Now Is the Time for Running

by Michael Williams

  I return to where Gawalia is sleeping. Tomorrow we will find Rais or Catarina. Angel will answer her phone. Tomorrow everything will return to normal.

  I lie down and pray for sleep to come.

  In the morning, Gawalia and I go back to the police station. There are more people on the steps than the previous day. Shelters have been set up against the wall. A man is handing out parcels of food from the back of a truck. A team of people is putting up white tents in a field opposite the station.

  We wander through the crowd of frightened people, checking faces, asking questions. I have never spent a night without my brother before. I keep turning around expecting to find Innocent standing close to me.

  All morning, we wait in the line at the police station. When we finally get to the counter inside, we fill out a missing persons form. I look at the questions and know that this is not going to find Innocent. I leave the office and wait for Gawalia outside.

  The morning’s news from Alexandra is bad. Yesterday the police fought running battles with the kwerekwere killers, trying to restore the peace. I half listen to their stories, watching the street carefully, checking each new arrival for Innocent: the only face that will bring me peace.

  At three o’clock Catarina and Rais come down the road, carrying Rasta and Tsepo. Gawalia cries out in relief as the boys run into their father’s arms. Over the crush of talking and laughing I ask, “Where’s Innocent?”

  Catarina turns to me. “Deo, when we heard the gunshots we all got out of the bridge as fast as we could.”

  She looks at Rais.

  “I grabbed the kids and Innocent,” adds Rais. “We crossed the highway and went to the Community Center. People said it wasn’t safe to go to the police station.”

  “But where’s Innocent now?”

  “He came with us,” says Rais. “Really, Deo, he was with us.”

  “Rais, where is my brother?”

  “He didn’t want to stay at the Community Center. He went mad when we told him that he had to stay with us. He wanted you. He started screaming,” says Rais.

  “He wanted his Bix-box,” says Catarina.

  “You forgot to take his Bix-box? He never goes anywhere without that. You know that!”

  “Deo, you’re shouting. Calm down,” says Gawalia.

  I shrug Gawalia’s hands off me.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. How could they not check if he had his Bix-box? Of course he would go mad.

  “Where did he go?” I demand, but neither Rais nor Catarina answers. Tsepo starts crying.

  “Innocent went back,” the little boy says. “To fetch his box. He told me.”

  “You let him go back to the bridge? Alone?”

  “The boys, Deo, we had to look after them…. W-we couldn’t stop him,” says Catarina, stuttering. “We were frightened.”

  We both know what might have happened to Innocent. I see it in her eyes.

  “He wouldn’t listen. He ran away,” says Rais, raising his hands as if he had just given up.

  “You never give up with Innocent. Of course he didn’t listen to you, Rais. You gave up on him,” I say.

  These people do not understand my brother the way I do. How can they? I turn to leave.

  “No, Deo, you can’t. It’s too dangerous. Wait until the police have…”

  But I know what I have to do, and no one will stop me.

  20

  BURNT GARBAGE

  I must go carefully, with eyes in the back of my head. The men in Alexandra will kill me if they catch me, but I must go back to the bridge. That is the place Innocent knows, and that is where he will be. He will be waiting for me at the bridge we call home.

  I dash across the street, dodging the cars, and run along the pavement. The afternoon sky is dark with the smoke of fires that still blaze. Ash catches in my throat. The smell of burning tires makes me thirsty.

  The more ground I cover, the more confident I become. I know I will find Innocent. He would never go somewhere strange without me. I’ve told him that if he gets lost he must return to the place we were last together. I know he will be waiting for me at the bridge.

  Wait for me, wait for me, is the beat in every step that I make, the prayer of every breath that I take. I run along the road toward the bridge. I slip past a roadblock set up to stop cars from going into the township.

  Once on the top of the bridge, I scramble down the side and kick through the remains of our home. I find my soccer pouch and stuff it into my pocket.

  “Innocent!” I shout up into the hole.

  I clamber up and stand in the semidarkness inside the bridge.

  “Innocent!” There is no answer.

  Nothing stirs.

  And then a match is struck, its tiny light massive in the darkness. I stumble toward the light. “Innocent, I knew I would find you. I was so worried….”

  The light comes from the other end of the bridge. The sheet glows yellow in front of the flickering flame. I hear a groan as I move the sheet aside.

  “Deo?”

  It is Angel.

  Angel is covered with blood, beaten. She lies on her bed, curled up in a ball. Her face is swollen. Her eyes are slits in puffed-up balls.

  “Angel, what happened?” I kneel next to her, afraid to touch her.

  She raises her hand slowly, moving my question away. “They were tired of paying a kwerekwere. They wanted it for free,” she says, with a laugh that sounds more like a choke.

  “Where’s Innocent?”

  “He tried to stop them. He tried to help me. They took him outside.”

  I back away from her. I swing through the hole back to the ground. He tried to stop them. They took him outside.

  I climb the embankment back up to the road and look toward Alexandra. Two police vans have parked next to each other a short distance away on the Alexandra side of the bridge. They have to help me. I run toward them.

