Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  Sudi led the way down the main road, turning right up a gentle slope and following the dirt road to a large property with no gate. In a corner of the overgrown stand there was a ruin, outside which a dozen Beachboys had arranged their bodies in depressions in the rubble. The walls of the ruin were densely marked with seaman names and slogans.

  Adebayor. Mafegi Tenaa. Dogo Visheta. Ommy Jey. Crazy Sailor.

  Adam approached like a prize fighter, shouting ‘Oyaa, oyaa, oyaaa,’ and letting everyone know that we were no common delegation. He explained who I was and what we had just done. My camera was passed around to illustrate where we had been. ‘Sean-y shavu moja,’ they shouted. ‘Sean-y mah cheeky’. Adrenalin was still kicking in my system, and it felt good to be sitting there as the group mood took off, the moon rising above the missing roof. Everyone wanted his picture taken, with me, with us. They took their own pictures. We smoked the little bits of weed the group had left; when it was done some of the boys went indoors, shifting a panel of corrugated roofing away from the doorway and climbing into a midden of plastic on the floor. Those of us still outside talked in lower tones, and a young man called Jimmy London led us in a long du’a, which was the most beautiful I have yet heard.

  Then the temperature dropped, and I decided I would return to the service station and try for transport after all.

  Adam and Sudi walked with me, but Sudi stopped at the main road. The town was too quiet now, he said – the cops would notice us for sure. Adam remonstrated with him but Sudi was adamant. The two of us would be okay, he said, with our paler skins and command of English, but South African cops would pick him out as a foreigner in seconds. He turned back, saying he would return after sunrise. If we were not there, he would know we had found a lift. He would follow, meet us in Johannesburg perhaps, or back in Cape Town.

  ‘Good luck for you,’ he said, and vanished into the shadows thrown by the tall roadside trees.

  The garage was very quiet by the time we arrived. The drivers of the minibus taxis were all asleep on their front seats. Three young women working the night shift in the 24-hour store had locked the doors for the sake of security and were serving through a reinforced glass window. There was a single petrol attendant on duty, called Dumisani, and a single security guard, called Sipho Mthembu, both Tsongas. They were pleasant characters who came over one at a time to chat and smoke with us at the edge of the paved forecourt. These gatherings drew the attention of an elderly drunk with a well-fed white dog at his heel, called Kanga. Kanga loved her master, never straying more than a few feet from his legs.

  When the old man heard Adam was Tanzanian he became animated.

  ‘Nyerere,’ he grunted. ‘Great man.’

  ‘Nah, he was a poes,’ said Adam.

  ‘Angry young man,’ said the drunk, cackling. ‘Angry. Young. Man.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I was there,’ said the old man. ‘I served with Umkhonto we Sizwe [the former military arm of the ANC]. Mbeya. Bagamoyo. Morogoro. Kongwa. I knew all the camps.’

  ‘You know Tanzania, father, you know,’ said Adam, now genuinely interested.

  ‘I know Africa,’ the drunk rejoined. ‘Angola, Uganda. I was there, in the camps.’

  Our gathering attracted another drunk, a much younger man clothed in an extraordinary, colourful robe.

  Sipho, the security guard, circled his forefinger around his temple. ‘He’s not right.’

  The man sang a song, then fought the older drunk for half a beer Adam had offered around. Adam seized it back and downed it.

  ‘What the fuck, you think I’d give you people half a beer?’

  The former soldier produced some marijuana and rolled it up in a strip of light cardboard. Adam took the joint from him and smoked most of it, then pulled his arms inside the sleeves of his football shirt and fell asleep with his head on my bag. Sipho talked to me about the annual Tsonga marula festival, which occurs annually in mid summer, when the marula fruit ripens.

  ‘People come from all over the country to visit the place of the Tsonga king. There’s a tap that you turn to fill your cup with marula beer, for free. You must come back for that one, you will enjoy it so much.’

  The robed madman curled up next to Adam and was soon snoring away. The old freedom fighter wandered off, leaving his bags, and returned with a full beer.

