Double Negative

by Ivan Vladislavic

  ‘Be careful.’

  The backpack clung to her shoulders like a gigantic beetle. Miming some sort of SWAT team procedure, she slipped through the gap in the gate with the digicam cocked. You’re not my father.

  I greeted Antoine and before our hands unclasped he started talking. He’d given me the outline of his life story on the telephone and now he went on to the unabridged version, starting with the hardships he’d endured in the Congo before escaping to South Africa eight years ago. I let him talk while I set up the camera. It was an epic journey. Although he’d cadged the occasional ride, he seemed to have walked a lot of the way – in more sensible shoes than these, I assumed. The trip had cost him the few items of value he’d left home with, down to the watch off his wrist. When he finally arrived in Johannesburg, he was so poor, he said, he did not even have the time.

  My laughter was excessively hearty, I thought. But then so was his. I thought.

  On a wooden post beside the gate was a letterbox made of a Wall & All tin with a slot cut in the bottom. Pebble Beach, according to the label, ran in horizontal streaks along the tin, defying gravity. I shooed a few of the bolder children out of the background and asked Antoine to stand next to the letterbox. I wanted him to look at the camera, to look at me, but he kept looking away down the street. I looked too, with the feeling that someone was creeping up on us, although I could see no one there. All the while, he kept talking, showing me the length of his journey, the scale of his suffering, between his outstretched palms.

  Before I could take a shot, Janie was back with the denim jacket tied around her waist and a gaggle of kids pointing imaginary cameras, playing follow the leader.

  ‘It’s a village back there! You’d never say so, but there must be twenty shacks behind this wall, a whole shanty town in the middle of a suburb. I reckon there could be a hundred people living here. Do you want to take a look?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘You’d get some great shots. It’s like the kasbah or something, all these twisty alleyways between the shacks, really beautiful. There’s one shack made of ten different materials – iron, hardboard, scraps of lumber, you name it – but the whole thing’s been painted eau de Nil. It’s an artwork. Have you been to Zanzibar? It’s like that, except the scale’s all weird because everything’s been reduced to fit on one plot. Maybe it’s three-quarter scale like Melrose Arch. It has that sort of charm, although it’s very different, of course, I don’t mean to suggest. When you’re done, you should look around.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want the inside story.’

  ‘But aren’t you curious?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘What’s the problem then? Don’t tell me you’re scared.’

  ‘I’m allergic to drama. I can’t go poking around in the pitiful contents of strangers’ lives. Even the miraculous tales of endurance are too much for me.’

  She gave me a look, in conjunction with a hand gesture that was half an insult, and went back through the gap in the gate. I was being indiscreet, I realized, this was another aspect of my interview manner I’d have to brush up on. Rule number one: Never speak your mind. I must remember to tell her it was off the record. A casual ‘OTR’ will prove I’m in the know.

  Antoine was looking at me, almost, with the same disbelieving half-smile and empty-handed gesture, like a father wondering whether he really should embrace the prodigal son. Not that he was old enough to be my father. Down the bells of his colourful sleeves I could see all the way to his skinny chest. Was the suit for special occasions? Or did he wear something this beautiful every day? He was luminous. Fabulous. Fabulosity be damned. Prodigal. Now that’s a peculiar word. It means wastefully extravagant, and yet it seems to mean returned home.

  I went back to the camera and he went back to telling me about the night last year when a mob armed with knobkieries and golf clubs had driven him out of his shack in Alex. No, not his neighbours, he said, he did not know these people. Except for that one from across the road and his brother. They had brought tyres and petrol and threatened to burn him alive. For the first time since he came to South Africa, he was glad his wife and children were not with him. He was lucky to get away with his life. With the clothes on his back, I thought. As he told how narrowly he had escaped, the space between his hands diminished until they were pressed together in a gesture of prayer.

  Much later, when I looked at the photo and Antoine refused to meet my eye, gazing instead down the street, I was reminded of Klee’s Angel. He has always been with me, from the door of my room in a Yeo Street commune, to a notice board in Finsbury Park, to the wall of my studio in Leicester Road. I went to look at him again, to see if the resemblance to Antoine was fanciful. There he is, hurtling into the future with his big ears flapping, the furled diplomas of his wingtips raised in surrender, the unravelling scrolls of his hair in a tangle. His face is not turned squarely towards the past. He watches from the corners of his eyes. Even the Angel of History can hardly bear to look.