  Two policemen stand smoking, leaning against the front of the vehicles, their backs to me. A loud voice shocks me back to reality. It comes from the two-way radio in the police van. The men ignore the crackle and conversation from their radio.

  Then I see Innocent’s Bix-box lying on the ground next to a pile of burnt garbage.

  They must have found Innocent! He must be in the back of one of their vans. I quickly look inside the one van. Not here. The other van.

  Not here either.

  I walk around the van to pick up Innocent’s Bix-box.

  “Hey, boy, get out of here. This is no place for you,” says one of the men, flicking his cigarette to the ground.

  “I have to get that box. It belongs to my brother,” I say, pointing at the tin box and staring at the garbage that isn’t garbage at all.

  “Get out of here!”

  And as he grabs me, I see the shape of a human head, lying on its side. The shape of an arm and a hand, stretched out toward the Bix-box.

  I don’t feel myself falling, but I fall.

  I don’t feel myself crying, but I cry.

  I don’t hear myself screaming, but I scream.

  I don’t feel the hands trying to stop me from going to Innocent, but somehow I reach the body of my brother, facedown on the ground, covered with rubble.

  Then I stop screaming, stop crying, stop seeing… and feel nothing.

  PART 3

  UNDER A TABLE MOUNTAIN

  (EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER)

  21

  COMING DOWN

  The ball sails toward me, carried by the wind. It moves slowly in the air, spinning and rotating. I wish it would leave me alone.

  I used to know what to do with a soccer ball heading my way. I watch how it spins through the air: a new, shiny, black-and-white soccer ball. In another four seconds it will strike some part of my body. Maybe it will hit my face. Maybe it will hit my arm, my chest, or my leg.

  I don’t care.

  I sit under a highway that snakes its way into the city. The cars speeding above me are so far away, like the
cliffs of Table Mountain rising a mile high into the sky. All I am capable of at the moment is sitting, my head against a wall, coming down from a glue-tube high, where the world is unbearably light, slow, and very bright. The glue makes everything weightless; I am no longer heavy with memory and guilt. In my glue-tube world there are no decisions to take, no plans to make.

  But coming down is the worst time. The world comes into focus again. My muscles start aching. I begin to feel my tongue. I might have to stick my finger down my throat and vomit. I usually feel better after that. My thoughts turn into heavy, fat balloons of words.

  Memories return. Guilt cramps.

  I am thirsty and hungry, all at the same time. Nothing new about that. My stomach aches. I’ve started feeling again. Like shit. Always like shit.

  Sooner or later I’m going to have to find another magic tube. The others will help me. They know where to get the stuff that keeps everything nicely out of focus, nicely slow and light. They left me when I passed out under the highway—maybe it was last night?

  I am alone now. Nothing new about that either anymore. I have learned to be alone. You use people when you need them, and you leave them when you don’t. I meet people and I leave them. That is how it has always been with me.

  I left Amai and Grandpa Longdrop, Captain Washington, Gawalia, Tsepo and Rasta. I left Rais and Catarina. I left Angel.

  When the government closed down the camp at the Methodist church in Jozi, the people of the bridge had to make one of two decisions: go back home or go back to the bridge. We had spent four months in the camp—a place of plastic food, leaky tents, and officials with notebooks—and we knew it was time to go. Many people wanted to stay in the tents, but the officials said it was safe to go home.

  I had no home to go back to. And I would not go back to the bridge. So I took a train and crossed a desert and ended up beside the sea at a Camp called Sea Haven. Running can take you a long way, but I can run no farther because of the sea. The blue line of the watery horizon can’t be reached by running straight ahead. In my worst moments, I’ve thought about running into the sea and searching for the life after this one. But I’m not ready to end my life. Not yet.

  Not like Muhammad, the Somali man who had had enough of the camp.

  “They dropped us off at the end of the world,” Muhammad said to me, his shawl wrapped around his shoulders against the cold as we stared out at the angry waters only a few feet away from the tents. “What do you see behind us, Deo?”

  “Tents and police vans,” I answered.

  “Suffering, Deo. People suffering. That is what is behind us.”

  He was right. I had seen enough suffering at the camp in Johannesburg and this one in Cape Town to know what he was talking about.

  “And in front of you?” he asked again.

  “The sea,” I said.

  “No, Deo. There is nothing in front of us. Our lives end here at the end of the world. To lose your dreams is one thing, but to lose your place in the world…” Muhammad shook his head and sighed. “We do not belong anywhere, Deo. We have no future.”

  Muhammad had had enough of what he called a life without hope and without country. He couldn’t leave Sea Haven, so he chose to run to the blue horizon. They sent out a boat to fetch him, but they never found him.

  The ball has not reached me yet. Why does it take so long to travel through the air? I should move, but that will take effort.

  “When you wake up in the morning, are you Deo first, or are you a refugee?” asked the pretty young woman from the United Nations, staring at me from behind her smart glasses and writing down everything I said.

  “I am a refugee,” I answered her. “How can I be anything else? Everywhere I look reminds me that this is not my home. The truth is in the pots they dish our food from, in the mat I sleep on, the blankets, in the tents. It is in the food I eat, in the water I drink, and in the look in your eyes—it’s in everything. I don’t want to be called a refugee, but how can I change what I am?”

