Fatima’s directions were as unpersuasive: ‘Above the lake and to the left,’ she said. ‘Start at Clarens. Where Kruger finished.’
So they made him ready for the journey. Babybel insisted on pressing his white shirt, because, she said, if a man was leaving for parts unknown with literally nothing but the clothes he stood up in, he would want to put his best foot forward. Visser agreed, saying that Blanchaille faced an ordeal ahead, a battle, a formidable enemy. When one entered the Garden of Eden, he explained somewhat mysteriously, one faced not merely the snake, but the apple, and there were circumstances in which apples were more subtle than serpents.
It was Freia who injected a note of realism into these conversations by revealing that Eden was hardly Blanchaille’s destination. He was going to England. Indispensable Freia! Owing perhaps to her training as a township tour guide she had checked his ticket and revealed that he was flying to London with a thirty-six-hour stopover before his flight to Geneva. Why not a direct flight? Blanchaille protested, but there was nothing to be done. Besides, said Visser, the police themselves had booked his ticket and must have known what they were doing. Only the police knew what they were doing. They comprised the holy circle. Since the police in this instance were personified by Van Vuuren, whose status as a policeman was increasingly mysterious, Blanchaille hoped he still fell within the holy circle referred to by Visser. Blanchaille hoped he knew what he was doing.
As if to console him, Babybel gave him a necklace of golden Krugerrands, pierced and threaded on a string which she told him to wear at all times and promised him that it was a key, the use of which he would know when the time came.
And then, in the evening, I saw how they personally escorted him from the hotel to the airport, stepping over the bodies of the Presidential Guard which lay scattered on the streets and pavements like soldiers from a child’s toy box. Whether dead or drunk, simply asleep or resting, he could not tell. Then I saw with what tears the girls fell upon his neck and kissed him goodbye. On the plane he was given a window seat beside an Indian gentleman. At ten o’clock the plane took off. Peering towards the bright lights of the airport as they began to taxi, the sight of Visser and his four girls waving from the roof of the building was the last he saw of Africa.
CHAPTER 11
On the non-stop flight to London Blanchaille sat beside Mr Mal who explained that he was a fleeing Asian. Blanchaille said he thought that Asians had stopped fleeing Africa, but Mr Mal replied that Africa was still full of fleeing Asians, if only you looked around you. Mr Mal had fled from Uganda to Tanzania, from Tanzania to South Africa, and he was now fleeing to Bradford. He spoke of Bradford in the terms of wonder American immigrants must once have used about California. In his opinion the Asians were the Jews of Africa. It was amazing, Blanchaille thought, just how many people claimed to be the Jews of Africa. President Bubé in a celebrated speech claimed that distinction for the Afrikaner; Bishop Blashford was not above claiming it for harassed Catholics in the days when they were often persecuted by the Calvinists as ‘the Roman danger’. President Bubé issued a statement declaring that the Catholics could pretend to be Jews or Methodists or Scientologists for all he cared, but while subversives threatened the country under the cloak of religion, he would show no mercy . . . (this a reference to the flight of Magdalena dressed as a nun). Let them go around in prayer shawls and yarmulkas if they liked, the security forces would root them out. Newspapers discussed this animatedly. CAMPS FOR CATHOLICS? the headlines wondered excitedly, and BUBÉ PLANS POGROM? What did the real Jews of Africa call themselves – with so many people competing for the title?
There was a large party of deaf-mutes travelling on the plane, pleasant young people who seemed quite unaffected by their disability. Blanchaille watched a young man in blue jeans and a red shirt carrying out an animated conversation with his girlfriend. He was a walking picture show. He held his nose, pulled his ears and seemed able to rub his stomach and pat his head simultaneously. He also did impressions: a boxing referee counting his man out, the drunk in the bar thumping his chest angrily, he opened bottles, he snatched a hundred invisible midges out of the air, hitched a ride, sent semaphore signals across the cabin. His fingers, his hands, his busy silent tongue that lapped against his open lips were altogether an eloquent and loquacious display. His hands and fingers flew, pecked and parroted, swam in the air, signalled, sang, played the old game of scissors, paper and stone. They were an excited aviary those flying hands, moving hieroglyphics, they signalled the meanings which words, if they had tongues of their own, would picture to themselves. His girl appeared to listen to him with her nose. Frequently her eyes applauded. He almost envied them their ability to talk so openly without fear of being overheard. He wished he knew why he had been routed through London. Beside him Mr Mal dozed, and cried out in his sleep of the pleasures of exotic Bradford.
