The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  I say, “I just wanna ask you something, man.”

  “He wants to ask you something,” says the other one, not looking at me.

  “Just, like, if you know someone,” I say. “Who maybe like used to work here?”

  Longhair says to the other, “Their ears never work. You notice that?”

  “Never, hey,” agrees the other. Longhair turns his back on me but with his face in profile, so he’s keeping an eye on me but pretending not to, and when I open my mouth to speak my brother’s name, Longhair steps back and hits me with his elbow, right under the sternum. He is a strong, full-grown man and he hits me full stick. It’s a nasty trick of turning his back like that cos it catches me by surprise, my stomach relaxed, and all the air is smashed out of me and I fold like a mousetrap snapping shut. Drop to my knees. Can’t breathe. The pain is everywhere. I hold my guts and fall over sideways on the filthy street. I can see how the streetlight has an aura around it, like an orange bubble. I move my eyes down. Mouth and Spunny are behind traffic, trying to hurry across the street as I hear a voice say, “Alley?”

  “Ja, better alley him.”

  “Check his little mates, ay.”

  “I’ll sort em.”

  A hand comes down and grabs my collar and then I’m being dragged along the pavement to the corner where the dragger goes right and takes me with into an alley smelling of rubbish. Sliding away from the street the last thing I see is the other bouncer in front of Mouth and Spunny, pointing with his whole arm. They stop, hesitating. The bouncer points again. Then I am deep into shadow. Still paralyzed. A young wildebeest getting dragged under by a big croc. There’s a group of kitchen workers having a smoke break and they stop talking as I slide past, a white kid pulled by a white man—now it’s me who is part of a different world to theirs, and them looking in and none of their business. My only hope is Mouth and Spunny but that other bouncer will keep them out of this alley. I try to turn myself over, get my feet under me, but can’t manage it.

  A young voice ahead says, “Howzit, Ray, how you?” Ray just grunts and goes on dragging. Then he says, “Head up for a minute. Ukay?” The voice says back, “Surely, man. No hassles.” I’ve heard that voice before. I stare up at the stranger as he passes. Thick bushy hair, a nose like a scissors blade. He wipes it with the back of his hand, and it’s that familiar gesture that makes the picture come together and all-a-sudden I see it—see him. Cannot believe it. I try to shout his name, but only make a gasping noise. Desperate, I wave my arms and stamp my feet and this makes him look down at me, just for a second but it’s enough. He leans forward, squinting, and then his eyes go pop and he runs around and is jabbering like mad at this bouncer called Ray. Saying I know this oke and please loz it, hey, I’ll make it up to you, he’s a china of mine, please, hey, please, he’s a lank good oke. I can’t see exactly what’s happening but I think he’s handing Ray something. And then I hear Ray’s voice. “Ja, well you tune him next time he tries causing with us he is getting planted solid. I don’t give a shit whose china he is.”

  “Of course, of course, Ray, man. Shot, man. Thanks, hey. Thanks a million, I mean it.” The hand lets go of my shirt and Ray moves off down the alley and I’m being helped up, using the brick wall too. “Come on, bru,” he says. “Let’s get the hell out of here before that mulet turns round and changes his mind.” The back of the alley ends in a chain-link fence with a locked gate that he opens. I can more or less walk on my own by the time we reach it. There’s a Vespa scooter chained to a fire escape. He turns to me. “Hop on, bru.” Suddenly he grins all wide. “What are the chances, hey?” I do my best to grin back, I’m still holding my belly. He laughs and starts the engine.

