Portrait with Keys

Point B

Reality favours symmetries and slight anachronisms.

Jorge Luis Borges

We make our way to Gate A15. SA 562 to Johannesburg will be boarding in twenty minutes. In a brushcut’s yellow nap, the drawstring of a Woolworths tracksuit, a splay-heeled foot in a rubber slipslop, a way of lounging against one another like seals, we recognize our kind. Relieved and repulsed, we slip back into the brown water of South African speech.

André, the removal man, is supervising the retrieval of our possessions from Wood’s Self Storage. The van is parked in the alley between the rows of storage units, the workers are moving to and fro under André’s instruction. Before a single item finds its way onto the van, he wants everything brought out of the unit and arranged before him, like an orchestra before a conductor. He himself appears distracted–he goes aside to speak on his cellphone several times–but the workers are as calm and unhurried as ever. They carry our furniture and boxes out into the sunshine. It is a relief to see the familiar tables and chairs, it assures us that we are home. Good thing Minky dissuaded me from dumping everything. The only niggle is Louis Fehler’s trommel, hot and glossy in the sunlight, throbbing like a guilty conscience.

André starts orchestrating the loading of the van. ‘Bring vir my daardie boks…Sit hom daar agter onder die tafel…Bring vir my nog ’n boks.’ These familiar formulas collapse time, drawing the year of our absence into a single pause for breath, an ellipsis.

The phone rings again and he retreats along the alley. Comes back pale, grimacing as he lights a cigarette.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘It’s my sister. She’s been missing since yesterday.’

‘Jesus, what happened?’

‘There was a burglary at her townhouse, the TV and the hi-fi are gone, also the car. But the big problem is the burglars seem to have taken her with them. We haven’t heard a thing.’

‘That doesn’t look good.’

‘You telling me.’

The episode overshadows our first night at home. Made insecure by the proximity of our possessions, we speculate about André’s sister, quoting the conventional wisdoms about crime scenes and how to deal with them, repeating the platitudes.

A week passes before the body of André’s sister is discovered in a field near Cullinan.

Although we hardly know the removal man, we feel caught up in his story. As we feel him to be caught up in ours. He has filed us and retrieved us, weighed our shortcomings and excesses, he knows the way we fit together. Minky phones and leaves our condolences on his voicemail.

In the following days, three suspects are arrested, and then the story comes out in the papers. The two men who killed Estelle Greeff were hired by her husband, Dr Casper Greeff, a Kempton Park dentist. The plan was to cash in her life insurance policies. Elliot Masango and Christopher Njeje overpowered the victim in her house and tied her hands behind her back. Masango then strangled her, after which they wrapped her body in a blanket and bundled it into the boot of her husband’s car. They drove to a farm north of Pretoria. When they opened the boot, he was upset (Masango later testified) to find that the woman was still alive. They dragged her out of the boot, and Njeje sawed through her neck with his accomplice’s Okapi. It was so painful that she pleaded with them to get it over with.

Passing sentence at Masango’s trial a year later, Acting Judge Eben Jordaan said that people may use alarms, high walls and bars on their windows to defend themselves against strangers, but there is no defence against someone you know.

Two years after first being put up for auction, the Marymount Nursing Home is bought by the Vroue Federasie. It is to be refurbished as an old-age home. Now I understand why Albemarle Street has been so busy lately, cluttered with shiny sedans that look as soft as ice cream when it rains. The architects and accountants have arrived.

An unhappy reversal: a place where souls were ushered into the world is now dedicated to ushering them out.

‘I had a chat with the developers,’ says Mark, ‘and they assured me that the old people won’t be a problem. Just occasionally one might get out and try to barter a dressing gown or a pair of slippers for a pack of cigarettes. What should we do then, I wanted to know. Oh, just humour them and send them home.’

For years, a panel in the ceiling of my lounge had slowly been caving in. When its collapse seemed imminent, I climbed up on a ladder and tapped some nails into the board. Two considerations made me wield the hammer with restraint: I did not want to dislodge some other part of the ceiling and I did not want to drive a nail through a pipe or cable. Who knew what lay behind? My feeble repairs had no visible effect and the panel continued to sag. Then a gap began to open up between the cornice and the wall. ‘One of these days,’ Minky said, ‘the sky is going to fall on your head, like you-know-who. It’s time to call Ben.’

Ben Homan breaks things with the casual ease given only to those who know how to build again. He got up on his own ladder and beat on the ceiling with his fist. The whole thing shook. A volley of nails sprang out of the boards and clattered away under the furniture. He looked down on me. ‘It’s had it,’ he said. ‘It’ll fall down before Christmas.’

‘Just this panel?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Nah, the whole thing.’

He looked at me with sad, fatalistic eyes.

Somehow I felt that I had to offer an explanation. ‘A couple of years ago,’ I said carefully, ‘the geyser burst while we were away on holiday. Ball valve was shot.’ I was mimicking the plumber, trying for the familiar, offhand tone that men use to talk about cars and sports teams. ‘The water must have spilled through here and weakened this panel.’

‘Nah,’ he said, ‘it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s the points of attachment.’

He climbed down off the ladder and with an outstretched arm pointed out the rows of nailheads, in parallels a metre apart, which showed where the ceiling boards were attached to the beams above. ‘The joists are too far apart to support the weight of the boards,’ he said. ‘There must have been pressed steel here before, see. When they took it out and put up boards, they should have put in extra joists. But the builder was probably cutting corners. The ceiling is weak everywhere. It’s started on this end, but the whole thing is sagging. You can see it over here.’ He took a walking stick from the umbrella stand at the door, the heavy Namibian one with the carved handle, and thumped it against the ceiling. Another bombardment of nails. ‘Won’t last into the new year.’

I could also see it now, all the boards were sagging gently like the roof of a tent. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? It would certainly never look flat to me again. Now that I knew where the joists were, I could see too why my emergency repairs had been so ineffective: I had tacked the board painstakingly to the empty air above.

After he’d gone, I picked up the nails. The old ones had a sugar-coating of white paint on their heads; the shiny new ones were my efforts from recent months.

Ben and his assistant Chico tore the ceiling down in a day, unloosing decades of dust and lumps of brick and plaster. Without a ceiling, the room felt strange and bare. The entire house changed shape and function. I spent half the night in the lounge, looking up into the space below the sheeting. I felt the sky pressing down on the roof as if on my own head. The echoing As of the rafters were a reading lesson. Here and there on the rough beams the carpenter’s marks were still visible, and the stencilled name of the timber supplier. Pipes and wires snaked over the trusses to the light fixtures and the walls, the corrugated-iron sheets strained under the weight of the night. The removal of the ceiling had exposed the house for what it was, a mere shelter, a pile of bricks and boards propped up on the veld to keep out the elements. Suddenly I was aware not just of the icy air above the iron sheets, but of the musty air below the floorboards, and the damp soil below that. I was suspended, between earth and sky, like an afterthought in brackets.

The next day Ben and Chico covered the floor with tarpaulins and sheets of thick plastic. They spent two whole days building a platform of scaffolding and wooden boards almost as large as the room itself. To save time, Ben said, you have to spend it. Once the platform was in place, they would be able to move freely while they installed the extra joists and the ceiling itself. It would save an enormous amount of time and effort not having to go up and down ladders constantly.

Ben is seventy-five years old. His stolid presence evokes a vanished metaphorical order: as strong as an ox, as placid as a carthorse. He works methodically, precisely and implacably. When he drives in a six-inch nail he uses an eleven-pound hammer, it takes three or four blows, evenly spaced, it goes in straight. He wants to pass these skills on to Chico, who is not yet twenty. Ben thinks of Chico as his apprentice. He speaks to him with unshakeable patience and expects him to work no harder than he does himself.

As he works, Ben talks, in his long-winded, relentless way. Often he tells stories about the other things he has built or repaired–a garden pavilion in Sandton, the kitchen in a house near Sir Edmund Hillary Primary, a roof in Yeoville. He has just finished raising the wall around a house in Norfolk Street. He noticed that there was a jacaranda planted too close to the perimeter and predicted that in a couple of years’ time the roots would start pushing the wall over. He could have broken out an arch and put in a lintel, giving the roots room to breathe, but it was costly and the owner said no, he’d rather wait until the wall fell over–if he was even alive to see it–and claim for a new one against the insurance. Well, when it does, Ben told him, give me a ring.

These stories hold me pinned in the doorway of my study. I have work to do, the texts are lying under my desk lamp, lit up like a museum exhibit. But he rolls on like a wagon-wheel or a plough. His stories have no clear beginnings or endings. Like some artful piece of handiwork, one slots seamlessly into the next, so that the opportunity to interrupt is lost.

Occasionally, as if he senses my impatience, Ben talks about the room in a way that is bound to interest me. ‘This bit of the chimney is called the breast,’ he says (and by his intonation makes it sound anatomical). ‘You can look it up in your dictionary. Go on. And this bit is the flue. I’m not making that up, I promise. And all the way along the edges here we’ll be putting in cornishes. They’re under the scaffolding there in the corner, you can take a look. These are six-inch cornishes. The last lot were the four-inch. Too small, cutting corners again. Look it up in your dictionary, see if it’s there. Cornish.’

Ben’s tools, his scaffolding, his tarpaulins, his overalls are steeped in the work he has done. The smells of wet cement, rusty water, linseed oil, paint, sawdust are in these things. It is months since the new ceiling, as perfectly flat and blank as a new page under a coat of PVA, drove the outside world back to a proper distance, but still the house smells of this specific history of labour.

Hello! says the slip of paper the man has just handed me. It is the size of a business card and has been cut from a photocopied sheet. buona vista car guards is typewritten across the top. The other side says: I am not a beggar. My name is……I will watch your car while you are shopping. I am here to ensure your peace of mind and the safety of your property. If you are satisfied with the service, you may offer me a small reward. Have a good day!

‘What is your name?’

He takes back the paper, borrows my pen and leans on the bonnet to write: Victor

‘Do you mind if I take a picture of your keys?’ the journalist from Sweden asks.

We are chatting in the garden, under the pagoda tree, and the bunch is lying on the table between us. The table top is sprinkled with soft, pale blossoms like tiny dropped handkerchiefs.

‘Not at all.’

She aims the camera, stands up into a better angle, wrings the lens and presses the shutter. So much for the candid shot, now for something posed. She jangles the keys at arm’s length, as if shaking water off them, puts them down again near an edge where the blossoms are thickest. Shifts the foot of a wine glass into the frame, then out again.

‘Such enormous collections of keys! I’ve never seen anything like it. In Sweden, only a janitor would need this.’

A tribe of turnkeys.

‘I think I’ve got four keys on my ring at home–and that includes the bicycle lock. You’ve got dozens here.’ She fans them out with her forefinger, flips over the immobilizer jack for the car, takes another shot. They shame me now, lying there like the keys to my psyche, a feeler gauge for every insecurity. ‘How do you keep track of them all?’

The first principle of key management is to separate working groups on interlocking rings. Coming and going through the front: street-door deadlock, Yale, security gate (outside), front-door deadlock, Yale. Coming and going through the back: back-gate padlock, back-door deadlock, Yale, security gate (inside). Coming and going by car: garage door, car door, steering lock, immobilizer, ignition. Miscellaneous: window lock, cellar door, postbox.

I have threaded them on to the rings with their profiles facing in the same direction, like a dressed file of soldiers. Their noses and chins are familiar to my fingertips, I can find them in the dark.

‘Only seventeen, by the way.’ I’ve been totting them up in my head.

‘Well, that’s not too bad then,’ she says.

Genpei Akasegawa’s most beautiful sculpture is A Collection of End Bits of Lead from a Mechanical Pencil, a small and delicate china bowl containing a frittering of pencil leads, none of them more than five millimetres long. These are the stubs that were too short to be gripped by the mechanism of the propelling pencil with which he draws and so had to be ejected. If you look closely you can see–or imagine–the flat edge at one end and the rounded edge at the other where the lead pressed against the paper, a contour that captures the size of the hand that held the pencil, the strokes it preferred to make, its chosen paths across the page, unique as a brush stroke. What this bowl of leavings represents is time spent, work done, measured against an insignificant deficit.

