The pavements were crowded. Lindi noticed a pair of policemen on each corner of the cross roads. Their battle-blue uniforms, the tapered trousers tucked into shin-high boots, the bulletproof vests and, above all, their guns, seemed to belong to a war zone, not the morning rush-hour. She noticed how the policemen cradled their weapons, as you might hold a baby.
‘Are the police always here?’ she asked.
‘Ah, no! They are just here to make sure there are no problems.’
‘What sort of problems?’
‘Ah, no! It’s nothing, madam. It’s just that after this business in Mpumalanga they don’t want any troublemakers here.’
On the pavement the men and women who side-stepped and shimmied past each other had that same purposeful air you see in commuters the world over, their eyes apparently fixed on some distant finishing post, which lured them on just as surely as a long-distance runner might keep her eyes on the prize.
The taxi pulled over. ‘We are here, madam. That is the building you are looking for,’ he said, pointing just ahead of them through the windscreen. He got out, lifted Lindi’s bag and shut the boot in a deliberately slow and smooth motion while throwing her a knowing smile, like two old friends sharing a private joke. She handed over some notes, suppressing the urge to explain what she had meant to say earlier. The taxi driver held out his hand: no hard feelings.
Lindi stepped back onto the pavement and watched the car ease itself into the heavy flow of traffic, another version of the frenetic movement that was now parting either side of her on the pavement. There was a hum of activity all around her, like a social tinnitus, but it was never distinct enough to identify its source straight away. Very few people were talking. They surged one way or another, heads down and concentrating on the mission. An urban anthropologist in some far distant time might study this daily migration and exclaim at the way nobody actually bumped into anybody else, guided by an inner sense of space and proximity. It was only when Lindi concentrated her gaze at a particular point in this streetscape that she was able to tune into its sound. From inside the shoe shop, just opening for trade, the forced chirpiness of morning radio, and from the newspaper boy, a punchy verbal précis of the story of the day – the lustful indiscretions of a local celebrity. And further up the road, the metallic clatter of a dustcart as it swallowed the detritus of a downtown night.
Lindi caught the sweet early-morning whiff of freshly baked pastries and bread. It was coming from a mobile stall a few metres away from her. The prices were written in permanent marker on the glass cabinet that shielded the shelves of food. ‘Sausage rolls – R10/-, jam rolls – R2/-, bunnichow – R20/-.’
So that’s how you spell it, she thought. Bunnichows – soft white loaves with their centres hollowed out and filled with curried meat – had been a treat in the Seaton household, a special reward for a good week at school or comfort food on a particularly gloomy winter’s day. As children, half the fun had been derived from pushing their little fists into the loaf and pulling out handfuls of airy white bread, which they would stuff into their mouths. Harry was the bunnichow expert and he’d help them ladle his ‘special’ curry into the hand-made cavity. Eating bunnichow was always accompanied by a lot of shrieking as the filling inevitably oozed out of the bread and trickled down their faces and hands.
In later years they had switched to vegetarian fillings because Ralph had become convinced that the filling was in fact made of bunny-rabbit meat. Nothing Harry or Helen said could assuage his fear that a fluffy little mammal with a white bobble tail had ended up in the saucepan. The memory brought a smile to Lindi’s face. It gave her a connection with this frenzied place, which was all the more welcome because it had been unexpected. It was the first inkling that this city, this country, was, in fact, an integral part of her family’s story – her story. She remembered, again, with a twinge of regret, the way she had sometimes berated her parents for being so hung up on their past, on being South African. What had seemed to her an imaginary and exaggerated connection with this nation might have been, after all, exactly what they said it was – a visceral, umbilical link with the place in which they had been born and raised.