  ‘Why is it that the people who have nothing end up getting drunker than the people who have something?’ Sipho wondered aloud. The old man listened to the snoring at his feet and said that he never sleeps. Then he was off again. ‘Kanga, tsk, come Kanga,’ he snapped, and the faithful bitch jumped to her feet and trotted after him, into the night.

  At 3 a.m. Sipho excused himself, and went into the staff utility area to sleep. The town was still, and would be for another two hours. At about 5 a.m. the first pedestrians would begin to appear, traders with bags of merchandise on their heads. The first cars would turn in for Dumisani to fill their tanks; he would be looking forward to his 6 a.m. handover. The taxi drivers would wake, stretch, and walk over to the toilet block to wash up. By 8 a.m. the town would be fully alive, and we would be there to see it all.

  But, until then, there was nothing for it but to follow Adam’s example and lie down on the cold bricks, pulling my arms inside my sleeves.

  ◆

  At about 8 a.m. we parted ways.

  It had been my intention to stick with the Beachboys all the way to Cape Town, but when I awoke it was light – well after dawn, in fact. Sipho was standing above me – possibly he had shaken me awake – saying I should get up before the owner arrived. For a second I failed to recognise him, or recall where I was. My throat felt terribly hot, and my right arm was painfully asleep. In another ten minutes I had my hand back and I was using it to pour purple Energade into my mouth. I still felt far from composed. SMSs had continued to crowd into my cellphone inbox: bank statements, cock pill solicitations from Men’s Health International.

  I was back on grid, geolocated.

  If you’re looking for perspective on your life, switch off your phone for six weeks. Then switch it back on. You’re in debt. Your copy is late. Your wife loves you, misses you. You could do with a harder erection. The phone pinged again, an advisory from Marcia, the bride-to-be:

  BRING GUMBOOTS!!! HEAVY RAINS FORECAST THIS WEEKEND!!

  ‘What day is it?’ I asked Sipho.

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘Goddamn it.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Adam asked.

  ‘I promised my wife I would be back by Friday. I thought today was Wednesday. If it was Wednesday there would be just enough time.’

  Seven hundred kilometres from Manguzi to Johannesburg. Fourteen hundred from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

  ‘It is Thursday today, Sean. There’s no way you can make it, unless you fly.’

  I had air miles, thousands of them. I could be in Durban by midday, home by evening.

  Sudi came strolling up the main road, shoulder-bumped us both.

  ‘Sean need to fly home today,’ Adam announced, taking the decision out of my hands.

  Sudi nodded.

  ‘It’s good.’

  Minutes later, I had booked a place in a Durban-bound minibus. I handed the Beachboys what I felt I could afford from my remaining funds, drawn from my credit card account, which I was now able to access. We hugged.

  ‘Sea Power,’ said Adam.

  ‘See you in Cape Town,’ said Sudi.

  The taxi crier slammed the sliding door shut and the driver pulled out of the garage. Sipho, waiting for a taxi of his own, waved.

  A friend from school days picked me up in the parking lot of the La Lucia Mall, to the north of Durban. ‘You stink,’ he said, but insisted I use his car for the day, after dropping him off at his ocean-view offices in Umhlanga.

  It seemed a reckless dos
e of power and freedom. Five minutes to the beach. Ten to the airport. A few hours to the middle of nowhere, if I really put my foot down. I drove to a mall I once swore I would never again set foot in and bought gumboots, then carried on down to the beach, aiming to take the sort of swim that resets the nerves. Adam called while I was stripping down, to say they were R400 short for their taxi fares to Johannesburg. He explained I could send the money through Shoprite. I put my clothes back on and returned to the mall, only to learn that I could not send money without my ID, which was lying somewhere out on the border, a mist of moisture between the book and its plastic sleeve, no doubt.

  ‘Don’t worry, bra, we’ll find the way,’ said Adam.

