A few months later the convict came again. I was in bed with the flu and I recognized the man at the gate at once. Very tall, as Mom had said, and upright. A big block of a head, shaven clean like a prisoner’s, and his hands held out in front of him as if he was scared of falling. His straw-coloured canvas suit seemed to be ingrained with coal dust and he had white boots like the pair in the bottom of Dad’s wardrobe from his cricketing days. I watched through the net curtain as he turned stiffly around to close the latch. Cassie jumped up against him without barking and he put one hand on my dog’s head and pushed him gently down.
Mom came into my room with her finger on her lips. She’d seen him from her own window. She stood against the wall and I lay in bed with the blanket drawn up to my chin. After a while the knock came on the door, three evenly spaced taps, repeated three times with a long pause in between. Then he left. Cassie followed him to the gate, bouncing up against the backs of his thighs.
That winter, Granny Reilly came to live with us for three months. She’d moved out of the boarding house in Sunnyside and was going to live with her cousin in Durban. She and Annie had always been as close as sisters and now that they were both widows they’d decided to set up house together. Granny had a few things to tie up before she moved to the coast and so she boarded with us.
Granny and Dad never saw eye to eye. The only thing that made her stay tolerable was that everyone knew it would be over soon. She felt trapped in the house. She complained about the built-in cupboards and the wall-to-wall carpets. Fixed property: things you can’t get rid of. The picture windows, letting in so much light and colour, drew her outside on the coldest days. I wasn’t made for city life, she said. As soon as the sun had burnt the frost off the lawn, she went out onto the stoep and stayed there all day. Mom was busy at her knitting machine and this arrangement suited her. At eleven she’d take out a pot of tea and a sandwich, and when we came in from school a few hours later the tray would still be on the table.
Granny was a lull in the passage of the day, spilling out of the wire garden chair that cupped her like a big soft-boiled egg. Her legs were crossed at the ankles and her slippered feet rested on their sides. She had a tin of snuff and a packet of humbugs within reach on the tabletop. She wanted for nothing except company. And so when people passed by in the street, she would hail them and begin a conversation. Sometimes these chats were over in a few minutes. More often they went on for half an hour, an hour.
The word got around that there was a white woman in Cambridge Road who spoke Zulu. Granny had grown up in the countryside near Volksrust before the Great War and she’d spoken Zulu before she spoke English. Domestic workers and gardeners from the neighbourhood came to speak to her. They leant on the fence and talked in loud, rolling tones. We didn’t know whether to feel proud of her or ashamed.
Dad didn’t like it one bit. You don’t know these people, he said. You be careful what you say to them. Do they ask questions about us? Do they want to know when we’re going on holiday?
One day when I came in from school the man in the canvas suit was sitting on the front steps talking to Granny. He had a slice of bread and jam in his hand and a mug of tea standing on the bricks between his big white boots. The convict! I was astonished to see him sitting there in our yard. When he saw me at the gate, he stood up with his hands outstretched and backed into the driveway. For a moment it looked just as if he were surrendering.
Mom was in the kitchen punching a lump of dough on a floured board. Is he gone? she asked.
No, he’s still there.
That grandmother of yours. She asked him in without so much as a by your leave. She’ll be the death of me.
Pale flour rose in a haze from the board.
Over supper that evening Dad told Granny this talking to strangers had to stop. You’re as simple as a child, he said. Imagine inviting a skelm like that into our yard.
Skelm my foot! she said. He comes from Nongoma. He’s a very fine man who’s down on his luck. He worked in the trading store at Memel until he hurt his back. He knows the Collingwoods! Where did you get this story that he’s a thief?
Branko
The Jag is sitting outside the Sabre Caffie like a shiny red apple. Dad and I have been to the municipal offices in Lyttelton to pay the lights and water and we’re on our way home when we spot it. An E-Type with triple carbs and bucket seats in real leather is not something you see every day. Dad makes a U-turn and we go back for a closer look. For him the streets and parking lots of the city are one big showroom. He thinks nothing of asking a stranger to pop the bonnet of his car so he can look in the engine or let him sit behind the wheel and tap the accelerator to gauge the results on the rev counter. Mom says it’s a cheek, and Dad says nonsense, they can only say no.
