by JT Lawrence
The dog isn’t that scary. I mean, it’s not one of those Dobermans like Higgins has in Magnum P.I., the ones that look like the Devil’s dogs. And I am sure this particular dog’s growl can be interpreted as ‘Oi, have we met?’ rather than ‘I’m going to tear you limb from limb’, but one can never be sure. He looks like a giant whippet. I don’t know what they are called, perhaps a greyhound? I hope he doesn’t recognise my voice from all the times I’ve yelled at him to shut up. I don’t know much about dogs but I know that greyhounds are fast, so I need to outsmart him because there is no way I will be able to outrun him. I look him in the eyes and try to act firm but friendly. I take a few slow steps in the direction of the west wall. He barks, once, twice, like Lassie reporting a girl child fallen down a forgotten well.
“Gravy,” comes a sweet female voice from heaven, and then a beckoning whistle. “Gray-vee, c’mere boy.” Another friendly whistle. Gravy doesn’t take his eyes off me but rears back and lifts his snout in the air and barks again. I take a few more steps away. I motion wildly for him to go toward the voice. He is not fooled – until there is clanging of metal food bowls – then he is gone in a wag of a tail.
I am able to climb over the west wall too, thanks to a giant compost cube; from there I jump down onto the grassy pavement where I am free and clear. As soon as my feet touch land I run in the opposite direction to my house and the visitors. My heart is pumping, my muscles are singing and I feel good. Thank God I have been running in the last few days. It takes five minutes to get to a main road where I point upwards with my right index finger to signal a taxi to take me into town. A red kombi in particularly bad nick comes barrelling past but then slams on the brakes so hard the cars behind him have to squeal to stop. I hop in and the passengers shuffle aside to make space for me.
I am heavy-breathed and sweaty but the taxi is overcrowded, so I guess there is no chance of a window seat. There is kwaito on the sound system which more or less blankets the noise of the angry hooting outside and once I pay and sit back, the rest of the passengers seem to get over the novelty of having a white man in the car and start talking again. We lurch forward, nudge our way back into the lane in small jumps and we’re off. Various parts of the interior are stuck together with Prestik and masking tape. The rear-view mirror is barely hanging onto the ceiling of the car, weighed down by purple fuzzy dice, a hula girl and some prayer beads. The driver eyes me, suspicious, and I look away.
When we reach town I have to ask a few people how to catch the next ride: I don’t know the hand signal or where I should go. Someone outside the Chicken Licken on Bree Street directs me to a huge taxi rank I never knew existed and find my way pretty easily from there. Strangers smile. They must think I am a lost (or brave) tourist and they flash their gums at me. I wonder how they would react if I was driving my air-conditioned Jag XKR around here, instead of sweating through my shirt, trying to find the way out. To reach the rank I pass market stalls which deserve to feature in Visi magazine: beautifully arranged bowls of colour with green Granny Smiths, vibrant naartjies and bruised guavas. A few meters on, the panorama of food becomes nightmarish: tables of sheeps’ heads, some skinned with bursting eyeballs, others still in their wool, matted with blood. There are men without their shirts on, bloodslick on blackskin, with pangas in their raised hands. There are women squatting on beer crates, hunched over and stirring aluminium pots over small fires. Skaapkop. Sheep’s head. I smell the guavas and the milky-eyed skop. Flies buzz in the hot air.
When I reach the taxi rank it is easy to find the right car. The stereotypical taxi driver is aggressive, disrespectful and violent and most times I wouldn’t want to be caught in a dark alley with one, but today there is a sense of levity with whistling and comradely shouting back and forth. I wonder if there is an important soccer match today. I have to wait for the minibus to fill up with passengers before we head off and this takes about half an hour. I spend the time trying to plan what to do next but I don’t come up with anything promising and instead walk around reading bumper stickers. I jot the best ones in my Moleskine:
This Taxi Stops Anywhere.
Thank God I Was Born Black.
If Women Were Good, God Would Have One.
All Whites Are Racists.
