A sleeper is always absent; although present, there on the back seat.
‘The way he spoke about black people, wasn’t it surprising? I mean—he’s black himself.’
‘Oh no he’s not. Couldn’t you see the difference? He’s a Cape Coloured. From the way he speaks English—couldn’t you hear he’s not like the Africans you’ve talked to?’
But of course he hasn’t seen, hasn’t heard: the fellow is dark enough, to those who don’t know the signs by which you’re classified, and the melodramatic, long-vowelled English is as difficult to follow if more fluent than the terse, halting responses of blacker people.
‘Would he have a white grandmother or even a white father, then?’
She gives him another of the little history lessons she has been supplying along the way. The Malay slaves brought by the Dutch East India Company to their supply station, on the route to India, at the Cape in the seventeenth century; the Khoikhoi who were the indigenous inhabitants of that part of Africa; add Dutch, French, English, German settlers whose back-yard progeniture with these and other blacks began a people who are all the people in the country mingled in one bloodstream. But encounters along the road teach him more than her history lessons, or the political analyses in which they share the same ideological approach although he does not share responsibility for the experience to which the ideology is being applied. She has explained Acts, Proclamations, Amendments. The Group Areas Act, Resettlement Act, Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Act. She has translated these statute-book euphemisms: people as movable goods. People packed onto trucks along with their stoves and beds while front-end loaders scoop away their homes into rubble. People dumped somewhere else. Always somewhere else. People as the figures, decimal points and multiplying zero-zero-zeros into which individual lives—Black Persons Orderly-Moved, -Effluxed, -Grouped—coagulate and compute. Now he has here in the car the intimate weary odour of a young man to whom these things happen.
‘Half his family sick… it must be pretty unhealthy, where they’ve been made to go.’
She smiles. ‘Well, I’m not too sure about that. I had the feeling, some of what he said… they’re theatrical by nature. You must take it with a pinch of salt.’
‘You mean about the mother and sisters and so on?’
She’s still smiling, she doesn’t answer.
‘But he couldn’t have made up about taking a job so far from home—and the business of sending his wages to his mother? That too?’
He glances at her.
Beside him, she’s withdrawn as the other one, sleeping behind him. While he turns his attention back to the road, she is looking at him secretly, as if somewhere in his blue eyes registering the approaching road but fixed on the black faces he is trying to read, somewhere in the lie of his inflamed hand and arm that on their travels have been plunged in the sun as if in boiling water, there is the place through which the worm he needs to be infected with can find a way into him, so that he may host it and become its survivor, himself surviving through being fed on. Become like her. Complicity is the only understanding.
‘Oh it’s true, it’s all true… not in the way he’s told about it. Truer than the way he told it. All these things happen to them. And other things. Worse. But why burden us? Why try to explain to us? Things so far from what we know, how will they ever explain? How will we react? Stop our ears? Or cover our faces? Open the door and throw him out? They don’t know. But sick mothers and brothers gone to the bad—these are the staples of misery, mmh? Think of the function of charity in the class struggles in your own country in the nineteenth century; it’s all there in your literature. The lord-of-the-manor’s compassionate daughter carrying hot soup to the dying cottager on her father’s estate. The ‘advanced’ upper-class woman comforting her cook when the honest drudge’s daughter takes to whoring for a living. Shame, we say here. Shame. You must’ve heard it? We think it means, what a pity; we think we are expressing sympathy—for them. Shame. I don’t know what we’re saying about ourselves.’ She laughs.
‘So you think it would at least be true that his family were kicked out of their home, sent away?’
‘Why would anyone of them need to make that up? It’s an everyday affair.’
‘What kind of place would they get, where they were moved?’
‘Depends. A tent, to begin with. And maybe basic materials to build themselves a shack. Perhaps a one-room prefab. Always a tin toilet set down in the veld, if nothing else. Some industrialist must be making a fortune out of government contracts for those toilets. You build your new life round that toilet. His people are Coloured, so it could be they were sent where there were houses of some sort already built for them; Coloureds usually get something a bit better than blacks are given.’
‘And the house would be more or less as good as the one they had? People as poor as that—and they’d spent what must seem a fortune to them, fixing it up.’
‘I don’t know what kind of house they had. We’re not talking about slum clearance, my dear; we’re talking about destroying communities because they’re black, and white people want to build houses or factories for whites where blacks live. I told you. We’re talking about loading up trucks and carting black people out of sight of whites.’
‘And even where he’s come to work—Pietersburg, what-ever-it’s-called—he doesn’t live in the town.’
‘Out of sight.’ She has lost the thought for a moment, watching to make sure the car takes the correct turning. ‘Out of sight. Like those mothers and grannies and brothers and sisters far away on the Cape Flats.’
‘I don’t think it’s possible he actually sends all his pay. I mean how would one eat?’
‘Maybe what’s left doesn’t buy anything he really wants.’
Not a sound, not a sigh in sleep behind them. They can go on talking about him as he always has been discussed, there and yet not there.