  39

  The cold night air feels good rushing against my face and the tall, hard city is a blur that slowly gets low and green and fuzzy, turning into the suburbs of trees and hedges. I realise we are in Linksfield and soon we pull up at a high steel gate and he cuts the Vespa’s engine. He punches in a security code. I help wheel the scooter to the end of the driveway and on around the side of the main house, a larney Linksfield home made of white cubes and big windows. We leave the scooter behind the servants’ quarters and cross the garden. The swimming pool filter hums and the Kreepy Krauly beats underwater like a pulse, vacuuming the curved walls. In the poolhouse there’s a dusty bar, a leather couch, a billiards table. When he turns on the light I see him properly for the first time. He’s got some stubble on his upper lip and he looks much bonier and bigger and is about nine months overdue for a haircut but it’s him all right. Patrick Cohen. The same cheeky smile I remember so well from those days playing slinkers in the foyer of the Emmarentia Synagogue with Ari Blumenthal.

  “What you think of it, hey? This is all mine. I live here by myself.”

  “You serious?” I say. “Shweet, man!”

  Pats is wearing a tie-dyed fanny pack that he takes off now and tosses on the billiard table. He unzips it and starts pulling out crumpled balls of cash. I ask whose house this is. His fingers work on the cash, straightening and making piles. “Shit, china,” he says. “Can’t believe you here. Old Marty Marts. You must have a horseshoe up your arse these days, know that, Mart? If I wasn’t there tonight, you’d be on hospital food, know that?”

  “It checked that way, hey.”

  “It was that way. Trust me, I know Ray McAlvin and he’s a bladdy maniac. He was about to stomp your face in, no jokes. Hey, you still live in Greenside?”

  “Of course, man.”

  “And that school a yours? Fancy-shmancy Solomon. How’d that work out?”

  “It’s oright now,” I say. “But was helluva rough before.”

  “You made some chinas, hey?”

  I nod. But I’m thinking, some chinas they turned out to be. Leaving me to get stomped in the alley. Pats is counting the notes. “Not a bad night so far,” he says. “I’ll head back in like a couple of hours when the real action starts to swing. You asked me whose place this is. S’a friend of a friend. I think it’s Segal is the name, a surgeon or something. They on holidays in the overseas for like a year, not really sure. No one’s ever home.”

  “So how’ve you ended up living here?” He doesn’t answer, his lips moving as he counts again. I say, “What school you going to, with hair like that? Is it Milton?” Milton College is this private school in town that doesn’t have uniforms and specialises in cramming for matric finals. They send dropouts there to get sorted before it’s too late—a lot of times I’ve thought I’d end up there myself. Pats looks up and gives me this hard face, like I’ve said something wrong. “Stuff all that,” he says. It catches me off balance, him turning so serious and I don’t say anything. He asks me if I’ve ever smoked zol. I shake my head, starting to feel nervous. He goes into the pack, pulls out plastic bank bags full of dark green chunks and pills and also sheets of what look like stamps, and spreads them on the table. “I’m ganna have a little white pipe to mellow out my head space,” he says. Then laughs at my expression. “Joking,” he says. “Relax.” A white pipe is crushed Mandrax pills smoked through a bottleneck. It turns you into an instant drooling zombie. “Mandrax is magic for my business,” Pats is saying. “You know, no other country in the world uses it like we do right here in good old South Effica. We the innovators of this stuff, man. But I’ve also got the best zol product there is. From local growers down on the Wild Coast, the freshest Transkei heads.” He gets out rolling papers and adds some green from a bank bag plus a little tobacco, then licks and rolls to complete the joint.

  I think of Patrick Cohen the shul boy, the reader of strange books from his sister, the arguer of everything. I remember how he went quiet at the Emmarentia Dam that day when Sardines Polovitz headbutted him. It’s all a million miles away from this zol-head in front of me and I say, “I can’t believe how much you’ve changed.”

  “Once you free your mind,” Pats says, “you don’t go back.” He lights the joint and inhales and goes over to the couch, waving
me to follow. Instead I ask him how he knows Ray the bouncer and where the money comes from. He tells me it’s what he does now, full-time, it’s his business. He knows all the bouncers cos he supplies product to the clubs. “Product,” I say. He flops on the couch, smiling at me. “Just like the song,” he says. “I’m the real-life Sugar Man.” Meaning the monster Rodriguez hit, the one about the drug dealer with all the magical dope to sell.

