless but that doesn’t mean I have to be dirty, hard as it may be to stay clean.
Seems a good night to widen my repertoire of drinking holes and maybe get lucky on the squeeza side. Poor Man’s Pub, you could say, is in my neighbourhood and it doesn’t take me long to foot it. But today it kind of gets me down. Don’t want to think of this as my second home. And there are no squeezas in sight so after a beer I head on down to Happiness at Night, just down the block, for those who have no intention of sleeping.
Is it my breath or my general attire that keeps the squeezas away? Two of them, one a bit on the old side and the other one cute and young, sit near me but are clearly not biting. Don’t give up that easily, I tell myself and, after three beers at Happiness, I drop in at Chicken King. But still no luck.
When I open my eyes, my head is flat on the grimy pine table. I look up at the clock. 2 am! How was I able to sleep through this noise? The pub is dark but the jukebox and booze are keeping us there. Dancing, people chatting, figures moving in and out of the interior, smoke curling up towards the ceiling. Another beer will do as the jukebox guzzles my money. I play ‘Kuse Jozi, msawawa’ (It is in Jo’burg, my friend) over and over, a track about this city that has me in i
ts grips but that somehow makes me nostalgic for home.
This night has given me all it can but I am not keen to go back to my drain. I decide to take a turn in town, just to beat the pavements with my soles. I walk and try to ward off this hangover-to-be. The knife is under my left foot. Being right handed, keeping it on the left means it is easier to get it out in a hurry. I walk and walk and walk, not really in the city but in my stride and thoughts. Are we all drunk all the time, one way or another? Raindrops glistens from the tar road in the dark, puddles reflecting light. A cold wind hits me in my face and automatically my hands shove deeper into my pockets. Lampposts sway to the high winds.
I turn again into one of those dark narrow streets. Up ahead lays the park in Rissik Street. On the curb next to the park, I pass small iron benches bolted to the ground, now only lumps of darkness with metallic glints. Further on, steely contraptions and cages, which hawkers sell from during the day, are fastened with heavy chains and locks to the iron railings of the park fence. I see occasional patches of cardboard with a body asleep, ready to wake and catch the early-morning trade. Far across the park, red-and-yellow fires, figures dotted around, staring into the flames. Surely that kind of hypnosis is healthier than all this booze?
I walk with slow, languid steps, sometimes losing a footing but recapturing it in time. The bridge, slightly humped, stretches up ahead of me. They now call it Mandela Bridge, meant to link two worlds. The decaying city world, going to rot since the whites moved their businesses out to Sandton, the New World. Braamfontein is the island between the two and the place I call home.
Just as I turn the corner, my head jerks up in time to see two youthly figures running towards me, in my direction but at an angle going towards the other side of the street. Can’t see much of them but they don’t have the look of street kids. Seem better dressed.
White Paper, White Ink Page 2
