I leafed through the cuttings and cards with my feet on a three-bar heater – so much for the spring – and my head in two places. In two minds. Making this choice had not resolved a thing.
Sometimes photographs annihilate memory; they swallow the available light and cast everything around them into shadow. Two of Saul Auerbach’s images were like shutters on my mind: Veronica in the yard in Emerald Street, Mrs Ditton in her lounge in Fourth Avenue. Dense with my own experience, but held there in suspension, in chemically altered form. If I could seize them for myself, my time and place would spurt like juice between my fingers. But how to reach through the frame?
The house next door was another matter. Over the years, with nothing in the world to measure it against, it had crumbled away in the folds of my brain, leaving a residue as evocative as the smell of my father’s aftershave. It had the appeal of an incomplete gesture, always on the tip of my memory, just about to come back to me.
Living in Johannesburg again, I thought about the house next door more often. I was afraid to tamper with the memory – it was like a fragile manuscript it would be better not to touch – but eventually I went down into Bez Valley. Auerbach territory: on every side, there were street corners and houses he had photographed, or might have, or would yet. He was around here somewhere, I knew, still doing his thing.
Mrs Ditton’s house had disappeared behind a wall, an assortment of pillars, plaster and glass brick lumped together like a display of building materials. Given room to breathe, this wall might have suited a mansion, one of those elaborate new follies on the edge of the city; crammed into such a narrow space it could only look grandiose. It was all nouns. Through the tracery of a precast concrete rose, I saw Spanish bars on the windows, a prison gate on the front door.
The house next door – my house, the one I had chosen from the vast range of possibilities but could not enter – neither surprised nor disappointed. The instant I laid eyes on it, the faint traces in my memory were absorbed into its simple reality. The defensive touches were new: a doodle of barbed wire along the fence and armed response signs on the gateposts. Against the faded yellow plaster, the signs with their heraldic shields and pennants were as bright as stained glass. Rampant lions with flashy claws directed burglars towards Mrs Ditton’s. The plastic numbers attached to the wall were spaced too widely, so that the place appeared to be counting under its breath.
As if the blinds of Auerbach’s vision had fallen away, the day came back to me in a flash. I sat in the car, twisting the threads of my life in my fingers, while a young version of myself, a long-haired boy with a pipe between his teeth and his fists in his pockets, came and went on the pavement. My camera was in the boot, but I could not use it. A photographer! Sometimes the idea still made me quail. How on earth? When an acorn rebounded off the windscreen I took it as a sign that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and drove home to Killarney.
I arrived in London with no idea how to make a living. At least I had a roof over my head, half of a flat for which my father had paid three months’ rent in advance. As unhappy as he was to see me leave the country, he’d done everything he could to help. My flatmate Richard was the son of one of his business connections.
Richard was an actor. The two of us worked together for a while in a restaurant near Covent Garden where the menu changed with the nationality of the chef. The word ‘yuppie’ had just been coined to describe our clientele: young people with money to spend on the finer things and no way of knowing what they were. Being a waiter was not for me. I would have been happier washing dishes if it wasn’t for the tips. Orwell was right: restaurants bring out the worst in people. These days, we don’t expect to be waited upon much, we’re used to packing our own groceries and doing our own banking, but even then opportunities to be served were becoming rare. In restaurants, overpriced ones especially, people were flattered to think they had servants. Waiting on the lords and ladies of the realm knocked the last bit of working-class stuffing out of me.
Before I could give the manager a reason to fire the pair of us, Richard found me another job. One evening he asked, ‘Can you drive?’
‘Sure. But I’m not licensed for over here.’
‘Probably won’t matter. Can you use a camera?’
You did not need a licence for that. I went to work for John Hollier, a schoolfriend of Richard’s who had a small production company. He talked up their documentaries for Channel 4, the hot new broadcaster, but their bread and butter was in advertising.