  When we were driving again, she went back to my sense of adventure.

  I had to defend myself. ‘Every day, I feel more and more like a bloody sociologist. All I’m capable of is making a survey.’

  ‘Whatever happened to the participant observer? You need to explore.’

  ‘I’m past that. Just going out for groceries is a mission.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how interesting that place is. I might come back and do a proper piece about it. Apparently there are people from all over Africa there, from ten different countries. I’m sure you could see it in the styles of the shacks. This woman told me it’s a little version of Addis. Or maybe Luanda.’

  A brief, chiming avalanche of currency from the backpack like a fruit machine paying out. She opened the zip and took out the phone, then changed her mind and put it away again without answering.

  ‘Have you heard of urban exploration?’

  Another frivolous new discipline, I supposed, like sky polo or extreme proofreading, but it was a serious thing. She had written an article about the urban explorers, men and women on their own voyages of discovery through the backwoods of contemporary life. As wealth and power ebb and flow through an increasingly urbanized world, she said, it’s only natural cities should begin to generate their own wildernesses. More and more places that were domesticated – warehouses, power stations, hospitals, hotels, theme parks, film studios – are outliving their uses and becoming derelict. Those that cannot be remodelled fall into disrepair, not going back to nature, exactly, but winding down into wilder, freer states. This is the New World of the urban explorer. Even properties that have been abandoned may be defended, mind you, and entering them takes courage, there is only so much you can learn on Google Earth. Working alone or in teams, the new explorers venture into run-down paradises with cameras and notebooks to enjoy their pleasures and chart their mysteries. I could look on her blog. The codes of conduct are strict: take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints. There are wonderful pictures on the web from Sheffield, Bucharest, Newark and a hundred other places, every bit as exciting as the views of Mars sent back by Viking 1. Images of the future, she said, this is how the world will be when the turbines of development finally seize and things begin to run backwards again.

  ‘I wouldn’t last a day,’ I told her. ‘I have the hiking boots, but I’m not intrepid enough. And I’m not sure we’re in the right place for this particular pastime. You’ll be taking your life in your hands if you break into a mothballed warehouse in Denver or Cleveland.’ I meant the industrial areas of Johannesburg, but the American cities echoed through the names more clearly than usual. ‘There are too many trigger-happy security guards running around. You’re as liable to be hurt by a militiaman who got his gun licence in a lucky dip – don’t quote me – as by some homeless desperado who wants your takkies.’

  ‘The homeless aren’t the problem,’ she said, ‘it�
��s the people with property you need to worry about.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve met a lot of homeless souls.’

  ‘I have actually. I did a piece on the Homeless World Cup in Cape Town.’

  ‘Always wondered about that. Do they put the players up in hotels or must they take their chances at the city shelter?’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘No really, it’s a heartless question but a fair one. It’s about survival, which is your thing. Are the referees homeless too?’

  My old friend Sabine called me after her divorce. By then her educational resources agency had grown into a little corporation supplying services to the sector. Human resource development, information technology, knowledge management. I’d done some work for her back in the twentieth century when the deal was IT centres in schools – my moody shots of kids at the keyboard did wonders for the annual report – but we had not seen one another since. Now she was single again and looking for company.

  On our first date, we went to Gatrile’s in Sandown, her choice, her expense account. While she was sipping her sherry and I was chewing my tongue, Eddie Ledwaba stopped at our table to say hello. The poster boy of BEE, if the business pages can be believed. She remembered him from his trade union days, she told me afterwards, before the Cuban cigars and single malts. He still had a Lenin cap, but he only wore it on public holidays.

  Over the mains (rack of lamb for me, sole for the CEO), Sabine told me that she and Bob Heartfield had parted company professionally and personally, in that order. Apparently he’d been caught bending the rules on certain tenders and been allowed to resign to keep his ass out of court. That was the American part of his anatomy she singled out. Soon afterwards, they decided to cut their losses and unbundle the marriage too.

