Rage c-11
Page 59
Now he studied Michael'closely as he stood awkwardly before his desk. Despite the fact that he had cropped his hair in one of those appalling brush cuts that the youth were affecting these days and wore a vividly patterned bow tie, he was a likable-looking lad, with a strong determined jawline and clear intelligent eyes. Perhaps he was too thin for his height, and a little gawky, but he had quite noticeably matured and gained in self-assurance during the short period he had been at the Mail.
Suddenly Leon realized that he was being cruel, and that his scrutiny was subjecting the lad to unnecessary agony. He picked up the sheet of typescript that lay in front of him, and slid it across his untidy desk.
'Did you write that?" he demanded gruffly, and Michael snatched up the sheet protectively.
'I didn't mean anybody to read it,' he whispered, and then remembered who he was talking to and threw in a lame, 'sir." 'Strange." Leon Herbstein shook his head. 'I always believed we were in the business of writing so that others could read." 'I was just practising." Michael held the sheet behind his back.
'I made some corrections,' Herbstein told him, and Michael jerked the page out from behind him and scanned it anxiously.
'Your third paragraph is redundant, and "scar" is a better word than "cicatrice" - otherwise we'll run it as you wrote it." 'I don't understand, sir,' Michael blurted.
'You've saved me the trouble of writing tomorrow's editorial." Herbstein reached across and took the page from Michael's limp fingers, tossed it into his out basket and then concentrated all his attention on his own work.
Michael stood gaping at the top of his head. It took him ten seconds to realize that he had been dismissed and he backed towards the door and closed it carefully behind him. His legs just carried him
!iFi to his desk, and then collapsed under him. He sat down heavily in his swivel chair and reached for his cigarette pack. It was empty and he crumpled it and dropped it into his wastepaper basket.
Only then did the full significance of what had happened hit him and he felt cold and slightly nauseated.
'The editorial,' he whispered, and his hands began to tremble.
Across the desk Desmond Blake belched softly and demanded, 'Where are the notes on that American what's-'is-name fellow?" 'I haven't finished it yet, Mr Blake." 'Listen, kid. I warned you. You'll have to extract your digit from your fundamental orifice if you want to get anywhere around here." Michael set his alarm clock for five o'clock the next morning and went downstairs with his raincoat over his pyjamas. He was waiting on the street corner with the newspaper urchins when the bundles of newsprint were tossed on to the pavement from the back of the Mail's delivery van.
He ran back up the stairs clutching a copy of the paper and locked the door to his bed-sitter. It took all his courage to open it at the editorial page. He was actually shaking with terror that Mr Herbstein might have changed his mind, or that it was all some monstrous practical joke.
There under the Mail's crest at the very top of the editorial page was his headline: 'A MARTYR IS BOR'.
He read it through quickly, and then started again and read it aloud, mouthing each word, rolling it over his tongue like a noble and precious wine. He propped the paper, open at the editorial, beside the mirror while he shaved, and then carried it down to the Greek fast-food car where he had his breakfast each morning and showed it to Mr Costa, who called his wife out of the kitchen.
'Hey, Michael, you a big shot now." Mrs Costa embraced him, smelling of fried bacon and garlic. 'You a big shot newspaperman now." She let him use the telephone in the back room and he gave the operator the number at Weltevreden. Centaine answered on the second ring.
'Mickey!" she cried delightedly. 'Where are you? Are you in Cape Town?" He calmed her down and then read it to her. There was a long silence. 'The editorial, Mickey. You aren't making this up, are you?
I'll never forgive you if you are." Once he had reassured her, Centaine told him, 'I can't remember ever being so excited about anything in years. I'm going to call your father, you must tell him yourself." Shasa came on the line, and Michael read it to him. 'You wrote that?" Shasa asked. 'Pretty hot stuff, Mickey. Of course I don't agree with your conclusions - Gama must hang. However, you almost convinced me otherwise, but we can debate that when next we are together. In the meantime, congratulations, my boy. Perhaps you did make the right decision after all." Michael found that he was a minor celebrity in the newsroom, even the sub stopped by his desk to congratulate him and discuss the article for a few moments, and the pretty little blonde on the reception desk who had never before been aware of his existence, smiled and greeted him by name.
