The discovery of something unexpected about the world always filled her with an infectious wonder. Once, she tugged me over to the balcony railings at the Florian to point out the iron covers on the water mains set into the pavements. Did I know the spaces below these covers, where the meters are housed? Well, the poor people of Joburg, the street people–we did not call them ‘the homeless’ in those days–the tramps, car parkers and urchins, used them as cupboards! They stored their winter wardrobes there and the rags of bedding they used at night, they preserved their scraps of food, their perishables, in the cool shade, they banked the empty bottles they collected for the deposits. It tickled her–she laughed out loud, just as if the idea had poked her in the ribs–that such utilitarian spaces should have been appropriated and domesticated, transformed into repositories of privacy for those compelled to live their lives in public. Any iron cover you passed in the street might conceal someone’s personal effects. There was a maze of mysterious spaces underfoot, known only to those who could see it. And this special knowledge turned them into the privileged ones, made them party to something in which we, who lived in houses with wardrobes and chests of drawers, and ate three square meals a day, could not participate. Blind and numb, we passed over these secret places, did not even sense them beneath the soles of our shoes. How much more might we be missing?
The food came. While we ate, I began to argue with her about the ‘cupboards’ and what they represented, as if it were my place to set her straight about the world.
‘It’s pathetic,’ I said, ‘that people are so poor they have to store their belongings in holes in the ground.’
‘No it’s not. It’s pathetic when people don’t care about themselves, when they give up. These people are resourceful, they’re making a life out of nothing.’
‘It’s like a dog burying a bone,’ I said.
‘Oh, you’ll never understand.’
When we’d finished our lunch and were walking down Twist Street, I wanted to lift up one of the covers to check the contents of the cavity beneath, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t right to go prying into people’s things.
‘What about the meter-readers?’ I asked. ‘Surely they’re always poking their noses in?’
‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘They’re professionals. Like doctors.’
‘They probably swipe the good stuff,’ I insisted.
‘Nonsense. They have an understanding.’
Then we parted, laughing. She went back to the children and I went back to the books. And this parting, called to mind, has a black edge of mourning, because she was walking in the shadow of death and I am still here to feel the sun on my face.
Ten years later, the domestic duty of a tap washer that needs replacing takes me outside into Argyle Street to switch off the mains. There is a storm raging in from the south, the oaks in Blenheim Street are already bowing before its lash, dropping tears as hard as acorns. I stick a screwdriver under the rim of the iron cover and lever it up. In the space beneath I find: a brown ribbed jersey, army issue; a red flannel shirt; a small checked blanket; two empty bottles–Fanta Grape and Lion Lager; a copy of Penthouse; a blue enamel plate; a clear plastic bag containing some scraps of food (bread rolls, tomatoes, oranges). Everything is neatly arranged. On one side, the empties have been laid down head to toe, the plate balanced across them to hold the food; on the other, the blanket has been folded, the shirt and jersey side by side on top of it, the magazine rolled up between. In the middle, behind a lens of misted glass, white numbers on black drums are revolving, measuring out a flood in standard units.
I kneel on the pavement like a man gazing down into a well, with this small, impoverished, inexplicably orderly world before me and the chaotic plenitude of the Highveld sky above.
32
Walking along Viljoen Street in Lorentzville one day, I saw a black man in overalls sitting on the kerb, taking off a pair of broken boots and putting on a brand-new pair of running shoes, which he had just finished lacing. I was reminded of Douglas Spaulding, the American kid in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, who exchanged his winter shoes for a pair of Litefoot sneakers at Mr Sanderson’s shoe store. Douglas cleverly persuaded the proprietor to try on a pair of Litefoots himself, to feel how quick and lively they rendered the wearer. Not only was the old man moved to give the boy the sneakers at a discount, he offered him a job selling shoes in his emporium. While I was recalling this, the black man finished tying his laces and walked quickly away with a spring in his step, leaving the old boots side by side in the gutter. The whole episode seemed like a parable about the dignity of labour, the moving congruence of hard work rewarded by simple but intense pleasures. I went on my way with a lump in my throat.