Don’t Rush Me, I’m On Time.
Three Missed Calls.
Wasted Time Never Returns.
When Days Are Dark Friends Are Few.
When the driver deems the taxi suffiently overcrowded we’re off. Apart from ploughing through the occasional red light, he is a good driver.
When I arrive at the house and ring the doorbell everything looks the same but I feel I have been away for years. I see him stomp up to the frosted glass and I wait while he shuffles keys, then opens the door. He squints at me, blinks, adjusts his glasses.
“Slade?” he frowns.
“Hi Dad,” I say. “I need a favour.”
My father pours me half a glass of beer from an open quart of Amstel. He slaps my back as he gives it to me, as if to say that it will sort me out.
We stand, awkward, in the kitchen.
“You fixed the doorbell,” I say. He presses his lips together.
“I had to. Some tsotsi tried to break in and made a mess of the damn gate. Had to re-wire the whole thing.”
All of a sudden my mind is clear of my own predicament.
“What? When did this happen? Are you okay?”
He unbuttons his shirt to reveal a continent of purple on his chest.
“Bugger smashed my chest in with a knobkerrie.”
I look at his liver-spotted hands holding open his shirt, the fabric trembling, the blood under his skin.
“Fucking savages,” I seethe. “You need to get out of this house. It’s too big for you. And the neighbourhood has gone to shit.”
He shakes his head. His pale eyes are moist.
“What more will it take? Next they will be in here slitting your throat with a bread knife!”
“Good God,” he says, taking a sip of his beer. “This isn’t Rhodesia, son.”
“Zimbabwe, Dad.”
“No, I meant Rhodesia. Night of the Long Knives, or something like that. Besides, there’s nothing of any value here to steal.”
I won’t argue with that.
“Have the cops been round?” I ask.
He buttons his shirt and picks up his beer.
“Yes, they took their time but when they arrived they took fingerprints. And the bloke filling out the report could read and write so I was pleasantly surprised.”
“No,” I say, “I mean, looking for me.”
“What?”
“The cops. Have they called?”
“Er …”
“Look Dad, I’m in some trouble.”
He looks at me long, as if he didn’t hear, then snaps into real time.
“Anything you need,” he says. He doesn’t ask what kind of trouble, he doesn’t round on me like I do him. He just looks at me and waits to hear what help I need.
“There has been a misunderstanding,” I say. “The police think I’ve done something and they want to arrest me. But I’m worried that if they do, they’ll stop looking for the person who actually did it. So I need to find that person.”
He frowns. “They can’t arrest you without evidence. Without a warrant.”
“There is plenty of evidence. Unfortunately it all seems to point to me.”
He looks into my eyes and something touches his face, as if he wants to tell me something, but then it clears.
“I need to get out of the city. Can I borrow the Merc?”
Dad has a Mercedes Benz from the 1950s that used to embarrass the hell out of me when I was a kid but it’s so old now, it’s cool. He keeps it as a spare car. Dad’s never been good at getting rid of things.
“Of course,” he says and leaves the room. When he gets back he hands the keys to me with a slight tremor, along with a wad of cash. I protest but he doesn’t say anything. He just pr
esses the cash into my hands.
“I’ll pay you back,” I say. I move as if to leave but he puts a finger in the air as though he’s just remembered something. He opens his ancient fridge and retrieves a Cornish pasty still in its wax paper.
“I was saving it for dinner,” he smiles, handing it to me.
He walks me out to the car where he opens a padlock on the inside of the garage door. The door is one of those ancient ones with two long, heavy weights on either side, like metal punching bags. I shoulder my way in and try to do most of the work. As it gains momentum and gives way the light pours in and the world is lost in bronze dust particles and the scurrying things that live in abandoned places. We say goodbye. My father reminds me not to step on his footbrake too hard and I nod. I shake his hand and he pats me on the back. I climb in, praying to no one in particular, and it starts first time. I reverse into the street and Dad salutes me before he closes the garage door. I open the cubby hole to throw my things in when I see his wallet. I whisperswear and pull back into the drive. I try to open the garage door but it’s already locked so I go around to the front entrance. His spare house keys are on the car keys so I let myself in and call out to him. Wallet in hand I bound up the front steps. He is standing in the entrance hall with his rounded back to me, holding the phone up to his ear. No wonder he didn’t hear me. I’m about to call him again when I hear him say, “Yes, he’s just left. Yes, in the Merc. LDR 504 GP. Out of the city. No. No, he didn’t say.”
