Life Times Stories Part 20

That one was a toughie, all right the detainee. When Sergeant Chapman took over again, the bloke was so groggy like a loser after ten rounds but he wouldn't talk, he wouldn't talk. At about ten o'clock he pa.s.sed out and even the Major agreed to call it a day until six in the morning. Sergeant Chapman told him about the venison. The Major thought it a great joke but at the same time suggested the Sergeant's young wife ought to learn how to handle a firearm. Next time it might be more than a monkey out there in the yard. Sergeant Chapman ought to know the situation.

There had to be some sign that the plot was being cultivated. That was what black men were for; so Eddie hoed the mealie patch. Vusi kept to the house. He sat in his armchair and read a thick paperback whose pages, top and bottom, were splayed and puffed by exposure to climatic changes or by much thumbing. Africa Undermined: A History of the Mining Companies and the Underdevelopment of Africa: sometimes he would borrow a ballpoint from Joy, mark a pa.s.sage. If he began to yawn and sigh this was a prelude to his suddenly getting up and disappearing into the back room. She would hear him tinkering there, the clink of small tools; she supposed it was to do with what was locked in the shed. She filled several hours a day with Teach Yourself Portuguese, but didn't have her ca.s.settes with her, here, as a guide to p.r.o.nunciation, so had to concentrate on the grammar. Vusi could have helped her with German but Portuguese!

'How long were you there?' He had trained in East Germany. That much she knew about him.

'Two years and three months. We didn't learn from books. You just have to begin to talk, man, you have to make people understand you when you want something, that's the best way. But what d'you want to learn Portuguese for?'

'Mozambique. Charles and I thought of going there. To live.' She pulled her hair back down behind the arms of her gla.s.ses. 'I might go, anyway. Teach for a while.'

'What do you teach?'

She made an awkward face. 'I haven't much, yet. But I can teach history. The new education system there; I'd like to be involved . . . in something like that. One day.' The two words pa.s.sed to him as a token that she was not deserting.

'Ja. You'd like it. It's going to be a good place. And Charlie, he's learning too?'

'He was. But not now.'

Vusi picked up her book and tried out a phrase or two, smiled at his poor effort.

'You do speak Portuguese.'

'Some words . . . I was only there a couple of months, everyone talks English to you.' He managed, with an accent better than hers, a few more phrases, as if for his and her amus.e.m.e.nt.

He sat in his chair again, waiting, his face as he himself would never see it, not in any photograph or mirror. He was possessed by an expression far from anyone's reach, so deep in the past of himself, a sorrow he did not consciously feel there in the watergleam of his black eyes hidden in the ancient cave of skull, in the tenuousness of life in the fine gills of the nostrils, the extraordinary unconscious settling of the grooved lips lips that, when he was unaware of himself, not using them to shape the half-articulate communication of a poorly educated black man's English, held in their form what has never been, might still be spoken.

Now when he did speak, on the conscious level of their being in the room together, it seemed to her he did not know who he was; she had to make the quick adjustment to his working perception of himself. 'You not really married?'

She looked at his mystery, while he showed simple curiosity.

'No. Not really anything.'

He understood was meant to understand? she doesn't sleep with Charlie. If so, it was a confidence that licensed questions. 'What's the idea?'

'Well. There's no other room for me, is there.'

He arched his head back against the chair, expelled a breath towards the ceiling with its pine-knots and pressed lead curlicues all four of them, at times, took tally of obsessively.

'We came to a sort of stop. About five months ago, after nearly six years. But we'd already accepted to do this, while we were still together, so we couldn't let that make any difference.'

'h.e.l.l, you're a funny kind of woman.'

It was said with detached admiration. She laughed. 'You know better than I do what matters.'

'Sure. Still-'

'It's because I'm a woman you say still-'

He saw she jealously took his admiration as some sort of discrimination within commitment. He s.h.i.+ed away. There came out of that mouth of his a careless response a city black man picks up as the idiom of whites in the streets. 'That's one I can't handle.'