It’s a beaut, says Dad. But it could do with a wash.
It’s true. There’s a thick coat of dust on the duco.
We get out of the Zephyr.
Just then a man comes out of the shop with a grease-spotted brown-paper packet. It’s the driver of the Jag. And fuck me if it isn’t Mark Condor!
I’ve got a stack of Mark Condor comics at home and here he is standing in front of me. Dad has never read a photocomic in his life and so this unbelievable fact escapes him. Pardon me, he says to the stranger, have you got a minute?
I grab him by the arm. I want to tell him it’s Mark Condor but the words don’t come out.
Pardon me, he says again. But Mark Condor gets in behind the wheel and slams the door.
Crikey, says Dad. Excuse me for asking. And then the sound of the engine blows away his irritation. Listen to that. There’s 250 horses under that hood.
The Jag accelerates out of the lot and goes up Cantonments Road. The spoked wheels look as if they’re turning backwards the way they do in Dad’s Super 8 films of the races at Zwartkops.
What’s wrong with you? Dad says.
I get my voice back and tell Dad who we just saw.
Mark who?
When Joe and I were young enough to play with the boys from the neighbouring yards, we were the secret agents and mercenaries of the photocomics. I was the Saboteur. All I needed was a vest and an old scarf of my gran’s to knot around my head. This guy is a sort of commando, although his hair is much too long for the army. Maybe he’s a mercenary? He looks like Sylvie’s old boyfriend Flip van Jaarsveld.
Joe was always Mark Condor. He’s a James Bond of the Highveld, boyishly good-looking and debonair. He drives an E-Type Jag and packs a pistol with a silencer that he took off a dead KGB man. Some desperate father is always calling on him to save his daughter from kidnappers. Or he’s got to stop the terrs from laying their hands on the uranium. Or get back the nuclear warhead while resisting the charms of a beautiful cosmonaut who looks like she comes from Boksburg.
We don’t have television but we’ve got photocomics. The black-and-white panels, with captions and speech bubbles, are like storyboards for films. Some of our heroes are home grown, like Sister Louise and the Grensvegter. You can see by the houses and the veld that they were made in South Africa. Others come from overseas. Everyone looks Italian but they’re speaking Afrikaans, like in a badly dubbed film. Appearing in a photocomic is not the most glamorous job in showbiz. It’s hardly acting: it’s more like posing. If I thought for a minute, I’d realize that the people in the comics must have other jobs, like wrestlers, this must be a sideline. But still, I no more expect to bump into one of them than I expect to see Our Man Flint – I mean James Coburn – walking down Schoeman Street.
When we get home I tell Joe we just saw Mark Condor. Of course, he doesn’t believe me. So I get out the comics.
Dad confirms it. That’s the bloke. He looks like one of The Beatles.
George, says Mom. Or maybe Paul. Paul’s unmusical cousin.
And that’s the car, says Dad.
The E-Type’s actually re
d, I say to Joe.
Fancy that, says Mom.
I hope they wash it first, says Dad, before they take its picture.
It’s weird, I say. It looks red to me now even though it’s black and white.
What’s black and white and red all over? says Joe.
It turns out that our meeting with Mark Condor – or rather the man who plays him – is not such a coincidence: he lives down the road from us. He has a chicken farm in Rabie Street where the suburbs bump up against the smallholdings. I cycle past there on my way to school every morning. There are a couple of low-slung sheds with dirty white walls and corrugated roofs, a house half hidden by a hedge, a moth-eaten horse browsing on the plot. I’ve never paid the place much attention, until I see the Jag turning in there one day. Now I can’t go past without wondering what Mark Condor is up to. Collecting eggs, sweeping out the hoks, wringing necks. Or does he dispatch them silently with the pistol? I know when he’s home, because the sleek nose of the Jag sticks out from behind a drinking trough. You can smell the place from a mile away, chicken shit and damp feathers, and when you drive past you have to wind up the windows. Mom always makes a performance of pressing a hankie to her nose. I don’t know how the neighbours put up with it, she says, it makes me sick to my stomach.
