The women recoil in horror. Now the men surge forward, carrying Bossies like a banner, and drive the women out. Stones rain down on the counter and the mirror smashes. The men were unhappy about that afterwards, looking at their puzzled faces in the cracked glass.
Usually when Bossies ripped his shirt we’d rally round to find the buttons for him so that his wife could sew them back on again, but this night we left them where they fell.
There was a great deal of drinking that night in the Terminal Bar, and a great deal of weeping and vomiting. I think they all slept over, I don’t think one of them made it back to the Transit Lounge. I didn’t even try to kick them out: I couldn’t bring myself to switch on the fluorescent tubes and watch over that unthinkable array of stains and blotches.
The next morning when I was scouring the floor for small change I found the buttons and stuck them there against the mirror as a memento.
* * *
—
Another night Wilson says, “Take your average Kreepy Krauly.”
And Boshoff says, “You should see what I did to a guy once with a Kreepy Krauly.”
And I say (don’t ask me why, I usually keep my nose clean), “Talk is cheap but money buys the whisky.”
Another night there’s the sound of a plane revving up at the end of the runway, and Weinberg takes his wife and runs for it. Without even saying goodbye. “It isn’t done,” Father O’Reilly says.
Another night Wilson presents me with the head of the Kreepy Krauly mounted on kiaat; there’s a small ceremony and it’s hung behind the bar.
Another night Smith tries to get a close-up of Boshoff’s tattoo, and Boshoff beats him to within an inch of his life. Wilson does likewise to Moloi, out of a sense of loyalty to his friend, he says. That’s the last time Smith and Moloi set foot in the Bar. They have to live with the women and children in the Transit Lounge. I take them a couple of beers occasionally when the others have gone to sleep.
Another night, it was still kick-out time, although it was dawn. I’m there among the sleepers, among the dislocated dentures, the gummed-up eyes, the wet lips, I’m picking up small change on the murky bottom before Josephine starts to clean, and the woman comes in. She moves so quietly I don’t hear her, but I feel the stale air shift. At first she doesn’t see me on my hands and knees between the tables. She moves slowly around the room, looking at my patrons one by one. I think perhaps she’s looking for Boshoff. She comes to him, balanced like a fallen statue between two bar-stools, his big shoes jutting like a pedestal. She goes on to Wilson in his crumpled suit, his lips pressed to the cold surface of the counter, and Weinberg – no, Weinberg is gone. She looks them all over. She comes to me and looks me over too, and what makes this difficult is that I look back. She goes into the men’s room and stands with her face pressed to the small window, listening for something. I listen too. A jet engine, perhaps, or distant gunfire, or someone calling, or the grinding of the earth’s axle. She goes out. I follow as far as the batwing doors.
Josephine brushes past me with her mop.
I switch on the aquarium lights. “Morning!” I move among the sleepers, nudging them with the tip of my shoe, and they stir in the silted air, bloated and pale, like drowned men.
Another night in the Terminal Bar, don’t ask which, it is always night here, night has always fallen like a drunkard between the tables.
Let’s say the woman will come tomorrow. I’ll follow her to the men’s room and we’ll listen to whatever it is we’re expecting to hear. Then she’ll go out and I’ll move among the sleepers, watching over them, nudging them with the tip of my shoe.
“Time, gentlemen!”
Propaganda by Monuments
For Chas Unwin
The Tuba
The darts started when Cliffie brought home a Saddam Hussein dartboard. Basil went out and bought them each a set of darts, plastic flights for Cliffie and feathers for himself. Every Saturday afternoon from then on someone or other would drop in for a game – Cliffie’s friend Larry, or John de la Porte, or Beachball Buitendag, or Sergeant Dundas from across the road, or a little Irish chap with a bad skin who did not like them calling him Smurfie. An odd number of beer-drinkers, peanut-tossers and dart-pushers – you don’t throw a dart, lady, you push it. And blou wildebeeste would not drag them away from the board. When the weather warmed up they moved from the kitchen to the front verandah. They hung Saddam Hussein on the door to Cliffie’s room at the side of the house, and kept the braai fires burning, and played on in the summer evenings under a string of jaundiced moons.