  The way, as it turned out, constituted two minor robberies en route to Johannesburg and a slightly more serious one in Hillbrow. The minibus taxi they boarded for Cape Town was stopped short in Laingsburg, a small town in the arid Karoo, where the driver was incarcerated over unpaid fines. The friends called from a trucker’s cellphone at 10 p.m. on Friday night. They had made it to Kraaifontein, thirty minutes outside Cape Town, and owed the driver the price of their passage – R50 each.

  ‘Go,’ said my wife. ‘Finish the trip.’

  The Beachboys were in high spirits when they clambered into the Conquest, though Sudi was again sick with withdrawal. They thanked the trucker, called him father.

  We made a stop at the Maskani railway bridge so that Adam could buy weed, and continued up to University Estate and parked outside the block of flats in which the dealer lived.

  ‘You coming in?’

  ‘No, go ahead. I’ll find you tomorrow.’

  At 4 a.m. my phone rattled on the bedside table.

  My wife sat up. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, everything’s fine.’

  I smiled in the darkness, shook my head and switched off my phone.

  AFTERWORD

  Adam’s departure on the very same night of their return to Cape Town was a real blow for Sudi. After handing over their ndongas to the Woodstock dealer, they had returned to Maskani with a portion of their payment, much of which they had spent on vodka and unga. Sudi, who has no head for hard tack, had passed out the moment they returned to The Kitchen, at about 1 a.m. He had woken to find Adam missing, but had not for one second suspected the reason.

  No Beachboy had ever stowed away on the very same night of their return to Cape Town. No Beachboy had even thought to try.

  When I shared Adam’s news, Sudi took my hand. ‘Let’s make a du’a for him. We must pray that we never see him again. Memory Card is my brother, but if I never see him again I will be happy, because it will mean he made it somewhere.’

  Sudi took a ship of his own six months later. He had hated every intervening moment. The dealer to whom he had handed his ndongas had been Adam’s contact, and in Adam’s absence the deal had gone cold, which put Sudi back to threatening drugmen with mortal violence. Worse, he found he was unable to forgive Cape Town for the murder of his friend Aubadeeleh. Several of the mwiba mwitu who had backed Chawa Suga remained living under the Foreshore bridges, and Sudi refused to pass that way. Temba, the Beachboy who had handed Chawa Suga the murder weapon, had moved to Delft, and Sudi knew exactly where. Naturally, he wanted to burn the house down. He tried on several occasions to get me to sign on as his driver, and was visibly disappointed when I refused.

  By night he threw himself at the port, and eventually made it onto the Warnow Moon, which took him nyuma mlima, to Durban. After being flown back to Dar es Salaam he called to say that he had broken off relations with Sauda: his old friend Ayoub had exposed her relationship with another man from the neighbourhood. When Sudi confronted her, he learnt that there had been several men in his long absence. He resolved to take Esau to his place in Sinza, but before the details could be worked out he had set fire to the car belonging to Sauda’s lover and then robbed every single other man she had allegedly slept with in his absence. These actions put a price on his head – he was forced to relocate to Ukonga, a township out near the airport. In January 2016, after paying for Esau’s coming school year, he headed south again, with a kilogram of unga in his stomach. Adam suspects that Sudi will head for Durban, a city in which his enemies have limited influence.

  Barak’s appendix burst in September 2015, and his life was saved by the surgeons in Groote Schuur Hospital’s F ward. He moved to the Blikkiesdorp sick house to recuperate but developed an infection, which brought him even closer to death’s door. It took another month in Groote Schuur and several courses of antibiotics to save him. I would often find Morieda at his bedside when I visited. She, too, was very sick, with cancer of the brain. She said her two grown children seemed relieved by her diagnosis, because in their eyes the tumour explained her relationship with Barak, a homeless Tanzanian man half her age.