(Of course, I cannot be sure that this sculpture is evidence of an actual process. It is presented as the accumulated labour of years, but it may have been manufactured in ten minutes, which is all you would need to snap ten cases of unused pencil leads into fragments. I take the artist at his word.)

This sculpture could be a companion to my own Autobiography, and that may be a good part of its appeal, for nothing is more pleasing than the echo of one’s own voice, even if it is no longer clear which is the voice and which the echo. Autobiography is a shallow wooden box resembling a picture frame, containing 392 pencil stubs (at the last count). The pencils that these stubs commemorate were used and sharpened down to nine or ten centimetres, and then inserted in a pencil extender made from a joint of the bamboo that grows outside my window, and used and sharpened again until there was nothing left for the sharpener to pare. None of the stubs is more than two and a half centimetres long. If you look through the glass front of the box, the stubs form a layer ten centimetres deep, like the leaves and twigs fallen beneath a tree in the woods. Ten years of tinder. Shake the box and you will see the different colours of the shafts. The six-sided barrel of a pencil lends itself to stripes, and so you will see dog-ends of red and black mainly, the ubiquitous Staedtler, but also blue and gold Faber-Castell and solid green government issue. There is very little lettering left, most of it was scoured off in the sharpening, just here and there an ‘–astell’ or an ‘HB’ at the chewable end of the stub.

The old man used to sit on the pavement outside the Jumbo. He had a piece of cardboard which he put down on the kerb for the cold, creating the impression that he was fastidious about his ragged clothes. He was a small man with a grizzled white head and beard, made to look even smaller by his oversized army greatcoat. His hands were enormous, good for a man twice his size, and the skin was hard and smooth. I discovered this when I started to give him money. Sometimes, when I put the coins in his hand, my fingertips brushed the skin of his palm. It was leathery, but not folded or creased like a glove. It reminded me of a shoe. The fat pads of his palm, the swollen base of his thumb, the bulging fingers were like the often-polished uppers of old shoes. Why were his hands so big? What work had he done to give them this shape? What substance, grasped or stroked or kneaded over a lifetime, could have given his skin this sheen? It could not be soil. Perhaps it was skin. Is this what skin does to skin?

The cross in the parking lot at the Church of the Holy Angels is tall enough to challenge the palm tree it stands beside. Our padrão has a shiny metallic frame with panels of blue and white Perspex, lit from within, and glowing in the rush-hour haze at dusk it signals that a bit of Las Vegas has come to Bez Valley. Yet on the whole, the churchyard of this Portuguese parish smacks appropriately of the sea rather than the desert: the white plastered walls offset the colour-coded blues of the roof tiles, the palisades and the notices of the Chubb armed response company.

From the southern side of Kitchener Avenue you can see the blue cross as well as the minaret of the mosque down in the valley, rising above the rooftops like an opened lipstick. The dome of the minaret is exactly the same blue. Was the cross a riposte?

As I’m passing by one day, a priest is coming out of the church. When he sees me, he reaches for a remote control device dangling from his belt like a crucifix and jabs it with his thumb. The security gate someone has inadvertently left open to the pavement trundles shut between us like a curtain drawn in the confessional.

We have left the security arrangements for my birthday party until the last minute, resisting the imposition of it, hoping the problem will resolve itself. Once, your responsibilities as host extended no further than food and drink and a bit of mood music; now you must take steps to ensure the safety of your guests and their property.

‘I think it’s irresponsible of us to have a dinner party at all,’ I say to Minky. ‘There should be a municipal by-law that only people with long driveways and big dogs are allowed to entertain. We should call the whole thing off.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘Just stop obsessing.’

The last time we had people over, I had to keep going outside to check that their cars were still there. It spoilt my evening.

‘We’ll get a guard,’ she says. She phones the armed response people. It is too late, all their guards are booked. But they recommend the Academy of Security, where trainees are registered for on-the-job experience. She phones the Academy. Yes, they do supply security guards for single functions. A dinner party? Sevenish? Can do. That will be the half-shift deal, unless you want him to stay past midnight, and pay the full-shift rate? Being inexperienced, the guard cannot be armed, of course, but he will be under constant supervision. They could arrange an armed guard from another company, probably–but at such short notice, it will be more expensive, you understand? We settle for inexperienced, unarmed, half-shift.

‘The security costs more than the food,’ I say, ‘and he’s still an appie. We should have gone to a restaurant.’

The apprentice security guard is called Bongi. So far, he has only acquired the top half of a uniform, a navy-blue tunic that is too short in the sleeve. The checked pants and down-at-heel shoes are clearly his own. By way of equipment, he has a large silver torch and a panic button hanging around his neck. My theory is that he is earning the uniform item by item, as payment or incentive. After six months or so, he’ll be fully qualified and fully clothed.

‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ I say to Minky. ‘He’s just a kid.’

Bongi is standing under a tree on the far side of the road. He looks vulnerable and lonely. It is starting to drizzle. Minky takes him an umbrella from the stand at the door, the grey and yellow one with the handle in the shape of a toucan, which once belonged to her dad. With this frivolous thing in his hand, Bongi looks even more poorly equipped to cope with the streets.

‘This is unforgivable,’ I say, ‘this is a low point. I’d rather live in a flat than do this.’

‘What difference would that make?’ says Minky, who always sees through my rhetoric. ‘People have still got to park their cars somewhere.’

‘A complex, then, I’d rather live in a complex. Some place with secure parking.’

The guests begin to arrive. Bongi waves the torch around officiously, and then stands on the pavement under the toucan umbrella, embarrassed.

When dinner is served, Minky takes out a plate of food and a cup of coffee. ‘Poor kid’s starving,’ she says when she comes back.

Excusing myself from the table, on the pretext of fetching more wine from the spare room, I sneak outside and gaze at him from the end of the stoep. He’s squatting on the kerb, with the plate between his feet on the tar, eating voraciously.

‘He’s a sitting duck,’ I say to Minky in the kitchen, when we’re dishing up seconds. ‘What the hell is he expected to do if an armed gang tries to steal one of the cars, God forbid. Throw the panic button at them? This whole arrangement is immoral. Especially our part in it. Our friends are insured anyway, if someone steals Branko’s car, he’ll get another one. What if this kid gets hurt while we’re sitting here feeding our faces and moaning about the crime rate? I think he’ll have seconds too.’

With a plate of Thai chicken under his belt, and another in prospect, Bongi is looking better. We exchange a few words. He comes from a farm near Marikana, out near the Magaliesberg, and he’s been in Joburg since June. His uncle found him this job, his uncle has been a ‘full-time security’ for five years. He looks quite pleased with himself. Perhaps he’s thinking this is not such a bad job after all.

But we cannot see it that way. At ten-thirty, Minky calls him inside to watch the cars from the stoep, over the wall. When the supervisor arrives an hour later, there’s a hullabaloo. You’ve got to maintain standards, he says, especially when you’re training these guys. You can’t have them getting soft on the job.

That’s it, we say to one another afterwards. No more parties. Never again.

In September 1981 it snowed in Johannesburg for the first time in decades. I was working for a mining house in the city. It was company policy that I should sit with my back to the window, to avoid the distractions of blue sky and sunshine, and I might have missed the onset of the snowfall entirely had a colleague in the next office not telephoned and told me to take a look outside.

I tilted the blades of the venetian blinds and watched the flakes sifting down, thinking that it would blow over in a few minutes. One by one, the lighted windows in the surrounding buildings filled with people. Snow falling on Joburg, in spring. It was inconceivable.

At first the snow just speckled the tar and the roofs of the cars in the parking lot in the next block. Then the whole scene whitened. And still it kept falling. People from other departments came into my office, which had one of the better views, giggling and joking. Someone hauled up the blinds so that we could see better, and one of the typists opened a window and caught a few flakes on her palm.

As the snow thickened, you could sense the expectation rising, a wish transmitting itself, binding us into a new community with a single exhilarating thought. Don’t let it stop. Let it go on snowing, let it go on until there are drifts in the streets, let’s be snowed in, just for once.

Soon the windows in some of the other blocks began to go dark and we saw people coming out into the streets and running around like children let out of school early. But my boss was a stickler for regulations and we had to go back to our desks. By the time we were allowed to leave, just half an hour earlier than usual, six inches of snow had fallen, and it showed no sign of stopping.

The snow changed the city miraculously. We were all in it together. There were traffic jams everywhere, but it didn’t matter because they prolonged our time outside. In the streets, white businessmen and black newspaper vendors were throwing snowballs at one another. My double-decker inched its way up Eloff Street. Our bus, our whites-only bus, came under repeated attack from gangs of black snowballers, messengers and cleaners from the office blocks, free to bombard us. They took aim at our windows, so that we would have to open them to clean off the snow if we wanted to restore the view, and then they had a chance to pelt us. After a while some strategist on the upper deck realized that there was snow to be had on the roof of the bus, and, braving a bombardment, leaned out of the window and scraped together enough to fashion a counter-attack. It took an hour and a half to reach the busway on the edge of Joubert Park, where the first snowmen were already standing. But no one minded. Every vehicle had become part of a carnival procession. Every driver, marvelling at the unexpected slipperiness under the wheels, felt out of his element and part of a great experiment.

White kept falling, this cold and foreign substance. People threw colour at one another. ‘You want to be white?’ the newspaper vendors said, ‘Well here it comes. How do you like it?’ And the businessmen said, ‘You think you’re white, chucking snowballs at us? Try this for size.’ And this ‘being white’, this ‘white’ itself, was nothing more than a froth that melted between your fingers or burst apart on a turned shoulder, was something improbable and silly that you could play games with, that did no real harm, that would not last.

Janice and I had an arrangement to meet in Hillbrow. On the bus, I decided that Christmas would come early this year, and so I went into Exclusive’s and bought her a book, the Thames & Hudson Matisse. It was beyond my means–but the snow had made me generous. I wanted to go through the streets with the brightly wrapped package under my arm like a character in an O. Henry story. We met in the Gattopardo coffee shop and I gave her the book, and she gave me a jersey to put on under my jacket. Then we walked and walked, slipping and sliding like everyone else, clutching at strangers to keep from falling.

In Pretoria Street, outside the Ambassador Hotel, a coloured hobo, barefoot in the snow, took me by the arm and said, ‘Don’t worry, boss. It’s just God defrosting His fridge.’

Louise was in Durban when the snow fell. She drove all the way back just to see it, but by the time she arrived most of it had melted. Within a day or two the city had returned to its cool normality and there was nothing left of the snowfall but a few snowmen, fainting away on the grass in Joubert Park like foolish Europeans who had had too much sun.

The cage occupied by Max the Gorilla has the blatant charm of a garden in Meyerton. There is an expanse of rolling kikuyu and a water feature over on the left. The perimeter wall is good red face-brick covered with greenery (I recognize it as the same creeper I have on my own garden wall, with its yellow flowers and string-bean pods). The gates set into the wall are Windsor green. Here and there, clumps of trees and shrubs have been ringed by fences topped with electrified wires; a sign says that gorillas are destructive creatures and that the new plants must be protected until they can establish themselves. The insulators and strands of wire lend the enclosure a surprising sophistication. What suburban landscape is complete without these things? They are as evocative as river pebbles and railway sleepers. It’s as if Max’s keepers have set out to cultivate an environment that parodies our own. It is not even a parody. All he needs is a gazebo and a pool, and any one of the spectators would trade places with him.

Max’s status as a crime fighter has been acknowledged in many ways. After he was shot, members of the public sent him gifts and donated cash so that a ‘burglar-proof’ cage could be built for him. He was declared Newsmaker of the Year by the Johannesburg Press Club. Radio 702 sent a man dressed in a gorilla suit to the Milpark Hospital with a message for Max’s attacker: We’re looking forward to seeing YOU behind bars. Fanie Booysen, a retired zookeeper who had looked after Max for nearly twenty years, came to visit him, and the invalid rose from his sickbed to greet his old friend. The police gave him a bullet-proof vest and tried to recruit him as a reservist.

But the single greatest accolade came when Maxidor, a company that specializes in physical security such as gates and grilles–‘Your home can be the safest place on earth!’–decided to adopt Max. In an official ceremony at the enclosure on 15 April 1999, Max, already embedded in the name of the company and its products, was incorporated into Maxidor as the embodiment of the corporate vision. ‘We view our adoption of Max as a long-term relationship. Max will become part of our family as much as we will become part of his. We commit ourselves to be there for him and to support him through anything. With him we will share the growth and changes of life and society in our country.’