He escaped her, taking up Africa Undermined aimlessly and putting it down again on his way out of the room.

Charles returned from his daily run; part of the routine he had constructed for himself to support the waiting. His rump in satiny blue-and-red shorts rose and fell before motorists who overtook him and often waved in approval of his healthy employment of time. Eddie would have liked to come along (oh how long five years ago, as a seventeen-year-old in Soweto he had run in training, had ambitions as an amateur flyweight) but a black-and-white couple would have been conspicuous. Panting like a happy dog, s.h.a.ggy with warm odours, Charles was brought up short, in the room, as when one enters where some event is just over; but all that he was sensing, without identifying this, was that he had been talked about in his absence.

Although once she would have made a peg with fingers on her nose and so sent him off to shower, she did not now have the rights over his body to tell him he stank of good sweat; just smiled quickly and went on with her future tenses. He meant to go and get dressed but the need to know everything his colleagues knew, to follow their minds wherever they went, that would have made him a natural chairman of the board if he had grown up responding differently to propitious 'circ.u.mstances', led him to have a look at what chapter Vusi had reached in his book, and then, although he himself had read the book, to begin reading, again, wherever the other man had made his mark in ballpoint blue.

Not suddenly there must have been the too-soft impression before first Charles, then Joy became conscious of it there was a voice never heard before, in the house where no one but the four of them ever entered, now. It was unexpected as the feeble cry of something newborn.

Vusi came into the room with an instrument from which he was producing a voice. He pa.s.sed Charles and stood before Joy, playing a m.u.f.fled, sweet, half-mumbled 'Georgia On My Mind' yes, that was it, identified as a bird-call can be made out as phonetic syllables humans translate into words. From those lips rippling and contracting round a mouthpiece, beneath his fingers pressing crude b.u.t.tons, the song was issuing from an instrument strangely recognisable, absurd and delightful. Every now and then he drew a gulp of breath, like a swimmer. He played on, the voice gaining power, sometimes stammering (the peculiar b.u.t.tons got stuck), occasionally squealing, but achieving the gentle, wah-wah sonority, rocket rise to high note and steady gliding fall out of hearing that belong to one instrument alone.

While what they had to do was wait, Vusi made a saxophone.

It was for this that he had collected the tabbed rings off beer cans. The curved neck was perhaps the easiest. It was made of articulated sections hammered from jam tins. Some of the more intricate parts must have required a thicker material. There might be a few cartridge cases transformed in the keyboard. He had worked on the saxophone shut up in the shed with the necessities stored there, as well as away down at the pigsties, where it was tried out without anyone else being able to hear it.

The white couple marvelled over the thing. An extraordinary artefact, as well as a musical instrument. Having played it to the girl that first time it was ever played for others, Vusi was unmoved by praise because no one would see what they were really looking at, as laymen enthuse over something that can't be grasped through their secular appreciation.

He didn't know Charles was reminded of the ingenuity of objects displayed in the concentration camps of Europe, now museums. These were made by the inmates out of nothing, effigies of the beautiful possibilities of a life to be lived.

The munic.i.p.al art gallery owns a sacred monkey. A charming image, an Indian statuette copied by a Viennese artist in glazed ceramic, green as if carved out of deep water. It lives in a cupboard behind gla.s.s. The gallery is poorly endowed with the art of the African continent on which it stands, and has no example of the dog-faced ape of ancient Egyptian mythology, Cynocephalus, often depicted attendant upon the G.o.d Thoth, which she has seen in museums abroad and has been amused to recognise as the two-thousand-year-old spitting image of a baboon species still numerous in South Africa.