'Listen, kid,' said Desmond Blake. 'One little fart doesn't make a whole sewage farm. In future I don't want you pushing copy over my head. Every bit of shit you write comes across my desk, get it?" 'I'm sorry, Mr Blake. I didn't--' 'Yeah! Yeah! I know, you didn't mean it. Just don't go getting a big head. Remember whose assistant you are." The news of Moses Gama's reprieve threw the newsroom into a state of pandemonium that didn't subside for almost a week. Michael was drawn in and some of his days ended at midnight when the presses began their run, and began when the first papers hit the streets the next morning.
However, he found that the excitement seemed to release limitless reserves of energy in him and he never felt tired. He learned to work quickly and accurately and his way with words gradually assumed a deftness and polish that was apparent even to himselfi Two weeks after the reprieve the editor called him into his office.
He had learned not to knock, any waste of time irritated Leon Herbstein and made him bellow aggressively. Michael went straight on in, but he had not yet entirely mastered the pose of world-weary cynicism which he knew was the hallmark of the veteran journalist, and he was all radiant eagerness as he asked, 'Yes, Mr Herbstein?" 'Okay, Mickey, I've got something for you." Every time Mr Herbstein used his Christian name, Michael still thrilled with delicious shock.
'We are getting a lot of requests from readers and overseas correspondence. With all the interest in the Gama case, people want to know more about the black political movements. They want to know the difference between the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress, they want to know who's who - who the hell are Tambo and Sisulu, Mandela and Moses Gama and what do they stand for? All that sort of stuff. You seem to be interested in black politics and enjoy digging around in the archives - besides I can't spare one of my top men on this sort of background stuff. So get on with it." Herbstein switched his attention back to the work on his desk, but Michael by now had sufficient confidence to stand hi: ground.
'Am I still working under Mr Blake?" he asked. He had learned b this time if you called him 'sir' it just made Leon Herbstein mad.
Herbstein shook his head but did not even look up. 'You are or your own. Send everything to me. No hurry, any time in the nex five minutes will do nicely." Michael soon discovered that the Mail's archives were inadequate, and served merely to initiate him into the complexity and daunting size of the project he had been set. However, from them he was a!
least able to draw up a list of the various black political groups and related associations such as the officially unrecognized black trade unions, and from there to compile a list of their own leaders and officials.
He cleared one wall of his bed-sitting room and put up a board on which he pinned all this information, using different-coloured cards for each grouping and press photographs of the principal black leaders.
All this achieved was to convince him of how little was known about the black movements by even the most well-informed of the white section of the nation.
The public library added very little to his understanding. Most of the books on the subject had been written ten or more years before and simply traced the African National Congress from those distant days of its inception in 1912 and the names mentioned were all of men now dead or in their dotage.
Then he had his first inspiration. One of the Mail's sister
publications under the banner of Associated Newspapers of South Africa was a weekly magazine called Assegai after the broad-bladed war spear that the impis of Chaka the Zulu conqueror had wielded. The magazine was aimed at the educated and more affluent section of the black community. Its editorial policy was dictated by the white directors of Associated Newspapers but amongst the articles and photographs of African football stars and torch singers, of black American athletes and film actors, an occasional article slipped through of a fiercely radical slant.
Michael borrowed a company car and went out to see the editor of Assegai in the vast black location of Drake's Farm. The editor was a graduate of the black university of Fort Hare, a Xhosa named Solomon Nduli. He was polite but cool, and they had chatted for half an hour before a barbed remark let Michael know that he had been recognized as a spy for the security police, and that he would learn nothing of value.