If you visit the Johannesburg Zoo, you will find a notice-board on the viewing platform overlooking Max’s cage, where a couple of clippings about his adventures have been pinned up. My American friend is amazed. Where’s the merchandise? she wants to know. If Max was an American, there would be a multimedia presentation, a souvenir store, a museum. This would be Max-the-Fucking-Gorilla-World.

Piet Retief disarmed me almost from the first word. He had come to my window in the parking lot at Kensington Gardens in Langermann Drive. A sunburnt Afrikaner, with a drinker’s complexion under the tan, obviously a tramp, but holding on to his dignity enough to trim his beard and wash his hands. ‘How are you, sir?’ he asked me.

‘Very well thanks,’ I said unkindly, ‘and how are you?’

‘Can’t complain.’

Can’t complain? Kannie kla nie. It was such a peculiar thing for a man in his situation to say. He meant it too, apparently, for there was no sob story and he did not ask for money. We just spoke about this and that, the weather, the fact that the jacarandas make a mess of the pavements. In the end I gave him some small change anyway, with the usual awareness that the first instalment would set the standard for any future transactions there might be, and he accepted it with an air of mild surprise, as if it were my idea entirely, which strictly speaking it was.

There proved to be many continuations. Piet Retief (as I christened him) and I had the same territory. He was a parking-lot specialist. Perhaps he had figured out that someone packing groceries into the boot of a car feels their privilege rather more sharply than an empty-handed pedestrian. So he would pop up in the parking lot at the Darras Centre, or outside Game at Bruma Lake, or around Queen Street, where I had first encountered him. Less often at the Bez Valley Spar or in Derrick Avenue in Cyrildene. He always wanted to have a chat, so that it felt less like begging, I supposed, and more like borrowing a couple of bucks from a mate. Sometimes, if I reached for my wallet too soon, he would carry on speaking as if he couldn’t see the money in my hand. And he always pocketed whatever I gave him without looking at it in my presence. In this way we colluded in the fantasy that he was not a beggar.

(Just once, he avoided talking to me. I happened upon him in the toilets at the Darras Centre, in the corner next to Capri hairdressers, washing a shirt in the basin. He pretended that he didn’t know me; he threw up a wall of ignorance so impenetrable it made me feel as if I didn’t exist.)

The second or third time I saw him, he asked me how the wife was doing. And the kids? I don’t have children. He must have mistaken me for someone else, another one of his patrons. But I was in a hurry and so I said, ‘Fine, thanks,’ and drove off. Probably I was thinking that it was just part of the spiel. What did it matter? He would not be around for long, he would drift away after a few months, the way hoboes do. Let him think whatever he thought. But he stayed. And he never failed to ask after the people at home–die mense by die huis. There must have been opportunities to break the pattern, but I let them slip.

‘Is the little boy at school yet?’ he asked me once.

‘Ja, he’s in Grade 2 already,’ I replied.

I think that was my first actual invention. In time, there was a little girl too. Still at nursery school, cute as a button. It was pleasant having an imaginary family, for a fraction of the effort and expense demanded by the real thing.

Eventually, I acquired a respectable occupation. ‘How’s the business?’ he asked me, out of the blue. ‘Pretty good,’ I said, ‘considering how badly the economy’s doing.’ ‘Ja well,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter how bad things get, people still like to swim, hey?’ So I went into swimming pools. Later it transpired that I wasn’t actually a contractor myself, but a supplier of pool chemicals. Mr Chlorine.

When I told Branko about all this, in a sentimental hour after Christmas lunch at the folks’, he was outraged. ‘What’s your case? Haven’t you got relatives of your own? Aren’t we good enough for you? You should be ashamed of yourself, lying to this poor sod. Piet Retief…Jesus. If I bump into him–I know exactly who you mean, I’ve seen him a dozen times and never gave him a cent–I’m going to tell him the truth.’

‘You keep out of it,’ I said, ‘it’s none of your business. In any case, half the time I think he was on to me from the beginning. He’s invented more of my life story than I have. He’s playing games with me, I’m the one you should feel sorry for.’

‘Kafka,’ says Elias Canetti, ‘truly lacks any writer’s vanity, he never boasts, he cannot boast. He sees himself as small and proceeds in small paces.’ Whereas Canetti, by his own account, is ambitious: ‘I cannot become modest; too many things burn me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.’

Canetti is also at his best in small paces. Raising an unexpected possibility, asking ‘What if?’ in a quiet voice: ‘A city with secret street-names; policemen tell you where you are if they trust you.’ The more ambitious he becomes, the less persuasive he is. Crowds and Power, the compulsive enterprise to which he devoted much of his creative energy for a quarter of a century, is his most impressive and least engaging book. It seems always like a monument to a vain cause. For his theory of the crowd to gain the currency of Freud’s theory of the individual, people would have to be as interested in their relations to the larger group as they are in the workings of their own psyches. In spite of its significance in the history of the twentieth century, which Canetti set out to grab ‘by the throat’, and its persistence into the twenty-first, the crowd has begun to seem like an archaic phenomenon. We are becoming fields of disparate beings, according to my friend Leon, the dotcom man, and we no longer need the proximity of others, the press of elbows and shoulders, to confirm our belonging.

Herman Wald’s Leaping Impala sculpture was installed in Ernest Oppenheimer Park in 1960. Eighteen animals in full flight, a sleigh-ride arc of hoof and horn twenty metres long, a ton and a half of venison in bronze. In the sixties and seventies, fountains splashed the flanks of the stampeding buck, while office workers ate their lunch-time sandwiches on whites-only benches. Although the park deteriorated along with the inner city in the following decades, until it came to be used primarily as a storage depot by hawkers, the herd of impala seemed set to survive the century unscathed. But towards the end of 1999, poachers started carving away at it, lopping heads and legs with blowtorches and hacksaws. At the end of October, a civic-minded hawker, who arrived at the park to find a man stuffing two severed heads into a bag, called the police. They arrested the thief, but he was subsequently deported as an illegal alien and the heads disappeared without trace. A fortnight later, an entire impala was removed from the park by four men, who told security guards they were transporting it to another park. Stock thieves. A week after that, another ten heads were lopped. Police later rescued one of these heads from a Boksburg scrap-metal dealer. A leg was found in a pawn shop in the CBD.

Johannesburg has an abundance of wildlife, and the poachers have taken full advantage of the open season. They’ve bagged a bronze steenbok from Wits University; a horse from outside the library in Sandton (first docking the beast, to see if anyone would mind, and then hacking off its head like Mafiosi); a pair of eagles nesting near the Stock Exchange; and another steenbok in the Botanical Gardens at Emmarentia. This little buck, which had been donated to the Gardens by the sculptor Ernest Ullmann in 1975, was taken in 1998. The head turned up afterwards in a scrapyard and was returned to the scene of the slaughter, where it was mounted on a conical pedestal like a trophy, along with a plaque explaining the circumstances of its loss and recovery. But before long the head was stolen for the second time and now the pedestal is empty.

Of course, urban poachers are not just hungry for horseflesh, any old iron will do. They are especially fond of the covers on manholes and water mains. When Kensington Electrical Suppliers took over Tile City (the cobbler with the goatee had to move on) they painted the covers on their pavement bright yellow to deter thieves, but the logic was flawed: now thieves could spot them from a hundred metres.

Elsewhere in the city, the council has begun to replace the stolen iron covers with blue plastic ones. These bits of plastic tell the scrap-metal thieves to go ahead and help themselves as the authorities have given up on protecting their resources. The council could wrest back the initiative by lifting all the remaining iron at once and selling it off. They could apply the same argument the Botswana government uses for the controlled sale of ivory. Get the jump on the poachers by selling the booty yourself.

The urban poacher is a romantic figure. In unequal cities, where those who have little must survive somehow by preying on those who have more, the poacher scavenging a meal from under the nose of the gamekeeper may be admired for his ingenuity and daring. AbdouMaliq Simone: ‘There are young people in Johannesburg who spend twelve and more hours a day simply passing through different neighbourhoods, different parts of the city, seeing what can be taken easily, but also running into others like themselves, who pass along information and impressions, sometimes teaming up to do “jobs”, sometimes steering each other in the wrong direction.’

Colour is not the strong point of Kensington Electrical Suppliers. The proprietors painted the building charcoal in an effort to discourage graffiti, but it served as a very effective ground for certain colour schemes and before long the walls were splashed with drawings again. After enduring the insult for a couple of years, they painted over all the graffiti and added a sign: these premises are under 24-hour surveillance. Is that really a camera? A rickety contraption has been suspended from the gutter, a Heath Robinson scarecrow.

Chas is halfway across the garden, fishing in the pocket of his pants for the key of the cottage, before he sees the burglar on the window ledge, silhouetted against the sunroom panes, caught in the act. The dramatic backlighting of yellow squares on a black grid, the looming, foreshortened figure, arms and legs spread to brace himself against the glass; afterwards, when he tells the story, Chas will be reminded of a Soviet poster depicting the rise of the proletariat.

(The sunroom is a soft spot, everyone says so, including the man who installs security gates.)

For a moment they both stand frozen, and then the burglar leaps down and rushes at him, raising a knife in his hand. Chas trips and falls back on the lawn beneath the washing line, and the man stoops over him, shoulders hunched, slashing the air in front of his face. This ostentatious calligraphy still hovers, luminous and pulsing, preventing Chas from stirring as effectively as if he had been pinned to the earth by the blade, even after the knifeman withdraws, which he does slowly, when no resistance is offered, with a nonplussed air, towards the garden wall.

(Another soft spot, everyone says, lapsing into the technical language of security, the wall isn’t high enough, the perimeter can be breached.)

On top of the wall the burglar pauses, as if he has forgotten what he is doing here, and calls down:

‘What time is it?’

‘Half past seven,’ Chas guesses, and these ordinary words stick to the roof of his mouth.

With a satisfied grunt, the man jumps down into the street.

Later, beneath the arrowheads of arum leaves, we find the monkey wrench the burglar dropped, a chunk of rusted iron as long as his arm, weighing all of three kilograms, with a jaw that can stretch to ten centimetres. A hyperbolic restatement of something useful. We keep it beside the fireplace, less as a trophy than a measure of everyday abnormality.

A guard is waiting for us at the end of the row of parked cars, semaphoring with his torch. We coast down the avenue towards him, over a familiar surface of wet tar, pushed up into humps and ridges by the roots of the trees, acorns crunching under the tyres. He directs me into a parking place and then retreats to a well-trained, discreet distance. His uniform is black, almost military, with a leather bandolier over his shoulder, combat boots, regimental flashes on the sleeves. There was a shower earlier and the air still smells of wet earth and trimmed foliage. On the garden wall, the ivy has been trained along a lattice of wires to form diamond patterns against the white plaster. I pull the little lever next to the seat to open the boot, and Minky gets out to fetch the present and the bottle of wine, while I engage the Gorilla.

‘Good evening, sir,’ says the guard as I join Minky on the pavement. ‘My name is Sifiso and I’ll be looking after your car this evening. Johnson will show you the way.’ He casts the beam of the torch on his colleague, waiting twenty metres away. I see that Johnson has a pistol on his hip. Top Flight Security: We mean business.

‘Damn, I forgot to take the price off the wine,’ Minky says.

‘Give it here. You’ll break a nail.’

We go along the pavement towards Johnson, who is smiling genially. I scratch at the sticky tag with my thumbnail.

‘Should I give them something?’

‘When we go.’

‘If the car’s still here.’

‘Exactly.’

An enormous drop of water explodes against the lens of my glasses.

‘Good evening, sir. Good evening, madam.’ He unlocks the wrought-iron gate, ushers us through, locks the gate again behind us. Then he leads us up the driveway, shining the torch backwards, expertly. ‘Watch your step, it’s slippery here.’ Minky, who is wearing heels for the occasion, takes my arm. The beam slides over bricks, leaves, the shiny toes of our shoes.