  Sabine had a townhouse in Sunninghill and an office in Woodmead. It suited her, this unfinished edge of the city, defined not only by the obvious construction sites, bristling with cranes and scaffolding, but by the leavings of building materials dumped on pavements and empty lots, stacks of bricks, piles of boards and fascias under torn plastic sheets, prefab huts, heaps of rubble and river sand. It was hard to say whether things were half-built or partly demolished. Sex with Sabine had a provisional quality to it too, our bodies never quite fitted together. When I left her place in the early mornings and drove away through the clutter, I had my doubts about the merger.

  The headquarters of her company were in an office park near the freeway. The suite was huge and determinedly neutral, with sisal matting on the floor and some sort of ecru canvas on the walls. ‘It’s all about the finishes,’ Sabine said to me when she gave me the guided tour. Besides the MD, no one had an office as such; people sat at workstations in odd corners, perched on the edges of their ergonomically designed chairs as if they had just paused for a moment to skim through a spreadsheet or rattle off an email. Sabine’s office was so huge it made her enormous desk look small. The only other items in the room were a chair for visitors, in which I sat like a truant, and a chocolate-brown ceramic pot containing a tree covered with waxy leaves and tiny oranges. African contemporary, she said, under contract. In winter, the pot was replaced by an ivory urn and three long wands of pampas grass. The air conditioner hummed to itself. One blade in the wooden blind droned along sympathetically.

  You would think that things were winding down here, being wound up. They must be on the point of moving: soon they would carry out the last few filing cabinets and switch off the lights. But the impression was mistaken. Sabine assured me that they were not going anywhere, they had been in their new premises for a year and they were settling in very nicely. The building was brilliant. You couldn’t ask for better finishes at the price.

  The atmosphere of places made to be abandoned clung like cigarette smoke in my clothes. You were not meant to grow attached to them, and it was scarcely possible because they offered no purchase. The almost-unpacked, never-lived-in look was the mark of success. Everyone was a fly-by-nighter.

  Our love affair was not entirely unpleasant. My side of it was pure curiosity and for her it was a case of getting back into the market with a low-risk investment. We had a lot of fun. I thought she overdid the throaty laughter under the duvet, but before I could take offence, we went back to being friends, and then not.

  We turned off the N3 and drove back towards Sunninghill. I had not been in the area for years and it still seemed incomplete. Janie held her camera out of the window and took photos. My friends in the trade insist that photos are made rather than taken, but she was a taker. She took samples, clipping them out of the fabric of the unspooling world at arm’s length and barely glancing at the screen to see what was there.

  On Witkoppen Road, I pulled over, turned the volume down on Classic FM, which I’d been using to staunch the flow of talk, and opened the Map Studio. Sunninghill Extension 11, where Aurelia Mashilo lived, was not in the book yet.

  ‘You need a Garmin,’ Janie said.

  ‘God no, I don’t want to go around like a pigeon with a ring on my leg. I’ll leave that to your intrepid explorers.’

  ‘But if you had GPS, you would never get lost.’

  ‘I know.’

  I did have a new map of Gauteng, which I’d fetched from the AA in Park Meadows the day before. We unfolded it on the dash and found Sunninghill Extensions 9 and 10. With a bit of luck Extension 11 would be where it seemed to fit, like a puzzle piece, in one of the few patches of pale-green veld left on the edge of the suburb.

  There’s an art to folding the flat earth into a pocketbook: you must learn to read the curvature of a crease, the lie of the paper land. I should write a guide to the subject, I thought as I refolded the map, and she can put it on her blog with the survival tips.

  ‘Why don’t you call and get directions,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s first see if we can find it.’

  It was townhouse territory, complex country. One walled city after another, separated by remnants of open veld. Some of the vacant plots were covered with tall grass; others had been burnt to blackened stubs, revealing huge molehills of rubble. A few men waiting on a corner for work barely glanced at the Charade, supposing that no building contractor would drive such a thing. As if to demonstrate their own ingenuity as builders, they had fashioned seats from the rubble, miniature stonehenges of bricks or stools of half-bricks and planks, which allowed them to swivel managerially without raising their elbows from their knees. Casual labour.