A set of pan pipes sticking up out of the bathwater: toes. A face reflected in the snout of the s.h.i.+ny tap bulged into a merry gourd with a Halloween mouth. She can look at that but she doesn't want to see the distortion of her lower torso which is reflected if she leans her head, in its plastic mob cap, against the back of the bath. Her legs become gangling and bowed, joined by huge feet at one end and a curved perspective that leads back to a hairy creature, crouched. There is nothing beyond this voracious pudenda; it has swallowed the body and head behind it. She lies in the bath for relaxation. n.o.body's told her she's dying, but they're being brought down all around her, as a lion moves into a herd, tearing into the flesh of his victims. A breast off here; a piece of lung there; a bladder cut down to size. She lies on her back and palpates her b.r.e.a.s.t.s dutifully. There are ribs, but no lumps. The nipples don't rise; that's good, she doesn't like the masturbatory aspect of what doctors advise you to do to yourself, as a precaution, in order to stay alive. These b.r.e.a.s.t.s don't recognise her hands; they've known only male ones. Her hands don't make them remember those.

Despite the fun-palace image in the tap, her real thighs still have that firm cla.s.sical roundness. They don't pile like half-set junket round the knees when she's standing. Not yet.

The delicately engraved imprint of autumn leaves a few vari-cosed patches is more or less covered by a tan.

However she lies, her stomach rises like the Leviathan.

It was always there, waiting, flattened between the hip bones, for its years to come! She doesn't take it too hard. These fantasies are the consequence of waking so early, and there's a simple scientific explanation for that: reduced hormonal activity means you need less sleep. She nods her head in sage comprehension when this is explained to her; what it really means is you sleep eight hours after love-making. She feels them, other people, sleeping this sleep in other rooms. It's true that as you get older you suddenly know what happened in childhood. She understands quite differently, now, the family joke she used to be told about how she crawled over to her mother's bed at dawn, lifted her sleeping eyelid and spat in her eye. Oh lovers, I envy you the sleep, not the love-making, but n.o.body would believe me. I am told to disbelieve myself. 'It's something a doctor can't really let himself prescribe . . . but you need to stop thinking you're not interesting to men any longer.'

Old stock; hers. She goes over it again, toes, thighs, t.w.a.t (yes, put down the great notion it had of itself, temple of pleasure), nice b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The face can be left out of it, thank G.o.d, you can't verify your own face by looking down on it in the bath, wiggling it, spouting its flesh out of the water and scuttling it to sink to the belly b.u.t.ton again. This is not a bath with mirrors, far nicer, it has a gla.s.s wall that looks on a tiny courtyard no bigger than an airshaft where shade-loving plants and ferns grow, ingeniously and economically watered, in time of drought, by the outlet from the bath. They flourish in water favoured by this flesh as the s.h.i.+-ites buy grace in the form of bathwater used by the Aga Khan. She ought to contemplate the plants instead. She feels she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to be distracted from what she has to see, but she forces herself she must stop watching herself, and this makes her feel someone's watching her, there's a gaze forming outside her awareness of self, it exists for a moment between the greenery.

Looking at the woman in the bath. Seeing what she sees.

She thought of it as having struck her, first, as the head of antiquity, the Egyptian basalt rigidity, twice removed as animal and attribute of a G.o.d from man, but with a gleam of close golden brown eyes like a human's.

No. A real baboon, Peeping Tom at large in the suburbs.

She had to think of it as that. If not (soaking herself groggy, seeing things), it would have to be her own visitation; a man.

Eddie came upon some droppings not far from the back of the shed. They looked human, to him. All four went to the spot to have a look. The Kleynhans place was so isolated, except for the pa.s.sage of life on the road, to which it offered no reason to pause. They had felt themselves safe from intruders.

The hard twist of excreta was plaited with fur and sinew: Charles picked it up in his bare hand. 'See that? It had rabbit for supper. A jackal.'

Joy gave a s.h.i.+very laugh, although there was no prowling man to fear. 'So close to the house?'

Vusi was disbelieving. 'Nothing to eat there.' The converted shed with its roll-down metal door was just behind them.