At the end of the drive, there is a gap in the creeper-clad wall. He passes through that and stands aside. ‘It’s not this door here, but that one over there, in the white wall. Just follow the path. Enjoy the party.’

There is music on the air, laughter, talk. The path is a string of slate islands in a glistening sea of lawn. We go along it, hand in hand, towards the murmur of hidden voices.

Laden with groceries, I push open the door from the garage into the garden with my foot and take two steps along the back path. Stop dead as a stranger appears at the corner of the house. My height more or less, my age, neatly dressed in a leather jacket, jeans, three or four days’ stubble on his cheeks.

Before I can speak, he points urgently to the garden wall and says: ‘Soontoe!’ That way! as if I am late for an important appointment or he wants to get me out of harm’s way. I look at the wall, which is blank, I look at him. He is earnest, healthy, tense. I can see the ball of his fist in his jacket pocket.

‘Wat maak jy hier?’

‘Daar was ’n dief, baas.’

It is mid-morning, sunlight pools like oil on the black leather, the garden is damp but the clouds have lifted. I feel my heart beating near my collarbone, but I am not afraid. We are having a reasonable conversation, chatting like neighbours. If my neighbours called me baas.

‘What do you mean: There was a thief?’

‘A tsotsi was stealing here. I am chasing him away.’

He gestures again towards the wall. Now I understand: the thief went that way.

‘I find that hard to believe.’ My tone is more than civil, it is stuffy, schoolmasterly. ‘But thanks all the same.’

‘I have saved everything.’

‘Yes, thank you very much. And now you should be going.’

We need to keep up this pretence. If we can go on lying to one another, and more importantly, believing one another, everything will be fine. Neither of us will have to do what the situation demands of him. I should drop the groceries and run out into the street, yelling for help. He should point a gun at me. Does he have one?

‘The door is over there.’

He goes up the steps to the stoep. We are still talking about tsotsis, about how bad they are, and how it is a good thing to chase them and save everything. I follow him at a distance, there’s really no rush, across the stoep, down the front path to the street door. He cannot open the catch. I put the shopping bags down and he stands aside so that I can open it for him. ’Seblief baas, dankie baas. Remembering his pleases and thank yous. He goes out.

The instant the door shuts between us, the pretence falls away. He runs down the road and I run into the house. There are goods scattered in the lounge, clothes, hi-fi equipment trailing cables, there are splashes of blood in the hallway. The fiction that the thief and I have just spun together bamboozles me: it must be the blood of the tsotsi who went over the wall. Caught redhanded. Tangled in this story, I follow the trail into the kitchen. Stop dead as another stranger turns towards me. He is in the corner behind the Morris chair, against the windows, where I cannot see him properly.

Hemmed in here, with my possessions stacked on the kitchen table and blood on the floor, there is no room for pretence. My skin turns to parchment, the wires in my joints snap. He lets out a startled cry. There is no drama, only ballet, a fear-filled pas de deux. He springs out from behind the chair, brandishing something in his hand, and rushes at me. We grapple and fall, I’m trying to fend off his hand, I cannot see what’s in it, we tumble over one another until he thrusts me away and I rattle sideways, try to get to my feet and stand on something slippery–it is Minky’s silk shirt, her blue silk shirt–half fall under the kitchen table, scramble up again to my knees, knocking over a chair. If he had a knife, he would have plunged it into me, surely, he would have run out of the front door, but instead he has leapt back behind the Morris chair and crouched down. I crouch behind the table. We gaze at one another like two cornered animals.

Then my legs begin to work, I stand up and back out, and close the door, try to lock it, find that the lock is broken. The threshold smells of the thief, as rank as if a cat had sprayed against the doorpost. Perhaps he has pissed himself.

The Flying Squad’s number is taped to the telephone table. I dial it, begin speaking in gasps, realize I have reached an answering machine: Please be patient. Your call will be answered. I drop the instrument and run back to the door, try the lock again with trembling fingers, but it won’t engage. Bloody palmprints on the frame. I drag an armchair in front of the door, run back to the telephone.

A person now.

‘I want to report. a burglary.’

‘Is the burglary in progress, sir?’

‘One of them. is in the kitchen. The other one. has run away.’

‘Are they still there? Is the burglary in progress?’

I see the thief stumbling across the lawn below the window. How stupid of me! The front door was locked when I came in, so they must have broken in through the back. He must have cut himself on the kitchen window. The first guy steered me away from that corner to give his accomplice time to escape. But why has it taken him so long? He’s been crouching there in terror, that’s why. He’s as scared as I am.

There is a walking stick in the umbrella stand at the door, which Minky brought back from Namibia, a heavy thing with a carved handle. I grab it and run outside. The thief is struggling to get up on the garden wall. It is high here, and after the monkey-wrench man we made it even higher, with metal palisades and spikes. He is scarcely more than a teenager, slight, with a yellow canvas hat on his head, a silly round kwaito hat like a toddler’s. He sees me coming, keeps on scrabbling against the surface of the wall. I hit him. He wards off the blow with a raised arm, yelps, scrambles into the shrubbery. He has a bloody shirt wrapped around his right hand, it is my shirt. I hit him again. The stick glances off his shoulder and the carved knob jams among vines and trellises. While I’m trying to work it free, he gets up on the wall, straddles the palisades. I leave the stick and grab the cuff of his trousers, pinning his leg between the slats. He plunges over, one tackie goes flying, I hear him thump down on the pavement outside.

He will go down the hill to Bez Valley like his pal. I retrieve the stick, run to the garage, fling up the door. There he is on the opposite pavement, limping in his bare foot. I am going to beat the living daylights out of him.

No, I have gone too far. It’s like this: I see the thief crossing the lawn below the window. I grab the stick from the stand at the door and rush outside. He is on top of the wall, straddling the palisades. I wave the stick at him and he plunges over.

And even this is too far.

The story is going around that burglars use a secret language of litter to mark houses where there are easy pickings. In this code, a red Coca-Cola bottle top means a place is poorly defended: there is garden furniture to be had, the windows at the back are not burglar-proofed, the beware of the dog sign on the gate was left behind by a previous tenant. Whereas if the place is flagged with white, say a scrap of plastic caught on an acacia thorn at the back gate, you’d better watch your step: there are sensors in the garden, the old lady has a gun.

‘The police say there’s no truth in it,’ I tell Branko. ‘But residents are advised to keep the pavements outside their homes clean and tidy anyway to discourage loiterers and petty criminals.’

My brother snorts into his macchiato.

‘It’s hard to imagine how such a code would work in Troyeville,’ I go on. ‘There’s so much crap in the streets, you’d have to be an expert to decipher it. What do they call them?’

‘Garbologists.’

‘That’s it. Maybe this rumour was started by one of the garbologists at Pikitup. Part of their economy drive.’

Branko perks up, I don’t know whether it’s the coffee or the conversation. ‘Interesting notion, that every rumour goes back to an original source, that there’s a Typhoid Mary at the root of every cockamamie urban legend.’

‘It would be someone like you,’ I say. ‘Someone obsessed with litterbugs.’

‘You can scoff,’ he says, ‘but you’d be a different person if you moved out here. It’s so much more agreeable. You should try it.’

We are having coffee at Sandton Square. This is our third venue since my brother moved north. We tried the Europa in Norwood, but you couldn’t hear yourself think with the traffic noise, and the Brazilian in Rivonia Road felt like a cheap imitation, even though it had a conveyor belt.

‘There’s a unit going in the complex.’

‘God forbid.’

‘It’s a prime site, very private, and not too close to the wall.’

‘I would die out here,’ I say. ‘I need the buzz.’

‘I thought writers needed peace and quiet.’

‘Not everyone wants earplugs. Dickens couldn’t work without the noisy rhythm of London outside his window.’

‘Dickens again. Christ, I wish you’d read some Mayhew instead. Better yet, some Auster or some DeLillo. We’re already in the twenty-first century and you’re still harking after charabancs and gaslight. Get with it, man. The clock’s ticked over and you’re two centuries behind the times.’

He rattles the metal catch on the back gate every third or fourth day. When I lift the curtain at the bedroom window to see who’s there, he shows his face between the iron bars of the gate like an identity card. He used to say his name, but now he has fallen back on this visual shorthand. Even in the gloom, I recognize his white peaked cap. I go out and let the money fall into his cupped palm. He squints at me through the bars and drops a little curtsey. Neither of us says a word. We have been reduced to a simple mechanism of supply and demand. Occasionally, I spy on him as he leaves, counting the coins, stepping out quite confidently. I think he is pretending to be a backward rustic to keep my sympathy.

‘Hello.’

‘Glynis here. Listen, what’s the name of your security company again?’

‘It’s N.I.S.S. What’s up?’

‘Have you got their number?’

‘I’ve got the emergency number here, there’s a separate one for admin. Are you thinking of joining?’

‘I’ll look it up in the book. N.I.S.S.? Sorry, can’t chat.’

And she hangs up.

A week later, she phones to apologize. She was in a bit of a flap, she says. The neighbour’s charlady had overheard some dodgy characters plotting to burgle her house and came to warn her. Panic stations. All she could think of was getting a security company, fast. N.I.S.S. arrived within the hour to put up their signs, although they were really busy and could only install the alarm a few days later. In the meantime, they promised to send a patrol car around from time to time. Still, she hardly slept a wink until the alarm was put in.

‘And how’s that working out?’

‘Bit of a relief. At least we don’t feel we have to defend our property with our bare hands any more. On the other hand, it keeps going off for no reason and scaring the hell out of us. N.I.S.S. says it’s the cats or the fridge or something. Teething troubles.’

Despite the alarm, Glynis is jittery. She wants to put her house on the market, but Sean talks her out of it. ‘Everyone keeps saying Troyeville’s going downhill,’ he says. ‘What are they talking about? It’s always been at the bottom of the fucking hill. Just think about it for a minute. It was fucked when I was a kid, in an Afrikaans sort of way. It was fucked when I was a teenager, in a more Portuguese sort of way. And now here I am, fully grown, surrounded by Angolans and Nigerians–and guess what, it’s still fucked. It’s just a different shade of fucked.’

I remember: one Saturday in the eighties, it must have been, Liz and I were walking in Troyeville. We passed some row houses in Nourse Street that appeared to be empty. There was no gate, so we went onto the stoep of one place and peered through the window, cupping our hands over our eyes to shade the glass. In the middle of the room looking back at us was a tiny man with long dirty hair hanging down from under a Stetson, wearing denim jeans tucked into cowboy boots, holding a knife in his left hand. The knife seemed disproportionately large, like a pantomime dagger, but only because the man himself was so small, almost a midget. Scarcely had our eyes picked out the figure in the gloom, had our minds acknowledged what our eyes perceived, than the little cowpoke burst through the front door, rabid and enraged, cursing and raving in Portuguese, spraying spittle, flourishing the knife. We scrambled to the pavement, falling over one another, and fled back to Yeoville where we felt safe.

100

The house was run-down, set too close to the street on a busy corner and overlooked by blocks of flats. It was the sort of place you would expect to be rented out cheaply to students. We lived in it for six months with our foam mattresses and vinyl beanbags, bookshelves of brick and board, overflowing ashtrays and dog-eared paperbacks. We were white kids from middle-class and professional homes. To obscure the extent of our privilege, we were obliged to practise carelessness and cultivate squalor.

The best thing about the property was its garden. A profusion of shrubs and creepers and flowers made a soft green island in which the house nestled, cut off from the concrete and glass of Berea. You could sit out there on a rickety bench and imagine you were in the countryside or the suburbs. The noise from the traffic was filtered to a muffled rumble through leaf and stem and green shadow. It was a garden that resisted what little maintenance we were inclined to offer. It simply grew and overgrew and fed on itself. To enjoy it, you waded through grass or forced a path in the undergrowth to a place where you could sit and smoke and talk.

A man lived in the room at the back. He came with the house, and our lease with the agent stipulated that he could not be evicted. Presumably he had been abandoned there by the owner to keep an eye on things. A caretaker. We hardly ever saw him. During the week he worked long hours at the General Hospital as a cleaner; on weekends he stayed in his room and drank. From time to time you would see him weaving in with a plastic bag from Solly Kramer’s.