  After Muhammad sank beneath the waters, searching for the blue horizon, I knew I could not stay in Sea Haven. I heard the promises of the government, listened to the words of the officials of the United Nations, but I could hear no truth in them. They did not know what to do with us. Then the storm blew down the tents, and the blue-uniformed police came and told everyone to leave. We had to reintegrate, we were told.

  How?

  Nobody could answer that question. We had to return to our countries, they said.

  How?

  They had no answers to that one either. So I ran again. The streets in the city are warmer than the tents of Sea Haven. Here you are free and nobody tells you what to do, what to eat, where to sleep. Here you can get whatever you want. Here everything is possible.

  The ball is closer now.

  I think it will hit my cheek in about two seconds. I’ll wait and see what will happen. That’s how it has been so far. Things happen to me; I’m forced to react.

  I have to get up, move, join the others. I will not be alone for long. The others will come back when they are hungry and need someone to do the running.

  That’s what I’m good at—running.

  When I run from a shop, no one can catch me. It’s the easiest thing in the world to walk into a shop and fill up a basket and then run. I dodge past people, feint this way, that way, and then sprint across the street, leaving anyone foolish enough to run after me puffing and panting behind.

  Finally the ball smashes into my cheek. It stings like a slap in the face. I shake my head, lift my hand to my cheek.

  But there are more balls. The air is filled with two more. No, now there are three, four, even more, flying through the air. They bounce around me like giant hailstones. I blink several times. The glue-tube must still be working its magic.

  I can’t believe what I am seeing, yet my cheek stings, so I must have been struck by one of these balls. I stand up. Where have these balls come from? Why are they flying toward me?

  I aim at the wall holding up the highway, striking angrily at the ball that hit me in the face. My kick is solid. The ball springs from my foot, flies toward the wall. It bounces back to me. I strike it again, this time with my left foot. It flies away again, heading back toward the wall, but then, as if reminding me of something I have long forgotten, it returns to me. The ball will not let me go. It demands that I do something.

  I remember.

  I head the ball. Once, twice, three times in the air, watching it carefully as it bounces off my forehead. Now the ball is in my control. It listens to me. It will not strike me in the face again. I let it drop onto my knee and then bounce it to my other knee. I swivel, shifting my weight onto my left leg, and catch the ball with my right, kicking it in the sweet spot, sending it back to the wall.

  The satisfying sound of ball against wall, hitting the exact spot I aimed at. Yes, that feels good. I do it again and again, striking the ball harder and harder against the wall. And each time it returns to me, as I know it will.

  This I can depend on.

  I remember how to run with the ball at my feet, how to pass it from one foot to the other, how to lift it up in mid-run and flick it past my opponent. I dribble the ball around the other balls that have now come to a rest under the highway. I line up the shot, lead with my left foot, and deliver a powerful kick that sends the ball curling through the air straight back at the wall.

  I lift my hand in the air, acknowledging the applause. But there can be no applause. I am alone.

  I spin around.

  A man is applauding me. At his feet is a net-bag full of soccer balls. There is a laughing tiger tattoo on his neck. A silver whistle glints on his chest. He has a funny expression on his face.

  “And you? Beckham under a bridge. Where did you learn to play soccer?”

  His words come from a long way off. I stare at him, feeling the world slow down to a blur. I say nothing. The tiger on his neck laughs at me. He looks like one of the others b
ut for his smart tracksuit, the whistle, and white sneakers. I cannot explain to him where I learned to play soccer. He would never understand.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I am a refugee.”

  He laughs. “But you have a name?”

  I shrug. It’s time to run. I should come down alone. Find the others. I turn away.

  “Wait! Where do you think you’re going? Do you want to play soccer?”

  I stop. The stranger lifts his net-bag full of soccer balls as if he is offering them to me. The tiger on his neck winks at me; the whistle blinks.

  “So you think you’re hot? Show me what you’ve got.” He takes out one of the balls and rolls it to me. I do what the ball asks me to do, kicking it straight back at this man, aiming for his net of balls. The balls explode out of his net with the force of my shot.

  “Phew! So you’ve got a mean right foot. Good. That’s good. Come with me, if you want to play,” he says.

  I have to do something, so I go with him.

  22

  STREET SOCCER

  We have enough, Salie! We agreed on twenty. That’s all we can afford, remember?”

  “I know what we said, but just one more, Tom. That’s all I’m asking for—just one more.”

  “That’s what you said when we agreed on a pretrial squad of four teams, and then suddenly it became five teams, and now you want one more player….”

  “Tom, he’s something special, I can feel it. You know how I found him?”

  “Oh no, you’re not going to tell me another miracle story….”

  “I was late, going too fast on the highway, and somehow the balls got loose in the back of the truck. As I came down the off-ramp, they went flying, most of them landing under the highway. I drove around to collect them, and there was this boy, hammering balls against the wall, dribbling and bouncing balls from knee to knee like David Beckham.”