My boy Richie would be roped in to keep score, to fetch and carry cold quarts from the fridge, to baste the chicken with a paintbrush. I told Basil and Cliffie: your pals better watch their language in front of Richie. He’s only a child, and you know how he is, he picks things up. But as soon as my back was turned Cliffie would give him beer – mainly froth, but still – in a tumbler with a cancan dancer on it, a two-faced tart flicking her petticoats quite coyly at the outside world, while under the drinker’s nose, on the froth-laced inner curve of the glass, she revealed more naked flesh at every sip. Richie would perch on a bar-stool with a kindergarten blackboard propped on his knees and a cigarette of chalk between his fingers, his tumbler on the windowsill beside him, like one of the boys. But he was not one of them. He was not one of us. He was always drifting off, he didn’t answer when he was spoken to, he looked through us with his round eyes.
Then I would say: he’s somewhere else.
Most of those Saturdays went the same way: the more they drank the angrier they got with Saddam Hussein. A few months earlier not one of them would have known him from Adam, but now they couldn’t stand the sight of him. When the face behind the wire began to fade, just as it had faded from the newspapers and television screens, they recognized in its pock-marked features other faces that enraged them: politicians and priests; members of parliament and talk-show hosts; managing directors and their wives; half-remembered headmasters, playground bullies, army corporals; ex-wives, bad friends. And in the small hours, invariably, their brothers, themselves.
On pay-days the boys were always a bit wild, but in the festive season they became ungovernable. They forgot about pushing the darts and threw them like assegais. It’s a wonder no one was hurt. They aimed for the eyes or the nose, but sometimes they didn’t even hit the board. One night Smurfie launched a dart into the rafters and shattered a reindeer in the Christmas lights. Beachball Buitendag managed to throw a dart into the doorpost with such force they couldn’t pull it out again; Basil unscrewed the flight the morning after and worked the barrel out with a pair of pliers. In the end there were so many holes in that door it took two coats of Wall and All to cover.
* * *
—
The Salvation Army band came round as usual in the week before Christmas. I heard them from the kitchen window, when I went in to fetch Cliffie’s famous sosaties and Basil’s chops; they were playing “While shepherds watched their flocks” in the next block.
I took the meat outside. Sergeant Dundas and Basil had started another game of 301, and the Sergeant was losing. “This kid of yours is blind,” he said, ruffling Richie’s hair, “or his arithmetic’s up to sherbet.” Sergeant Dundas’s prickly italics were for my benefit, proof that he was watching his tongue. Richie double-checked the sum in the Sgt D column. Then he went back to colouring in the holes in the alphabet stencilled across the top of the blackboard, his marbled irises vivid and intent.
The Salvation Army trooped around the corner into Chromium Street. In front was a man carrying a music stand and a white baton. He was wearing sunglasses with wraparound frames and reflective lenses, incongruous under the melodramatic peaked cap with its puffed up crown.
“And here comes Richie Richardson from the golf-course end,” said Cliffie.
My Richie glanced up at the sound of his name and t
hen returned to his drawing. But Sergeant Dundas came to the end of the verandah and glared at the conductor. His lips were pursed, his cheeks were swollen, his fingers were kneading the stodgy flesh of his paunch. Sergeant Dundas was a musician himself – he played the tuba in the Correctional Services orchestra – and when he started puffing away at an invisible instrument it was always an omen.
The band gathered on the pavement in front of Sergeant Dundas’s house, and I hoped they would stay there. A dozen black men, in sober uniforms and pious boots, with saxophones and side-drums and trumpets and trombones all of stainless steel, as practical as a hospital kitchen. There was one woman too, carrying a Bible and a little white collection tin.