  Barak’s outlook on life was fundamentally altered by these experiences. The moment he was back on his feet he asked me to help him find a job and, to demonstrate intent, he relocated from his highway mchondolo to a unit in Blikkiesdorp, where he would be able to keep his body washed and his clothes clean. I hooked him up with a Zimbabwean friend called Felix, who runs a cupboard-spraying business from his garage in Athlone. The first week went well. Felix reported that Barak worked hard, and seemed a fast learner. In the second week, however, Barak failed to pitch up two mornings in a row. He initially complained that it was dangerous to cross from Blikkiesdorp to the Delft taxi rank while it was still dark, but later he admitted to punching an influential Blikkiesdorp dealer during an argument, a rush of blood that had forced him to leave Blikkiesdorp for two nights. He wouldn’t say where he had slept, but based on the state of his clothes I suspected the Port Jackson forest between Blikkiesdorp and the airport.

  This on-off approach to his work persisted for a month or so. Stretches of attendance would be followed by inexplicable disappearances. After a particularly long period of absence, Felix called to say that his patience was wearing thin. I begged him to give Barak another chance. Things blew up on Barak’s first day back. Felix’s other employees – two young Zimbabweans – had asked Barak why the mzungu continued to intervene on his behalf, beyond reason. What was he doing for the white man in return? they probed, while showing off some lewd hip movements.

  They will probably never know how close they came to bleeding out on the floor of that Athlone garage. Barak had been in a state of intense agitation for weeks. After his run-in with the Blikkiesdorp dealer, he had started carrying a fold-out Okapi lockback. In my experience, the period between a Beachboy’s decision to carry a blade and his violent use of it is never very long. Fortunately, instead of knifing the young men, Barak had complained to Felix, who had wisely ordered his employees to take the afternoon off and to return the next day with cooler heads, or not at all.

  At the Athlone taxi rank Barak, still fuming, had bumped into some Tanga Boys who told him about a new maskani they had started in the Athlone railway reserve. Barak had not touched a single cocktail since his first operation but felt he needed something now, and followed them there. Instead of smoking unga he accepted a puff on a tik bulb, and another. The smoking continued late into the night and culminated in a fight with an abrasive Tanga youth, during which Barak used his Okapi. He fled, and spent the next week sleeping rough in secret locations. Another Beachboy had been stabbed and killed in that same maskani on the same night. When Barak heard this he threw up, believing he was the murderer. Barak’s victim survived, though, and after another month tensions had cooled, enabling him to return to his mchondolo in The Kitchen.

  He smoked tik day and night for a month, and became gaunt. To kick the habit he started smoking cocktails again, and slowly gained weight and calmed down. He is back to spending his days as he spent them before his operation. I see him often, but our conversations have become wooden and awkward. There is no mention of the terrible pain, fear and depression he experienced i
n hospital, or of the rare opportunities he squandered afterwards because he could not control his temper. His eyes convey his desperation, but his pride will not permit him to ask for more help; I have not offered any, nor will I.

  That said, I did try to help him find Morieda, with whom he had lost contact during his time in Blikkiesdorp. Staying with Morieda had never been an option for Barak, as she had lived with her children and they had forbidden it. Their relationship had always been conducted in his territory, and on her terms. When apart, they had remained connected by their phones, but one day her number had gone dead. Months had passed before he heard from some Grand Parade shopkeepers that she had been admitted to Somerset Hospital for aggressive treatment of her cancer. We visited the hospital only to be told that Morieda’s treatment had been suspended, and that she had been transferred to St Luke’s Hospice in the southern suburbs for terminal care. I called, but the receptionist could not locate any record of a Morieda Swart ever having been admitted.

  ‘Try Morieda Hussen,’ said Barak. ‘Maybe she used her married name.’

  I could hear the receptionist typing in the new details, and then a pause.

  ‘Yes, we had a Morieda Hussen here, but I’m sorry to say, sir, that she passed some weeks back.’

  Barak received the news without flinching, but did not say another word until I dropped him at the Beachboy Office. Later that night, he called to thank me for my help. ‘I’m happy,’ he said, ‘because I know Morieda kept her own mind until the end. If she used our married name it means her family was not controlling her. I will never forget her. I never had a mother, and if I’m honest I must tell you that Morieda was more like a mother to me than a wife. I know she’s in a better place now, a beautiful place. I can see it in my mind. I even feel jealous, you know, when I think of that nice place she gone to.’