Dad has a special way of laughing when something incredible has happened, a head-shaking, conspiratorial chuckle that dares you to disbelieve. Jissimpie, he says, wait till you hear this.
He’s sitting at the robot in Botha Avenue when the Jag pulls up next to him. It’s Mark Condor at the wheel – Dad knows him now – looking straight ahead through his dark glasses. Dad taps the accelerator as if he wants to dice, just a little joke, and glances over.
And what do you think he’s got in the back?
A dead body rolled up in a Persian carpet? A ballistic missile? A beautiful heiress wanted by Interpol? No, it’s none of these things.
Chicken feed, says Dad, as God is my witness. Two fat streepsakke full of chicken feed. There’s a surprising amount of space under that fastback – but kiepiemielies. In an E-Type. He should be shot!
I don’t like having Mark Condor around. Now when we buy chicken pies at the farm stall on the Old Joburg Road I wonder if it’s Mark Condor chicken. How many people who read the comics know that he’s a chicken farmer? Or that the Jag is red and he drives it around in the full-colour world? Maybe that was part of the deal: he could play Mark Condor if he brought his own sports car.
Joe laughs it off. The gap between how things are and how they appear to be doesn’t seem to bother him.
Joe
Cassius Marcellus Clay was named for the plantation owner who had emancipated one of his slave ancestors. He was the sixth man in his family to bear the name. In 1964, after he won the WBA and WBC heavyweight titles from Sonny Liston, he took the name ‘Cassius X’, identifying himself with the Black Power movement, but he soon discarded this in favour of the name bestowed on him by Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam: ‘Muhammad Ali.’
Seven years later, when I started following Ali, most of the boxing writers were still calling him ‘Cassius Clay’. You would think the headline writers especially would have embraced the new name, happily trading the alliterative potential of ‘Cassius’ (as in ‘Cocky Cassius’) or ‘Clay’ (as in ‘Clowning Clay’) for the brevity of ‘Ali’, but they avoided it so routinely that it could only have been an editorial directive.
There were exceptions. The pin-up magazine Scope always used ‘Ali’. And the mainstream press sometimes made concessions to his new identity. In the Sunday Times’s front-page spread on the Fight of the Century, ‘Muhammad Ali’ appears in brackets after the article’s first mention of ‘Cassius Clay’. Everywhere else he is ‘Clay’.
The tussle over his name reflected the contradictions in his identity and became part of its elusiveness. In the articles that date from the time of his comeback, some writers seem to be grappling with the shift and trying to muster a response, either determined to pin him down or content to let him float. Others just want to keep Cassius Clay in his place. Malcolm Balfour, the Sunday Express’s ‘Man in Miami’, disliked Ali intensely. He calls him the champ and the Great Himself in inverted commas. Railing against Ali’s theatrics before the Fight of the Century, he describes a scene at Dundee’s gym in Miami where Ali produced an envelope from the pocket of his robe with The Secret of Muhammad Ali printed on it and then took from it a sheet of paper that simply read Flash! Ali said he would fill in the rest of the prediction in his dressing room just before the fight, which he duly did in the company of another great actor, Burt Lancaster. The prediction was that Frazier would fall in six – not one of his best calls. Balfour mocks this flimflam designed to juice up the theatre gate and ends on a sarcastic note: I was one of the ‘privileged few’ to get a chance to speak to Clay privately, and was immediately reminded, ‘Hey man, the name’s Ali.’
By contrast, Alan Hubbard, who was well disposed towards Ali, accepted the name change genially. This went along with a different attitude towards the theatricalization and commercialization of boxing (and sport more generally). In an article published by the Pretoria News on the day of the fight, in which Hubbard said he was backing Ali because I like my sport with style and flair or even with arrogance, he also referred to the magnificent enigma that is Cassius Clay, or, if you prefer it, Muhammad Ali.