Nothing prepared Blanchaille for the shock of finding her waiting at the barrier.
She took his trolley from him despite his protests and led him through the automatic glass doors into the thin uncertain sunshine of the English spring. He gazed at her, the thick blonde hair was pulled behind the pretty ears and expensively waved. Her perfume enveloped him in waves of warm musk. Magdalena looked chic and well cared for. He watched her small, square, capable, deft hands on the steering wheel. He couldn’t believe he was sitting beside her again.
‘This is kind, Magdalena. But not necessary, really.’
‘Not kind or necessary. Blanchie, it is absolutely essential!’
He sat back in the car and watched the huge clouds passing low overhead like enormous aircraft showing their massive bellies. The sky in England seemed very low. That was his only observation to date. Magdalena had hugged him mightily and noted his weight increase. ‘Too much beer,’ she said affectionately.
In the old days Father Lynch had remarked on the abundance of Magdalena’s affections. She resembled her biblical namesake, he said, and much would be forgiven her for she loved much, or more accurately she loved many. That was true. The altar boys had heard of Magdalena’s powers as one hears of a wonderful cave of diamonds from which everyone is free to help themselves; of a hill of cash; a love goddess one dreamed of, panted after and never expected to get and who suddenly announced she was giving away the lot, for the asking.
Van Vuuren had announced the miracle: ‘There’s a girl called Magdalena. She gives.’
‘How much?’
‘Everything.’
It seemed inconceivable, a colossal lie. One could not accept the alarming hugeness of this claim. How much did she give? And what exactly did that wild generalisation mean? Did she pet? Did she French kiss? Did she allow her bra to be removed? Was it possible to go any, well, further?
‘Piss off,’ said Van Vuuren. ‘You’re an unbelieving lot. I said the lot. I mean the lot. Everything.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How do you think?’
‘You didn’t? Just like that.’
‘We don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care. But you can try for yourselves.’
And they did. Zandrotti first, followed by Ferreira and both returned glowing from the encounter, enchanted and absolutely converted, aflame with new faith and zeal. In her arms they had passed from uncertainty to deep belief. She was a miracle, a blessing! Kipsel confirmed, and Van Vuuren looked knowing, the veteran. Blanchaille held out in his scepticism. His unbelief was of Augustinian proportions and he prayed that it be strengthened with each fresh report of his friends’ success, with Zandrotti’s tears, always emotional, in recalling how amazingly easy it had been, she had been. She had just opened up and took him in and there he was, doing it like he’d been doing it all his life.
‘What – without precautions?’
‘Sure. When are you going to do it, Blanchie?’
‘Soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘Just soon.’
‘You’re chicken.’
And it did seem to him too fast and too far. Too implausible. Sexual intercourse was something that clearly required longterm planning, something worked up towards, a large project studied in the old Chambers’s Encyclopedia of 1931 which he found in the hostel library and which dwelt in detail on the fertility rites of remote tribes in New Guinea. Not something you nipped in for on a Saturday afternoon. But it was for Saturday afternoon that it had been arranged and he was to be driven there by Van Vuuren, Zandrotti, Kipsel and Ferreira, in Van Vuuren’s brother’s bottle-green MG. It occurred to him that they feared that unless they took him there themselves he might not go, he might just say he’d been . . . He denied it vehemently but knew it could well have been true.
