‘Chris Vorster?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘I have a complaint against you.’
I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights at Point Road Police Station alone in the cell I had occupied a week before. I once briefly saw the younger policeman who had arrested us in Burman Bush, but none of the others from that incident. ‘Back again?’ he said. ‘What’s it this time? You fuck another coon girl?’ He laughed at that. Apparently it had been a joke.
‘I got into a fight,’ I told him.
‘Stick to the other game,’ he said. ‘Fucking women is better than fucking up guys.’ This was another joke, and he walked away laughing. We were almost old friends.
All my life, when the pressure of living with my wife or running my business or just being alive has been too great, I have sought refuge in sleep. The length of time I spend unconscious has always been a measure of my state of mind. On those three nights, I spent almost twelve hours a night asleep. And they were not pleasant hours. The dreams that disturbed my sleep, and brought me to the surface continually, all disappeared before I could take hold of them. On waking every morning, I was left with the same feeling of helplessness and guilt that seemed to be a part of me now. Even the satisfaction of seeing Snake Wilson disappear under his kitchen table did not overcome all that I realised later had been growing in me for most of the previous year.
They had allowed me to make two calls, so I phoned Mister Jordan to tell him I would not be in my room over the weekend, but that I would be back on Monday. That was an optimistic assessment, but it did turn out that way. Then I phoned Mister Harvey. After I had described my new situation to him, I heard him sigh. ‘I thought this was not over yet.’
Mister Harvey was wrong about that though. It was over. This was nothing more than a minor postscript. I appeared before the magistrate on Monday morning. Snake gave evidence about how he had suffered an unprovoked attack. I was delighted to see that he had a badly blackened eye and that his left arm was in a sling. That saucepan, Snake’s own saucepan, had some effect after all. He had tried to go on testifying about my being a security threat, but the prosecutor had stopped him. I believed then, and I do now, that was also a result of some magic Mister Harvey had performed behind the scenes.
In his address to the magistrate, Mister Harvey said that I was essentially a good boy who had made a mistake. He believed that light corporal punishment would be sufficient to deal with the matter. The magistrate agreed and sentenced me to time served and six strokes with a light cane, the same cane my former cellmate had assured me was soaked in salt water so that it would cut the skin. I cannot say if it had been soaked in salt water, but it did cut the skin. I was asked if I had anything to say, and I said that I was determined that such a thing would not happen again.
I had wondered if either of my parents would be in court, but neither were. I never discovered if they even knew about the latest scandal I had brought upon our family.
The strokes themselves were administered on the same morning within half an hour of judgment being passed. They were painful, but only bled in two places. The policeman who administered them, a burly sergeant, deep into middle age, took his task seriously. It was clear that he wanted to ensure that I would not be cheated out of the lesson I had earned. Not only did he apply the requisite effort, but he waited for all of a minute after each stroke. ‘That is because they should feel each stroke,’ he explained to a younger officer. Mister Harvey was present throughout.
We said goodbye on the pavement outside. ‘How do you feel now?’ he asked. His friendly smile had returned.
‘Stinging, but better than I did on Friday.’
‘Better than you did on Friday?’
‘Yes. I feel light-hearted now, at least lighter-hearted.’
‘You’re a strange one, Chris.’ Then his face became serious. ‘Now, this is the last time I am coming to your rescue. I have other things to do with my life. Do we understand each other?’
We did. He offered me a lift back to Hollywood Heights, but I declined. Although he knew so much about me, I was nevertheless ashamed of my current accommodation.
That night in Hollywood Heights, in the passage outside my door, I heard the unsteady footsteps of my fellow residents from time to time as they staggered in from the evening’s business or entertainment. I slept on my side to spare my buttocks and I slept peacefully for the first time since Mama had first heard about Ruthie and me. The cane had done something to my soul. That policeman’s heavy arm and the pauses to allow some recovery before each stroke had cleansed a part of me that needed it badly.
In the early morning hours, long before my usual waking time, the hum of the city reduced to the roaring of just a single motorcycle a few blocks away, I woke and knew that Abraham was with me in the room. A curtain in front of the closed window stirred or seemed to stir. I sat up in bed, expecting to see him, but the room was as I would have expected. I reached out with both hands. If he was with me, I wanted to touch him or have him touch me. I cannot say how long I remained in that position and whether the tingling I felt in both hands was just my imagination, but when I did sleep again, it was with the feeling that I was not alone.
fifty-six
Through the grimy glass of my one small window, I could see the Durban traffic flowing along Pine Street: businesspeople with briefcases, street characters of every sort, a few young girls in their school uniforms carrying hockey sticks, two men erecting a sign above a shop, a delivery man unpacking boxes from the back of a truck, a Zulu auntie with a colourful umbrella as defence against the morning sun. Seeing the girls in their uniforms, I remembered that I would have been expected at school myself. With all the pressing matters of the past week, I had forgotten that aspect of my life. Whatever relationship with my parents remained, no doubt I was still listed as a pupil on our school register. In the streets of Durban there would be schoolfriends and teachers, relatives, people from our church, people from Red Hill and others from Greenwood Park. They were the faces that had become familiar in the course of even a young life and that I would now seek to avoid.