A week later the Mail published the first of Michael's articles in its Saturday magazine edition. It was a comparison of the two leading African political organizations: the Pan Africanist Congress which was a jealously exclusive body to which only pure-blooded African blacks were admitted and whose views were extremely radical, and the much larger African National Congress which, although predominantly black, also included whites and Asians and mixed blood members such as the Cape coloureds, and whose objectives were essentially conciliatory.
The article was accurate, obviously carefully researched, but, most important, the tone was sympathetic, and it carried the by-line 'by Michael Courtney'.
The following day Solomon Nduli called Michael at the offices of the Mail, and suggested another meeting. His first words when they shook hands were, 'I'm sorry. I think I misjudged you. What do you want to know?" Solomon took Michael into a strange world that he had never realized existed - the world of the black townships. He arranged for him to meet Robert Sobukwe, and Michael was appalled by the depth of the resentblent the black leader of the Pan Africanist Congress expressed, particularly for the pass laws, by his enormous impatience to effect an upheaval of the entire society, and by the thinly veiled violence in the man.
'I will try to arrange for you to meet Mandela,' Solomon promised, 'although, as you know, he is underground now, and wanted by the police. But there are others you must talk to." He took Michael to Baragwanath Hospital and introduced him to the wife of Moses Gama, the lovely young Zulu woman he had seen at the trial in Cape Town. Victoria was heavily pregnant, but with a calm dignity that impressed Michael deeply until he sensed the same terrible resentment and latent violence in her that he had found in Robert Sobukwe.
The next day Solomon took him back to Drake's Farm to meet a man named Hendrick Tabaka, a man who seemed to own most of the small businesses in the location and looked like a heavyweight wrestler with a head like a cannonball crisscrossed with scars.
He appeared to Michael to represent the opposite end of the black protest consciousness. 'I have my family and my business,' he told Michael, 'and I will protect them from anybody, black or white." And Michael was reminded of a view that his father had often expressed, but to which Michael had not given much consideration before this. 'We must give' the black people a piece of the pie,' Shasa Courtney had said. 'Give them something of their own. The truly dangerous man is one with nothing to lose." Michael gave the second article in the series the title 'Rage' and in it he tried to describe the deep and bitter resentment that he had encountered on his journeys into the half-world of the townships. Iended the article with the words: Despite this deep sense of outrage, I never found the least indication hatred towards the white person as an individual by any of the bla leaders with whom I was able to speak. Their resentment seemed ton to be directed only at the Nationalist government's policy of aparthe while the vast treasure of mutual goodwill built up over three hundrc years between the races seems to be entirely undiminished by it.
He delivered the article to Leon Herbstein on the Thursday an found himself immediately embroiled in an editorial review of it th lasted until almost eight o'clock that evening. Leon Herbstein calle in his assistant and his deputy editor, and their views were divide between publishing with only minor alterations and not publishin at all, for fear of bringing down the wrath of the publications contrc board, the government censors who had the power to ban the Ma and put it out of business.
'But it's all true,' Michael protested. 'I have substantiated ever single fact I have quoted. It's true and it's important - that is all that really matters." And the three older journalists looked at him pityingly.
'All right, Mickey,' Leon Herbstein dismissed him at last. 'Yo can go on home. I will let you know the final decision in due course.
As Michael moved dispiritedly towards the door, the deputy edito nodded at him. 'Publish or not, Mickey, it is a damned good effort You can be proud of it." When Michael got back to his apartment he found' somebody sitting on a canvas holdall outside his front door. Only when the person stood up did he recognize the massively developed shoulders.
the glinting steel-rimmed spectacles and spiky hairstyle.
'Garry,' he shouted joyously, and rushed to embrace his elder brother.
x They sat side by side on the bed and talked excitedly, interrupting each other and laughing and exclaiming at each other's news.
'What are you doing in Jo'burg?" Michael demanded at last.