To Blanchaille’s horror Magdalena’s parents were at home, something which deterred his grinning sponsors who began a swift retreat and left him with the miracle herself, a broad-shouldered, solid, commanding, shapely girl with a mature manner and a shrewd assessing look in her blue-grey eyes. Backing out with embarrassed grins his friends mumbled shamelessly about ‘getting home’, probably regarding the afternoon as lost. Suddenly the parents also left, claiming with what Blanchaille considered false sincerity that they’d remembered an urgent appointment at the bowls club. Blanchaille was contorted with shame and rage; could the parents of the easiest girl in town play bowls? Surely they knew why he was there and were not going to allow it? Could they remain slumped in deck chairs over their brandies after playing a couple of taxing lengths on the green without a care in the world about what their daughter was doing with her young friend?
Obviously they could.
Magdalena had sized him up with a practised eye. Blanchaille thrust his hands into the pockets of his grey raincoat which he had worn, not against the weather, but simply because it hid the frightful khaki shorts all the hostel boys were made to wear. What happened next was a blur. She did not ask him to sit down (speed was always her strength), she crossed the room, kissed him hard, so hard she lifted him off his heels. In his confusion he thanked her but she did not seem to require thanks. Indeed, seeming to regard all conversational niceties as superfluous she pushed him down onto the sofa and attempted to spread him out. The fear of her parents returned. His own unpreparedness plus some foolish juvenile desire to preserve at least a vestige of the romantic formality made Blanchaille resist her advance, bracing his legs, refusing to straighten the knees. Magdalena left off pushing and went to the heart of the matter by loosening his belt, lifting his shirt, easing him, fingering him, making him ready. All this with the one hand while the other, on his chest, pinned him firmly to the sofa and then directing his hands beneath her skirt, obliging him to lower her pants, wriggling expertly as she sloughed them off and planted herself upon him. Blanchaille attempted to say something but his tongue had thickened in his mouth and all that came out was a low gurgle. He thought afterwards that perhaps what he’d meant to say was something like: ‘Shouldn’t we at least close the curtains?’ But the moment was gone, passed before he knew it. She moved once, twice, three times and Blanchaille was afloat in that warm sea he’d just entered.
And just as suddenly cast ashore. Someone who has invested so much reading time in such concepts as ‘ejaculation’ cannot but expect far more. But to have come and gone before one knew it! Brief and involuntary. Behind almost before it began. Like a hiccup. ‘We might have been shaking hands.’
‘Hell, Blanchie, you’re a born romantic,’ Kipsel said.
And then some time later, once again, in Blashford’s other, unofficial garden.
What could one say of Magdalena? Everybody’s girlfriend once, twice, and then she took off like a rocket into the political firmament, out of reach of mere altar servers, numbering among her lovers such heavy figures as Buffy Lestrade the Hegelian radical lecturer, and no more contact was made until Kipsel rediscovered her and carried her off to blow up pylons in the veld. Afterwards the trial, the betrayal, and the extraordinary escape. Magdalena, the saboteur turned demure nun in her audacious dash for freedom from beneath the very nose of the Regime, became a legend.
Once in London she came to be rated amongst the six most dangerous enemies beyond the borders. Connected with the Azanian Liberation Front, romantically linked for a time with one of its leaders, Kaiser Zulu, she was branded a convinced and radical believer in the violent overthrow of the Regime. Rumours and legends constantly appeared in the press. Red Magda they called her. He remembered Magdalena’s mother had made an attempt to save her. She announced that she would go abroad and talk to her daughter, call on her to repent. Various well-wishers raised money. Her local bowling club of course, a building society, and several newspapers ran the campaign to raise money to send this brave mother to save her daughter from the clutches of a terror movement, notorious for its cruel atrocities throughout the southern sub-continent. The usual photographs of flyblown and swollen corpses of murdered nuns, frozen in typically blind poses of hopeless entreaty, were shown, the pathetic stumps of what had been arms and legs pushing against the concrete air. Those shockingly familiar pictures the newspapers so loved, of decaying remains pictured against the dusty landscape of Africa which seemed in a strange way to lend a curiously gentle, eerily inoffensive aspect to the once-human husk, as if the horror melted away amid these vast indifferent surroundings and the bones, the hide, the carcass spread-eagled in the veld like a lion kill, or a drought victim, was another of the necessary sights of Africa. Except these were holy remains. The papers said so. Sacred clay. Relics. Powerful muti. As those who killed them and those who photographed them knew, in Africa the only good nun was a dead nun.
