‘I find that hard to believe.’ My tone is more than civil, it is stuffy, schoolmasterly. ‘But thanks all the same.’
‘I have saved everything.’
‘Yes, thank you very much. And now you should be going.’
We need to keep up this pretence. If we can go on lying to one another, and more importantly, believing one another, everything will be fine. Neither of us will have to do what the situation demands of him. I should drop the groceries and run out into the street, yelling for help. He should point a gun at me. Does he have one?
‘The door is over there.’
He goes up the steps to the stoep. We are still talking about tsotsis, about how bad they are, and how it is a good thing to chase them and save everything. I follow him at a distance, there’s really no rush, across the stoep, down the front path to the street door. He cannot open the catch. I put the shopping bags down and he stands aside so that I can open it for him. ’Seblief baas, dankie baas. Remembering his pleases and thank yous. He goes out.
The instant the door shuts between us, the pretence falls away. He runs down the road and I run into the house. There are goods scattered in the lounge, clothes, hi-fi equipment trailing cables, there are splashes of blood in the hallway. The fiction that the thief and I have just spun together bamboozles me: it must be the blood of the tsotsi who went over the wall. Caught redhanded. Tangled in this story, I follow the trail into the kitchen. Stop dead as another stranger turns towards me. He is in the corner behind the Morris chair, against the windows, where I cannot see him properly.
Hemmed in here, with my possessions stacked on the kitchen table and blood on the floor, there is no room for pretence. My skin turns to parchment, the wires in my joints snap. He lets out a startled cry. There is no drama, only ballet, a fear-filled pas de deux. He springs out from behind the chair, brandishing something in his hand, and rushes at me. We grapple and fall, I’m trying to fend off his hand, I cannot see what’s in it, we tumble over one another until he thrusts me away and I rattle sideways, try to get to my feet and stand on something slippery–it is Minky’s silk shirt, her blue silk shirt–half fall under the kitchen table, scramble up again to my knees, knocking over a chair. If he had a knife, he would have plunged it into me, surely, he would have run out of the front door, but instead he has leapt back behind the Morris chair and crouched down. I crouch behind the table. We gaze at one another like two cornered animals.
Then my legs begin to work, I stand up and back out, and close the door, try to lock it, find that the lock is broken. The threshold smells of the thief, as rank as if a cat had sprayed against the doorpost. Perhaps he has pissed himself.
The Flying Squad’s number is taped to the telephone table. I dial it, begin speaking in gasps, realize I have reached an answering machine: Please be patient. Your call will be answered. I drop the instrument and run back to the door, try the lock again with trembling fingers, but it won’t engage. Bloody palmprints on the frame. I drag an armchair in front of the door, run back to the telephone.
A person now.
‘I want to report. a burglary.’
‘Is the burglary in progress, sir?’
‘One of them. is in the kitchen. The other one. has run away.’
‘Are they still there? Is the burglary in progress?’
I see the thief stumbling across the lawn below the window. How stupid of me! The front door was locked when I came in, so they must have broken in through the back. He must have cut himself on the kitchen window. The first guy steered me away from that corner to give his accomplice time to escape. But why has it taken him so long? He’s been crouching there in terror, that’s why. He’s as scared as I am.
There is a walking stick in the umbrella stand at the door, which Minky brought back from Namibia, a heavy thing with a carved handle. I grab it and run outside. The thief is struggling to get up on the garden wall. It is high here, and after the monkey-wrench man we made it even higher, with metal palisades and spikes. He is scarcely more than a teenager, slight, with a yellow canvas hat on his head, a silly round kwaito hat like a toddler’s. He sees me coming, keeps on scrabbling against the surface of the wall. I hit him. He wards off the blow with a raised arm, yelps, scrambles into the shrubbery. He has a bloody shirt wrapped around his right hand, it is my shirt. I hit him again. The stick glances off his shoulder and the carved knob jams among vines and trellises. While I’m trying to work it free, he gets up on the wall, straddles the palisades. I leave the stick and grab the cuff of his trousers, pinning his leg between the slats. He plunges over, one tackie goes flying, I hear him thump down on the pavement outside.
