by Jon Zackon
“Why?”
“Well have you or haven’t you?”
“I think so. It’s probably in the boot of my car. But I’m not the best of packers.”
“Good. We’ll take that as a yes. We’re playing on Tuesday.”
“We? You and me?”
“Yep. And Moira and Ruth.”
My brain, which had been focused on a story I was trying to write, did a somersault or two. “Ruth? What are you talking about? We’re barely on speaking terms.”
“I don’t think you understand the workings of the female mind, Danny. Moira suggested it and Ruth was really up for it.”
“But she acts like I’m a piece of dog shit under her shoe, Conrad. Seriously.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She obviously rates you. Anyway, the game’s fixed. I’ve booked a court.”
He walked off in the direction of Neal Smythe’s office, leaving me struggling to regain my grip on reality. I couldn’t see his face but it wouldn’t have surprised me if he was beaming.
I could see Marty out of the corner of my eye. He must have been watching, waiting for a chance to speak. Now it was his turn to disturb me.
“Er, Daniel?” he said. “Sorry to interrupt the great reporter, son, but I just want to remind you we’ve got a game on Sunday night. Pick you up at seven.”
What game? Since when did I say I’d play in that school again? There were unresolved issues galore, not least of which were my financial situation and having to deal with Koos, now established as a killer, on a social level.
While I tried to remember my previous conversations with Marty he took advantage of my hesitancy. He placed a hand on my shoulder, said, “That’s fine, then,” and strode off.
An outside observer might have concluded that I was retarded. Why, otherwise, did I keep looking back at people with my mouth hanging open? And yes, I could have called out to Marty that I was no longer interested. But I was weak. I wanted one more crack at the game.
There was little work later that night. Neal, Conrad and I sat around chatting. Conrad refused to elaborate on Ruth’s apparent change of heart. Perhaps he genuinely didn’t know anything more.
“Are you going to the races tomorrow?” he asked.
“Greyville? Definitely.”
“I heard something tonight that you, as a big gambling man, would really like to know.”
“I’m a small gambling man, Conrad. Small but earnest – but go on.”
“I was talking to some of the cops on my rounds, right, and they told me that Freddy the Flyer was brought in last night …”
“Freddy the Flyer, hey?” I really was surprised. Conrad was talking about South Africa’s champion jockey.
“Yes, yes, Freddy Snaip, otherwise known as Freddy the Flyer. Anyway, two uniform guys on patrol found him totally smashed in his car. Slumped over the wheel, keys in hand.”
“Shit a brick, that’s serious. He could lose his licence. Could he go to jail?”
“Come on! The guy’s a national treasure. The cops recognised him immediately and never had any intention of arresting him. Otherwise I’d be writing the bloody story up right now, wouldn’t I? They just took him back to the station to sleep it off. They let him out in the morning.”
“So how does that affect my gambling addiction?”
“Apparently, when Freddy realises he hasn’t been arrested, and isn’t going to be charged, he’s so fucking grateful he almost starts crying. Then ... then … he tells them to back a horse at Greyville on Saturday. Says it can’t lose.”
My interest levels shot up several hundred per cent.
“You’re joking! What horse?”
“Er, something like King’s Boy in the fifth. Is there such a horse running?”
“Listen, I’ll find it. Freddy the Flyer’s mount in the fifth. Could be the best bloody tip in the history of racing, pal. If he thinks the cops have put money on it that makes it as near to a certainty as you’re ever going to get. Wow and wow again!”
***
At midnight we were joined by three of the subs – Harland Mayfield, Chris Cleburn-Smith and Geordie West. Neal had a family to go home to. The rest us headed in separate cars for my flat.
Waiting outside the block was Fazal Ali Malik, one of the Messenger’s two Indian reporters. He took a huge pot out of the boot of his car. I helped by carrying a smaller metal container and in we all went.
Once inside the flat we broke into a crate of beer – all except Fazal the Mohammedan, that is. He busied himself with plates and serving utensils.