  I say, “You remember that day at the Emmarentia Dam, hey Pats?”

  “It was lank wrong of us,” he says. There’s a silence and I know what he’s thinking of, remembering, but he shakes his head—he’s not going there. Instead he says, “Was lank wrong for me and Ari—afterwards—to crap all over you for going to Solomon, hey. Whatever that place is, I promise you it’s zilch compared to the circle of hell they call a government high school.”

  “Izit,” I say.

  “Ja, bladdy unbelievable, man. The Initiation and the jacks. Headmaster fuckface used to do his jacks publicly, man, during assembly. It’s short back and sides all the way. March this way, run here. You fully into the sausage maker from day one. The whole bladdy system, the shitstem with a capital S. We had mandatory cadets. Goosestepping up and down every arvy like good little Nazis. You don’t want to know what veld school was like. They sent us off in the bush with these dutchmen in charge of us that hammered the kuk out of us, brainwashing to fight the Total Onslaught and to dig out the communists vortel en tak.” His voice had changed to put on a deep accent for this Afrikaans phrase, root and branch. “And when they found out me and Ari and a few other okes were a bunch of bliksem Joode”—bloody Jews—“well, china, you don’t wanna know. But that was how it was in that school anyway, we had a little clique of us Jew boys and there were hard-core rawls every single day. Lebs vers Jews and Poras vers Greeks and English vers each other, this one vers that one. One time this china of mine was parked there with his back to the wall peeling and eating a naartjie all quiet, and someone rocked up and soccerkicked him full stick in the face and he half choked on that naartjie and lost his teeth, had a fractured skull. Genuine. I knew the oke, his family. Another someone had a gun in the stands for one rugby match and it went off by accident. Bang! Man, I bladdy hated it so much.”

  “And Ari?”

  “Ari got religion hey, more and more frum. Lank of the Jewish okes get into it, hey, the religion. Me, I went shwoosh! the other way. The whole thing started to crack open for me from my sister, you remember Laurel?”

  “Of course.” The drama student with the crazy hair, black candles in her room and the books on UFOs and Gandhi and atheism and witchcraft.

  Pats inhales and screws up his face, holding the smoke in. He waves me in with the joint. My heartbeats are heavy as I sit down beside him. He says, “See, she got arrested, hey.”

  “You serious?”

  “Ja, man, taken in by security police, held in detention for three weeks. Twenny-two and a half days. When she came out she wasn’t Laurel anymore. Never been the same. She can’t even look anyone in the eyes. They did bad things to her in there, man. Just because she is against racialism, that’s the only reason. And things got bad at home after that. My da moved out, he also had like a kind of nervous breakdown thing, and like I don’t talk to Ma anymore, cos of . . . ach, it’s a whole big mess.”

  “So you just what? Moved out? Dropped out of school?”

  “China, the day our vice-head came into our class and gave us our little army numbers for the call-up, I said fuuuuuck this. You scheme I’m ganna go into the army after what they did to Laurel? I mean I would have gone to varsity, oright, but still, just having that army draft number—no, man—no ways—ach, I don’t want to talk about what happened to Laurel, but I know what they did. They put—you know those crocodile clips from a car battery? They stuck those on her—never mind, hey, no one will believe it, but I know what happened. I know what goes on. The whole shitstem is rotten, hey. We all living in one big prison and it makes us all mean. Best thing I can do is sell everyone good drugs. It’s a bladdy mitzvah, man, a hell of a good deed. Get us all to mellow out and see another way. Some chemicals to try and shut the shitstem down from inside . . .” He scrunches around on the couch and gives me the joint. I lift it to my lips and inhale. Pats tells me to hold it in. The room starts to spin. Pats smokes and passes it back and I smoke some more. My scalp starts to feel crackly and a part of me is sinking down a deep well and I’m too weak to climb out and then I’m too giggly to even want to try and there’s no strength in my hands like sometimes when you wake up.