  ‘I’ve got software on my phone that lets me keep track of my friends,’ she said.

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘For laughs, mainly, but it’s also a security. I mean, if someone gets hijacked or whatever, you can find out where they are. I wouldn’t like to get a puncture out here.’

  Extension 11 was a small, exclusive addition to the suburb, two blocks of newly built mansions behind towering walls. We negotiated the boom and cruised between the sun-struck cliffs, looking for the number. Here and there, through gaps in the defences, we caught sight of grey modernist bunkers, late Tuscan villas, contemporary African homesteads with walls in shades of mud and ochre.

  Leora’s sister Jacqui, who is a landscape gardener, had found Aurelia Mashilo’s place for me. The photo she’d emailed had not done it justice. The wall was a cubist assemblage of nut-brown plaster, corrugated-iron parallelograms and pale drystone panels, somewhere on the trade route between Mali and Malibu. The gate was made of stainless-steel quatrefoils. A swathe of broken stone, like a half-built Roman road, lay in the shadow of the wall in place of a garden. On either side of the gate was an alcove lined with pigeon-blue slate and grilled with iron bars. These niches seemed custom-made for a Venus de Milo from Makro or a David from the Builders Warehouse, but they were empty.

  As if to make up for this lack, the letterbox, which was of particular interest to me, was in the form of a nymph holding a slotted cornucopia under her arm. Ceres, I thought, or Proserpine (now and then I am grateful for my beginne
r’s year of Classics).

  Aurelia buzzed us in, the shiny gate opened and I drove up on to a blood-red piazza. On that vast expanse of Corobrik, the Daihatsu felt smaller than a Cinquecento. The house behind the wall was an equally intriguing blend of pillars, pediments, stainless steel and layered stone. Aurelia was in the portico defying the elements in an earth-toned frock and silver sandals.

  ‘Sun Goddess,’ Janie said. ‘How did she make her money again? I’ll bet her husband gave it to her.’

  ‘She earned a pile of it herself. Not that he’s on the bones of his backside. She used to be in fashion, but now she devotes her time to charity and sits on a board or two.’

  ‘And how did he get rich?’

  ‘The South African way. Mining.’

  Actually, I had a soft spot for David Mashilo, the former Robben Islander known for his business savvy and his sports cars. I had also spent ten years against my will on a small, inhospitable island, although to my discredit I had not used the opportunity to get a BCom.

  I wasn’t sure where to put the car. In the end, I just switched off the engine where we were and we walked over to the house. Aurelia was more beautiful than her photographs, and taller too, what with the hair extensions piled on her shapely head. Under her arm she had a small hairy dog, which she shifted over to the other hip to shake my hand. She was vivacious and charming. She wanted us to come in for tea and cake, and the cool marble entrance hall was inviting, but I said we were running late. ‘We’ll lose the light.’ How often have I said that? Even at noon, it happens. She was going to insist, I think, but changed her mind when she saw the digicam.

  I got my camera bags and we walked down to the street.

  Aurelia and the mail nymph. It was perfect. She wanted to leave the gate open, so that the house would be visible in the background; my explanations about the wall and the street, my half-truths about the public and the private, already presented in a string of emails and repeated now, made no sense to her. The sun blared from the stainless-steel panels and my eyes began to burn. When I was on the point of giving up, it occurred to me to mention that if the gate stayed open the Charade would be in the picture too, and then she relented. But once the gate had closed, she became anxious out in the street – on foot, as she put it. A security guard with a nightstick had wandered closer from a hut at the end of the block, but if anything he seemed to make her more nervous. The dog began to yap. She buzzed the house and spoke through the intercom. In a while a young man in a nacreous suit and pimpish winkle-pickers that Antoine would have died for, wearing a holstered pistol on his belt, came to stand guard while we worked. The security cameras perched like crows on the wall dropped their beaked faces to watch. She was making big eyes and sucking in her cheeks, some crazy technique for looking good on film. The woman had been a fashion model. I wondered how I could make her stop and still get a decent shot. Meanwhile, in my shady interior, which smells of old ice and bloody polystyrene, Mr Frosty was whispering, ‘Drop the dog, drop the dog.’