He will go down the hill to Bez Valley like his pal. I retrieve the stick, run to the garage, fling up the door. There he is on the opposite pavement, limping in his bare foot. I am going to beat the living daylights out of him.
No, I have gone too far. It’s like this: I see the thief crossing the lawn below the window. I grab the stick from the stand at the door and rush outside. He is on top of the wall, straddling the palisades. I wave the stick at him and he plunges over.
And even this is too far.
97
The story is going around that burglars use a secret language of litter to mark houses where there are easy pickings. In this code, a red Coca-Cola bottle top means a place is poorly defended: there is garden furniture to be had, the windows at the back are not burglar-proofed, the beware of the dog sign on the gate was left behind by a previous tenant. Whereas if the place is flagged with white, say a scrap of plastic caught on an acacia thorn at the back gate, you’d better watch your step: there are sensors in the garden, the old lady has a gun.
‘The police say there’s no truth in it,’ I tell Branko. ‘But residents are advised to keep the pavements outside their homes clean and tidy anyway to discourage loiterers and petty criminals.’
My brother snorts into his macchiato.
‘It’s hard to imagine how such a code would work in Troyeville,’ I go on. ‘There’s so much crap in the streets, you’d have to be an expert to decipher it. What do they call them?’
‘Garbologists.’
‘That’s it. Maybe this rumour was started by one of the garbologists at Pikitup. Part of their economy drive.’
Branko perks up, I don’t know whether it’s the coffee or the conversation. ‘Interesting notion, that every rumour goes back to an original source, that there’s a Typhoid Mary at the root of every cockamamie urban legend.’
‘It would be someone like you,’ I say. ‘Someone obsessed with litterbugs.’
‘You can scoff,’ he says, ‘but you’d be a different person if you moved out here. It’s so much more agreeable. You should try it.’
We are having coffee at Sandton Square. This is our third venue since my brother moved north. We tried the Europa in Norwood, but you couldn’t hear yourself think with the traffic noise, and the Brazilian in Rivonia Road felt like a cheap imitation, even though it had a conveyor belt.
‘There’s a unit going in the complex.’
‘God forbid.’
‘It’s a prime site, very private, and not too close to the wall.’
‘I would die out here,’ I say. ‘I need the buzz.’
‘I thought writers needed peace and quiet.’
‘Not everyone wants earplugs. Dickens couldn’t work without the noisy rhythm of London outside his window.’
‘Dickens again. Christ, I wish you’d read some Mayhew instead. Better yet, some Auster or some DeLillo. We’re already in the twenty-first century and you’re still harking after charabancs and gaslight. Get with it, man. The clock’s ticked over and you’re two centuries behind the times.’
98
He rattles the metal catch on the back gate every third or fourth day. When I lift the curtain at the bedroom window to see who’s there, he shows his face between the iron bars of the gate like an identity card. He used to say his name, but now he has fallen back on this visual shorthan
d. Even in the gloom, I recognize his white peaked cap. I go out and let the money fall into his cupped palm. He squints at me through the bars and drops a little curtsey. Neither of us says a word. We have been reduced to a simple mechanism of supply and demand. Occasionally, I spy on him as he leaves, counting the coins, stepping out quite confidently. I think he is pretending to be a backward rustic to keep my sympathy.
99
‘Hello.’
‘Glynis here. Listen, what’s the name of your security company again?’
‘It’s N.I.S.S. What’s up?’
‘Have you got their number?’
‘I’ve got the emergency number here, there’s a separate one for admin. Are you thinking of joining?’
‘I’ll look it up in the book. N.I.S.S.? Sorry, can’t chat.’
And she hangs up.
A week later, she phones to apologize. She was in a bit of a flap, she says. The neighbour’s charlady had overheard some dodgy characters plotting to burgle her house and came to warn her. Panic stations. All she could think of was getting a security company, fast. N.I.S.S. arrived within the hour to put up their signs, although they were really busy and could only install the alarm a few days later. In the meantime, they promised to send a patrol car around from time to time. Still, she hardly slept a wink until the alarm was put in.