'Well, they pad around, sniff around. I suppose this place's still got a whiff of chickens and pigs. It's quite common even now, you get the odd jackal roaming fairly near to towns.'

'Are you sure? How can you know it's jackal, Charlie?'

Charles waggled the dung under Eddie's nose.

'Hey, man!' Eddie backed off, laughing nervously.

Vusi was a tester of statements rather than curious. 'Can you tell all kinds of animals' business?'

'Of course. First there's the shape and size, that's easy, ay, anyone can tell an elephant's from a bird's-' They laughed, but Charles was matter-of-fact, as someone who no longer works in a factory will pick up a tool and use it with the same automative skill learnt on an a.s.sembly line. 'But even if the stuff is broken up, you can say accurately which animal by examining food content. The bushmen the San, Khoikhoi they've practised it for centuries, part of their hunting skills.'

'Is that what they taught you at Scouts, man?'

'No. Not Scouts exactly.'

'So where'd you pick it up?' Eddie rallied the others. 'A Number Two expert! He's clever, old Charlie. We're lucky to have a chap like him, ay!'

Joy was listening politely, half-smiling, to Charles retelling, laconically self-censored, what had been the confidences of their early intimacy.

'Once upon a time I was a game ranger, believe it or not.' That was one of the things he had tried in order to avoid others: not to have to go into metal and corrugated paper packaging in which his father and uncles held 40 per cent of the shares, not to take up (well, all right, if you're not cut out for business) an opening in a quasi-governmental fuel research unit without, for a long time, knowing that there was no way out for him, neither the detachment of science nor the consolations of nature. Born what he was, where he was, knowing what he knew, outrage would have burned down to shame if he had thought his generation had any right left to something in the careers guide.

'You're kidding. Where?'

'Oh, around. An ignoramus with a B.Sc. Honours, but the Shangaan rangers educated me.'

'Oh, Kruger Park, you mean. They work there. That place.' Vusi's jerk of the head cut off his words like an appalled flick of fingers. Once, he had come in through that vast wilderness of protected species; an endangered one on his way to become operational. Fear came back to him as a layer of cold liquid under the scalp. All that showed was that his small stiff ears pulled slightly against his skull.

Charles wiped his palm on his pants and clasped hands behind his head, easing his neck, his matronly pectorals flexing to keep in trim while waiting. 'One day I'd like to apply the methodology to humans a cla.s.s a.n.a.lysis.' (He enjoyed their laughter.) 'The sewage from a white suburb and the sewage from a squatters' camp you couldn't find a better way of measuring the level of sustenance afforded by different income levels, even the sn.o.bbery imposed by different occupations and aspirations. A black street-sweeper who scoffed half a loaf and a Bantu beer for lunch, a white executive who's digested oysters and a bottle of Fleur du Cap, show me what you s.h.i.+t, man, and I'll tell you who you are.'

That afternoon a black man did appear in the yard. He was not a prowler, although he probably had been watching them, the Kleynhans place, since they'd moved in. He would have known from where this could be managed delicately, without disturbing them or being seen.

He was a middle-aged farm labourer dressed in his church clothes so that the master and the missus wouldn't chase him away as a skelm. But he needn't have worried, because the master and the missus never appeared from the house. He found the two men who worked there at Baas Kleynhans's place now, as he had done, farm boys. He had come to see how his mealies were getting along. Yes. Yes . . . There was a long pause, in which the corollary to that remark would have time to be understood: he had been circling round the Kleynhans place, round this moment, to come to the point an agreement whereby he could claim his mealie crop when it was ready for harvest. These other two, his brothers (he spoke to them in Sesotho and they answered in that language, but when he asked where they were from they said Natal) were welcome to eat what they liked, he was only worried about the white farmer. Could they claim the patch as the usual bit of ground for pumpkins and mealies farmers allowed their blacks? He would come and weed the mealies himself very early in the morning, before the baas got up, he wouldn't bring his brothers any trouble.