Lindi pulled up the handle on her bag and headed towards the building the driver had shown her. Once inside she saw that the BBC office was on the third floor and waited for the lift, along with a dozen or so other people. When the doors slid open she expected the kind of Darwinian rush that sorted out the men from the boys back in London. One or two did stride into the compartment, like their life depended on it, but many more stood back to allow her into it. The lift was filled with a smell that combined takeaway breakfasts with the over-generous application of aftershave lotion. On the third floor Lindi saw the BBC’s logo on one side of the lobby and headed towards the glass doors next to it, mentally reminding herself of the office manager’s name. The receptionist, a young woman with perfectly manicured nails, was talking into a phone held awkwardly between her neck and shoulder while signing a receipt note for a delivery.
‘I’m looking for Comfort Ramphele,’ Lindi said, when the receptionist finally put down the phone.
‘Just head down the corridor and she should be at the first desk as you enter the big newsroom,’ she said.
Lindi walked into a large, open-plan office. There must have been a dozen desks, each cluttered with PC screens, TV monitors and headphones. On one wall a line of clocks showed the time locally and in Lagos, Nairobi, London, Washington and Beijing. Underneath them, as if surveying the newsroom, was a life-size cut-out image of a beaming Nelson Mandela, his right arm raised in an iconic closed-fist salute. The great man had signed the picture. Lindi saw that its wooden base was screwed to the floor, presumably because it was the kind of memento for which there was a lucrative market.
On another wall there was a row of screens, each tuned to a different channel – CNN, ENCA, BBC World and Al Jazeera. The six or seven people in the office had congregated under them. Like supplicants at an altar, they were staring at the screens. Lindi recognised one, even in profile. The woman, a British-Asian, had become something of a celebrity a few years earlier for her reports on the implosion of Iraq and Syria. They had been robust, partly to do with the economy of language but also because she delivered them in an unforgettable mockney that was at odds with the more conventional tones of other BBC correspondents. She was now based in Johannesburg.
Anton had taken an instant dislike to her. ‘Frontline bimbo,’ he’d called her. ‘All talk, no analysis.’ On the edge of the group stood a plump, older-looking woman. Lindi guessed she might be Comfort Ramphele, the office manager who’d been unable to meet her at the airport.
As Lindi began to move towards the huddle, the woman turned around. ‘I’m sorry, we were so busy following the news I didn’t see you coming in. I’m Comfort.’
‘I’m Lindi Seaton from South Trust. I can wait if you’re busy.’
‘No, no, that’s all right. It’s time they all got going anyway. This is a terrible business,’ she said, as if Lindi must be aware of what was going on.
‘What’s happened?’ Lindi questioned. ‘I haven’t checked the news since I got on the plane last night.’
‘We had this terrible murder about three or four days ago … but you know about that, I’m sure. Well, it’s just escalated from there. They’re sending in the troops now – that’s what we were watching, an announcement from the minister of state security. He was saying—’
She was interrupted by the British-Asian correspondent, shouting from the other side of the room, ‘Comfort, call Tito and tell him to get his arse over here in half an hour. Tell him we’ll probably stay over. And tell Daniel to pack all the gear into the Kombi and follow us. I’ll go with Tito and let Daniel know exactly where we’re going to end up.’
‘Tito is meant to be off from tomorrow,’ offered Comfort, clearly knowing full well what the reply was going to be.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, he can have his bloody d
ays off when we get back. It’s not like Susie’s working or anything. They can go whenever they like. I’m going to make some calls.’ Her voice trailed off as she went into a partitioned room.
Comfort looked as if she wanted to apologise. ‘It’s always a bit tense when we’re trying to get people on the road,’ she said. ‘Look, that office is free – it’s the one Robert told us to set aside for you. Why don’t you go in there? Grab some of the papers, and you probably want to get online anyway. I’ve written the password on a piece of paper. There’s a coffee machine just off the reception where you came in. I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Any friend of Robert’s is a friend of mine.’