I place his wallet on a nearby chair and back soundlessly away.
35
Here Be Dragons, or,
Elbow Bacon
As I speed away from my crumbling family home, I try to imagine who it was he was talking to, but I decide I don’t want to think about it. I’m feeling pretty fragile to be honest, pretty fucking down-in-the-mouth and I don’t want to think of anything that will further retard my emotional state. I get on the highway, not knowing where I am going. I feel like pulling in to the closest bar and downing a few fingers of whisky but know if I do that I may as well drive straight to the cop shop and show them my wrists.
I have no idea who is behind this … this thing my life has become. This person who sends me letters and watches me from dark corners is interred so far in my head that I have begun to turn on myself. I have no idea where to even start looking. I drive for a long time before I have a vague idea. The thing that I have in common with this nebulous antagonist is, obviously, Eve. So if I start with Eve, start at the beginning, maybe I will find my way to this person. The problem with this idea is that I know virtually nothing about Eve’s past. If only I could trust Denise. Why would she never talk about Eve? Why would neither of them talk about growing up? I’m a writer, for God’s sake, not a private investigator. I get off the highway somewhere in Houghton and park the car on the shoulder of the road while I pull out my phone. The screen is cracked but it still seems to work. I Google Eve’s name but it is too wide a search, she has been in the media consistently for her art and there seem to be hundreds of entries on her latest exhibition alone. I Google ‘Denise Shaw’ but none of them is my Denise. Resisting the urge to throw the phone out of the window, I try to breathe and to focus. There is no air-con in the Merc and my skin is sticking to the cracked leather upholstery. I try to think of any clue she has ever possibly given me but I draw a blank. How could I have known her for so long, loved her, when I didn’t even know who she was or where she came from? And then, not learning from mistakes, go on to do the exact same thing to her shadowsister? I pull the photo of her family out of my pocket and search it for clues. It could be a picture of any (white) family in South Africa in the 70s: overdressed, overexposed. Probably taken after a Sunday Lunch. The mother with sticks for fingers and too many gold rings. Eve squirming under the gaze of the camera. Even the intimacy of a family portrait was too much for her. Despite the feigned formality of the occasion she is dressed like a boy, in shorts and a t-shirt. There is a kind of logo or insignia on the shirt but it’s small and the picture isn’t sharp. I need one of those programmes in CSI where they take a blurry photo from a hundred years ago and miraculously zoom in and sharpen it up to high res. It’s circular, with text on the circumference and some kind of graphic on the inside, but that’s all I can make out. I lean back into the car seat, close my eyes and think of Eve: I see her in her studio, bent over some finicky project, face and arms covered in paint and wallpaper glue, looking up at me as I tease her, her mouth showing one big, beautiful grin. The room darkens and Denise now stands where Eve was working. She is wearing Eve’s splattered work shirt but has nothing on underneath, and the paint is scarlet. She begins to lift the shirt over her …
A car driving past me hoots, making me jump. Asshole. I study the photo again and try to make out the words in the logo on Eve’s shirt. Aurohine, Automin, Aoruhin, like characters in a Tolkein novel. I jab them all into my keypad but the results look like gobbledegook, or Czechoslovakian. Eventually a variation I try—Auramine—picks up some promising results. On the www it tells me that Auramine O is a fluorescent dye also known as Basic Yellow 2, but on the South African pages AuruMine is a name of a mining operation in Nigel. Gold. Au. Aurum in Latin. Gold Mine.