After we had lived in this house for four or five months, we had a party. The following morning, as Ivor and Dave and I cleared away the debris, it occurred to one of us that the caretaker might want the leftover liquor, a few bottles of dubious spirits and a five-litre flask of Kellerprinz that was three quarters full. Roma White, bottled heartburn.

The caretaker was in his room. He came round to the side of the house, to the small stoep that opened off the lounge, where the ruins of the bar stood, a trestle table full of greasy paper plates and bottles. He was in his underpants, still a little drunk from the night before, his eyes unfocused. We gave him the Kellerprinz. It was an archetypal exchange.

He squatted at our feet in the sunshine. He was a parody of a servile tribesman in the presence of white authority, desperate and abject; and we were parodies of white authority, middle-class kids in scruffy clothes, well fed and embarrassed. He stuck his forefinger through the eye on the neck of the bottle, pressed its mouth to his own and tilted its fat belly up on the length of his forearm. He drank until the bottle was empty. He drank it down in one gulping flow, as if we might change our minds at any moment or had asked him to return the empty bottle immediately. I had never seen anything like it. He poured the wine into himself as if through a funnel, like a man quenching a fire, or rather fuelling one, stoking something in his tissues that dare not burn out. I had been taught that holding your liquor was one of the manly accomplishments. I was filled with appalled admiration.

When he had drained the bottle he lowered it to the ground and sat there dazed. Several times he tried to rise, but the weight of the bottle kept him anchored. His knees would unfold him as far as the length of his arm allowed, before he dropped back onto his haunches. He went up and down like a pump. Ivor and I disengaged his finger from the eye. Then we each took an arm and steered him towards his room. There was nothing to him, he felt like a husk, and I fancied I could hear the booze sloshing inside him.

His room faced the courtyard where we sometimes sat in the mornings, eating our Jungle Oats, smoking the first cigarette of the day, feeling that we were in charge of our own destinies. In there it was dank as a well. A flare of soot in one whitewashed corner showed where a Primus stove had given up the ghost. There was none of the comforting clutter of servants’ rooms. You looked in vain for a newspaper-lined tea chest, a scuffed suitcase, a zinc bath–those familiar objects that let you press your conscience to the warm memory of a nanny’s back.

In the middle of the room was a bed. Not an ordinary bed raised up on bricks, but a hospital bed with a black metal frame that could be tilted up at either end, with winches and slings and pulleys for splints and traction and burns, and rubber wheels on the ends of its long legs. The bed was wide and high, and it threw the small room out of scale, dragging down the ceiling and pulling the walls closer.

We took the caretaker as far as his door. Astonishingly he could still walk by himself and haul himself onto the mattress. The bed was tilted up at the head and the foot. He lay down in this obtuse angle on his back. When we looked in that evening he hadn’t moved. He was lying there cracked, folded in half like a banknote in a wallet. But the next morning when we looked in again, half expecting to find him dead, he had gone to work.

In the end, he repaid us handsomely for all our kindness. Four of us came home from university one afternoon to find that he had tidied away the garden. It was gone. He had uprooted everything it would not have taken an axe to fell.

We sat outside in Dave’s Volksie for a long time, looking in disbelief at the bare earth, raked smooth from fence to fence, and the pile of dead plants as high as the roof. We laughed and laughed, but it did no good. The house was ruined. Without the garden it looked ugly and unloved. It was obvious that we would have to move.

101

Tammy is sitting at J.B. Rivers in the Hyde Park shopping centre on a Friday afternoon, drinking a glass of dry white wine, waiting for her husband Joshua. They are going to see The Truman Show at last. She is eavesdropping on the tables near her: some white twenty-somethings on one side, making holiday plans, and some black twenty-somethings on the other, discussing property prices and unit trusts.

Tammy has the journalist’s habit of seeing feature articles everywhere. She whiles away the time composing an arresting opening line: ‘Gold always looks better on brown skin.’ Crude. Rather: ‘There is a certain kind of chunky gold jewellery that looks better on brown skin.’ Another angle: ‘The yuppies and buppies might not be sharing tables yet in the happy hour at Hyde Park, but they do share the chunky dah dah watches and strappy blah blah sandals.’ She really ought to brush up on her branding. The right labels lend a knowing sophistication to this kind of piece. She’s always busking, looking things up in Elle or asking Josh, it’s always second-hand. After the movie, she should do some window-shopping for designer colour.

As she’s turning the phrases over in her head, chunky this, strappy that–Blahnik, that’s what she was thinking–she fingers the rosary of her keys. Front door…security gate…bedroom door…and comes to a key she’s never seen before. An odd-looking key with a black loop and a thin brass stem. In addition to the standard bit it has a small blade like a skeg sticking out at right angles on one side. It looks less like the key of a house or a car than something you would use to arm a bomb. For the life of her, she cannot identify it. The immobilizer is on a special ring. The postbox is this one…

She is still puzzling over it when Josh arrives. He glances at it, says it’s probably something at her mother’s place–she’s got the spares to her mom’s townhouse–and then he hurries her off to the Metro. He always makes her sit through the ads, tells her to pay attention.

All through The Truman Show Tammy is thinking about the key. She knows it’s not her mother’s, she keeps those separate. But the next afternoon she drives over to Craighall Park anyway. Her mother doesn’t recognize the key either. They try it in the obvious places, they check it against her mother’s bunch, they even get out the spare keys in the old cutlery tray in the kitchen dresser. No match.

A few months later, Minky and I are introduced to Tammy and Joshua at a dinner party. Over dessert, Tammy tells this story. Then she takes out her bunch and shows us the mysterious black key. Her keys are passed around the table. At first, there are tipsy jokes about alien abductions and love nests, but soon the conversation turns serious. It’s an unsettling idea, already people are fidgeting in their pockets, where their own keys are beginning to weigh more heavily.

We offer logical explanations. The most persuasive, I think, is Leon’s. He says someone at the garage must have put the key on her bunch the last time the car was in for a service; perhaps they parked the car outside in the street and used a security device of some kind, and then forgot to remove the key afterwards. She should call them up and ask. Or it might have been a careless locksmith. When last did she have a key cut?

A woman whose name I’ve forgotten, a therapist apparently, says it’s obvious Tammy put the key on the ring herself and knows exactly what it’s for, but is repressing this knowledge. It must be something unpleasant. Does she have a gun-safe? the therapist asks. She has one herself and the key is weird. She takes out her own bunch and shows it to us.

This theory doesn’t win much support. But there are a few takers for the idea that the thing is a hoax. Someone’s playing a joke on her. A colleague at the paper perhaps? Dave suggests that someone might have put it there with a more serious purpose, to provoke some thought about security. Or rather insecurity. Less a practical joke than an object lesson. By then half of us have our keys out and are picking over them. Even Liz, who’s been laughing the whole thing off, fetches a bunch from her handbag in the lounge, which proves to be bigger than anyone else’s, and names them one by one, looking distractedly at their profiles as if they are the members of an extended family.

On the way home, Minky says she thinks Tammy has made the whole thing up. It’s some sort of party game. That bizarre moment, when everyone stopped talking and just sat there, hunched over the table, picking through their keys in the candlelight…She’ll write an article about us. You watch.

102

‘A week ago,’ Lesley says, ‘someone dumped a pile of rubbish on the pavement in Bezuidenhout Street. If it was a small pile, I would swallow my pride, go out there with a bag and clean it up. But you’d need a bakkie to take it away. It’s too big for one person to manage. Now it’s come to the notice of everyone looking for a place to drop their shit. So the pile keeps growing.’

Supper on the back stoep of her house in Ellis Street. A cool, clear sky through the vine leaves of the pergola, a warming yellow light from the open doors of the lounge, from buttercup walls dotted with Amnesty prints in black and white, and Ndebele beadwork in full colour. On the table, summer-squash soup from the vegetable patch. Earlier we browsed through the herb garden, picking leaves to crush under our noses, and those sweet-and-sour juices are still on our fingertips. Lemon thyme, marjoram, mint. The sage in the butter sauce came from the garden too.

This is a farewell dinner.

‘You’re the last person I thought would emigrate,’ Minky says. ‘You’ve always been such a…South African.’

‘It’s time,’ she answers with a laugh. ‘Signs and omens, things unplugging themselves, cutting me off. The TV is broken. My cellphone has been stolen. Two nights ago someone broke into the shed and stole the gardening tools.’

The ties to people and places, the bonds of work, friendship, conviction we thought would have to be hacked through with a will, have loosened too. The writing, the photography, the filmmaking on working people, colonial history, Aids, the political work, the teaching, the activism, none of it can hold her. She no longer believes she can make a difference; or rather, she no longer believes in the difference she can make. She has lost faith, she is afraid of living alone, of growing old in this violent city.

Under the carport, against the wall of the house, stands a row of seedlings in small pots. She gives us a chilli plant and instructions on how to care for it. Now we know what this evening will taste like in years to come. As we drive back to Troyeville, Minky holds the plant on her lap, a pale sprig sticking up out of the damp soil, with two curved leaves like the flukes of an anchor.

103

As it turned out, Isaac Mofokeng, the man who shot Max the Gorilla, was no lovable buffoon, he was a violent rapist. Earlier in July, before his encounter with Max turned both of them into media celebrities, he broke into a Johannesburg house where a young woman and her boyfriend were relaxing after a shower. He abducted the couple at gunpoint and drove them to Soweto, where he locked the man in the boot of the car and raped the woman in a field. When he was brought to trial, the charge of malicious damage to property arising from the shooting at the Zoo paled beside the other charges of robbery and rape. Just a week before Max was adopted by Maxidor, the Johannesburg Regional Court sentenced Mofokeng to forty years in jail.

104

The caged man, the one who paces up and down outside the Gem Supermarket like a creature in captivity, begs from time to time, in an offhand way, as if it does not really matter to him. He’ll beg for a while, breaking off his walking to ask for money in a low voice, and then he becomes more and more engrossed in his own rhythm, carried away by it, until he stops accosting people altogether.

One Sunday morning, I was spying on him when he asked a young couple for money, and the woman emptied the change from her purse into his palm. He examined her offering curiously. Before she could walk off, he began to pick through it and give the smaller denominations back to her. After a moment’s puzzlement, she held out her hand to accept the rejects. She seemed fascinated by the exchange: his raw fingers picking the coppers out of the pile and laying them on her soft white palm, occasionally dropping a ten-or twenty-cent piece that took his fancy in the breast pocket of his shirt. I imagine that he would have winnowed the entire handful, but the woman’s companion, who had been edging impatiently towards his car at the kerb, suddenly realized how improper it was, how ungrateful and insulting, strode back, struck the caged man’s wrist so that coins flew everywhere, grabbed her arm and hurried her away.

105

Ag no, it’s Piet Retief. I’ve come up behind him on Kitchener Avenue in the late afternoon, labouring along towards the Darras with all his possessions slung over his shoulders in two enormous shopping bags. I could cross the street to avoid him, but surely it won’t be necessary, he’ll never keep up with me, not with those bags. So I just greet him as I pass and pick up my pace a little, meaning to leave him behind as quickly as possible. He lengthens his stride at once and falls in beside me, asking as always about the wife and kids. I offer a few brusque replies and step out even faster, but still he matches me, heaving the bags up on his shoulders every few metres. I cannot shake him. After two blocks I relent. No point in killing myself.

‘Where’ve you been?’ I’m not used to seeing him so far from his base at the Darras.

‘No, I’ve been to the bioscope by the Carlton. Do you know it?’

‘The Kine Centre?’

‘Ja. For seven rand fifty you can watch films all day. Only at six everyone must go outside and then you must pay to come back in again. Anycase, it gets boring afterwards because they show the same films over and over.’

‘Sounds like a bargain.’

‘They chip you two beers as well. Long Toms.’

‘What did you see?’

‘There was one about the war.’

‘That’s great.’

‘And there was a porn show about some people in Las Vegas. On honeymoon.’

So we stroll on, side by side, shooting the breeze.

106

I have to speed on Stewart’s Drive, especially at night. There’s something in the powdery light on the roadway, the old rock of the ridge raked by the headlights, the arches in the stone parapet. Whether or not it was built by Italian prisoners of war (who are given credit for every decent piece of stonework in the country) this is a seaside wall, and it makes you long for water in the dip below, where the lights of Bez Valley and Kensington are flickering. My spirits lift, ascending or descending, and I put my foot down, leaning into the corners a little harder than usual.