Lindi went into the room and shut the door behind her. She opened her laptop and booted it up. She stared at the screensaver, a photo of the family taken the previous summer on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. Ralph’s girlfriend, who had recently become the latest in a long line of ex-girlfriends, was in the shot. She logged into her email inbox. There was a long message from Anton. It had been sent at 4 a.m. London time. Typical! He’d probably not slept since getting home from seeing her off at the airport. She started reading the message, which began in characteristically robust vein: Fucking hell, it’s all kicking off.
There was a whole line of exclamation marks, just in case the expletive had not been enough to grab her attention. We might be too late already, it continued. Lindi scanned the email. He’d forwarded a link to a news item. It was headlined, ‘Pangas the Weapon of Choice as South Africans Turn On Foreigners’, a reference to the all-purpose wooden-handled blade that many farm labourers used.
Lindi opened the page in Vice News. The report was subtitled, with no voiceover from a reporter. What the raw video material lacked in finesse, it made up for with the sheer shock of what appeared on the screen. A mob gathered round a shack in a squatter camp. One of them, a bandana wrapped around his face, smashed the feeble door to the dwelling and threw a bottle of fuel through it before chucking in a burning rag. Worse than the act itself was the manifest glee on the faces of the mob as the camera turned to them.
‘Come out!’ shouted one man. ‘We are waiting for you.’
Another lifted his panga and ran his tongue over the edge of the blade.
‘Today we are going to taste Mozambican blood,’ he said.
In the background you could hear screams from the hut. The camera turned to show smoke billowing out from under the tin roof. After what seemed like an implausibly long time, a woman’s hand could be seen pushing a young girl, no more than ten years old, into the compound. She stood, blinking into the glare, shivering. She was motionless, paralysed with fear. A youth walked over to her, grabbed her hair and, as he pulled her away, said to the crowd, ‘Let her see what will happen when her father and mother come out.’
And they do. The mob surged past the camera, obscuring the view. You could see a flash of a panga blade as it was raised high in the air before it slashed down – again and again. The screaming, both from the victims and perpetrators, was animal, fear and hate unhinged from the conventions of civilised behaviour. A couple of minutes later, the sound of a police siren could be heard, getting louder as it approached the chaotic scene. One by one the mob dispersed. The child approached the corpses of her parents and sat down next to them. No tears. She seemed to be keeping watch. That’s what the police find when they arrive.
Lindi flicked back to Anton’s email.
All this must have been happening while we were sitting in Terminal Five having a coffee, Anton had written, as if the two things were somehow connected. An eyewitness to one attack, interviewed on the BBC World Service, had said the crowd had been screaming, ‘Where are the amakwerekwere, the foreigners, those filthy Mozambicans – where are the Mozambicans?’
This is bad [Anton had written]. There are tens of thousands of Mozambicans in SA, especially on those farms up there in Mpumalanga, and God knows how many other migrant workers from Zimbabwe and the other neighbouring countries. There are plenty of people who’ve been waiting for a chance like this to drive them out. You know as well as I do, xenophobia is not just a European thing.
Lindi could feel the suffocating weight of responsibility bear down on her – followed closely by the inevitable question: ‘Am I up to this?’ She could sense the incipient menace of self-doubt and knew that, if she did not manage to stamp it out, it would overwhelm her. It was like having the walls of a room slowly but surely close in on her, pushing out the air, starving her of oxygen. Over the years she’d learned that the only way to deny its power over her was literally to let the air in. She got up, opened a window, then went to the door and left that ajar to get a draught through the room. It usually worked and it did now. She knew she was dealing only with the symptom and not the deep-seated well of anxiety from which the fear arose but it would have to suffice for the moment.
The correspondent had come to Comfort’s desk; Lindi could hear her unmistakable voice but not see her.
‘London says the World Service has run an interview with an eyewitness to last night’s attacks. Get someone here to track it down, find out who it was and let me know. Maybe we can take the guy into the squatter camp and do a walkie-talkie with him – that’ll keep the News Channel happy for a bit and we can concentrate on Ten.’
