Up ahead the music shops were still going full blast, the blare of records all mixed up so you could not tell one tune from another. Shopkeepers, Jewish, Indian, and Greek, stood in the doorways along the arcade of stores on each side of the street, waiting to welcome last-minute customers; and the vegetable and fruit barrows were still out too, the hawkers in white coats yelling their wares and flapping their brownpaper packets, bringing prices down now that the day was ending. Around the bus-stop a crowd pushed and jostled to clamber onto the trackless trams, struggling against the passengers fighting to alight. Along the pavements little knots of youths lounged in twos and threes or more, watching the crowds streaming by, jeering, smoking, joking against the noise, under the balconies, in doorways, around the plate-glass windows. A half-mile of sound and movement and signs, signs, signs: Coca-Cola, Sale Now On, Jewellers, The Modern Outfitters, If You Don’t Eat Here We’ll Both Starve, Grand Picnic to Paradise Valley Luxury Buses, Teas, Coffee, Smoke, Have You Tried Our Milk Shakes, Billiard Club, The Rockingham Arms, Chine … nce In Korea, Your Recommendation Is Our Advert, Dress Salon.
Michael Adonis moved idly along the pavement through the stream of people unwinding like a spool up the street. A music shop was playing shrill and noisy, ‘Some of these days, you gonna miss me honey’; music from across the Atlantic, shipped in flat shellac discs to pound its jazz through the loudspeaker over the doorway.
He stopped outside the big plate window, looking in at the rows of guitars, banjoes, mandolins, the displayed gramophone parts, guitar picks, strings, electric irons, plugs, jews-harps, adaptors, celluloid dolls all the way from Japan, and the pictures of angels and Christ with a crown of thorns and drops of blood like lipstick marks on his pink forehead.
A fat man came out of the shop, his cheeks smooth and shiny with health, and said, ‘You like to buy something, sir?’
‘No man,’ Michael Adonis said and spun his cigarette- end into the street where a couple of snot-nosed boys in ragged shirts and horny feet scrambled for it, pushing each other as they struggled to claim a few puffs.
Somebody said, ‘Hoit, Mikey,’ and he turned and saw the wreck of a youth who had fallen in beside him.
‘Hullo, Joe.’
Joe was short and his face had an ageless quality about it under the grime, like something valuable forgotten in a junk shop. He had the soft brown eyes of a dog, and he smelled of a mixture of sweat, slept-in clothes and seaweed. His trousers had gone at the cuffs and knees, the rents held together with pins and pieces of string, and so stained and spotted that the original colour could not have been guessed at. Over the trousers he wore an ancient raincoat that reached almost to his ankles, the sleeves torn loose at the shoulders, the body hanging in ribbons, the front pinned together over his filthy vest. His shoes were worn beyond recognition.
Nobody knew where Joe came from, or anything about him. He just seemed to have happened, appearing in the District like a cockroach emerging through a floorboard. Most of the time he wandered around the harbour gathering fish discarded by fishermen and anglers, or along the beaches of the coast, picking limpets and mussels. He had a strange passion for things that came from the sea.
‘How you, Joe?’ Michael Adonis asked.
‘Okay, Mikey.’
‘What you been doing today?’
‘Just strolling around the docks. York Castle came in this afternoon.’
‘Ja?’
‘You like mussels, Mikey? I’ll bring you some.’
‘That’s fine, Joe.’
‘I got a big starfish out on the beach yesterday. One big, big one. It was dead and stank.’
‘Well, it’s a good job you didn’t bring it into town. City Council would be on your neck.’
‘I hear they’re going to make the beaches so only white people can go there,’ Joe said.
‘Ja. Read it in the papers. Damn sonsabitches.’
‘It’s going to get so’s nobody can go nowhere.’
‘I reckon so,’ Michael Adonis said.
They were some way up the street now and outside the Queen Victoria. Michael Adonis said, ‘You like a drink, Joe?’ although he knew that the boy did not drink.