Watching the procession of humanity passing below my window, I knew that my relationship with all of them was over. If Durban was driving me away, there was also a magnet drawing me towards it. The railway station was only two blocks away. I examined my wallet. The cash I had left would be enough. And I had nearly a thousand in my savings account.
On the way to the station to book my ticket, I bought a hot dog for breakfast at a roadside cart I had made use of before. The girls in their school dresses, six or seven of them, giggled as I walked past.
In those days, most train trips between Durban and Johannesburg were overnight affairs. You boarded in the late afternoon and disembarked soon after breakfast the next morning.
Dinner on the train was not wonderful, but it was the best meal I had eaten for almost a week. An auntie who looked older than Mama shared my table. She made loud, smacking sounds as she ate and picked her teeth with the corner of a business card. I was relieved when she finished and left me alone at the table. By the time the steward brought my coffee, the day had faded into evening. The bright lights inside the dining car dismissed the world outside, reducing it to a featureless succession of shadows.
I shared my compartment with two middle-aged men, one of whom had tried repeatedly to engage me in conversation. It seemed that he had the urgent need to impress someone, in this case me, with his knowledge of horse racing. Most of all, he wanted to tell me how to make a fortune betting on the horses. He reminded me of my investment guru from Hollywood Heights. Looking at his worn shirt collar, his scuffed shoes and the fact that he was doing the trip by train instead of air, it seemed that he had not personally applied his excellent theories.
The other man had looked at my kit bag and asked if I was going camping. I said no, I was running away from home.
I think he thought I was joking. ‘I wish I was running away from home,
’ he said.
The two of them were strong reasons for me to stay in the dining car as long as I could. After coffee, I ordered a beer. I had never before had one, but the adult men I knew all drank beer, so it seemed the thing to do. The waiter looked suspiciously at me, so I told him I was eighteen and he brought the beer. I hated it, but tried not to let my distaste show in case he was watching. By the time I got back to my compartment, my fellow travellers were both in bed, occupying the two bottom bunks. I would have to sleep on one of the narrow bunks at the top, but at least I had avoided the need for more conversation.
The next morning I was up first and waiting outside the dining car when they opened the doors. I made the breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast a languid affair. Choosing my seat in the dining car so that I would be facing the front of the train had been deliberate. I was not sure what, if anything, of the approaching city would be visible, but I wanted to be ready – just in case there was something to see. It seemed a bad idea to order beer at that time of the morning so, to spin out my time in the dining car, I drank three cups of coffee, each consumed so slowly that it was cold by the time I got down to the grounds at the bottom.
While sitting there I realised that, since the train had left Durban station, I had not thought once about my parents or my sisters or the Petersons or even Ruthie. They all seemed far away now, the inhabitants of some place more distant than just six hundred kilometres. After his death, Abraham had always seemed close to me, but now he too had been left behind in the town where he had died. The fourteen hours since I had left Durban had an effect not unlike the caning the burly sergeant had administered. Falling asleep in the train compartment was like dying and waking in some other life, perhaps in a new incarnation on a different planet.
Even in my youth, I had the ability to avoid thinking about those matters that I found uncomfortable. I have been told many times that this is not to my advantage, that it is a bad characteristic and breeds neuroses. But, bad or not, I have always done it. My thoughts avoided Auntie Pearl and Uncle William and what had been done to their lives. Perhaps I should say what I had done to their lives. I never really accepted Mister Harvey’s view that I was not to blame.
It was on that train that I finally admitted to myself that when I had escaped from the police station, I knew that I had seen Ruthie for the last time. I hated the thought, but I had already learnt that some things in life cannot be changed and therefore have to be accepted.
I thought briefly about all I might have done after leaving Mister Harvey’s office. If I had been the main character in a movie, I would have killed Snake Wilson. Then maybe I would have smuggled Ruthie across our borders to some safe refuge. I would have confronted my father and told him the truth about his life. But I had done none of these things. Instead, I had caught a train out of town.
I thought about Mama and I knew that the cloud I had brought to her life would not be lifted this side of the grave. My sisters were different. There was some deep knowledge within me that I would see them again and they would be fine.
If my father had provided me with the model of what a man should be, Mama had been the very foundation of my life. And it seemed to me that she had withdrawn that foundation. Now, the old life was being replaced and new foundations, wherever I could find them, were needed. It was harder to think about her than it was to think about him. The completeness of her despair, her inability even to look at me, since she had heard about Ruthie and me and known the stories to be true, was a barrier that I knew to be impenetrable.
Without warning, and for the last time in my life, I found tears in my eyes, not for my father or my sisters or even Ruthie and the Petersons, but only for Mama. It was not that I would miss her or that I would struggle to cope without her. Without fully understanding it, I knew that I had caused some change in her, and she a change in me that could not be undone. No amount of repentance could have changed it. My last view of her, a tired, worn shadow through the kitchen window, would be the one that would remain with me.