I am in this mood one night, one early morning, as I drop down into the Valley from Yeoville. I have been drinking at Rumours and I am on my way home with a skinful of jazz. I follow the curve around the playground, accelerate to the first sharp bend and barrel through that. As the bend straightens, my lights pick out a motorcycle lying on its side in the middle of the road. The headlight is burning, pointing south. Plenty of time to brake. I ease up to the bike and go round it, looking for the rider, expecting to see him sprawled somewhere beyond the machine, but nothing. I roll down to the bottom of the hill.

I have half a mind to leave this problem for the next person and go straight home, but of course I cannot. At Terrace–Daisy de Melker’s old address, it occurs to me–I turn around and go back up the hill. The fallen bike looks desolate. This time I approach more slowly. Still no sign of the rider or anyone else. Now I have no option but to go to the top of Stewart’s Drive again to turn around.

As I swing into the U-turn my headlights sweep across familiar things: a tree branch poking through a wall (instead of lopping it off when he raised the wall, the builder decided to cement it into the structure) and a painted slogan–BRON YOU BISCUIT. It is impossible to turn from Stewart’s Drive into Jolly Street without seeing this graffiti and wondering who and why. It has been amusing me for years, but the vanished motorcyclist has cast an uncanny light over the moment and now the dead branch reaching through the wall and the dripping message chill me. I coast back down the hill for the second time.

Another car is coming up. We both stop thirty or forty paces from the bike. We are Joburg Samaritans, wary and wily, and not particularly good. We are waiting for a sign. Finally, I get out of the car, leaving the engine running, and take a couple of steps down the hill.

Someone gets out of the other car and calls to me: ‘What’s going on?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Did you knock this guy down?’

‘No ways, he saw his arse all by himself.’

We both take a few more steps towards the bike. I can smell petrol. My neck is bristling.

‘Hang on a second. Don’t I know you?’

‘Christ! Nick. Is that you?’

‘Vlad? I don’t fucking believe it. What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Same as you.’

I haven’t seen Nicholas for years. We reach the bike at the same time and shake hands. For a moment everything seems normal, and then it seems more bizarre than ever. Like something out of Twin Peaks, he says, and I agree. In that spirit, we do some sleuthing: the engine of the bike is still warm, so the accident couldn’t have happened too long ago. And of course the headlight is still burning. No skid marks. No sign of a collision. Key in the ignition.

‘But where the fuck is this guy?’

‘Perhaps he was thrown over the parapet.’

‘Have you got a torch?’

‘No.’

We hunt up and down along the stone wall, calling into the darkness, but get no response. We look up into the trees. We look down into the veld. In all this time, there is no sign of another vehicle, coming or going. Eventually, we have to get on with our lives, there’s only so much you can do in the middle of the night. We leave the bike lying where it is, shake hands again, and go our separate ways.

At home, I call the Yeoville police station and tell them the story. It sounds like an urban legend, even to me, but they say they’ll send someone.

‘Be sure to take a torch.’

The bike is still there the next day and the day after, standing upright on the pavement. Then it’s gone.

107

Someone turns up a video clip on a computer in the Salaries Department at police headquarters in Pretoria, showing Nelson Mandela’s face morphing into that of a gorilla. President Mandela brushes the insult aside. We should not be unduly alarmed, he says, by the fact that there are racists among us. But Commissioner Jackie Selebi is furious. Although it is just eight months since he called Sergeant Mothiba a gorilla, or rather, a chimpanzee, the Commissioner says that racism will not be tolerated in the South African Police Services. ‘The employee responsible for this show of utter disrespect will face the harshest disciplinary measures permissible in terms of the regulations.’

108

Blenheim Street is a thoroughfare from Roberts to Kitchener, and people coming down the hill from the shops drop their peels and papers in our gutters. But when Eddie lived at No. 19, the pavement outside was always perfectly clean. He tidied up in his own way, by punting the litter downhill. The street rises steeply there, and so a cooldrink tin usually needed just one stiff kick to send it trundling off his turf. A milk carton might have to be harried all the way to the border. Eddie’s law was precise: as soon as a piece of rubbish crossed into a neighbour’s territory, it ceased to concern him.

Although Eddie is gone now, gravity and summer thunderstorms still ensure that most of the litter in Blenheim Street washes up on my doorstep further down the hill. There is no point in being angry with the forces of nature. From time to time, I go out with a garbage bag in one hand and a gardening glove on the other and pick everything up. In my lazy moments, I follow Eddie’s example and boot a crust of bread or an orange peel or an empty mageu carton down the storm-water drain.

After a storm, everything is transformed. The cannas burst into wet flames, the dark scents of the earth seep out. Eddie’s gladioli, the ones grown from the bulbs he gave me, pop magically from the clean cuff of the air. The sound of water rushing in the storm-water drains makes me grateful that I am neither on top of the hill, nor down in the valley, but somewhere in between.

109

‘Could you bring me a loaf of bread?’

‘Sure.’

Eddie and I were chatting at his garden gate. I was going to the shop anyway and it was a small favour to ask, but he had never imposed on me before and so this signalled a new stage in our friendship. He gave me the warm coins from his pocket.

‘What shall I get you then?’

‘A government loaf thanks, brown, unsliced.’

The bakery at the Gem Supermarket produces round loaves and square loaves, hamburger buns and hotdog rolls, baps we identify as Italian or Portuguese, wholewheat or rye. On this day, the bins were brimming with every option except the standard brown loaf. I chose the next best thing, a wholewheat loaf with a seeded crust, and went back down the hill.

When he saw what was in the packet, Eddie’s face fell. He looked so disappointed that I offered to take the loaf myself and give him his money back.

‘No no, it’s fine, really, one loaf is as good as the next.’

But I had failed a test. It was the last favour he ever asked of me.

110

‘I am selling these.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Very cheap. Only ten rands.’

‘I don’t need one, thanks.’

‘Must I be a criminal?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I can be a criminal.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You people, you say we mustn’t do crime, so we try to sell things. Then you say we mustn’t do selling.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t say you mustn’t sell things, I said I’m not interested in buying what you’ve got. I don’t need a cap, that’s all.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Ja.’

‘Will you give me ten rands?’

111

In 1966, Takis Xenopoulos opened Fontana Foods, the country’s very first 24-hour bakery and takeaway, in Hillbrow’s High Point Centre. At the official opening, the owner made a public statement of faith in his idea: he threw the keys of the shop into the crowd. It was one of the grandest gestures ever made by a Joburger. And it seems even grander now in this barred and gated city. Somewhere, on a street free of sentry boxes and booms, we should raise a statue of Mr Xenopoulos lobbing his keys into the blue.

112

It has taken Chas and me the entire day to repair the carport. The new wooden crossbeams, which I bought at Tile City up the road and carried down the hill over my shoulder, have been screwed into place on top of the poles. No nails for me, 60 mm screws made of brass, I mean this thing to last. By the end of the day, our palms are raw from twisting the screwdriver at awkward angles, our fingers, more used to paper and keyboard than pine and saw, are full of splinters and aching, the backs of our necks–rooinekke, that’s what you can call us–are stinging from too much sun. All of these symptoms are relieved by the application of two cold Windhoek lagers, and then the carport looks like a job well done.

The next day I give the whole structure a coat of creosote, and in this acrid marinade it seems to brace itself and look sturdier than ever. I’m glad I decided against tearing it down. The shade-cloth the beams will be covered with has already been purchased at the Hypermarket in Norwood and is lying in a cool green accordion in the spare room. Next weekend I’ll stretch that, and lace it tight with nylon cords, and the carport will be ready. Then all I need is a car.

The following Saturday morning, I hear a rattle at the gate. It is Ben, the builder. I see the ladder on the roof of his bakkie sticking up above the wall, and then his round face, stringy hair awry, framed in a metal diamond at the top of the gate.

I go out.

‘I saw you doing this last weekend,’ Ben says. ‘You and Charles.’ His pale eyes are round and innocent. The carport shivers.

‘Yes?’

‘You shouldn’t have used that wood. It’s going to warp.’

My heart sinks. Of course I shouldn’t have used that wood, that dirt-cheap pine. That’s why the bloody thing collapsed in the first place: the clot who built it used wood. Why did I have to go and copy him?

‘You should have used conduit,’ Ben says. The way he pronounces ‘conduit’, it sounds like Latin. Like some legal principle, habeas corpus, bona fides. ‘Do you know what conduit is?’

‘I think so.’

‘This is conduit.’ He pushes a piece of plastic tubing through the gap in the gate. He’s been holding it in his hand, out of sight. ‘It’s used for electrical wiring. It’s very light and strong, and it won’t be damaged by sunshine or rain. It’s proof against insects and creeping plants. It’s also cheaper than wood. Even cheap wood. This is what you should have used.’

Conduit. I hold it in my hand like a judgement. Like the mark of a grand presumption, perhaps even a betrayal. I am still holding it after Ben has lumbered away down the hill. Conduit. It is light, strong, weather-resistant, termite-proof, cheap. It is the material I should have used instead of this third-rate pine, which is warping even as my faith in it drains away.

113

The old-age home at the Marymount has brought us new neighbours, among them a tall man who walks with a stick. Some malady has left him with a stiff leg, which imposes an awkward, swinging gait on him. Because of this (or so I assume) he walks in the road rather than on the pavements, occupying an entire lane with his stick and his swaying shadow, forcing cars to overtake him. Looking down on him from the stoep, I see that he has musical notes and keyholes shaved into his spiky hair like crop circles.

One morning, I happen to open the garage door just as he’s passing. He stops and sways towards me, producing an item from his pocket, holding it out to me.

‘I sell these to make a living, sir. Personalized key rings. Just twenty rand.’

The key ring is made of tan leather and shaped like a sow’s ear. It has a silver ring through a loop on one end and is branded with a dark, smoky ‘X’. For…Xavier?

‘You don’t have an “I” perhaps?’ I ask. ‘Or an “M”?’

‘Let’s see.’ He produces a fistful of key rings from his pocket and fans them out. Five more Xs, two Zs, a Q. Surplus people.

I choose the one that’s already in my hand.

114

Anyone can start a garden-gate telephone service: you just run an extension from the house to the front fence and set up an instrument there. You can put up a sign, if you like, advertising the rates. Later on, when you’ve made a bit of money, you add a metal booth, with an awning that swings up to shade the customer, and this should be painted white.

The Hillier Street cobbler has built a booth of metal sheeting and plywood. The structure is rickety and unpainted, but the swivel chair, an executive model with a high back and armrests, lends it the air of a professional office. He likes to lean back with his heels propped on a milk crate, looking like a manager.

The hawker at No. 12 Eleanor Street started with a couple of planks and tins, then added a trestle table, then a lean-to with a canvas roof. But her finest touch is a square of magic carpet laid down across the pavement. When you step from hard cement onto that soft and yielding surface, walls rise from the frayed edges of the square and for a moment you forget that you are under the sky.

People think that the informal economy rests on hard-edged things like plastic milk crates, cardboard boxes and supermarket trolleys, but it is floating on pillows of softly rounded air.

115

I came to the Johannesburg Public Library to read up on Max the Gorilla, our zoo’s most famous resident, and instead I’m absorbed in a trivial mystery. Besides the usual traffic between the reference library and the reading room where I’m working, I see people coming and going through an antechamber that used to be out of bounds. In fact, the sign that says staff only is still propped on the librarian’s desk. Is there a toilet back there now? Or a new wing? It hardly seems likely when the municipal budget won’t stretch to the basics like new acquisitions. What are they doing in there?

