37

DAY TOYI-TOYIS INTO EVENING

LONG AFTER THE TRADING STORE AND THE BEIJING BAZAAR had closed their doors and Vigilance was invited into the Outspan bar to pass on his news, people lingered on the pathways of Crocodile Flats to speculate. As always on Fridays and Saturdays when the café became a magnet for village teens, it stayed open till nine, with dancing on the steps to the thumping beat of boom boxes. Sales of cooldrinks and slap chips and vanilla cupcakes rocketed at weekends. Tex also sold zols under the counter, supplied by the Lucky Boys.

Unusually for a Friday, lights were also blazing in the houses along Holy Joe Row as the godly wrestled with the problem of the inconvenient brown Madonna.

Pastor Nazaret Harmse was on his bony knees in his office, praying through clenched teeth for guidance. Next to him, Hester van der Linde lowered her head over clasped hands in an agony of entreaty to the Almighty to foil the latest Catholic conspiracy. Tinkie Harmse was away, having been invited to a Hindu wedding for which she had made and iced a cake modelled on the lovely Narainsamy Temple in Durban. She had not mentioned her destination to Nazaret, who despised heathens even more than he feared Catholics.

The Buddhists were holding a group meditation to ascertain whether the brown Madonna had a connection to their dark goddess, Vajravahari. The wisest of the devotees proposed that both had a common prototype in the Great Mother, quoting a sage who wrote of a mine of spirituality extending back into prehistory and expressing each civilisation’s emotional ties to a founding mother.

The Quakers sat in silence after each had spoken, contemplating the impact of a baroque vision on their plain lives. In the Salvation Army home, the duty officer was supervising the weekly baths – always an effort with the oldies – while the band polished their brass instruments and tried to decide whether to include the site of the vision in their Saturday march.

At the rectory, the Reverend Ambrose Dauncey lectured his wife as he paced the faded Persian rug, now threadbare from his constant patrolling of the community’s standards. ‘It’s ridiculous, Una. A slum girl goes running to the nuns, claiming that she’s seen the Virgin Mary, and all the Catholics go into a frenzy. I hear that an expert on visions and a Mother Superior have been summoned. You’d think the hand of God had reached down.’

‘Maybe it has. Remember Maradona? Only this is the real McCoy.’

‘That’s blasphemous.’ He glared at her. Una went on knitting blankets for orphans in the evenings as they watched TV. The clickety-clicking drove him mad.

She said, ‘Logical, though. People need mystery and glamour in their lives. Who better than the saint at the top of the hit parade?’

The glare became a scowl. ‘How can you say such a thing? It doesn’t befit a minister’s wife.’

‘Nobody heard it except you,’ she pointed out, ‘and you were busy slagging off the Catholics. As usual.’ Clickety-click. Clickety-click.

‘Not in public. The clergy has to maintain solidarity.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, Pops. This place is a holy hotbed. Every member of the clergy in the village will be plotting an anti-vision strategy as we speak.’

He hated being called Pops; she said it to annoy him because she’d come to the end of her tether as a dutiful wife. With their two children grown up and gone, she had applied to enter the priesthood herself, knowing she could do a better job than Ambrose.

‘Plotting! You make this crisis sound like a cheap thriller.’ When she chuckled, he grew even more angry. ‘And put down that damn knitting. I need constructive input here. We need to stamp out the notion that ordinary people have direct access to Jesus via his mother, or our few remaining parishioners will dwindle to none.’

‘You said it, not me.’ Una’s needles went on clickety-clicking until he left the room in a huff, slamming the door.

Further down Holy Joe Row, the Prophet Hallelujah was hard at work planning a dramatic ceremony for the Sunday gathering, having vowed with much media fanfare to call down uMoya, the Holy Spirit, to save sinners. Everything was on track, with hourly bulletins spreading the good news on SABC and community radio stations. Violet had engaged a team of cooks and ordered food, cold drinks, concert equipment and portable toilets in a series of phone calls.

Tomorrow the tabernacle tent (a vast marquee) would go up next to the football ground to accommodate VIPS, special guests, the elderly and the infirm. The open side would feature a stage angled to face both the congregation and the overflow crowd on the lower slopes of the koppies, complete with a multi-speaker sound system connected to a battery of flashing lights. A smaller marquee would house the serving tables for the feast. The Hot Gospellers would arrive in the early afternoon, followed by supplies for the cooks: a slaughtered ox, goats and chickens, crates of wild spinach, tomatoes and chillies, sacks of onions, dried beans, samp, mealiemeal and charcoal. At first light on Sunday, giant pots of phuthu, isophu, umngqusho, chakalaka and morogo would be prepared, along with half-drums of sizzling coals for roasting the meat.