‘No thanks, Mikey.’
‘Well, so long.’
‘So long, man.’
‘You eat already?’
‘Well … no … not yet,’ Joe said, smiling humbly and shyly, moving his broken shoes gently on the rough cracked paving.
‘Okay, here’s a bob. Get yourself something. Parcel of fish and some chips.’
‘Thanks, Mikey.’
‘Okay. So long, Joe.’
‘See you again.’
‘Don’t forget the mussels,’ Michael Adonis said after him, knowing that Joe would forget anyway.
‘I’ll bring them,’ Joe said, smiling back and raising his hand in a salute. He seemed to sense the other young man’s doubt of his memory, and added a little fiercely, ‘I won’t forget. You’ll see. I won’t forget.’
Then he went up the street, trailing his tattered raincoat behind him like a sword-slashed, bullet-ripped banner just rescued from a battle.
Michael Adonis turned towards the pub and saw the two policemen coming towards him. They came down the pavement in their flat caps, khaki shirts and pants, their gun harness shiny with polish, and the holstered pistols heavy at their waists. They had hard, frozen faces as if carved out of pink ice, and hard, dispassionate eyes, hard and bright as pieces of blue glass. They strolled slowly and determinedly side by side, without moving off their course, cutting a path through the stream on the pavement like destroyers at sea.
They came on and Michael Adonis turned aside to avoid them, but they had him penned in with a casual, easy, skilful flanking manœuvre before he could escape.
‘Waar loop jy rond, jong? Where are you walking around, man?’ The voice was hard and flat as the snap of a steel spring, and the one who spoke had hard, thin, chapped lips and a faint blonde down above them. He had flat cheekbones, pink-white, and thick, red-gold eyebrows and pale lashes. His chin was long and cleft and there was a small pimple beginning to form on one side of it, making a reddish dot against the pale skin.
‘Going home,’ Michael Adonis said, looking at the buckle of this policeman’s belt. You learned from experience to gaze at some spot on their uniforms, the button of a pocket, or the bright smoothness of their Sam Browne belts, but never into their eyes, for that would be taken as an affront by them. It was only the very brave, or the very stupid, who dared look straight into the law’s eyes, to challenge them or to question their authority.
The second policeman stuck his thumbs in his gun-belt and smiled distantly and faintly. It was more a slight movement of his lips, rather than a smile. The backs of his hands where they dropped over the leather of the belt were broad and white, and the outlines of the veins were pale blue under the skin, the skin covered with a field of tiny, slanting ginger-coloured hair. His fingers were thick and the knuckles big and creased and pink, the nails shiny and healthy and carefully kept.
This policeman asked in a heavy, brutal voice, ‘Where’s your dagga?’
‘I don’t smoke it.’
‘Jong, turn out your pockets,’ the first one ordered. ‘Hurry up.’
Michael Adonis began to empty his pockets slowly, without looking up at them and thinking, with each movement, You mucking boers, you mucking boers. Some people stopped and looked and hurried on as the policemen turned the cold blue light of their eyes upon them. Michael Adonis showed them his crumbled and partly used packet of cigarettes, the money he had left over from his pay, a soiled handkerchief and an old piece of chewing gum covered with the grey fuzz from his pocket.
‘Where did you steal the money?’ The question was without humour, deadly serious, the voice topped with hardness like the surface of a file.
‘Didn’t steal it, baas (you mucking boer).’
‘Well, muck off from the street. Don’t let us find you standing around, you hear?’
‘Yes, (you mucking boer).’
‘Yes, what? Who are you talking to, man?’
‘Yes, baas (you mucking bastard boer with your mucking gun and your mucking bloody red head).’
They pushed past him, one of them brushing him aside with an elbow and strolled on. He put the stuff back into his pockets. And deep down inside him the feeling of rage, frustration and violence swelled like a boil, knotted with pain.