A few blocks further there was a commotion on the pavement outside Seedat’s Outfitters in Kitchener Avenue. A passerby had flung a brick through the plate-glass window and snatched some goods from the display. The brick was still lying there among the dusty satin drapes, chrome-plated pedestals and handwritten price-tags. It was a wonderful brick, a model brick, with three round holes through it the size of one-rand coins, filled with chips of broken glass.
33
Out of the blue, the tenants of 32 Albemarle Street were evicted. Their furniture piled on the pavement made it look like a forced removal. In passing, for the record, I counted ten double beds, and not much else.
34
Branko’s explanation of why people looking for the Marymount always got lost on my corner revealed something crucial about movement through the city. The way and the walker (and the driver, too, if he has time for such things) are in conversation. The ‘long poem of walking’ is a dialogue. Ask a question of any intersection–say you are looking for company, the centre of things, water, the road less travelled–and it will answer, not always straightforwardly, allowing a quirk of the topography, the lie of the land, a glimpse of a prospect to nudge you one way or the other. This conversation is one of the things that makes city walking interesting, and one of the masters of the art was Dickens.
Long before he invented London, Dickens knew that cities exist primarily so that we can walk around in them. The Sketches by Boz, his earliest published writings, collected for the first time in 1836, no less than the essays published thirty years later as The Uncommercial Traveller, arose largely from such wanderings. In each of the books there is a piece devoted to walking in the city at night. ‘The Streets–Night’ starts with the declaration that the streets of London, ‘to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winter’s night’, and the descriptions that follow are confined mainly to the savoury side of midnight, to muffin men and kidney-pie merchants and playgoers. In the later piece, ‘Night Walks’, the insomniac author, in the figure of ‘Houselessness’, walks and walks and walks, from midnight to daybreak, and presents a fuller and more sombre picture of the city.
Yet even as he tells us how quiet and empty the streets are when the last drunkards turned out by the publicans have staggered away, and the late pie men and hot-potato men have gone off trailing sparks, and even as he yearns for a sign of company, there seems to be life and light around every corner: the toll-keeper at his fire on Waterloo Bridge, the ‘fire and light’ of the Newgate turnkeys, a watchman with a lantern. In his most threatening encounters with other creatures–a furtive figure withdrawing into a shadowed doorway, a ragged beggar–they are as suspicious and frightened as he. In a coffee room at Covent Garden, where there is toast and coffee to be had at an early hour, he comes across the most alarming figure of all, a man who produces a meat pudding from his hat, stabs it with his knife, tears it apart with his fingers and gobbles it down. It is enough to make one envious, that the darkest villains of the piece should be possessed of such extravagant habits and showy appetites.
When daylight comes and the streets begin to fill with workmen and hawkers, Dickens admits what we have begun to suspect–that he and the streets have not just bee
n conversing, but arguing, that it has taken him some effort, and given him some pleasure, to pursue his solitary way: ‘And it is not, as I used to think, going home at such times, the least wonderful thing in London, that in the real desert region of the night, the houseless wanderer is alone there.’
Dickens was blessed to live in a city that offered the walker ‘miles upon miles of streets’ in which to be lonely and ‘warm company’ at every turn once his loneliness had been satisfied. Moreover, to live in a city that collaborated enthusiastically in its own invention. I live in a city that resists the imagination. Or have I misunderstood? Is the problem that I live in a fiction that unravels even as I grasp it?
A stranger, arriving one evening in the part of Joburg I call home, would think that it had been struck by some calamity, that every last person had fled. There is no sign of life. Behind the walls, the houses are ticking like bombs. The curtains are drawn tight, the security lights are glaring, the gates are bolted. Even the cars have taken cover. Our stranger, passing fearfully through the streets, whether in search of someone with open hands of whom he might ask directions or merely of someone to avoid in the pursuit of solitude, finds no one at all.