  But I’m still wide awake and concentrating with another part of myself, I’m asking Pats about the bouncers, how he got to know them. Pats says—his voice echoey and far away—that it all started with an oke called Declan Stone who went to his same high school. “Have you not heard of the Stone brothers?” he asks and I nod (so slowly) cos ja, I have, but not in detail. All I know is according to Schnitz there are a bunch of Stone brothers and they are like the best street fighters in Joburg. This is true, says Pats, and three of the oldest Stone brothers are bouncers. Liam, Stuart, and Conor. The youngest brother, Declan, he still goes to Pats’s old high school. Pats says Declan used to rock up to school on a motorbike and leave his helmet and gloves on the seat and no one would ever dream of touching it. “Ever do Great Expectations for a setwork book in English class? You know, the Dickens? There’s that bit about the lawyer, Jaggers, remember, where it says the whole of London used to shit itself for the name Jaggers. If any crook with a stolen watch was to realise it belongs to Mr. Jaggers, he would drop it like it was red-hot.” Pats chuckles, his bushy head wagging. “The Stone name is like that. Legend. People know. Like one time someone shot Stuart Stone in the leg so he was on crutches for a while. So two okes decided to liberty him while he was weak. They jumped him there in Rosebank, hey. Stuart Stone used his crutches to put them both into intensive care. One of the okes was a third-dan black belt, the other one had a hammer. That is true that I know for a fact. There’s a million stories like that about the Stones and mostly true.” It was at his government high school that Pats started to sell ready-rolled, he says, buying the zol from a friend of his sister, and that got him noticed by Declan, who didn’t want anyone dealing in school. “I said no problem, I’ll stop. Or if he liked, I could let him have a chunk of the profits. He liked that. So that’s how I started into this business, how I got my in. Through Declan Stone.”

  I pass the smoke back and nod my crackly head. “I get it,” I hear myself saying. “Cos he’s a bouncer too, or his brothers are, so then the clubs . . .”

  “Ja, ja, there’s it.” Pats leans forward. “You have to understand how it works, Marts. The clubs are the drug market. That’s where all the stuff is bought and sold to all the rich boys and girls who come in from the suburbs and all over the Witwatersrand to jol in town on weekends. Now the bouncers, they control the clubs. There is no club that can run without em. If they try, that place will get burned out or smashed up. If they try bring in their own backstop, their own security, then they’ll have to tangle with the Dynamite boys.”

  “Dynamite?”

  “The bouncers. The name comes from the Dynamite Gym. That’s where they all train, they all know each other, they’re chinas. The Stone brothers and Jannie du Preez and Max Bronfstein and Goran Kijuc and all the rest of em. They work together but it’s not like they have a boss exactly, they just operate as one unit, like. It’s all about the rep. Okes have to earn that rep. They become a bouncer by planting other bouncers. Just walk up and put them away. So the ones who are in are always watching out for okes coming out of nowhere. That’s why everyone is so aggro and bladdy paranoid.”

  “Like Mr. Longhair,” I say, noticing that my middle doesn’t hurt the way it did. I lift my shirt. My solar plexus has turned yellow, tomorrow it’ll be a lekker purple, I reckon.

  “Ja, Ray McAlvin,” Pats is saying. “Perfect example. When you walked up on him he was prolly thin
king you there to try your luck. That’s how their minds work. He’s a mean bugger that Ray.” He shakes his head. “See, also, it’s a lot of money and it’s a lot of hectic pressure on those okes, the bouncers, to be the hardest, to be the staunchest.”

  I take a deep hit of the smoke. “Ja, but tell me something. Do they all wear tuxedos?”

  He nods. “It’s like their uniform,” he says. Then he gets up with the last bit of the joint and heads off.

  I can’t feel my lips as I call after him, “I was looking for Marcus. Thaz what I was doing . . . tonight . . .” I’m not sure if he heard me, my eyes closing.

  When I wake up Pats is coming back from the bathroom, steadying himself on the walls. He stops and frowns. “What’s that you said—you were at Xanadu to find your brother?”