I was not qualified to be a location scout – I could hardly find my way to the office in Soho without a map – but it mattered less than I expected. My boss was an old hand called Alice and she did the research and made the appointments. Her briefings were peculiarly precise: she showed me pictures in back issues of the Woman’s Weekly. Stuff the script. Then she would give me names and addresses, stick a business card between two pages of the A to Z and point me towards the tube station.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used a camera. ‘But it’s the simplest thing in the world,’ Richard said. ‘You just look through the window and press the button. Make sure the client gets a sense of the place, the size of the room, the light from a window, some architectural detail they’re keen on. Click and it’s done. Send it off to be processed.’
It sounded easier than waiting on tables or painting road markings, but I was resistant. I kept thinking about my father’s arrangement with Saul Auerbach and it made me feel like a well-behaved child.
The new South Africa was a bewildering place. For a while, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. The parenthetical age had dawned, the years of qualification and revision, when the old versions of things trailed behind the new ones in brackets, fading identities and spent meanings, dogging the footsteps of the present like poor relations. Sometimes the ghosts went ahead suddenly, as if the sun had reeled to the wrong horizon in a moment and left you following your own shadow down the street.
I remember shooting stills on one of those rainbow nation commercials where a cheerful circle of friends, representing all the major population groups, gathered around the braai to drink beer and braai chops (but not yet to hold hands). These nation-building epics brought a lump to my throat, even if the easy companionship among the cast did not extend to the crew. When I left the studio and went back into the street, the present felt like the past.
I also remember the first time I heard Penny Levine’s northern suburbs drawl in the mouth of a cashier at Pick n Pay. A black kugel! She must have been to a Model C school (Sabine had told me all about it). I kept her talking. The papers were full of snide letters about the black voices we were beginning to hear on radio and television, and here was a girl whose accent could not be colour-coded. She struck me as a time traveller, someone who had gone into the future to show what was possible. The future is a foreign country too.
And then there were moments when the old South Africa reared its battered head. On a magazine shoot one day, I came face to face with the Great White Hope.
When Kallie Knoetze fought Denton Ruddock at Loftus Versveld in 1978, my father and I were in the crowd. Boxing was not my dad’s thing, but some big wall-to-wall buyer had given him the tickets and he felt he should go. That night Knoetze extended a winning streak by knocking the Englishman out in the third. I never thought I would see the man again, but here he was, up close, head to head with a Datsun bakkie in a scrapyard in Benrose.
The set-up was simple. Bakkie with crumpled bonnet facing right, boxer with broken nose facing left, boxer poking out a glove – hooks, uppercuts, let him try them all and we’ll see what works – as if he’s just stopped the bakkie in its tracks. The client was a body shop. When your car takes a beating, let us knock it back into shape. Knoetze himself had been panel-beaten by an amateur. It was fifteen years since he’d been in the ring, but when he made a fist he still looked like a fighter.
The shoot was sticky. I asked him what his best punch wa
s and he said it was the knockout. But once I’d soft-soaped him a bit – mentioning the bout at Loftus did the trick – he relaxed and started performing for the camera. The photo is in my portfolio somewhere. A high point.
Scouting. It sounded like bob-a-job week for the unemployable, one step up from the dole, and in London of all places. The idea made me sweat. If only I had the qualities that set people at ease – poise, charm, the gift of the gab. I was getting my hair cut in Camden Town and trimming my accent myself (I have always been a good mimic), but I was clearly a foreigner, a South African nogal, and toting a camera. As it turned out, though, there was not much to it. I discovered an aspect of the useful truth Saul Auerbach had revealed to me: everyone wants to be in the pictures.