But the young men were good young men. They wouldn't hear of baba doing that. The one in jeans and a s.h.i.+rt with pictures all over it (farm boys dressed just the same as youngsters from town, these days) said he was looking after the mealies, don't worry. Gazing round his old home yard, the man admired the new garage with the nice door that had been made out of the shed and asked why this new white man hadn't ploughed? What were they going to plant? And what was his (Vusi's) work, if this white man wasn't going to have any pigs or chickens? They explained that farming hadn't really begun yet. First they'd built the garage, and Vusi Vusi had been working inside. Helping the farmer fix things up. Painting the house. Ah yes, Baas Kleynhans was sick a long time before he died, there was no one to look after the house nicely.

The three black men talked together in the yard for more than an hour. They drifted towards a couple of boxes that still stood there, from Charles's deliveries, and sat on them, facing one another, gesticulating and smoking, sometimes breaking the little knot with a high exclamation or a piece of mimicry, laughter. When the man took off his felt hat a lump at the centre of his dusty hairline was polished by the sun. The white couple got a look at them from the bathroom window. It was an opaque gla.s.s hatch that opened under layers of dead creeper. What was happening in the yard could have been seen and heard more clearly from the kitchen windows, but the white couple also would have been visible, there, and they could not understand what was being said, anyway.

At first they felt only anxiety. Then they began to feel like eavesdroppers, spies: those who have no commune, those on the outside. The slow accretion of past weeks that was the four of them a containing: a sh.e.l.l, a habitation was broken. Eddie and Vusi were out there, yet it was Charles and Joy who were alone. They had no way of knowing what it was they were witnessing.

The man wobbled away on an old bicycle, calling the dying fall of farewells that go back and forth between country blacks. Both the pair in the house and the pair outside waited, just as they were, for about ten minutes. Vusi was silent but Charles and Joy (still in the bathroom, with its snivelling tap) could hear the continuing murmur of Eddie in monologue.

They all met in the kitchen. The girl looked ridiculously breathless, to the two coming in from the yard, as if she had been climbing.

'He used to work for the man who owned this place before. He wants his mealies.'

Charles's emotions, like his blood, flushed near the surface. He was testy when anxious; now, impatient with Vusi. 'It took the whole afternoon to say that! Christ, we've been going crazy. You seemed to know the man. We thought G.o.d knows what that you were having to give explanations, that you were cornered I don't know? And what could we do? You seemed to be enjoying yourselves, for Christ' sake . . .'

As anxiety found release his tone drained of accusation; he ended up excited, half-laughing, rolling tendrils of bright beard between thumb and finger. Like a fragment of food, at table, a shred of leaf from the dead creeper round the bathroom window clung to the hairs.

Eddie went to the fridge and took out beer. 'We should have given him something to drink, but I couldn't come into the white baas's kitchen and just take. He must've wondered why we didn't have any in his old room, man; I was scared he'd ask to go in there, and see no beds, nothing. I was already thinking could I say we had girlfriends somewhere, where we sleep. But he knows everybody for miles around this place.'

They discussed the man and decided there was nothing they could do except hope he would not come back too shortly. Soon it would not matter any more if he did.

Joy did not look at Charles but directed a remark at him: 'If we have to stay much longer I'll have to start wearing a pillow. When I met our friend the estate agent's wife at the chemist's last week she had a good look at me. "You don't show yet, do you, dear?" '

'Oh my G.o.d. You'd better stop going to town.'

She did not complain. Her hair was put up in an odd knot on the side of her head she was a woman, after all, she played about with her appearance, waiting. The way of doing her hair was very unattractive; on the side from which it was pulled over, the bone behind her ear was prominent and her skull looked flattened. 'And what was that Cyclops eye on his forehead?'

Eddie winced, puzzled. 'That what?'