I stuck a Thelonious Monk album on. My music. Not too loud. I didn’t dare disturb the neighbours.
A week or two back, I’d been extolling the quality of Durban curries to all and sundry in the reporters’ room. Fazal, a really sweet guy, immediately promised that his mother would make me a meal I’d never forget. And here it was – two chickens in an orangey-yellowy sauce in the pot and a heap of Basmati rice in the second container.
It turned out to be world class. Fazal giggled like a schoolkid as we guzzled his mother’s cooking and praised her genius.
Harland and Chris were lovers, or partners, or whatever you wanted to call them. They lived in a flat on the Berea, overlooking the city. They were knowledgeable, highly amusing and in my book, extremely brave to fly in the face of such a bigoted society.
Geordie, newly married, was a bit of a loner at work. By all accounts he was an exceptional sub and had been one of the paper’s top reporters. His bride thought reporting was dangerous and after the Cato Manor massacre he could no longer argue with her, which is why he’d turned to sub-editing.
“I was the first reporter there,” he told us. “The police had just secured the Manor when I arrived with Duncan the photographer. The cops wanted the world to see what the mob had done so they let us tag along as they collected the bodies. We piled into a police van and drove to this house …”
Geordie’s voice tailed off. He took a swig of lager and resumed, “There was this white policeman lying dead on the veranda. He was young, a teenager. His head had been sliced open by a panga. I was told that he’d run from the mob at the police station despite his terrible wound. He ran for over a mile until a family gave him shelter … and he slowly died. Right there on the veranda.”
Another swig. “Some of the dead black cops were naked. They obviously thought they could escape by shedding their uniforms. Uh-huh. Didn’t work. Every one of them was butchered. Anyway, the police started lifting the bodies into a van and I couldn’t help noticing two of them, one black, one white. They were lying side by side in the road and their hands were touching. I thought this was very moving. A powerful symbol – you know, divided by the colour of their skin in life, united in death. I could see it on every front page around the globe. So I nodded to Duncan but the silly bugger was reluctant. So I started gesticulating, you know, come on, come on” – Geordie waved an arm – “and still the bugger wouldn’t move his arse. Fuck knows why. So I started walking towards him and then I saw.”
Geordie took a deep breath. “Standing right next to him was the Chief of Durban City Police and he was looking straight at me and shaking his head. Fucking hypocrite! He wanted publicity that favoured the cops - but not if it wasn’t in keeping with the racially divisive workings of apartheid.”
Conrad turned to Geordie and said, “The next morning we both came into the office early, remember? You got in my car and we drove to the Cato Manor police station. We were both surprised when the police offered to let us join a convoy of ten vehicles they were preparing. The aim was to go right to the heart of the township, close to the beerhall. They said there was still an angry mob in there. So off we went in my old Chevvy. The lead police vehicle was a Saracen, one of those armoured cars with a machine gun mounted in the turret. So we obviously thought we were going to be safe.”
Conrad laughed dryly. “But when we got to the beerhall we were virtually surr
ounded by thousands of screaming Zulus brandishing sticks and pangas and God knows what else. I was shitting myself. I kept wondering, what if the car breaks down? Will the cops bother to rescue us?”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Well,” said Conrad, “the mob must have been pretty afraid of the machine gun. They stayed where they were and the car didn’t break down, so we crawled out of there at five miles and hour. But shit …”
“I know it sounds crazy,” said Geordie, “but I don’t remember being all that scared.”
“Oh, come on, Geordie” said Conrad. “What if they attacked us? We’d have been dead meat.”
“Yes, well, I don’t think they’d have harmed me. You know, I’d have stood up and shouted, ‘Oi fellas, I’m a bloody liberal. I’m on your side’.”
“And they’d have got the fucking message, right?”
“Exactly.”