35
The range of steering locks available in South Africa is impressive–the Wild Dog, the MoToQuip anti-theft lock, the Twistlok, the SL2 AutoLok, the Eagle Claw by Yale, the Challenger…All these locks work on the same principle: they are attached to the steering wheel and immobilize the vehicle by preventing the wheel from being turned.
The locks also have the same basic design. There is a hardened steel shaft and an extendable bar. The two parts are connected by a locking ratchet mechanism and each part is furnished with a U-shaped hook or ‘claw’. To engage the lock, you place the shaft diametrically across the steering wheel, with the bar retracted and the shaft claw around the rim. Then you extend the bar until the second claw fits around the opposite side of the rim. The ratchet engages automatically and locks the bar in place. If an attempt is made to turn the steering wheel now, the protruding end of the bar strikes the passenger seat, windscreen or door. To disengage the device, you insert the key in the lock and retract the bar, freeing the claws on both sides.
In some devices, the U-shaped hook on the shaft is replaced by a corkscrew hook, which is twisted around the rim of the steering wheel before the bar is engaged. The Twistlok, for instance, has such a hook, which is called the ‘pigtail end’.
The selling points of the various locks are similar. They are made of tough, hardened steel which cannot be drilled, sawn or bent, and they are coated with vinyl to protect the interior fittings. They are easy to install, thanks to the automatic locking system, and highly visible to thieves; to heighten their visibility, and therefore their deterrent value, they are often brightly coloured. They have pick-resistant locks and high-security keys: the MoToQuip has ‘cross point’ keys; the Challenger has a ‘superior circular key system’; and Yale offers a ‘pin tumbler locking system’ with ten thousand different key combinations and exerts strict control over the issuing of duplicates, by approved service centres only.
Some of these products draw explicitly on the symbolism of the predatory animal. The Eagle Claw, for instance, suggests a bird of prey, a raptor with the steering wheel in its clutches. The logo of the Wild Dog depicts a snarling Alsatian, more rabid and vicious than the conventional guard dog. The association with wild animals known for their speed, strength or ferocity is also found in other areas of the security industry: tigers, eagles and owls appear on the shields of armed response companies, and rhinoceroses and elephants in the logos of companies that supply electrified fencing and razor wire.
36
The day after I acquired my new car, a bottle-green Mazda Midge, my dad arrived on my doorstep. He was carrying a long package wrapped in mistletoe paper, although Christmas was a long way off. I knew at once what was in this package, but I pretended that I did not.
My dad works in the motor trade and I have always respected his opinions about cars. He gave the Mazda a thorough check-up, doing all the things men do to determine the quality of a second-hand vehicle–kicking the tyres, bouncing up and down on the fenders to test the shock absorbers, looking in the cubbyhole, jiggling the steering wheel, gazing under the hood. He announced that I had made a sensible purchase. Then he gave me the present. It was a Gorilla.
He showed me how it worked, engaging and disengaging the device with practised ease. When it was my turn, the lock suddenly seemed like a test of perceptual intelligence, an educational toy of some kind. My fingers felt thick and clumsy, my hand-eye coordination had deserted me. The ‘pigtail’ kept slipping off the rim, like one of those magician’s hoops that has a secret join in it.
Finally I managed to engage the Gorilla.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, I have a couple of tips for you. Before you do anything else, you want to engage the standard steering lock that comes with the car. Just turn the wheel anticlockwise until it clicks in.
‘Never install the device so that it’s touching one of the windows. I know a guy who did that, and the bar expanded in the sun and cracked his windscreen.
‘Then you must find a place to store the lock when it’s not in use. I suggest you put it down here next to the seat. It’s out of the way and there’s no danger of it getting caught under the pedals.
‘Finally, you need to put a drop of oil in here from time to time. Just a drop, very occasionally. You don’t want to get it on the upholstery.
‘Right. Let’s see you do it again.’