The cuttings in my archive chart the gradual disappearance of ‘Clay’ from common use. But the two incarnations persist in the rhetorical armoury of reporters, allowing them to express their ambivalent feelings about the man.
In October 1971, between the bouts against Jimmy Ellis and Buster Mathis, a ‘Special Correspondent’ in London who saw Ali during his ‘Drink Ovaltine’ advertising campaign felt that he had no real interest in boxing any more. He used the double name to express his disillusionment: I’ve finally accepted the sad truth – the great Cassius Clay will never box again. Sure enough a podgy businessman called Muhammad Ali will continue to perform against the talent-starved heavyweight hopefuls, but a meeting in London last week convinced me that the magnificent Cass we all knew has faded away.
Joe Frazier shared these sentiments. I almost always refer to Ali as Cassius Clay. He is a has-been. I don’t think he can get back in shape.
Sometimes ‘Cassius Clay’ evoked the early years of his career more happily. Before the Norton rematch in 1973, many writers commented that Ali had not been in better shape for years. One local sportswriter [probably Alan Hubbard] said of him: ‘He looks so young I almost called him Cassius Clay.’
For David Wright, the two names reflect two personas, the private and the public. He wonders about the perceptions of the fans who flock to the gyms to watch their idol. Who do they see? Not the sullen Muhammad of the dressing room. Nor the militant Muhammad. They see the Ali they know, the man who is intoxicated by the crowds that bring out the Cassius Clay in him. Perhaps it’s even the real Ali. So ‘Ali’ is a sullen mask and the authentic, attention-seeking persona is ‘Cassius Clay’.
To me he was always ‘Ali’: it’s there on the first page of ALI I. But I liked the sound of ‘Cassius Clay’. It had a ring to it. My Standard 6 setwork was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and so I’d come across the Roman general Cassius. The alliterative combination with Clay made it seem slightly artificial, like something a writer would make up, and it tripped more musically from my tongue. I didn’t much like ‘Muhammad’ – which is why ‘Ali’ on its own was always a good option.
As for my father, there were no two ways about it. It’s Cassius Clay, he said. That’s the name his mother gave him and it’s good enough for me.
Branko
The Bakers are a big family. They should start a bakery, we always joke. Taffy who’s the eldest left school in Standard 8 and went to work at Iscor, and his youngest sister is still in the grades at primary school. Georgie is in Standard 7, right
between Joe and me. He was at primary school with Joe and he sticks to him like chewing gum. As hard as Joe tries to keep out of his way, lurking at the far end of the playground under the cypresses or avoiding the taps, at some point nearly every day he finds Georgie planted in front of him. He has a pudding-bowl haircut, like all his brothers, and black-rimmed glasses.
What’s your name, little boy? he asks.
You know my name. I told you yesterday.
No, you have to say it for me today. What’s your name?
Joe.
Joe who?
It’s not your business.
But it is my business, Georgie says.
He clamps one hand around Joe’s wrist and leans in close. His breath smells of the condensed milk he had for lunch, squirted down his throat out of a little pyramid-shaped carton. Behind the lenses of his glasses, which are covered with greasy fingerprints, his eyes are boiled sweets sucked down to different sizes. When Joe speaks, as he has to sooner or later, Georgie watches his mouth as if beetles are clambering out of his throat.
Again, he says, again, blinking his gobby eyes and turning up the corners of his pink mouth. Say it again, little boy.
Joe stands there shivering in the spangled robe of his name.
It must be said.
Joe
In the space of a few decades we’ve come to take access to video records for granted. We expect to see everything that happens happen again, almost instantaneously, repeatedly if necessary. News is global: it flows everywhere like, with, as money. In South Africa in the 1970s, before the advent of television, sports events happened once only, in real time (a term we didn’t need). Sport was essentially territorial and expressed the local. To be there you had to be there. Sometimes, but not always, there was radio commentary on an important match. Occasionally you might see a clip or two from an international sports event on a newsreel in the cinema. After a Test series, a commemorative booklet would appear and the vivid images seemed miraculous. But the main record was in the press, in print columns and grainy images.
The Distance Page 5