We would all like to think, I suppose, that the confined spaces of our domestic lives are roomy enough to frame some greater drama. In the age of webcams and reality TV, the thrill of turning on the telly to find Joanna Lumley drinking a G&T in your sitting room, let alone a complete stranger eating Shredded Wheat at your kitchen counter, might seem quaint, but the impulse hasn’t changed. We have just learned to suspend our disbelief in more complicated ways. As much as we like to go behind the scenes, we still want to be taken in. Once the movie has dazzled us with its special effects, we want to see how it’s done. We’re just as happy to see how it’s done before we’re taken in. It makes the surrender to deception sweeter.
I was uncomfortable at first, poking around in people’s private spaces, but that soon gave way to amazed curiosity. You cannot imagine the things I saw. Not the major oddities, those are imaginable – you know there are people who rebuild vintage motorcycles in their living rooms or cannot bear to throw away a newspaper – but the minor ones, the colour schemes that made me ill, the collections of commemorative thimbles, the hallucinatory menageries of soft animals. I took pictures just to prove I wasn’t seeing things.
Little by little, I got the experience that should have been required of me as a qualification, and I got the lie of London too, in broad sweeps and primary colours. But the moods of places are subtle; they can change from one step to another, as Benjamin once pointed out, ‘as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs’ (I have the quote here on my notice board). I learned the basic English of the city, I followed the simple arguments of avenues and squares, especially when they were underlined by the river, but the things it was saying under its breath, the cryptic conversations of unfashionable neighbourhoods were always beyond me.
If the air seemed full of static, the fault was probably mine. I couldn’t go down the Tottenham Court Road or Baker Street or pass through Seven Dials or a hundred other places without feeling that I was in a story. I was reminded of my first glimpse of England as the plane descended towards Heathrow and I saw the neat patches of fields inked with roads and hedges, the muddy ponds, closer and closer as the plane dropped, until I could see chimney pots and roof slates like paint swatches in autumn shades, and then a tractor going down a lane and the farmer at the wheel, and I slipped into the pages of a book.
The agency handling the Kallie Knoetze ad had offices in Bedfordview and I drove out there to show them the contact sheets. They could have sent a driver – you didn’t email things in those days – but I was still relearning the map of the city and so I took them over myself. On my way home afterwards, I drove through Bez Valley. Against my better judgement, I went down Fourth Avenue again and stopped outside my house. The scene of the crime. The yellow walls were bilious in the afternoon light. There were two or three letters spindled in a wrought-iron curlicue on top of the gate. I collected the mail, climbed the steps and rang the bell.
I thought I heard a chime deep inside the house but no one came. I was just reaching through the security gate, meaning to knock on the frosted pane in the door, when it opened.
‘Can I help you?’
It always irks me when someone starts a conversation as if they’re behind the counter in a shop.
A small woman with a snail-shell of grey hair, more pewter than silver, lacquered and curled over a crunched nut of a face. Bespectacled. One of her eyes was made to look larger than the other by a thick lens. The big eye and the quizzical slant of the tortoiseshell frames made her appear unpleasantly surprised to see me.
‘These are yours.’ I thrust the letters through the bars and she took them without a word. She was dressed in black and wearing stockings without shoes. Good thing there was wall-to-wall on the floors, even if it was a dirty beige. In the pale dead ends of the stockings her toes looked like creatures suffocating.
I put on my nice open face. ‘I was passing …’ And that was the last truthful thing I said. For some reason, I began to lie. ‘My name is Neville and I’m an historian.’ Like a deadbeat at a support group. My mind ran on ahead. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it looped back, returning to ground we’ve already covered, sniffing for clues. ‘I’m writing a book.’ I really cannot explain it. The reason I was on her doorstep – a visit to the neighbourhood years ago had made me curious about the house – would not have been hard to convey. It would have been simpler than the story I was now concocting, that I had already made up in some way and kept half-formed in the back of my mind, ready to be filled out and flourished for the occasion. ‘I’m writing a book about Rosco Dunn.’
When I said it, when the name staggered out from a neutral corner of my mind, I almost laughed and spoilt everything.
‘The boxer,’ I added by way of explanation.