‘It must have been Julius who did the interview. He’s been in Nelspruit since Lesedi’s murder.’
‘Okay. Tell Julius to line him up for me – we should be there just after lunchtime, about two-ish,’ the correspondent said. ‘By the way, who’s the visitor?’
‘You remember Robert told us to hire out that room to someone from South Trust? That’s her.’
‘Oh, so that’s Whitaker’s Oxford totty. He sent me her CV. Well, she’ll need more than her friggin’ master’s in African development or whatever to sort this lot out. And all those beads and bangles. Very ethnic, right up Whitaker’s street. Is Tito here?’
‘He’s in the car park. He’s in a terrible mood.’
‘Well, that’s hardly breaking news! See you when I see you.’
As she listened to the conversation, a grim determination replaced the anxiety that had enveloped Lindi just a few minutes earlier. How bloody typical, that British proclivity to put people into their little boxes. And this from a woman who might have been expected to remember that a generation earlier her own people were being caricatured as garlic-munching, over-populating foreigners. And to think she had defended the correspondent when Anton had made his own snap judgement about her.
For as long as Lindi could remember she had fought the collective inclination to put people in their place, to give them a label. She had first come across it in secondary school, the way her classmates had instantly put her in a box marked ‘Posh’. It hadn’t helped that her parents, in a fit of political righteousness, had placed her in the local comprehensive where she was like some alien species. Her academic diligence prompted much curiosity but rarely any admiration. She hated being different but lacked the social guile to mask it. She blamed it on her parents, imploring them to be more like everybody else’s fathers and mothers. She used to make up prosaic weekend outings, imaginary trips to the shopping centres her mother loathed to replace the nights out in some crumbling community theatre where a travelling troupe of South African actors were putting on their latest experimental play.
She’d thought it would all end when she got to Oxford. But there it turned out she was not posh enough. One weekend house party at a fellow student’s country mansion had convinced her that she had no foothold in that world of privately schooled confidence and monied excess. ‘Your friend’s a bit serious,’ she’d heard someone say sotto voce to the friend with whom Lindi had travelled from Oxford. She knew enough about their type to understand that being accused of seriousness, like being a bore, was about as damning as it could get. And now this woman had decided that Lindi owed her presence in the BBC office to the amorous preferences of an ageing editor back in London. How diff
erent from the reaction of the airport porter just a couple of hours previously. He’d taken her at face value. Lindi clung to that thought.
That afternoon, Lindi checked into a guesthouse in Greenside.
She fought the temptation to lie down on the bed and forced herself to look at the list of calls she needed to make: there was an agricultural union representative, a Member of Parliament (an old friend of Anton’s), some journalists, a legal-aid charity, the bishop’s office in Mpumalanga. Hardly what you’d call the makings of a tourist itinerary.
The phone on the side table rang.
‘The taxi you ordered is waiting for you. Do you know how long you will be?’ asked the receptionist.
‘What taxi? I’ve only just arrived.’
‘We went out to check and he said he’s waiting for someone. We assumed it was you. None of the other guests has ordered a taxi.’
‘Well, there’s been a mistake. I’m not going anywhere.’
Lindi pulled back the blind. The taxi was still there. She decided to get on with her calls and keyed in the first number. She was about to press the green ‘call’ icon on her smartphone but stopped, a reflex: the less easy she was to track, the better. She put her mobile down and picked up the landline phone. She’d use that instead.
Finally, she got around to the call she’d been wanting to make from the minute she’d set foot in South Africa. She searched her contacts for Maude’s number.
‘And how’s my baby?’
Even after all these years Maude’s voice was as familiar as her own mother’s, and Lindi, who long ago had taught herself to put away childish things, felt, in an instant, like a little girl again. These were the very words she’d hear every morning as she stumbled, sleepy-eyed and groggy, into the kitchen where Maude would be preparing their breakfast.
‘Your mom told me you would be calling and I have been waiting by the phone.’
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