Sorry, Max. I return a bound set of the Sunday Times to Basil, who runs the stacks, and steel myself in the magazine corner. Then I stroll into the antechamber. It is like finding a secret passage behind a shelf of books. I half expect the voice of authority to boom, demanding the password. Stairs. I go down into grey air furred with the animal scent of old books. Scuffed Marley tiles make the place feel like a kitchen, and indeed here on a landing that ends at a closed door is a table just big enough for a kettle and a hotplate. I go down another flight and come to a barred gate through which I can see the stacks, long pent-up reaches of shelves full of books and binders. I retrace my steps to the floor above and try the door on the landing. It opens. I step out into the Harry Hofmeyr Parking Garage. This vast basement, where in years past you’d have been lucky to find a bay, is all but empty. A dozen cars are clustered around the secret entrance where I’m standing; I assume they belong to the staff and other initiates, the visitors I’ve seen coming and going. My own car is in a distant corner near the steps that lead up to Harrison Street. Shutting the door behind me, a featureless grey panel in a cement wall, and making a note of its location in case I ever need it again, I set out across a damp, echoey space as long as a football field.

Every new building in Johannesburg has secure, controlled, vehicle-friendly entrances and exits. The well-heeled–who naturally are also the well-wheeled–should be able to reach point B without setting foot in the street. Parking garages cling to the malls like deformed twins. Complexes of apparently independent buildings, designed to simulate the neighbourhoods of a conventional city, are undermined by huge, unitary garages that destroy the illusion. Superbasements. Older buildings have to adapt to the new requirements. The Johannesburg Art Gallery has turned its back on the public space it was designed for; instead of strolling in through Joubert Park, visitors leave their cars next to the railway line and hurry in through the back door. Elsewhere, walls have been broken through or tunnels and walkways opened up from existing basement parking garages into lobbies and reception areas. Usually these angular additions conceal their motives beneath a coat of paint, but the makeshift reversal at the Public Library is refreshingly ingenuous: while the black schoolchildren who are now the main users of the facility stroll arm-in-arm up the broad staircase from the library gardens or gather in the grand lobby to giggle and whisper, the few white suburbanites who still venture here park underground and slip in up the back stairs.

116

The entrance to the Joburg Metro typifies the understated charm of contemporary South African design. A corrugated afdak with a lazy slant rests on black-wattle posts, roughly dressed and creosoted, rooted in low white walls freckled with mosaic. The Metro-Net logo is picked out in ox-blood and mercury on the lintel. You enter the cage and it drops into the gloom. Light your lamp. You pass through lava and sediment into prehistory, falling back in time towards the pyritic ores of the Main Reef. At last, in the neighbourhood of hell, as you imagine it, the cage shudders to a halt and the doors open. Mind the gap. But you cannot step out at all because the opening is blocked by a sheet of rock. You lean towards this rich confection, a blue conglomerate studded with almond-quartz, and press your tongue to it. The smoky pebbles taste of salt. Swallowing sand, you remember the sign in the window of the ticket booth. Take your pick.

117

‘I don’t want to live under this thing.’

We are curving from the M2 East onto Harrow Road and by the tilt of his head Branko means the new Coca-Cola sign on top of Ponte. His declaration of independence is too earnest for my liking. I say:

‘Have you forgotten the one on the Durban beachfront? Things go better with Coke.’ We saw this sign on a family holiday in the sixties, an immense reservoir of effervescent light bulbs with a neon straw three storeys long sticking out of it, drained and replenished and drained a thousand times a day, a perpetual slaking of an insatiable thirst.

‘That was different.’

‘You couldn’t get enough of the spectacle. The old man had to drive past it fifty times, until the rest of us felt sick. All those lights fizzing up in red and black waves.’

‘That had style,’ he protests again, bending until his chin touches the dash to look up at Ponte’s fifty storeys, elongating as we draw closer. ‘This thing is vulgar. And the size of it! Do you know it consumes as much juice as the whole building? That scrap of neon in Durbs would look like a postage stamp beside this monster. It’s like they’ve stuck a label on the whole city, as if it belonged to them.’

‘The reason you hate it so much is that it’s damaged the skyline. You can’t cope with the slightest change. I thought I was bad, but you’re three times worse.’

‘Three? You know, they wanted to sign their name on the moon. Didn’t you tell me that?’

This was a couple of years ago. Today Branko calls me in a mood. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done to Ponte? They’ve replaced the Coke sign with a hideous thing for Vodacom, blue and green hoops flickering up and down on the tip of the tower. You’d think it was an advert for condoms.’

118

When my brother and my sister and I were growing up in Pretoria, Johannesburg was further away than it is now. The people there spoke English, the buildings were taller, the streets were dirty and dangerous, the drivers–the TJ drivers, we called them derisively, after their number plates–were fast and reckless. Real cowboys. It was almost another country, a suspicion confirmed by the adoption of the decimal system, which widened the distance between the two cities from a familiar thirty-five miles to a foreign sixty kilometres. Halfway House, a clutch of shops and houses that lay midway, had come by its name, as my dad never tired of telling us, in the days when the trip used to take so long travellers had to outspan overnight. Even in the sixties, the road through the veld was narrow and crooked, bluegums and pines dawdled beside it, and it was easy to imagine ox-wagons and tin lizzies passing through the shadows. Coming or going, the wagons would have belonged in our city and the motor cars in theirs. Despite the Zephyrs and Zodiacs, Volkswagen Beetles and Hillman Imps that progress had bestowed on Pretoria, we felt like people who had been left behind, who were not fast enough.

Apart from annual pilgrimages to see the Rand Easter Show and the Christmas lights in Joubert Park, we went to Joburg only for special occasions like family weddings or soccer matches. After a game at Balfour Park my dad would buy supper for Branko and me at Panburgers, a takeaway place off a service road on Louis Botha Avenue. The service road itself was a sign of the city’s American dream-life. In fact, the whole length of Louis Botha, named though it was after the Afrikaner Prime Minister and Boer War general, was an American way, jammed with American cars and lined with American businesses.

Panburgers was a clash of red and white stripes, sizzling grills and chiming cash registers. Heaps of pale chips lay glistening in glass tanks like aquariums. The cooldrinks were mostly crushed ice, the straws were made of plastic, the cooks wrapped the burgers in waxed paper and called them ‘panburgers’, as if they had invented a marvellous new foodstuff. The kitchen staff were the usual black men, but the counter hands were white children, the unnaturally pale progeny of Bramley Gardens and Savoy Estate. Pretoria children were hard and brown from the sun and bristly; Joburg children had floppy fringes and soft freckled hands and looked as if they never went outside. Yet all the fun we had riding bicycles and kicking soccer balls counted for nothing because they were in here working, wearing paper hats and striped aprons as if they were in an Archie comic. They were already kids and we were still children.

119

As he’s running along the Braamfontein Spruit early one morning, Mike sees a man lounging on a scrap of wasteland beneath a pylon, right beside the footpath. Mike is visiting the country, he’s heard the stories about people getting mugged for nothing more than their shoes, and so he’s wary. He slows down, considers turning back. But now he’s close enough to recognize the man: it’s the gardener of the townhouse complex where he’s staying, apparently relaxing before he reports for duty, smoking the first cigarette of the day. The man recognizes him at the same moment and calls a greeting. Mike stops to chat. Their paths have crossed half a dozen times in the past week around the complex, and Mike was struck by his surly submissiveness, but now he seems forthright and approachable. Meeting here on no-man’s-land has freed him to be a different person. Or rather, has freed them to stand in a different relation to one another, because Mike realizes that he must also be a different person, here. When the gardener lights his second cigarette, Mike takes one too, although he’s trying to cut down, although he’s in the middle of a run. They talk for twenty minutes about work and soccer and politics, and then it’s time to go back into the past, where their old selves are waiting.

120

The J&C Café in Harrow Road has two plate-glass windows painted over with signs, the one advertising the necessities–fresh bread (daily!), pies, chicken pieces, cigarettes, magazines–the other, Coca-Cola. Suddenly it comes back to me: I saw that sign being painted. Might have been when I was living in Mount Verna in Saunders Street. I had been reading Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, and signwriting struck me as a very fine trade. Woody Guthrie was a true artist, equally at ease painting a sign on a barn or a copy of Whistler’s Mother. Once, when a cop asked him what kind of work he did, he said, ‘Painter. Signs. Pictures. Houses. Anything needs paintin’.’ And this signwriter at the J&C, a coloured guy in a blue overall, with chunky black hair like a Hollywood Inca, he had flair too (although I doubt he had sables from Russia, the best that money can buy). Having chalked the whole design onto a red ground, he was now applying the paint. He was working on the initial C, filling in the flourish that breaks like a wave under Coca-, using a maulstick with a rubber pad as plump as a marshmallow. Making things difficult for himself. Surely it would be easier to do the letters from left to right and put the flourish in afterwards? Perhaps the initial had a momentum he could not resist and he needed to finish it in one gesture, curving the white surf to its breaking, always-about-to-break edge.

Here I am, twenty years later, gazing at his handiwork from my car as I wait for the lights to change, poetry tingling on my tongue like sherbet. All at once I begin to doubt my memory. I can see the signwriter as clear as day, but the place is vague. How can I be sure it was this sign, of all signs, when its reasonable facsimiles are scattered all over the city? Twenty years is a long time. I shift the signwriter around in my mind, superimposing him and his maulstick, and a short wooden ladder that has appeared unbidden in the frame, against the front of the café in Saunders Street opposite the Happy Autumn Home. He fits there. I put him against the Norana Bakery and Supermarket in Bellevue East. Fits there too. I try the Kenmere side of the Apollo Café in Yeoville, opposite the municipal baths–that window was broken for half a year, I recall, they must have replaced it. When was that? There. I move him from one corner café to another, wandering further and further from home, and even as the places become less familiar (Maha-Vij’s Provisions in Derby Road, Bertrams, the Medusa Street window of the Rhodes Park Supermarket and Takeaways, the Jules Street side of the Marathon Café in Malvern), the signwriter grows more vivid.

121

For years, we knew the double-storey at the bottom of Albemarle Street as the Gandhi House. In the decade before the Great War, we’d been told, Gandhi lived here with his family. Now the house has lost its claim on history (but not its plaque from the National Monuments Council). An enterprising researcher, with nothing to gain by this unmasking except the truth, has shown that Gandhi did not live here after all, but up the road at No. 11. One of Gandhi’s descendants, who visited the house as a child, has provided confirmation. The people at No. 11 should have that plaque moved to their wall.

Both the Gandhi Houses, the true and the false, are double-storeys set on a promontory between two thoroughfares, but the attitudes of the streets could not differ more. Hillier and Albemarle Streets approach the impostor rather kindly, cupping it in leafy palms, whereas Albemarle and Johannes grip the genuine article like an egg in a nutcracker.

No. 11 has a handsome corrugated-iron roof and a wide, shady balcony. I recall an ornate wrought-iron finial, the ECG of a Victorian heartbeat, dancing along the roof ridge, but it must have been removed by the renovators. I cannot remember ever seeing a person on the balcony, perfectly suited though it is to reading the paper or chatting over sundowners, but for a few years there were shop-window mannequins leaning on the parapet. Perhaps they were scarecrows for thieves? At night, with the lighted windows behind them, they always deceived the eye. Something in the atmosphere, a bit of lace around the neck, a reddish tinge to the light from the doorway, made them look like whores.

Apparently, the Mahatma used to take his rest on the balcony on summer nights. It is easy to picture him there with sleep in his eyes, buffing his little round glasses on the hem of a bed sheet.

122

The war memorial crumbling away on a traffic island opposite the Darras Centre tells the history of the city in a single word. ‘The following men of the Bezuidenhout Valley lost their lives in the Great War,’ it says, and then follows a list of names, some of them scarred by graffiti, others drifting away into the depths of the stone where the leafy reflection of an overhanging oak stirs. A century comes and goes in the definite article. When this memorial was commissioned, the Bezuidenhout Valley was still a feature of the landscape. Now it is impossible to think of ‘Bezuidenhout Valley’ as anything but a suburb.

123

Impossible. I have walked along this pavement a thousand times, there isn’t a detail I could have missed, never mind something so big. And such a peculiar, pointless thing too.

I go back, fearfully. It’s still there. A metal pole slightly taller than me, the bottom third painted black, the rest silver. It is too thick for its height: something so sturdily rooted should be as tall as a street light, whereas I could touch the top of it with the point of a new pencil. I try to throttle it, but my fingers barely reach halfway round. It appears to be solid: when I kick against it with the toe of my boot, I get nothing but a dull thud, as if it’s packed with cork. On top is a turnip-shaped stopper, apparently welded to the shaft. Has it been lopped and plugged? Or was it made like this? If it isn’t a telephone pole or a street light cut down to size…then what is it? Exactly?