‘And how’s that working out?’
‘Bit of a relief. At least we don’t feel we have to defend our property with our bare hands any more. On the other hand, it keeps going off for no reason and scaring the hell out of us. N.I.S.S. says it’s the cats or the fridge or something. Teething troubles.’
Despite the alarm, Glynis is jittery. She wants to put her house on the market, but Sean talks her out of it. ‘Everyone keeps saying Troyeville’s going downhill,’ he says. ‘What are they talking about? It’s always been at the bottom of the fucking hill. Just think about it for a minute. It was fucked when I was a kid, in an Afrikaans sort of way. It was fucked when I was a teenager, in a more Portuguese sort of way. And now here I am, fully grown, surrounded by Angolans and Nigerians–and guess what, it’s still fucked. It’s just a different shade of fucked.’
I remember: one Saturday in the eighties, it must have been, Liz and I were walking in Troyeville. We passed some row houses in Nourse Street that appeared to be empty. There was no gate, so we went onto the stoep of one place and peered through the window, cupping our hands over our eyes to shade the glass. In the middle of the room looking back at us was a tiny man with long dirty hair hanging down from under a Stetson, wearing denim jeans tucked into cowboy boots, holding a knife in his left hand. The knife seemed disproportionately large, like a pantomime dagger, but only because the man himself was so small, almost a midget. Scarcely had our eyes picked out the figure in the gloom, had our minds acknowledged what our eyes perceived, than the little cowpoke burst through the front door, rabid and enraged, cursing and raving in Portuguese, spraying spittle, flourishing the knife. We scrambled to the pavement, falling over one another, and fled back to Yeoville where we felt safe.
100
The house was run-down, set too close to the street on a busy corner and overlooked by blocks of flats. It was the sort of place you would expect to be rented out cheaply to students. We lived in it for six months with our foam mattresses and vinyl beanbags, bookshelves of brick and board, overflowing ashtrays and dog-eared paperbacks. We were white kids from middle-class and professional homes. To obscure the extent of our privilege, we were obliged to practise carelessness and cultivate squalor.
The best thing about the property was its garden. A profusion of shrubs and creepers and flowers made a soft green island in which the house nestled, cut off from the concrete and glass of Berea. You could sit out there on a rickety bench and imagine you were in the countryside or the suburbs. The noise from the traffic was filtered to a muffled rumble through leaf and stem and green shadow. It was a garden that resisted what little maintenance we were inclined to offer. It simply grew and overgrew and fed on itself. To enjoy it, you waded through grass or forced a path in the undergrowth to a place where you could sit and smoke and talk.
A man lived in the room at the back. He came with the house, and our lease with the agent stipulated that he could not be evicted. Presumably he had been abandoned there by the owner to keep an eye on things. A caretaker. We hardly ever saw him. During the week he worked long hours at the General Hospital as a cleaner; on weekends he stayed in his room and drank. From time to time you would see him weaving in with a plastic bag from Solly Kramer’s.
After we had lived in this house for four or five months, we had a party. The following morning, as Ivor and Dave and I cleared away the debris, it occurred to one of us that the caretaker might want the leftover liquor, a few bottles of dubious spirits and a five-litre flask of Kellerprinz that was three quarters full. Roma White, bottled heartburn.
The caretaker was in his room. He came round to the side of the house, to the small stoep that opened off the lounge, where the ruins of the bar stood, a trestle table full of greasy paper plates and bottles. He was in his underpants, still a little drunk from the night before, his eyes unfocused. We gave him the Kellerprinz. It was an archetypal exchange.