'I've come up from Silver River just for the weekend. I want to get at the new computer main frame in head office, and there are a few things I want to check at the land surveyor's office. So I thought, what the hell - why spend money on a hotel when Mickey has a flat? So I brought my sleeping-bag. Can I doss on your floor?" 'The bed pulls out into a double,' Mickey told him happily. 'You don't have to sleep on the floor." They went down to Costa's restaurant and Garry bought a pack of chicken curry and half a dozen Cokes. They ate the food out of the pack, sharing a spoon to save washing up, and they talked until long after midnight. They had always been very close to each other.
Even though he was younger, Michael had been a staunch ally during those dreadful childhood years of Garry's bed-wetting and stuttering and Sean's casually savage bullying. Then again Michael had not truly realized how lonely he had been in this strange city until this moment, and now there were so many nostalgic memories and so much unrequited need for affection to assuage, so many subjects of earth-shattering importance to discuss. They sat up into the small hours dealing with money and work and sex and the rest of it.
Garry was stunned to learn that Michael earned thirty-seven pounds ten shillings a month.
'How much does this kennel cost you a month?" he demanded.
'Twenty pounds,' Michael told him.
'That leaves you seventeen pounds ten a month to eat and exist.
They should be arrested for slave labour." 'It's not as bad as that - Pater gives me an allowance to make do.
How much do you earn, Garry?" Michael demanded, and Garry looked guilty.
'I get my board and lodging and all my meals at the mine, single quarters, and I am paid a hundred a month as an executive trainee." 'Son of a gun!" Michael was deeply impressed. 'What do you do with all that?" It was Garry's turn to look amazed. 'Save it, of course. I've got over two thousand in the bank already." 'But what are you going to do with all that?" Michael insisted.
'What are you going to spend it on?" 'Money isn't for spending,' Garry explained. 'Money is for saving - that is, if you want to be rich." 'And you want to be rich?" Michael asked.
'What else is there?" Garry was genuinely puzzled by the question.
'What about doing an important job the best way you can? Isn't that something to strive for, even better than getting rich." 'Oh sure!" said Garry with vast relief. 'But then, of course, you won't get rich unless you do just that." It was almost two in the morning when Michael at last switched off the bedside lamp and they settled down nose to toes, until Garry asked in the darkness the question he had not been able to ask until then.
She said "Don't mention that woman's name in Weltevreden again.
She was responsible for Blaine's murder." I thought you might know where she is." 'She's in London,' Michael said softly. 'She writes to me every week." 'When is she coming back, Mickey?" 'Never,' Michael said. 'She and Pater are getting a divorce." 'Why, Mickey, what happened that she had to leave like that, without even saying goodbye?" 'I don't know. She won't say. I wrote and asked her, but she wouldn't tell me." Garry thought he had gone to sleep, but after a long silence Michael said so softly that he barely caught the words, 'I miss her, Garry. Oh God, how much I miss her." The too,' said Garry dutifully, but each week that passed was so filled with excitement and new experience that for Garry her memory had already faded and blurred.
The next morning Leon Herbstein called Mickey into his office.
'Okay, Mickey,' he said. 'We are going to run the "Rage" article as you wrote it." Only then did Michael realize how important that decision had been to him. For the rest of that day his jubilation was tempered by that reflection. Why was his feeling of relief so powerful?
Was it the personal achievement, the thought of seeing his name in print again? It was part of that, he was honest with himself, but there was something else even deeper and more substantial. The truth. He had written the truth and the truth had prevailed. He had been exonerated.
Michael went down early the next morning and brought a copy of the Mail up to the bed-sitter. He woke Garry up and read the 'Rage' feature to him. Garry had only come in a few hours before dawn. He had spent most of the night in the computer room at the new Courtney Mining building in Diagonal Street. David Abrahams, on Shasa's discreet suggestion, had arranged for him to have a free hand with the equipment when it wasn9t being used on company business.