Magdalena’s mother’s visit of redemption went badly wrong. She got on famously with Kaiser Zulu, who, she said, reminded her of her old cookboy, and she was pictured singing choruses of ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ in some tourist nightspot and told reporters, on her return, that her daughter wasn’t as black as she had been painted. Angry letters filled the newspapers from readers demanding their money back.
RED MAGDA’S MOTHER DUPED! the headlines yelled.
The sunshine lay shyly on the grey-green fields beside the motorway. Blanchaille’s first glimpse of England showed it to be small and tightly woven. The fields fenced everything within view. Nothing out of eyeshot, everywhere contained, ordered, bounded. The jumble of houses to left and right, three small factories, a smudge of development eating away the green and then the countryside spluttering out in a last fling of parks and trees as the houses began in earnest, but still, even to Blanchaille’s untrained eye, recognisably houses, double storeys, detached, heavily planted in muddy yards, in the strange green smallness of the countryside.
Magdalena drove well, fast, her small, pretty hands in speckled yellow gloves calm on the wheel. The road swept upwards and ran as an elevated motorway into the solid, metalled city with its row upon row of semi-detached dwellings. It struck the stranger, the sandy tongued foreigner, blinking with lack of sleep, this sudden mass of building. It asserted itself, this solid, glued immobility of London, everywhere packed, joined, touching, far fewer single houses now and these were bulge-fronted, pebble-dashed, red tiled roofs. And then blocks of them, stuck solid, identical, joined irretrievably and running on for streets seemingly without end. He shivered. Magdalena must have seen this for she smiled.
‘You thin-blooded African creatures, travelling north without coats. You could freeze to death here. Even in summer.’
‘I brought nothing, nothing except what I stand up in.’
‘You’re unprepared then, in many ways. I’m glad to see you, Blanchie. But I have to tell you I really don’t know what you’re doing here. Your clerical career was both wild and original. You upset the Church, your friends, the Regime and you did it damn well. We all depended on you, watching from here. You were useful there. I’m afraid you may be at a bit
of a loss here.’ She lit a cigarette, the grey smoke blurred and clung to the furry coat she wore. She smiled, perhaps to soften the force of her remarks and showed sharp white teeth, but when he protested he had not come ‘here’ in any sense but was merely passing through he was cut short by a growl of displeasure.
‘This place is hell. I can’t tell you what I’ve been through. People told me I was lucky to have missed the balance of payments crisis. They say that was worse. The English are a strange race, obsessed with economics and they seldom bath. You’ve no idea how I suffered when I first arrived. When I came the country was governed by a series of pressure groups who went around shrieking at one another about incomprehensible causes. The daily obsession of the country was the value of the pound. “Pound up a penny” the headlines screamed, day after day. “Pound down a half penny!” Nothing else counted. Nowhere else featured. Wild rumours swept the land. I remember going to the opera when suddenly through the stalls and around the banks of boxes ran the whisper: “Pound lost three points against the dollar!” Pandemonium! Strong men tore their hair, women swooned. And given the lack of washing facilities, to which I’ve already referred, you can imagine what a malodorous demoralised crowd they were. Like an elderly woman with a guilty past they are beset by their desire to confess, on the one hand, and deny it all, on the other. They regret, repent and deplore all they’ve been, never realising that it’s only their past that makes them worth knowing.’
She lived in Sealion Mansions off Old Marylebone Road. A squat, solid, peeling green-painted block smelling of wax, dust and the sea. From the fishmonger’s opposite there drifted an aroma, a cocktail of brine, shell and sand wafting across the street. A corridor of fragrance crossed the road between fishmonger’s and entrance foyer along which the sea tang drifted from the boxes of silver fish, wide-eyed in their beds of crushed ice.
Also staring up at the flat were two men in raincoats. The sky was clear.
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