All that remained was for the prophet to choose his most eye-catching robes, orchestrate and fine-tune the order of ceremony, and write a speech that would knock everyone’s socks off.

‘The Moloi girl’s vision will pale by comparison,’ Violet assured him, pushing away the niggling notion that a brown Madonna was a sister who deserved support.

The only windows in darkness along Holy Joe Row were those of the Marie Stopes clinic, the Black Sash office and the Jewish charitable trust for adult education, all of which closed at four on Fridays.

Rod had driven Mother Esmé the short distance from the hotel to the ex-garage in the Beetle, intending to continue along the main road past where the tar became gravel and well into the open veld. He needed to make his satellite phone call in private, filing his copy with the agency to ensure it would make the Far East deadline for Sunday papers. Sixteen rolls of film were already on their way via long-distance taxi to Joburg. With luck, the whole package would be picked up by successive editions around the world before rival journalists could find a map showing Crocodile Flats, let alone get to it.

He could see the headlines already: SLUM SENSATION! – WAS THE MADONNA AFRICAN? … BLESSED BOOST FOR AFRICAN RENAISSANCE … SWEETNESS & LIGHT: SA TEEN CLAIMS HOLY VISION …

‘Bloody hell! That’s mine!’ He slammed on the brakes. The stripped and violated hulk on bricks was what remained of his willing pack mule that would tackle even goat paths in pursuit of a good story.

Cursing all thieving tsotsis, he flung open the driver’s door and got out to inspect the damage, but a furtive movement between the shacks huddled on the far side of the roadway stopped him. Daytime bravado was one thing, but now he was alone in growing darkness. He leaned against the Beetle with folded arms to pay his last respects to the trusty Land Rover. There’d be no financial loss. The phone call he was about to make would buy a brand-new Land Rover with all the bells and whistles, and plenty more. He could spare a few minutes for an old friend.

With the car at his back close to Vanderlindea’s floodlit security fence, he was protected from behind. In front, a many-angled metal sea of rusting corrugated iron dwindled into the murk of coal smoke, paraffin lights winking like fireflies in patchwork windows. The sounds were the same all over Africa: snatches of township music and laughter, the rumble of men over their beer, a repeated tune plucked on a guitar, fowls clucking as they settled for the night, the persistent throb of generators, muffled TV voices, feet shuffling in a dance.

It seems so peaceful, he thought. Maybe the Madonna was here yesterday. Sweetness believes it. Her eyes were shining when he shot the close-ups on the koppies.

One of the Lucky Boys, who had taken cover behind a shack when the Beetle’s door opened, muttered, ‘We could hit that dude now, Smart.’

‘No way. He’s got eyes all over.’

‘Donder him from behind?’

‘He’d see us. Too much light coming from the Boers’ place.’

‘But he’s dreaming, man. Easy meat.’

One of the others whispered, ‘My father looks like that when he gets out of jail. Gone in the head.’

Smart’s hands flew out to clamp tense fingers over their mouths. ‘Thula! He’s too big and kwaai, okay? We must go for the honky in the hotel tonight. There’ll be big money in the safe. Did you see how full the bar was?’

All four of them nodded. As usual.

The shebeens were crowded too. Queenie sent a messenger to tell Mad Zizwe to come back and help her haul more crates, but he couldn’t be found. When her stocks of beer, brandy and Southern Comfort ran out, she began to serve her new cocktail for the special occasion, Brown Mary: cane spirit and Kahlúa with a swirl of Amarula. But her customers complained that it was a woman’s drink and hammered the tables until she sent a messenger to the back door of the Outspan, an arrangement she had with Benjamin when the bottle store was closed.

‘Bring more hooch. Tell Ben I’ll pay tomorrow. Watch out for the cops.’

The messenger came running back to Queenie’s Place with two bottles of Heathery Glen Finest Scotch Whisky (bottled in Salt River) clanking under his shirt, and dire news. ‘Mr Ben says sorry, it’s all he’s got. Everything’s finished.’