Poor Conrad. He’d bared his soul telling us how terrified he’d been. And then Geordie goes and ruins his story by joking about it. Mind you, a cartoon image of Geordie stopping a bloodthirsty mob in its tracks by declaring his liberal beliefs would have sat well in Punch or the New Yorker. Conrad pulled a face and then even he had to laugh.
“Yes, very amusing, Geordie,” said Chris. “But the truth is, we’re never very far from mob violence in this city. It has to be one of the most racially divided places on earth.”
Chris, who was born in Wimbledon and took his degree at London University – after being among the first boys to pass the eleven-plus – proceeded to give us a detailed breakdown of Durban society.
In a city of close to a million people, he said, just under a third were white, a third were Indian and just over a third were African. The whites were divided into English, Afrikaner and a host of small ethnic groups. There was also the political division between Nationalists and an array of anti-government supporters.
The Asian population was divided into Hindus and Mohammedans, not to mention the appallingly divisive caste system brought over from the sub-continent. There were also various smaller Indian groups like Sikhs and Parsis, plus a number of Chinese.
The African divisions were largely between tribal Zulu traditionalists and more sophisticated African National Congress members.
“But what very few people seem to realise is that there’s also a significant Amaxhosa presence in Durban. Nearly 20,000 Xhosa, in fact,” said Chris.
“That’s hard to understand,” I said. “The Xhosas and the Zulus have been at each other’s throats for over a hundred years.”
“Well, they come here for the work. The Transkei, where they come from, is very downtrodden.”
“What about the pass laws?”
“I really don’t know. I don’t think the police are all that thorough. They tend to have a sweep or two and then relax a bit. I expect Verwoerd will chivvy them up. But I’d have thought that many of the Xhosas work on the docks, where they’re needed, so he won’t want to disturb that.”
“You know, we all think of Durban being a battlefield between black and white,” said Harland, who, like Conrad and Geordie, was born and brought up in the city. “But what about the tensions between the blacks and the Indian population?”
“Yes, all these divisions are very bitter and potentially explosive,” said Chris.
Fazal had been listening quietly. He leaned forward and said, “My mother’s cousin Ahmed was killed in the 1949 riots. He had a shop in Queen Street that was demolished by a horde of blacks. They were destroying and killing and raping. Ahmed rushed out to try to save his shop but he was beaten to death.”
We all commiserated. Chris, predictably, knew the riot figures. “At least 142 people died, a thousand were injured and two hundred and fifty houses were destroyed, as were about six hundred and twenty stores, mostly Indian owned.”
“What happened that day continues to haunt my people,” said Fazal. “It continues to sour relations between the African and Indian communities.”
“What about you personally, Fazal? Are you anti-African?” I asked.
“That’s difficult to answer. I think it may have made me anti-tribal, but it has also made me very pro-ANC. I believe only the ANC can save South Africa. What is also true is that we live in shocking conditions. Crammed into a small area with poor sanitation, few schools and much poverty – inside a very wealthy country.”
What I’d hoped would be a jolly little get-together had sunk into a dispiriting political morass. It crossed my mind that this was how every serious conversation was bound to turn out in this sad country.
And I still had questions to ask. “What about inside The Messenger? Do all these divisions show up among the staff? I’ve always thought of it as an untainted, liberally minded English language paper. That’s why I joined it.”
Harland and Geordie pulled wry faces.
“There are people on the paper you dare not trust,” said Harland. “They could well be government plants. So let me tell you something, Danny. You are too free with your views when you’re in the office. I’ve heard you. Try to be more careful.”
“Who do you mean?” I said. “Reporters? Subs? Printers?”
But Harland wouldn’t tell, and our little gathering grew quiet.
After everyone had left I was too tired to tidy up. I’d also had one beer too many. I chucked myself on my bed and found myself wondering whom Harland had in mind. Spies in our midst. But why was he shy to name anyone? I concluded that although there might be something in what he said, he probably didn’t know as much as he intimated.