'Some lump I could see in the sun, quite big and s.h.i.+ny.'

Charles tossed the remark absently at her, no one was interested. 'A cyst, I suppose. I didn't notice.'

'Like a bulging eye in the middle of his head. Or one of Moses's horns growing.'

Vusi had no need of ring-tabs any longer he dropped his in his emptied beer can and gave it a shake, sounding a rattle for attention. 'Kleynhans paid him fifteen rands a month. He worked for him for twelve years. When Kleynhans died, the daughter told the agent Klopper he could stay on without pay in that room in the yard until the place was sold. His son works at the brick-field and lives with his wife and kids with those other squatters near there. They've been chased off twice but they built their shack again. Since we came, the old man's living with them. No job. No permission to look for work in town. Nowhere to go.'

'Yes.' Charles dragged all five fingers again and again through his beard. 'Yes.'

A habitation of resolve, secreted by their presence among one another, contained them again, the four of them: waiting. They were quiet, not subdued; strongly alive. There was no need to talk. After a while Vusi fetched his saxophone and it spoke, gently. There was a summer storm coming up, first the single finger of a tree's branch paddling thick air, then the land expelling great breaths in gusts, common brown birds flinging themselves wildly, a raw, fresh-cut scent of rain falling somewhere else. So beautiful, the temperament of the earth. Waiting, they saw the rain, dangling over the pale spools that were the power station towers.

Ms Dot Lamb, chairperson of the Residents' a.s.sociation of the suburb where, if an outlaw can be said to have taken up residence, this one seemed to have a base, since it kept returning there, requested an interview with the town councillor whom the residents had voted into office to protect their property and interests. The promise given by him produced no result as if to show how little it felt itself threatened by the councillor, the creature 'cleaned up' as a resident put it, an entire bed of artichokes cultivated from imported seed for table use as an elegant first course. Ms Lamb called a meeting of the a.s.sociation. She was a woman who got things done; the residents were people who wanted things done for them, without having to take the trouble themselves. It was she who had rallied them to contest the plan to build a home for spastic children among their houses. She had won (for them) the battle to stop toilets for blacks being built at the blacks' suburban bus terminus, making a strong case that this convenience, far from promoting public decency, would merely encourage the number of blacks who gathered to drink among the natural flora of the koppies that was such a treasured feature of the suburb. Now these koppies were being used by an escaped ape as well. Was it for this that ratepayers had been notified of increases in property taxes envisaged for the coming year? Valuable pets, loved companions of children, had been killed. People feared to leave small children to play in their own gardens.

The residents authorised Ms Lamb to take further steps. She wanted no more s.h.i.+lly-shallying with the so-called proper channels. She went straight to the local police station, kicked up a fuss, and actually got the superintendent to send two armed white policemen and a couple of black ones to mount a search along the ridge of koppies behind some of the finest homes in the suburb. They rounded up several illicit liquor sellers and arrested fifteen men without pa.s.ses, but did not find what they had been instructed to.

The SPCA protested that an animal should not be hunted and shot by the police, like a criminal. Zoo officials offered to try and dart it. If, as a number of people insisted, it was an ape, it would find a safe home in the new ape-house, where at 3 p.m. every day the inmates perform a tea party for the amus.e.m.e.nt of children of all races.

Eddie went to the road and thumbed a lift in the African way, flagging a whole arm from waist level as if directing a motor race. He was wearing his Wild West jacket. Vusi and Charles were still asleep some people can pa.s.s the time, waiting, by sleeping more but Joy saw him go. Her hands tingled with anguish, as if she were going to be sick. She did not wake the others and did not know if she was doing what was right. She did not know whether, when they woke up, she would pretend she had not seen Eddie.

Eddie got a lift with a black man in a firm's panel van. They talked about soccer. He did not ask to be let down at the local dorp where Joy and Mrs Naas Klopper shopped. He went all the way to Johannesburg.