My thoughts were suddenly driven away. In the distance, the Johannesburg skyline appeared, towering above a grey haze, only the tops of the buildings visible. Around the buildings the morning sun streamed through the mist and smoke that Johannesburgers breathe every day, turning it to silver. There it was, Africa’s New York, and the ticket in my pocket was one-way only, bought with my own money. I calculated that the city had millions of businessmen, or at least hundreds of thousands. I imagined also that most of them would be forgetful enough to be fertile ground for Dog Box Flowers. I was free to pursue my new life.
fifty-seven
Michie arrived on an afternoon flight. I asked Nathan for the afternoon off and said I would work in the time. ‘Don’t be absurd, Christopher,’ he said. ‘You work more extra time than that every week. You go pick up your sister, but remember Rochelle and I want to meet her. Rochelle insists you bring her over.’
Michie was over fifty by now and barely recognisable as the teenage girl who wanted nothing more than to be glamorous. The bright flower that had endless schoolboys buzzing around her had become the earth mother, every few years picking up some new stray child who needed help. And Africa had plenty of those. She also had two of her own, to whom she managed to give plenty of attention and who seemed to enjoy the other children their mother brought home. Neither of the fathers had stayed. ‘I’m not sorry,’ she had told me more than once. ‘I know I’m not easy to live with. It’s better that I live alone.’ Throughout her adult life she had worked only for aid organisations and, of them, only those she thought were having some really beneficial effect on the indigenous population.
The first thing she said to me as I took the luggage trolley from her was, ‘Heaven knows, Chris, you do look better. You look much more relaxed.’
‘You look the same,’ I told her. ‘Have you saved Somalia and Zimbabwe yet?’
She laughed at that, a single loud squawk. ‘Don’t joke about it. Both bitterly need saving.’
That evening over supper and a bottle of red wine, I asked her if she ever thought about leaving.
‘Leaving what?’ she demanded. ‘The country?’
‘Not just the country, the continent. Do you ever think about leaving Africa?’
‘I’ve thought about it, but ultimately I probably never will.’
‘You feel safe there?’
‘I don’t feel unsafe there. But then it’s got nothing to do with safety. You joked about Somalia, but you can see me running a soup kitchen in Mogadishu, can’t you? There’s plenty to do in Africa. Not so much that needs to be done in the West.’
Yes, I could picture her in a Somalian soup kitchen. It took no effort. ‘What happened to the girl who got a hand from Mama across the back of the head because she thought a street prostitute looked glamorous?’
Again the short, squawking laugh. ‘Isn’t it terrible? I don’t know what happened. I started to see the world differently.’
I laughed too this time. ‘Do you remember the prostitute?’
‘I’ll never forget her. Of course, I didn’t realise what she was until Mama smacked me. I just wanted to be as glamorous as I thought she was.’
‘And now?’
‘Now, I don’t want anything.’
‘Just to help?’
‘Not even that. I didn’t choose any of the kids. They seemed to choose me. I just live from one day to the next. But if along the way I can do something good, that’s okay.’
The bottle was almost finished when she asked me if I ever thought about Ruthie.
I looked at her. She was not a vindictive person and there was no malice in the question. Not as much as before, I thought in answer to her question, not nearly as much as before. ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Maybe occasionally.’
‘She married …’
‘I know about the man she married.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
‘No, but I heard about him.’
‘A tall A
frikaner like you. She waited till after the law changed. She was in her thirties by then.’
‘I know.’
She could see that the subject was not one that I wanted to pursue and left it there.
In response to Rochelle’s instruction, I took Michie to visit her and Nathan on the third evening after her arrival. Rochelle cooked. Sharon had also been invited. Michie was on her best form, immediately cementing with both Rochelle and Sharon those mysterious female bonds that men do not understand. ‘Your sister looks exactly like you,’ Nathan told me. ‘If I had passed her in the street, I would have known right away that she was your sister. I would have stopped her and said, I know your brother, he’s a good friend of mine.’
Over spaghetti and more red wine, Rochelle said, ‘You must have come from the nicest family, Chris. You’re so nice and Michelle’s so nice, even nicer than you.’
‘We were all right, I suppose,’ I said.
‘We were terrific,’ Michie said. ‘Just a few skeletons we keep locked in the cupboard. Apart from those, we were great.’
‘Let me tell you,’ Rochelle said, ‘there’s no family on earth that’s got no skeletons, even the family I come from, even Nathan’s, specially Nathan’s.’
Nathan looked vaguely affronted. ‘What skeletons are there in my family cupboard?’
‘What about Uncle Lawrence, stuck in the loony bin?’
‘I’m glad other people also have skeletons,’ Michie said, ‘because we’ve got a lulu.’
Deep into the second wine bottle, Sharon suggested to Michie that you could tell a man by his relationship with his sisters. To my surprise, she agreed. Could you tell a sister by her relationship with her brothers? What had she seen in my relationship with Michie? What could she know about it?
Michie’s two weeks went by too fast. I showed her the loveliest places I had found along the coast. We went swimming a few times and walked on the sand more than once while the tide was out. Sharon came with us on one of the outings. There were other occasions when Michie asked if she should be invited again, but I told her no, I wanted us to be alone.
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