Her companion is alert to the risk of gullibility. He verifies the facts, smiling, just as he converts, mentally, into pounds and pence any sum spent in foreign coinage. ‘He didn’t sell the radio. When he said he’d sold all his things on the road, he forgot about that.’
‘When did he say he’d last eaten?’
‘Yesterday. He said.’
She repeats what she has just been told: ‘Yesterday.’ She is looking through the glass that takes the shine of heat off the landscape passing as yesterday passed, time measured by the ticking second hand of moving trees, rows of crops, country-store stoeps, filling stations, spiny crook’d fingers of giant euphorbia. Only the figures by the roadside waiting, standing still.
Personal remarks can’t offend someone dead-beat in the back. ‘How d’you think such a young man comes to be without front teeth?’
She giggles whisperingly and keeps her voice low, anyway. ‘Well, you may not believe me if I tell you…’
‘Seems odd… I suppose he can’t afford to have them replaced.’
‘It’s—how shall I say—a sexual preference. Most usually you see it in their young girls, though. They have their front teeth pulled when they’re about seventeen.’
She feels his uncertainty, his not wanting to let comprehension lead him to a conclusion embarrassing to an older woman. For her part, she is wondering whether he won’t find it distasteful if—at her de-sexed age—she should come out with it: for cock-sucking. ‘No one thinks the gap spoils a girl’s looks, apparently. It’s simply a sign she knows how to please. Same significance between men, I suppose… A form of beauty. So everyone says. We’ve always been given to understand that’s the reason.’
‘Maybe it’s just another sexual myth. There are so many.’
She’s in agreement. ‘Black girls. Chinese girls. Jewish girls.’
‘And black men?’
‘Oh my goodness, you bet. But we white ladies don’t talk about that, we only dream, you know! Or have nightmares.’
They’re laughing. When they are quiet, she flexes her shou
lders against the seat-back and settles again. The streets of a town are flickering their text across her eyes. ‘He might have had a car accident. They might have been knocked out in a fight.’
They have to wake him because they don’t know where he wants to be set down. He is staring at her lined white face (turned to him, calling him gently), stunned for a moment at this evidence that he cannot be anywhere he ought to be; and now he blinks and smiles his empty smile caught on either side by a canine tooth, and gulps and gives himself a shake like someone coming out of water. ‘Sorry! Sorry! Sorry madam!’
What about, she says, and the young man glances quickly, his blue eyes coming round over his shoulder: ‘Had a good snooze?’
‘Ooh I was finished, master, finished, God bless you for the rest you give me. And with an empty stummick, you know, you dreaming so real. I was dreaming, dreaming, I didn’t know nothing about I’m in the car!’
It comes from the driver’s seat with the voice (a real Englishman’s, from overseas) of one who is hoping to hear something that will explain everything. ‘What were you dreaming?’
But there is only hissing, spluttery laughter between the two white pointed teeth. The words gambol. ‘Ag, nothing, master, nothing, all non-sunce—’
The sense is that if pressed, he will produce for them a dream he didn’t dream, a dream put together from bloated images on billboards, discarded calendars picked up, scraps of newspapers blown about—but they interrupt, they’re asking where he’d like to get off.
‘No, anywhere. Here it’s all right. Fine. Just there by the corner. I must go look for someone who’ll praps give me a rand for the taxi, because I can’t walk so far, I haven’t eaten nothing since yesterday… just here, the master can please stop just here—’
The traffic light is red, anyway, and the car is in the lane nearest the kerb. Her thin, speckled white arm with a skilled flexible hand, but no muscle with which to carry a load of washing or lift a hoe, feels back to release the lock he is fumbling at. ‘Up, up, pull it up.’ She has done it for him. ‘Can’t you take a bus?’
‘There’s no buses Sunday, madam, this place is ve-ery bad for us for transport, I must tell you, we can’t get nowhere Sundays, only work-days.’ He is out, the plastic bag with the radio under his arm, his feet in their stained, multi-striped jogging sneakers drawn neatly together like those of a child awaiting dismissal. ‘Thank you madam, thank you master, God bless you for what you done.’
The confident dextrous hand is moving quickly down in the straw bag bought from a local market somewhere along the route. She brings up a pale blue note (the Englishman recognizes the two-rand denomination of this currency that he has memorized by colour) and turns to pass it, a surreptitious message, through the open door behind her. Goodbye master madam. The note disappears delicately as a tit-bit finger-fed. He closes the door, he’s keeping up the patter, goodbye master, goodbye madam, and she instructs—‘No, bang it. Harder. That’s it.’ Goodbye master, goodbye madam—but they don’t look back at him now, they don’t have to see him thinking he must keep waving, keep smiling, in case they should look back.
She is the guide and mentor; she’s the one who knows the country. She’s the one—she knows that too—who is accountable. She must be the first to speak again. ‘At least if he’s hungry he’ll be able to buy a bun or something. And the bars are closed on Sunday.’
Keeping Fit
Breathe.
Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching—the first imperative is to breathe.
Breathless.
Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation—comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe.