“Nineteen double twenty,” said Basil behind us and threw it. Practice was making perfect.
Cliffie was supposed to play the winner, but the coals were ready and he didn’t want to leave them. He opened the plastic pack with his teeth and put the sosaties on the grill. Basil and the Sergeant started another game.
“Just watch me whitewash you, china,” said the Sergeant.
“You and whose army?” said Basil, and opened with his first dart.
The members of the band spoke among themselves and looked at us shyly. Then the conductor picked up his music stand and led them across the street towards our house. The itchy-ball tree in the corner of our yard overhung the pavement and I thought he might choose its shade, but he set up the stand in the sunshine at our front gate and opened a book of music on it. The band gathered round him in a semicircle, facing us. A trumpet cleared its throat discreetly. Then he flourished the baton and they began to play. O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. Richie ran to the fence to listen.
I turned down the volume on the portable TV set, which was standing on a kitchen chair at the top of the verandah steps where Cliffie could keep half an eye on it. Cricket from the Wanderers.
“Turn it up,” said the Sergeant, wincing. “These jokers are giving me earache. Funny thing about blacks, you know, they can’t hold a tune. Not one of ours, I mean. Their ears are different.”
The same breeze that brought the devilled smoke from Cliffie’s sosaties to our noses kept rifling through the pages of music, turning them in flurries and carrying off the melody. The conductor went on regardless, as if the music stand was just for show. The darts thudded into the board in trios. The Sergeant poured another cane – for the pain, he said. Then he put his hands over his ears and said, “Me me me.”
Chri-i-st the Lord…
The cricket commentary became audible again. A Mexican wave was going round in the stadium, tossing up a spume of paper plates, beer tins and cheers. Sergeant Dundas applauded ironically and took his turn at the board. He was still trying to open, but Basil had whittled his score down to double figures.
The conductor turned and gave the slightest of bows. Basil put his arm around me. He smelt of brandy and Sta-soft. Cliffie burnt his fingers flipping the sosaties over and cursed. Sergeant Dundas italicized the curse in the background as his dart bounced off the bullseye and fell to earth. Basil pinched my side and made me jump.
I felt that the conductor was looking at me through his ridiculous glasses, as if I was a character in a three-dimensional film. They were all looking at us. You would think we were the show and they the audience.
I called Richie to go and fetch my purse. The conductor turned away again and the band struck up “Good King Wenceslas.”
“I hope you’re not going to give them money,” said the Sergeant.
“Why not?”
“Don’t want to encourage them. Worst version of “Old King Cole” I ever heard.”
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even. The grass rank and juicy between Richie’s toes, his dusty footprints on the red steps. I have never seen snow. A white Christmas is inconceivable.
The Sergeant was the musical expert, so I just said: “It’s for a good cause.”
“They’ll spend it on booze.” He scratched his pot-belly with the point of a dart.
“Double bull,” said Basil, and threw it.
“Uncle Colin…” I was going to explain how Uncle Colin, who hit the bottle a bit, ended up in the Salvation Army home, but thought better of it.
“We weren’t watching so it doesn’t count.”
“I saw it,” said Cliffie. “Perfect cherry.”
“How do you know they’re really from the Salvation Army?” said the Sergeant. He always had something up his sleeve.
“The uniforms, for one thing.”
“The uniforms! What does that prove? They look like bloody bus conductors. Haven’t you heard about these chancers dressed up in orange overalls, pretending to be dustbin boys and coming round for Christmas boxes? These guys are probably also trying to make a fast buck. The prisons are full of con-artists, you know. There’s big money to be made in charity.”
Big money. It resounded in the back of my mind like a cymbal.
Richie came back with my purse.
“You should give them some of that big money of yours, Cliff,” said the Sergeant. “That would be a hoot.”
“The Big! Money!” Cliffie sang out from the braai, like a quiz-show host, and sprayed beer over the flames. “There’s only one left.”
