The young man dropped from the trackless tram just before it stopped at Castle Bridge. He dropped off, ignoring the stream of late-afternoon traffic rolling in from the suburbs, bobbed and ducked the cars and buses, the big, rumbling delivery trucks, deaf to the shouts and curses of the drivers, and reached the pavement.
Standing there, near the green railings around the public convenience, he lighted a cigarette, jostled by the lines of workers going home, the first trickle of a stream that would soon be flowing towards Hanover Street. He looked right through them, refusing to see them, nursing a little growth of anger the way one caresses the beginnings of a toothache with the tip of the tongue.
Around him the buzz and hum of voices and the growl of traffic blended into one solid mutter of sound which he only half-heard, his thoughts concentrated upon the pustule of rage and humiliation that was continuing to ripen deep down within him.
The young man wore jeans that had been washed several times and which were now left with a pale-blue colour flecked with old grease stains and the newer, darker ones of that day’s work in the sheet-metal factory, and going white along the hard seams. The jeans had brass buttons, and the legs were too long, so that they had to be turned up six inches at the bottom. He also wore an old khaki shirt and over it a rubbed and scuffed and worn leather coat with slanting pockets and woollen wrists. His shoes were of the moccasin type, with leather thongs stitching the saddle to the rest of the uppers. They had been a bright tan once, but now they were worn a dark brown, beginning to crack in the grooves across the insteps. The thongs had broken in two places on one shoe and in one place on the other.
He was a well-built young man of medium height, and he had dark curly hair, slightly brittle but not quite kinky, and a complexion the colour of worn leather. If you looked closely you could see the dark shadow caused by premature shaving along his cheeks and around the chin and upper lip. His eyes were very dark brown, the whites not quite clear, and he had a slightly protuberant upper lip. His hands were muscular, with ridges of vein, the nails broad and thick like little shells, and rimmed with black from handling machine oil and grease. The backs of his hands, like his face, were brown, but the palms were pink with tiny ridges of yellow-white callouses. Now his dark brown eyes had hardened a little with sullenness.
He half-finished the cigarette, and threw the butt into the garden behind the fence around the public convenience. The garden of the convenience was laid out in small terraces and rockeries, carefully cultivated by the City Council, with many different kinds of rock plants, flowers, cacti and ornamental trees. This the young man did not see, either, as he stepped off the pavement, dodging the traffic again and crossing the intersection to the Portuguese restaurant opposite.
In front of the restaurant the usual loungers hung around under the overhanging verandah, idling, talking, smoking, waiting. The window was full of painted and printed posters advertising dances, concerts, boxing- matches, meetings, and some of the loungers stood looking at them, commenting on the ability of the fighters or the popularity of the dance bands. The young man, his name was Michael Adonis, pushed past them and went into the cafe.
It was warm inside, with the smell of frying oil and fat and tobacco smoke. People sat in the booths or along a wooden table down the centre of the place, eating or engaged in conversation. Ancient strips of flypaper hung from the ceiling dotted with their victims and the floor was stained with spilled coffee, grease and crushed cigarette butts; the walls marked with the countless rubbing of soiled shoulders and grimy hands. There was a general atmosphere of shabbiness about the cafe, but not unmixed with a sort of homeliness for the unending flow of derelicts, bums, domestic workers off duty, in-town-from-the-country folk who had no place to eat except there, and working people who stopped by on their way home. There were taxi- drivers too, and the rest of the mould that accumulated on the fringes of the underworld beyond Castle Bridge: loiterers, prostitutes, fab-fee numbers runners, petty gangsters, drab and frayed-looking thugs.
Michael Adonis looked around the cafe and saw Willieboy sitting at the long table that ran down the middle of the room. Willieboy was young and dark and wore his kinky hair brushed into a point above his forehead. He wore a sportscoat over a yellow T-shirt and a crucifix around his neck, more as a flamboyant decoration than as an act of religious devotion. He had yellowish eyeballs and big white teeth and an air of nonchalance, like the outward visible sign of his distorted pride in the terms he had served in a reformatory and once in prison for assault.
He grinned, showing his big teeth as Michael Adonis strolled up, and said, ‘Hoit, pally,’ in greeting. He had finished a meal of steak and chips and was lighting a cigarette.
‘Howzit,’ Michael Adonis said surlily, sitting down opposite him. They were not very close friends, but had been thrown together in the whirlpool world of poverty, petty crime and violence of which that cafe was an outpost.
‘Nice, boy, nice. You know me, mos. Always take it easy. How goes it with you?’
‘Strolling again. Got pushed out of my job at the facktry.’
‘How come then?’
‘Answered back to an effing white rooker. Foreman.’
‘Those whites. What happened?’
‘That white bastard was lucky I didn’t pull him up good. He had been asking for it a long time. Every time a man goes to the piss-house he starts moaning. Jesus Christ, the way he went on you’d think a man had to wet his pants rather than take a minute off. Well, he picked on me for going for a leak and I told him to go to hell.’