It came after twenty minutes or so, when he had left behind houses he had never entered but knew because they were occupied by people like himself, passed the aggressive monitoring of dogs who were at their customary gateposts, the shuttered take-away, prego rolls & jumbo burgers, and the bristling security cage of the electricity sub-station. These were his pedometer: three kilometres. Here where the grid of his familiar streets came up short against the main road was the point of no return. Sometimes he took a circuitous route back but this was the outward limit. Not quite a highway, the road divided the territory of Alicewood, named for the daughter of a real estate developer, from Enterprise Park, the landscaped industrial buffer between the suburb and the black township whose identity was long overwhelmed by a squatter camp which had spread to the boundary of the industries and, where there was vacant ground, dragged through these interstices its detritus of tin and sacking, abutting on the highway. Someone—the municipality—had put up a high corrugated metal fence to shield passing traffic from the sight.
At six o’clock on a Sunday morning the four-lane road is deserted. A wavering of smoke from last night’s cooking fires hangs peacefully, away on the other side, the sign of existence there. In the house he has left, a woman, three children, sleep on unaware that he has risen from her bed, passed their doors, as if he has left his body in its shape impressed beside her and moved out of himself on silent running shoes. The exhausted tarmac gives off a bitumen scent that is lost in carbon monoxide fumes during the week; he is quietly attracted, at his turning point, to mark time a few paces out on the road, having the pounded surface all to himself. It is pleasant as a worn rubber mat underfoot.
He began to run steadily along it. Now no landmarks of distance; instead, memory in a twin stream started to flow in its own progression, the pumping of his heart sending blood to open up where in his brain cells flashes of feeling and images from boyhood were stored at one with the play of fragments from the past week. Tadpoles wriggling in his pocket on his way home from school and the expression of irritation round his accountant’s mouth when he disputed some calculation, the change in the curve of a girl’s buttocks as she shifted her weight from one leg to another standing in front of him in a bank queue on Friday and the sudden surfacing of his father’s figure bending about in a vegetable garden, looming, seen at the height of a child who has done wrong (run away, was it?); the same figure and not the same, with an arthritic leg laid out like a wooden one and the abstracted glance of someone able now only to move towards death, the scent of the girl in the bank as her sharp exhalation of impatience sent the message of her body to his—all this smoothly breathed, in and out. In the flowing together of contexts the crow of a cock in the city does not come incongruously but is more of a heraldic announcement: day, today, time for ghosts to fade, time to return. The cock-crow sounds from over there behind the fence, a place which itself has come about defying context, plan, definition, confusing the peasant’s farmyard awakening with the labourer’s clock-in at the industries close by.
Of course, they kept chickens among whatever dirt and degradation was behind that fence. He must have done another couple of kilometres; there were no more factory buildings but the shanties occupied the land all along the other side of the road. Here in places the metal fence had collapsed under the pressure of shelters that leant against it and sections had been filched to roof other shacks, yet the life in there was not exposed to the road because the jumbled crowding of makeshift board and planks, bits of wrecked vehicles, cardboard and plastic sheeting closed off from view how far back the swarm of habitation extended. But as he turned to go home—it burst open, revealing itself.
Men came flying at him. The assault exaggerated their faces like close-ups in film; for a vivid second he saw rather than felt through the rictus of his mouth and cheek muscles the instant gaping fear that must have opened his mouth and stretched his cheeks like a rubber mask. They rushed over him colliding with him, swerving against him, battering him. But in their passage: they were carrying him along with them. They were not after him. Fuses were blowing in the pan
ic impulses along the paths of his brain, he received incoherently the realization that he was something in their path—a box they tripped over, an abandoned tyre-tube bowling as they kicked past it—swept into their pursuit. What had seemed to be one of them was the man they were after, and that man’s terror and their rage were a single fury in which he hadn’t distinguished one from the other. The man’s shirt was ripped down the back, another hobbled wildly with one shoe lost, some wore red rags tied pirate-style round their heads, knobbed clubs swung above them, long pieces of wire strong and sharp enough to skewer a man armed them, one loped with a sledge-hammer over his shoulder, there were cleavers, and a butcher’s knife ground to sword-point and dangling from a bracelet of plaited red plastic. They were bellowing in a language he didn’t need to understand in order to understand, the stink of adrenaline sweat was coming from the furnace within them. The victim’s knees pumped up almost to his chin, he zigzagged about the road, the road that was never to be crossed, and the tight mob raced with him, hampered and terrible with their weaponry, and he who had blundered into the chase was whirled along as if caught up by some carnival crowd in which, this time, the presence of death was not fancy dress.
The race of pursued and pursuers broke suddenly from one side of the road to the other, he was thrust to the edge of the wild press and saw his chance.
Out.
The fence was down. The squatter shacks: he was on the wrong side. The road was no longer the sure boundary between that place and his suburb. It was the barrier that prevented him from getting away from the wrong side. In the empty road (would no one come, would no one stop it) the man went down under chants and the blows of a club with a gnarled knob as big as a child’s head, the butcher’s knife plunged, the pointed wires dug, the body writhed away like a chopped worm. On the oil stains of the tarmac blood was superimposing another spill.
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