Eventually my mind drifted to a more pressing matter. The last words I muttered before I fell asleep were, “King’s Boy in the fifth, King’s Boy in the fifth.”
Chapter 11
IT WAS a long, uncomfortable wait for the fifth race. I’m the sort of mug who has to bet on every race and the big danger on that steaming day at Greyville was that I’d go broke before I could have a decent bet on King Boyd – which, it turned out, was the nag’s real name. For once, though, a modicum of self-knowledge drove me to act providentially. So as soon as I arrived at the course I set out to put most of my money on Freddy the Flyer’s mount.
The bookies were still laying out their stands and fiddling with their money satchels as I walked around the near empty betting ring. I was looking for the best early price, but what I found was disappointing. King Boyd was the favourite at three to one. I only had sixty rand to gamble with. I went up to a bookie and took one hundred and twenty to forty on the King, meaning that I had twenty left – a mere five rand to wager on each of the first four races.
Then I went and stood at the bottom end of the silver ring, at least a hundred and fifty yards from the finish.
As forecast, my betting kitty had vanished by the time Freddy the Flyer swung his chestnut mount on to the racecourse and cantered down towards the seven-furlong gate. If the big handsome animal were to lose, I told myself, I’d be reduced to supping on bread and water.
The tapes went up and Freddy immediately dropped King Boyd in behind the field. I hoped the champion jockey knew what he was doing. The straight at Greyville was under three furlongs, which was rather short, so it was generally best to be up with the pace.
All too soon the field turned into the home stretch. King Boyd was behind a wall of horses and there wasn’t far to go. I was getting anxious. Freddy must have been getting anxious. The punters among the Durban City Police must have been getting anxious.
Suddenly, at the furlong marker, I saw Freddy wave his whip and heard him scream, “Get out of the fucking way!”
The wall of horses parted and King Boyd shot through the resulting gap to win, as they say in racing parlance, going away. Whew!
I collected my winnings and headed for the car park.
As I walked behind the main stand I saw two familiar figures emerging – the hulking Theo towering over the dapper Koos. Theo saw me and gave half a smile an
d half a wave. Koos waved but his expression barely changed. They both looked a little flushed. I reckoned they’d been drinking – and I’d have bet every cent of my winnings that they’d also scored on King Boyd.
***
Once home I showered, put on a suit and tie and went out to treat myself to a steak dinner. I felt like walking afterwards, so I dawdled up West Street and turned towards the docks. I got to Frankie’s around nine thirty. The house band was just finishing its first session. The bandleader, who called himself Joe the Shmoe Earlberg, put his trombone down and came to sit with the customers. I’d met him on previous visits and now I bought him a Scotch.
In Jo’burg I had been to concerts to hear great bebop delivered by the sax player Kippie Moeketsi, the pianist Dollar Brand and trumpeter Hugh Masakela.
“Ever play with black musicians, Joe?” I asked.
“No way,” he said. “They’re a bunch of shits. I’m sorry to say this, but they’re also greatly overrated.”
I could hardly believe my ears. I’d once been introduced to Kippie and Hugh. Friendly, exuberant guys. Brilliant musicians. As opposed to the mordant, unfriendly, rather average – and blatantly bigoted – Joe the Shmoe. There was also the small matter of jazz being universally accepted as a largely black American medium. Not to mention the fact that all my favourite musicians – Monk, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown – were black. I vowed never to buy Joe the Schmoe another drink.
At ten past ten Steven walked in. With Ruth.
“Wow! What a surprise,” I gushed as they spotted me and came to sit at my table.
Ruth gave me a lovely smile. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse, turquoise pedal pushers and pumps. A turquoise headband and gold bracelet were her only accessories.
“You look as if you’ve come to dance,” I said.
“Well, come on then.”
She grabbed my hand and dragged me on to the tiny dance floor. I hated dancing when the music was good. I was always telling people that jazz was strictly for listening to. But Earlberg’s house band did not qualify.