Eddie had nothing to leave at the entrance to a supermarket where you were asked to deposit your briefcase or carrier bag in return for a numbered disc. He did not uncouple a trolley from the train against the wall, or pick up a plastic basket. He walked the lanes as if at a vast exhibition, pa.s.sing a.r.s.enals of canned fruit, yellow mosaics of pickles in jars, flat, round and oval cans of pilchards, sardines, anchovies, mussels in brine and tuna in cottonseed oil, bottles of sauces, aerosol cans of chocolate topping, bins of coffee beans, packets of rice and lentils, sacks of mealie-meal and sugar, pausing now and then, as if to read the name of the artist: Genuine Papadums, Poivre Vert de Madagascar and then pa.s.sing on to pet and poultry foods, detergents, packaged meat like cross-sections of viscera under a microscope, pots, Irish Coffee gla.s.ses, can openers, electric pizza-makers, saws, chisels, light bulbs, roundabout stands of women's pantyhose, and greeting cards humorous, religious or sentimental. White women pushed small children or small dogs in the upper rack of trolleys. Black people turned over the packages of stewing meat. Other blacks, employees, wielded punches that printed prices on stocks they were replenis.h.i.+ng. The piped music was interrupted by chimes and a voice regularly welcoming him (in his capacity as a shopper) and announcing today's specials. At the record and tape bar he spent half an hour turning over the decks of bright neat tapes the way others did meat packs. There were no facilities for listening to tapes or records, but he knew all the groups and individuals recorded, and their familiar music sealed within. A supermarket wouldn't have anything that hadn't been reissued in cheap ma.s.s pressings you'd need a record shop for really good, new stuff. Going through these was just looking up what hadn't changed.

He queued at one of the exits holding a set of transistor batteries and a snuffbox-sized tin of ointment he hadn't seen since his mother used to put it on his sores as a kid. A mama ahead of him, turning to speak Setswana, at home here in this city in her slippers, outsize tweed skirt and nylon headscarf from some street-vendor's selection, a.s.sumed his support, as one of her own, in an argument over change with the aloof almost-white cas.h.i.+er. From the stand beside him he took, as a tourist picks up a last postcard, one of the pairs of sungla.s.ses hooked there.

In the streets there were thousands like him. He crossed at traffic lights and walked pavements among them. Young ones loping in loose gangs of three or four, out of work or out of school, going nowhere. When you are that age, the city, where there is nothing for you, draws you from the towns.h.i.+ps, to which you always have to go back. Others, his own age, carrying their employers' mail and packages to the post office, daringly shaving their motorbikes past traffic, delivering medicines and film, legal doc.u.ments, orders of hamburgers. Older ones in those top bra.s.s peaked caps and military tunics with which white people strangely choose to dress the humblest of their employees doormen and commissionaires like their military heroes. The city was blacker than he remembered it. Down the west end of Jeppe and Bree Streets, the same long bus queues making an accompanying line of fruit skins and c.o.ke cans in the gutters, the same Portuguese eating-house selling pap and stew, the same taxi drivers using Diagonal Street as the backyard where they groomed their vehicles like proud racehorse owners, the same women crowded round the alley exit of the poultry wholesaler's to buy sloppy pails of chicken guts. But in the white part of the city, where there were no street stalls but banks and insurance company blocks, landscaped malls, caterpillars of people being carried from level to level into what used to be the white centre of the city, his own kind seemed to have flowed. It was Sat.u.r.day and there were light-coloureds, painters and carpenters of the building trade, dressed in pastel safari shorts and jackets, straw hats with paisley bands, like the Afrikaners who grandfathered them. Black kids of respectable families had dazzling white socks halfway up their small legs. Lovely black girls tilted the balance of their backsides to counter the angle of the high-heeled sandals it was apparently fas.h.i.+onable this year to wear with jeans; the nails of their crooked toes and beautiful hands signalled deep red as they approached and pa.s.sed him. All would have to go back to the places for blacks, when they had spent their money; but there was no white centre to the city any more (he had forgotten, in five years, that this was so, or it had happened in those five years). They came in and surged all over it, it lived off them and for them. The male office-cleaners, tiny, bare-chested figures looking down, in the wind and dust blown from the mine dumps, from the tops of skysc.r.a.pers where they washed their clothes and drank beer, must be able to see their own people far below, flowing all round the company headquarters of the white race.