“Come on, Cliff. It’ll be worth it. You can take it back afterwards.”
“Shanghai!” said Basil, starting and finishing another game. He was becoming superhuman.
Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine-logs hither.
Cliffie caught Richie by the arm and whispered something in his ear. The boy went into the house.
* * *
—
Cliffie worked in Lost Property at Jan Smuts. It was an endless source of gifts and novelties. But the best find of all, the one that had given him the most pleasure, had come from a friend in Customs, where it had been abandoned by an economic mission returning from a trade fair in Montevideo. It was a treasure chest, an old army-issue trommel covered with papier mâché barnacles and oversized padlocks, and filled to the brim with krugerrands. The coins were the size of dinner plates and made of wood, with a bust of Paul Kruger painted on one side and a leaping springbok on the other.
There were a hundred coins in the chest to start with and Cliffie spent them lavishly. He handed them out to beggars at robots, he tipped roadhouse waiters with them, he gave them to newspaper vendors. The memory of these transactions made him laugh until the tears ran down his cheeks. “You should have seen his face!” As the supply diminished he became thriftier, because a good laugh is hard to come by, but in the end the coffer was empty. Now it stood next to the stove full of dead men. The very last coin had been resting on the mantelpiece in the lounge for a month, waiting for some special occasion.
Richie came out of the house with the coin. Cliffie piled his sosaties on the edge of the grill, put down the tongs and bent to wipe his hands on the lawn. Richie actually held out the coin to him, but at the last moment he snatched it back. Cliffie thought he was playing some silly game and made a grab for it. The boy turned and ran up the driveway at the side of the house, and Cliffie chased after him.
They went round the house twice, but Cliffie could not catch up. After the third circuit Richie ran across the lawn with Cliffie at his heels. At the foot of the itchy-ball tree he had time to stuff the coin down the front of his shirt before he scampered up the trunk and disappeared in the greenery.
* * *
—
“I can’t even see him,” said Basil. And then in a different voice, loosening his belt: “Richard, if I have to fetch you from up there you’ll be sorry.”
“Forget it,” I said. “In your condition you’ll break your neck. And I won’t let you lay a hand on that child.”
“Just throw down the money,” said Cliffie.
“If he was my son I�
��d turn the hose on him,” Sergeant Dundas said to me. “Let him get away with little things like this, he’ll end up burning down the house.”
“Stay away from the phone wires, boy!”
We barged around under the tree, staring up into the foliage, shouldering one another aside.
Richie was always otherwise. He would be staring down at us absently, through eyes too full of colour, as if the irises had been stirred into the whites. The doctor said his eyesight was perfect though, better than average. What does he think of us, I thought, baying like hounds, baring our teeth. What does he see down our pink throats?
“It’s the same all over,” Sergeant Dundas shouted as “Away in a Manger” swelled up on the other side of the fence and surged over us. “The kids telling the grown-ups what to do. I see it every day. The prisons are bursting at the seams. Me me me me me me me.”
Basil tried to hoist himself up into the tree but the branch broke off in his hands and he fell on his backside. A raspberry from the trombone.
“Bugger this for a joke,” Sergeant Dundas burst out. “He’s making us look like fools. They’re laughing at us. Just look at them, in their fancy dress, with their pips on their shoulders. This one with the sax is a bloody brigadier.”
They did seem to be enjoying themselves. One of the trumpeters was actually smiling as he blew. I hadn’t thought it was possible.
“It’s the same wherever you go, some black face laughing at you. They’ll be toyi-toying in your front garden just now.” The Sergeant went over to the fence and shouted at them. “Enough of your stupid music you clowns. Go away!” And then, abandoning the italics, cursed them to high heaven.
The round mouths of the instruments looked mildly shocked. The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head. A string of saliva drooled from the end of the trombone to the dust.
Flashback Hotel Page 11