The big eye was a wanderer. The smaller one stayed focused on my face. I tried to change my expression to one of earnest enquiry. An historian? I did not even have a pen. The subject of my book had stumbled into my imagination a few days earlier and my stop at the agency had reminded me of him. When he arrived for the shoot, Kallie Knoetze was wearing a red satin robe with ‘Rosco Dunn’ on the back of it and he wouldn’t take it off. Our director had to call the casting agent and threaten to cancel the contract. By then she was on the verge of tears. ‘You’re supposed to be Kallie Knoetze,’ she said, ‘that’s the whole point.’
‘Who the hell is Rosco Dunn?’ I’d asked the make-up artist. ‘Someone he fought?’ The name rang a bell.
‘No, it’s some character he played in a movie,’ she said. ‘A contender. You see the parallel?’
The snail-headed woman was in the dark too. ‘What was the name again?’ she said through the gate.
‘Rosco Dunn. He used to live here. Well, not in this house, we can’t be sure, but in this street. Do you mind if I take a look around? It would help my research.’
‘In my house?’
I’d been back in Johannesburg long enough to know how suspicious people were. They always thought you were up to something – which I was. I should have told the truth. Except that telling the truth can make you sound like a chancer. In any event, the lies were tripping off my tongue.
‘I’m trying to discover who he was, my subject, what he was like. You can tell a lot about a person from the place they grew up.’
‘I suppose so. But the house has changed over the years. It won’t help you much.’
‘The details aren’t important, I’m after the shape of things, the general atmosphere. It would help me a lot, I assure you, and I’ll just be a minute.’
There were waxy runnels from the corners of her eyes to the corners of her small, pinched mouth, as if tears had dribbled and dried between the two. The big eye was settling down. Once that came into play, I was finished.
‘People are very interested in Rosco Dunn,’ I said, and again the name tickled me and I had to clench my jaw to stop from laughing. ‘Even overseas. Someone is thinking of making a movie.’
The magic word did not cause the gate to spring open. In fact, she began to fade back into the dark hallway. I had to restrain myself from grabbing her sleeve through the bars.
‘Perhaps I should speak to the neighbours instead,’ I said. ‘Do you know the
Dittons?’
That reeled her in again. ‘Oh no, you’re too late for that. They moved away years ago.’
‘Then you’re my only hope, Mrs …’ I should have looked at the name on the letter.
‘Camilla.’
‘Camilla. Perhaps I’ll take a picture of the outside, if you don’t mind, Camilla. I’ve got my camera in the car.’
My finger directed her lopsided gaze to the Mercedes on the other side of the street. Click. Her capitulation became audible in the sound of the latch.
‘I suppose it won’t harm.’ She pushed the gate open. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess. At my time of life, you don’t expect visitors.’
When the door swung shut, the air shifted as if someone had clapped their hands together next to my ear. A lamp like an old ivory chessman stood on a table in the hall. Half-blind and blinking in the gloom, I followed her down the passage. The first two doors we passed stood ajar and the rooms appeared to be empty. The third door was closed. Looking back, she pressed a finger to her lips and said softly, ‘Dr Pinheiro.’
The passage opened into a room I took to be the lounge, although the word did not fit. It seemed like a stage set, half-built or perhaps half-struck, and so sparsely furnished I could not help making an inventory. Under the window, an oak table and a straight-backed chair; in a row along one wall, five matching chairs pushed together to form a pew; at each end, a side table with a marble top the size of a dinner plate; on one of the tables, a brass bell; from a plain wooden pelmet, a fall of red velvet curtains; centre stage, like an island in a sea of beige, a small round red carpet.
I stood on the island. Camilla turned to face me, with her hands pinching a waist in the dress and her stockinged feet splayed, intent and suspicious, like an invigilator in an exam who has to make sure there is no cheating. Yet there was something girlish about the widow’s weeds, as if she had put on her granddaughter’s school uniform.
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