37
The Gorilla is the best of the breed. It is made in one solid piece. There is no ratchet and no extension; instead the lock, like a jointed metal jaw, slides up and down on a single bar. This bar is made of naked stainless steel, harsh on the eye and cold to the touch–until it is exposed to the sun, whereupon it gets hot enough to blister the skin. The ‘pigtail’ is bright red. The shiny metal bar is not coated with protective plastic and so the device is leaner than the average lock, but if anything it looks stronger. It has nothing to hide. One is never tempted to wonder what material is concealed beneath the plastic. This is ‘super hard steel’, as the packaging declares, designed to put an end to the ‘monkey business of car theft’.
The brutal style of the device is echoed in one of the manufacturer’s slogans: ‘There’s no substitute for brute force.’ The pun on ‘brute force’ furthers a play of meanings already suggested by the trade name ‘Gorilla’. Brute force is unthinking material force: there is no substitute for unbending steel. But it is also unfeeling animal force: there is no substitute for a powerful, dull-witted beast like a ‘Gorilla’.
In English, mechanical devices are very commonly given the names of animals. In mechanics and mining, for instance, there are countless devices designated as ‘dogs’. A ‘dog’ may be any form of spike, rod or bar with a ring, hook or claw for gripping, clutching or holding something. ‘Dogs’ form part of machines used in mines, sawmills and engineering works. ‘Firedogs’ are used to support wood in a fireplace, ‘raft dogs’ to hold together the logs forming a raft. Various machines and implements are also named ‘monkeys’, either arbitrarily or because of a supposed resemblance between the object and the animal. A ‘monkey’ is a crucible used in the manufacture of glass, for instance, or a weight used in the manufacture of iron. In the nautical environment, ‘monkey’ usually indicates that something has a peculiar use or location; it may also indicate that something is easy or simple. A ‘monkey link’, for instance, is an easily inserted repair link for a chain. This may be part of the derivation of ‘monkey wrench’, a tool which is a close cousin of the Gorilla.
The ambiguous identity of a single device as dull object and dumb animal is captured in the logo of the Gorilla, which shows a stylized steering wheel gripped by two huge, humanoid paws, with the shaggy suggestion of an animal body in the background. Attaching this particular lock to the stee
ring wheel is like leaving a Gorilla sitting in the driver’s seat. Elsewhere on the packaging we read: ‘Find your car where you left it–get a “Gorilla” to protect it.’ This slogan hints at a more covert layer of meaning. Colloquially a ‘gorilla’ is a powerfully built, brutish, aggressive man. So the device may be seen as a sort of simian watchman.
38
One former owner of our house was a DIY man and fond of wood. The house is full of his handiwork. He must have been very tall, Minky says. Her feet don’t touch the floor when she sits on the window seat, and the rails of the built-in cupboards are so high she can hardly reach. Even his little touches were large ones–the door handles were made for a heavyweight’s fist, the window sills would hold a set of encyclopedias.
On the inside of the wall beside the front gate he installed a letter-box for a person with large appetites, someone capable of sustaining extensive correspondences and making extravagant purchases by mail order. On the outside was a brass slot, with a peak like a postman’s cap for keeping out the rain, covering an aperture in the wall. That slot was generous enough to admit a rolled newspaper or a thickly stuffed A4 envelope.
A small letterbox is more than an inconvenience, it is the mark of a mean nature. But if our letterbox had been smaller, if there had been less brass in it, it may have been less attractive to a thief. One night some scavenger after scrap stuck a crowbar under an edge of the slot and broke it out of the plaster. Now the box is filling up with dust and dead leaves. The hardware man at Tile City offered us a replacement in plastic, not as durable as brass but unlikely to be stolen. People were coming in all day, he said, wanting plastic numbers for their gates.
Afterwards Minky and I took a walk through the neighbourhood, from one shadowy number of unvarnished wood to another of unpainted plaster, following the trail the thieves blazed up and down the blocks, breaking brass numbers off doors and walls.
Portrait with Keys Page 5