He squatted at our feet in the sunshine. He was a parody of a servile tribesman in the presence of white authority, desperate and abject; and we were parodies of white authority, middle-class kids in scruffy clothes, well fed and embarrassed. He stuck his forefinger through the eye on the neck of the bottle, pressed its mouth to his own and tilted its fat belly up on the length of his forearm. He drank until the bottle was empty. He drank it down in one gulping flow, as if we might change our minds at any moment or had asked him to return the empty bottle immediately. I had never seen anything like it. He poured the wine into himself as if through a funnel, like a man quenching a fire, or rather fuelling one, stoking something in his tissues that dare not burn out. I had been taught that holding your liquor was one of the manly accomplishments. I was filled with appalled admiration.
When he had drained the bottle he lowered it to the ground and sat there dazed. Several times he tried to rise, but the weight of the bottle kept him anchored. His knees would unfold him as far as the length of his arm allowed, before he dropped back onto his haunches. He went up and down like a pump. Ivor and I disengaged his finger from the eye. Then we each took an arm and steered him towards his room. There was nothing to him, he felt like a husk, and I fancied I could hear the booze sloshing inside him.
His room faced the courtyard where we sometimes sat in the mornings, eating our Jungle Oats, smoking the first cigarette of the day, feeling that we were in charge of our own destinies. In there it was dank as a well. A flare of soot in one whitewashed corner showed where a Primus stove had given up the ghost. There was none of the comforting clutter of servants’ rooms. You looked in vain for a newspaper-lined tea chest, a scuffed suitcase, a zinc bath–those familiar objects that let you press your conscience to the warm memory of a nanny’s back.
In the middle of the room was a bed. Not an ordinary bed raised up on bricks, but a hospital bed with a black metal frame that could be tilted up at either end, with winches and slings and pulleys for splints and traction and burns, and rubber wheels on the ends of its long legs. The bed was wide and high, and it threw the small room out of scale, dragging down the ceiling and pulling the walls closer.
We took the caretaker as far as his door. Astonishingly he could still walk by himself and haul himself onto the mattress. The bed was tilted up at the head and the foot. He lay down in this obtuse angle on his back. When we looked in that evening he hadn’t moved. He was lying there cracked, folded in half like a banknote in a wallet. But the next morning when we looked in again, half expecting to find him dead, he had gone to work.
In the end, he repaid us handsomely for all our kindness. Four of us came home from university one afternoon to find that he had tidied away the garden. It was gone. He had uproo
ted everything it would not have taken an axe to fell.
We sat outside in Dave’s Volksie for a long time, looking in disbelief at the bare earth, raked smooth from fence to fence, and the pile of dead plants as high as the roof. We laughed and laughed, but it did no good. The house was ruined. Without the garden it looked ugly and unloved. It was obvious that we would have to move.
101
Tammy is sitting at J.B. Rivers in the Hyde Park shopping centre on a Friday afternoon, drinking a glass of dry white wine, waiting for her husband Joshua. They are going to see The Truman Show at last. She is eavesdropping on the tables near her: some white twenty-somethings on one side, making holiday plans, and some black twenty-somethings on the other, discussing property prices and unit trusts.
Tammy has the journalist’s habit of seeing feature articles everywhere. She whiles away the time composing an arresting opening line: ‘Gold always looks better on brown skin.’ Crude. Rather: ‘There is a certain kind of chunky gold jewellery that looks better on brown skin.’ Another angle: ‘The yuppies and buppies might not be sharing tables yet in the happy hour at Hyde Park, but they do share the chunky dah dah watches and strappy blah blah sandals.’ She really ought to brush up on her branding. The right labels lend a knowing sophistication to this kind of piece. She’s always busking, looking things up in Elle or asking Josh, it’s always second-hand. After the movie, she should do some window-shopping for designer colour.
As she’s turning the phrases over in her head, chunky this, strappy that–Blahnik, that’s what she was thinking–she fingers the rosary of her keys. Front door…security gate…bedroom door…and comes to a key she’s never seen before. An odd-looking key with a black loop and a thin brass stem. In addition to the standard bit it has a small blade like a skeg sticking out at right angles on one side. It looks less like the key of a house or a car than something you would use to arm a bomb. For the life of her, she cannot identify it. The immobilizer is on a special ring. The postbox is this one…
Portrait with Keys Page 13