‘Ja,’ Willieboy said. ‘Working for whites. Happens all the time, man. Me, I never work for no white john. Not even brown one. To hell with work. Work, work, work, where does it get you? Not me, pally.’
The Swahili waiter came over, dark and shiny with perspiration, his white apron grimy and spotted with egg-yolk. Michael Adonis said: ‘Steak and chips, and bring the tomato sauce, too.’ To Willieboy he said: ‘Well, a juba’s got to live. Called me a cheeky black bastard. Me, I’m not black. Anyway I said he was a no-good pore-white and he calls the manager and they gave me my pay and tell me to muck of out of it. White sonofabitch. I’ll get him.’
‘No, man, me I don’t work. Never worked a bogger yet. Whether you work or don’t, you live anyway, somehow. I haven’t starved to death, have I? Work. Eff work.’
‘I’ll get him,’ Michael Adonis said. His food came, handed to him on a chipped plate with big slices of bread on the side. He began to eat, chewing sullenly. Willieboy got up and strolled over to the juke-box, slipped a sixpenny piece into the slot. Michael Adonis ate silently, his anger mixing with a resentment for a fellow who was able to take life so easy.
Music boomed out of the speaker, drowning the buzz of voices in the cafe, and Willieboy stood by the machine, watching the disc spinning behind the lighted glass.
When mah baby lef’ me,
She gimme a mule to rahd …
When mah baby lef’ me,
She gimme a mule to rahd …
Michael Adonis went on eating, thinking over and over again, That sonavabitch, that bloody white sonavabitch, I’ll get him. Anger seemed to make him ravenous and he bolted his food. While he was drinking his coffee from the thick, cracked cup three men came into the cafe, looked around the place, and then came over to him.
One of the men wore a striped, navy-blue suit and a high-crowned brown hat. He had a brown, bony face with knobby cheekbones, hollow cheeks and a bony, ridged jawline, all giving him a scrofulous look. The other two with him were youths and they wore new, lightweight tropical suits with pegged trousers and gaudy neckties. They had young, yellowish, depraved faces and thick hair shiny with brilliantine. One of them had a ring with a skull-and-crossbones on one finger. The eyes in the skull were cheap red stones, and he toyed with the ring all the time as if he wished to draw attention to it.
They pulled out chairs and sat down, and the man in the striped suit said: ‘Het, Mikey.’
‘Hullo.’
‘They fired me.’
‘Hell, just near the big days, too.’ The man spoke as if there was something wrong with his throat; in a high, cracked voice, like the twang of a flat guitar string.
The boy with the ring said, ‘We’re looking for Sockies. You seen him?’
The man in the striped suit, who was called Foxy, said, ‘We got a job on tonight. We want him for look-out man.’
‘You don’t have to tell him,’ the boy with the ring said, looking at Foxy. He had a thin, olive-skinned face with down on his upper lip, and the whites of his eyes were unnaturally yellow.
‘He’s okay,’ Foxy told him. ‘Mikey’s a pal of ours. Don’t I say, Mikey?’
‘I don’t give over what you boys do,’ Michael Adonis replied. He took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his leather coat and offered it around. They each took one.
When the cigarettes were lighted the one who had not spoken yet, said: ‘Why don’t we ask him to come in? We can do without Sockies if you say he’s okay.’ He had an old knife scar across his right cheekbone and looked very young and brutal.
Michael Adonis said nothing.
‘Mikey’s a good boy,’ Foxy said, grinning with the cigarette in his mouth. ‘He ain’t like you blerry gangsters.’
‘Well,’ said the scarfaced boy. ‘If you see Sockies, tell him we looking for him.’
‘Where’ll he get you?’ Michael Adonis asked.
‘He knows where to find us,’ Foxy said.
‘Come on then, man,’ the boy with the scarface said. ‘Let’s stroll.’
‘Okay, Mikey,’ Foxy said as they got up.
‘Okay.’
‘Okay, pally,’ the scarfaced boy said.
They went out of the cafe and Michael Adonis watched them go. He told himself they were a hardcase lot. The anger over having got the sack from his job had left him then, and he was feeling a little better. He picked up the bill from the table and went over to the counter to pay it.
Outside the first workers were streaming past towards Hanover, on their way to their homes in the quarter known as District Six. The trackless trams were full, rocking their way up the rise at Castle Bridge, the overflow hanging onto the grips of the platform. Michael Adonis watched the crowds streaming by, smoking idly, his mind wandering towards the stockinged legs of the girls, the chatter and hum of traffic brushing casually across his hearing. Up ahead a neon sign had already come on, pale against the late sunlight, flicking on and off, on and off, on and off.
He left the entrance of the cafe and fell into the stream, walking up towards the District, past the shopfronts with the adverts of shoes, underwear, Coca-Cola, cigarettes.
Inside the cafe the juke-box had stopped playing and Willieboy turned away from it, looking for Michael Adonis, and found that he had left.