He spent a long time looking in windows filled with pocket calculators of all sizes and kinds, video equipment, cameras and the latest in walkabout tape players, which, as watches once had been, were being reduced to smaller and smaller format. Inside a shop he had this marvellous precision of workmans.h.i.+p demonstrated to him by a young Portuguese who probably had fled to this country from black rule in Mozambique just about the same time as Eddie had fled from his home, here in Johannesburg, eluding the political police from the handsome building with touches of blue paint, John Vorster Square, a few blocks from the shop in which he was now trying on headphones. 'S'wonderful, 'ey? You don't 'ardly feel them, they so light.' The young Portuguese was willing to show every feature of each shape, size and model. When Eddie left without 'making up his mind', he gave Eddie a card with a name written large and curly below the shop's printed t.i.tle Manuel. 'H'ask for me, I'll look after you.'

In an outfitter's Eddie was shown a range of casual trousers by an Indian employed there. 'This's what all the young chaps are wearing, man. Bright colours. What are you? Twenty-eight?' He sized up Eddie's waist with a frisker's glance. He admired Eddie's jacket: that certainly wasn't locally made! When Eddie didn't see anything he liked, he was rea.s.sured: 'Just look in next week, say, after Tuesday. We getting fabulous new stuff all the time. Whenever you pa.s.sing . . .'

He roamed again towards the west end, to the queues from which he could catch a bus to get him part of his way back. He bought a carton of curried chicken and ate as he went along. Outside a white men's bar a black girl singled him out with a sidling look, and approached. He smiled and walked on: no thanks, sisi. With the prost.i.tute's eye for the stranger in town, she was the only one in the city to recognise him: someone set apart in the crowd of his own kind from which he appeared indistinguishable.

Stanley Dobrow entered his photograph for the 'Picture of The Year' compet.i.tion held by a morning paper.

Old Grahame Fraser-Smith the 'old' was an epithet of comradeliness on the part of his colleagues, he was only forty-eight got the idea in his head that although short-sighted, he had seen into the eyes of the creature. In the operating theatre, during those intervals between putting together broken faces with a human skill and ingenuity more miraculous than G.o.d's making of a woman out of a man's rib, he told the story differently, now. It seemed to him that as he bent down for the golf ball, he saw the creature bend first, just as he was doing, but farther off. And they looked at each other. You know how arresting eyes can be? It was hardly necessary to point this out where everyone around him was reduced to eyes above masks. No, true, he couldn't describe the body, certainly not the gait, as van Gelder insisted he could. Yet the eyes you know how it is sometimes, in a room full of people, you see really only one person, you look into that pair of eyes and it's as if you are face to face, alone, with that person? It was like suddenly meeting someone seen many times on a photograph; or someone he'd been told about as a child; or someone people had been telling one another about for generations. He stopped there. He didn't want the a.s.sisting surgeons, anaesthetist, nurses, the medical students who came to watch the beauty of his work (about which he was genuinely modest) to reduce that encounter to something fanciful, and therefore funny. But if van Gelder was a bone man, so was he, a Hamlet who had contemplated and reconstructed with his own hands the living maxillo-facial structure of a thousand Yoricks. To himself he secretly continued: he had looked back into a consciousness from which part of his own came. There were claims from within oneself that could materialise only in these unsought ways, in apparently trivial or fortuitous happenings that could be felt but not understood. He thought of the experience as some sort of slip in the engagement of the cogs of time.

Eddie was there before dark.