Half an hour later I have left civilization behind me and am heading east towards the hillbillies. There is a roadblock just outside of Jo’burg and when I see the blue lights I start to sweat. I have the urge to run my car over the centre island and start a high-speed chase on the wrong side of the highway. End my life in a blaze of glory. Instead I swallow a lot and try to look normal. I don’t want to avoid looking at them because I’m sure that’s what criminals do, nor do I want to look too directly at them. Nothing screams guilt more than looking someone straight in the eyes. I make sure that I’m wearing my safety belt. The fake driver’s license burns a hole in my wallet. The cars around me slow down to a virtual stop at the officers’ command and I can just feel that they are going to pull me over. The music on the radio is shouting at me so I turn it off. I am a few meters away from a busty policewoman who is bursting out of her uniform and has wet black marbles for eyes. She blinks at me, looks too long. She holds out her hand. She has recognised me and is going to pull me over. I look left and right for an escape route but am boxed in by cars on all sides. I think of jettisoning the car and running but I wouldn’t stand a chance with all these uniforms and walkie-talkies about. Just as I lose my hearing to the blood in my ears, the policewoman shunts her arm at the car behind me, signalling it to park. Bless you, Jesus. The breeze rushes in the window as I accelerate, away from the spinning lights. Maybe my luck is turning, after all.
Within ten minutes I am far enough away from the cops to feel hopped up. I can see how Bonnie and Clyde became addicted to being on the run. The frisson of the open road; the rushing knowledge that one has just dodged a bullet. The tinny banjo tune from Deliverance strums my brain. High-rise steel and glass gives way to crumbling concrete and bad paint jobs. Trees morph into pylons. The smell of city grit gives way to the rotten vegetable smell of abandoned fields. The land becomes flat and I drive past a glass factory and commercial cold storage. A fine dust covers the car. I eat the pasty.
When I reach what I guess is halfway, before the first toll road, I pull into a quiet service station and fill up. In the convenience store I find cheap orange razors, nail scissors, black hair dye, a Hawaiian shirt flocked with flamingos and a pair of cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs. Instead of using the public toilets I walk around the back of the building and find the staff amenities. I lock myself in and begin cutting my hair. I mix the dye and massage it in. The plastic gloves are too damn tight and they split as I am working, leaving me with black welts on my hands and mechanic’s fingernails that look like they have been slammed in the door. While the dye is in I shave off my beard, find a bottle of bleach in the supplies cupboard and try to clean my hands with it. It’s soapy and feels good, the way it stings my skin. I wash out the dye, using my T-shirt as a towel, then put
all the used things back into the plastic bag and dump it. When I get to the car I take off the license plates and chuck them in the boot.
I drive through Boksburg, Brakpan, Springs and, just when I think I’m going to fall off the edge of the world (Here Be Dragons!) I see the sign, a huge green mining wheel: Nigel Welcomes You. Not very auspicious, I agree.
I have hollow hope that there is a pleasant place to stay. I head slowly to the main road on the lookout for promises of accommodation but end up collecting hostile stares instead. The locals here don’t like strangers. Especially strangers like me prowling around in old junkers looking (I can imagine) like evangelists, molesters, or crack dealers. I pass giant peaks of fine yellow sand, mining dust melted by the rain, like wax mountains. Eventually I roll on down to what seems to be the popular part of town. There is a butcher, a bottle store and a steakhouse, with a church on every block. What more does a small town need? I will stick to the bottle store for my brand of entertainment. In general I am not anti-religion, just anti-stupidity. I drive past a shop called ‘Tombstoneland’ and it reminds me of the gravestone showroom I saw on the way to Eve’s wake, a hundred years ago. A minute ago. Am I the only one who finds this bizarre? You would think that with my preoccupation with death, I would delight in bright yellow signs on shop windows promising marked-down caskets, but I don’t. If it was my coffin then perhaps I would be interested, enough even to venture inside and run my fingers over the cheap finishes and Chinese satin but, as they stand, they remind me of what I have lost, and I drive on.