Context. Stone wall behind belongs to No. 17 Roberts Avenue, well built, expertly mortared. Sign on the letterbox beside the gate says independent pathology services. Second box with a wider slot to receive specimens for the attention of various doctors. Through the bars of the gate, a yard with space for two or three cars (only one there now).

I cannot believe that the doctors have anything to do with this. It’s like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can imagine that it was put here by an alien or left behind by an ancient civilization whose monuments I am incapable of recognizing.

The next day, I take Minky up the road and make the introductions.

‘Have you seen this thing before?’ I ask.

‘I don’t think so. What is it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Looks like a pole. A short pole.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘Beats me.’

She looks at it from another angle. ‘I like it. Must be the same Victorian vintage as the Yeoville water tower. It’s like a little minaret in Omar Khayyam.’

‘Yes. But what’s it for?’

I have been passing this thing for years without seeing it, but now that it’s made itself visible it insists on being acknowledged every time. I look out for it, imagining it from a block away. No sooner have I turned the corner from Blenheim into Roberts than I anticipate its compellingly useless presence. I hope it will have vanished and dread that possibility too. It has become an anchor. No, it is more firmly rooted in the earth than that, it is a bollard to which an anchor might be secured.

Saturdays are quieter than Sundays on Roberts Avenue. On the Sabbath, you are likely to meet lost tribes of Zionists in salt-white robes, bearing wooden drums and long staffs that wriggle like snakes; or teams of soccer players jogging to the pitch, keeping time with the drum-bounce of a ball. On a Saturday afternoon, then, I stroll up to Roberts Avenue with a tape measure in my pocket. Height: 2.5 metres. Circumference: 70 centimetres. There are no other dimensions. It resists reduction. So I carry these facts home, height and circumference, two dense figures, compact as seeds.

A year later one of the seeds germinates. What grows is a tomason.

The term ‘tomason’ was coined by Genpei Akasegawa to describe a purposeless object found on a city street. He has tracked and tagged hundreds of them in Japan and other parts of the world. A tomason is a thing that has become detached from its original purpose. Sometimes this detachment may be so complete that the object is turned into an enigmatic puzzle; alternatively, the original purpose of the object may be quite apparent and its current uselessness touching or amusing. It may be a remnant of a larger fixture that has been taken away, or it may be a thing complete in itself, whose purpose has been forgotten. Perhaps the people who put it there, who used it and needed it, have moved away or died. Perhaps the trade it was meant to serve is no longer practised. The natural habitat of the tomason is the city street. This is not to say that tomasons cannot be found in the countryside, but they are so scarce there that hunting for them would be tedious. Tomasons thrive in the man-made world, in spaces that are constantly being remade and redesigned for other purposes, where the function of a thing that was useful and necessary may be swept away in a tide of change or washed off like a label. They are creatures of the boundary, they gravitate to walls and fences, to entrances and exits. You will find them attached to facades or jutting out of pavements, like the short pole in Roberts Avenue.

I am grateful to have been given a category that will hold certain chance observations so tidily. More than that, it is a category that casts the world in a different light: having discovered a new shade of interest, I now seem to notice it everywhere. The tilt of my head has been altered and significance flares up in odd places. Every day I trawl along my habitual routes ready to be startled by something else I have missed until now. After a while, however, this deliberate hunt begins to foul the workings of chance, which is one of the pleasures of walking. My focus narrows. Details snag me, every bracket or niche has become a puzzle. Is this a true tomason? Or a doubting tomason whose apparently mysterious function will suddenly become clear? The world at large is lost to me. As my eye becomes attuned to everything that is extraneous, inconspicuous and minor, that is abandoned or derelict, the obvious, useful facts of the city recede and a hidden history of obsolescence comes to the surface. Every time I go walking, I stumble right out of the present. In the end, it is a relief when I have gleaned what I can from the edges of my neighbourhood and the conscious enterprise fades to the back of my mind.

124

When Henion finished cutting his film A letter to my cousin in China, he invited us to a viewing. We walked down to his house in Cambrian Street on a summer evening after supper. On the pavement outside, a security guard was sitting on a white plastic chair with his fingers laced behind his head, chatting to a domestic worker from the neighbourhood. We buzzed and Henion let us in. The kids had been swimming: a trail of wet footprints led from the pool to the verandah steps. Henion showed us into his studio, a room of cool, calm surfaces and lightly accented space, where African and Chinese objects conversed in low tones.

That was three years ago. Last night, Minky and I watched the documentary again on video. A lot has happened to us in the interim–we’ve been abroad and come back again, Henion and Lee have left for Australia–and this overshadowed my understanding of the film. Then I thought it revolved around the ideas of mortality and home. Now I see that I should have paid more attention to a suckling baby, a grieving widow clutching a dead man’s jacket, a group portrait. It is about physical intimacy with the feeling body and its unfeeling remains.

In a memorable scene, Henion’s father, Chi Ho Han, practises acupuncture upon himself to still the pain of his terminal cancer. Is he struggling to find the exact spot because of failing powers? No, the struggle is rather a sign of precision. As he probes beneath his skin with the point of the needle, a hidden network of nerve comes to the surface, like an acupuncturist’s chart concealed in his own flesh. This sense of intimacy with flesh and blood is heightened because he behaves as if he is alone, although he is not, the narrating camera is also there, yet so close, so much a part of himself as to have made itself invisible. Probing with the needle, he reveals an aged body, a ragged toenail, the relief of veins, as nakedly as any lover in his prime.

In the following scene, the old man appears to be drifting in and out of sleep. His glasses cast a film of light over his eyes. Earlier we have seen him asleep; later we will see him in his coffin. On this last occasion, the camera goes to his eyes, beneath the glasses–yes, the corpse is wearing glasses–to touch the jagged line of a sealed lid. Has the eye been sewn shut? Of these three views–the sleeping man, breathing yet oblivious; the man on the verge of sleep, fading in and out of consciousness; the dead man, blind and unfeeling–it is the middle man who stays with me.

Chi Ho Han is dead now and buried in Los Angeles, as far from Wenchang where he was born as from Johannesburg where he spent most of his life. His wife and mother, or rather their substances gathered into twinned ossuaries, are buried beside him. For his father, Henion says, the important thing was proximity. You had to be close together. You had to feel the shoulder of the person beside you against your own. That gentle pressure on the body is the sense of belonging.

125

Minky and I talk about moving, but we’re afraid of what might happen to the pagoda tree in our garden.

When Glynis sold her house in Johannes Street, the new owner chopped down the trees. The first time she went back, she had to step over the trunk of a palm she had nursed to adulthood, swathing it in hessian every winter against the frost until it was tall enough to fend for itself. She cannot bring herself to go there again. She sends Sean to collect the mail.

In those Joburg suburbs where the stands are small nearly every front garden has made way for a carport or a parking bay. Often the space in front of a semi is so cramped you wouldn’t think a car could fit there. For a while, one of my neighbours had a parking problem: the bay carved out of his front yard wasn’t quite long enough for his bakkie and he had to park it on the diagonal, with the two gates angled outwards and joined by a chain. When he acquired a second vehicle, a better solution had to be found. So he employed a burglar-proofer to weld an extension onto the existing gate, a cage half a metre deep that allows the tail ends of both vehicles to stick out over the pavement.

Periodically, the municipality savages the oaks on Kitchener Avenue, cuts them down to size to remind them that they’re in Africa. They line the streets, showing us their stumps, and we feel sorry for them, although there is nothing we can do. In spring, they grow a fuzz of leaves, and become big-headed and tender. Then every stump shoots out a clutch of long straight water shoots. They are never themselves again. With their new limbs standing on end, they look permanently startled, deranged. The aloes in between lean out towards the street like old people waiting for a funeral procession.

Dave comes home from the bush with a dozen saplings on the back of his bakkie. There are no exotics among them, our city is full of those, the newcomers are all locals. And they are not for his own garden, which has already spilled over onto the pavement, they are for us. He plants them a block away, on the verge in Barossa Street opposite the Wits Mental Health Society. The young trees wear their names on paper bracelets around their skinny wrists, where I could discover them if I chose, or I could ask Dave to call the roll by heart, but the rhythm of walking without stepping on the cracks makes me invent: naboom, boerboon, melkhout, ash, yellowwood, ironwood, umbrella tree.

Details (Route 1)

126

4 Kitchener

This house once had a beautiful fence of wrought-iron vines and sawtooth leaves. In the summer, nasturtiums would twine up and fleck their pale stems among the green-painted iron ones. Then a scrap-metal scavenger snapped off all the iron leaves, clean as figs, and left the jagged stems pointing to holes in the air.

38 Kitchener

A house in two minds. Having stripped it of every curve and kink, squared it off and cemented it over, the builder decided that it needed a softer touch after all and put three rounded arches in the facade; and then, doubting himself again, sank a square window frame in one of them. The high wall is topped with curly wrought-iron panels salvaged from the low wall it superseded, but they look strangely displaced at that height, with the sky behind them rather than the garden. The pillars end in cement globes like cannonballs. On the roof of the stoep a plaster eagle, an ugly bird bought from a nursery as an embellishing touch. Could the same person who hacked the features off this house possibly have tethered that bird of prey up there? It was meant to evoke ruined grandeur, but instead it reeks of the graveyard; it belongs in the Church of the Holy Angels across the way.

83 Kitchener

On the whitewashed gable, like a holiday destination on the front of a bus: the kloofs.

94 Kitchener

The garden path leads to an impregnable barrier of spiky palisades; only the postbox is there to mark the spot where the gate in the old fence must have been.

105 Kitchener

White plastered walls with the texture of coconut ice, split into crazy paving by forked black lines. It looks as if someone dropped the house and broke it into a hundred pieces.

110 Kitchener

Three cement frogs, each squatting in its own plastic pot, ranged along the garden path like plants.

118 Kitchener

Dr Z. Ebrahim’s Surgery has a black palisade fence. A solitary, truncated palisade, just thirty centimetres high including its elaborately spiked crown, is bolted to the top of a pillar in the corner of the garden. It stands on this pedestal like an African idol in the Musée de l’Homme.

141 Kitchener

The tiler who lives here has turned his yard into a chaotic catalogue of ornamental stone. It is paved with offcuts of every variety, and more are stacked against the wall of the house, ready to be applied to other surfaces. The only order in the patchwork is created by three cement pots like goldfish bowls set into the paving at regular intervals and holding nothing but dark-brown earth. Beside the front door is a fourth pot with cacti jutting from it like spiky truncheons.

3 Broadway

Wavy pillars studded with mud-brown stones on the stoep and patches of tan slate on the gable. Together these features invariably make me think of giraffes.

127

City centre (Route 2)

Go east on Jules Street–he says–all the way to the end. Just before the kink, take a right into Stanhope. You’ll see the Pure & Cool roadhouse on your left (hope it’s still there). Keep on for a kilometre or two, past the rubbish dump and the vehicle testing grounds. At the second or third set of lights there’s a Caltex on the left and one of those outdoor workshops opposite, with exhaust pipes propped up in tripods or strung on lines like wind chimes. Turn right and go down towards the railway line. Just after the crossing take the fork to the left and you’re nearly there. This is mining land. Bluegums on one side, open veld on the other. Look out for the sign that points to the shooting range. Just after that there’s a dirt road where you can make a U-turn. Drive back towards the city for a bit and you’ll see a lay-by. Park there.

Go at the end of winter. If you’re lucky, a fire will have turned the khaki cotton of the veld to black velvet. Loose threads of smoke are still drifting up, the air smells burnt at the edges.

Engage the Gorilla and get out of the car.

The veld slopes down to a highway in the south. On the far side, the sawtooth roofs of factories, the rutted flanks of a mine dump. These are the leavings of the mine whose headgear you can see on the horizon in the west, like a model made of matchsticks, an engine of war. The sky is the colour of a week-old bruise. You may hear the whisper of traffic on Main Reef Road, the crack of rifle shots at the range, which is carved out of another dump among the gums. In the east, beyond that billboard advertising Caesar’s, you will find a vlei full of poisoned water and a suburb cowering beneath power lines.

Now you must go into the veld–don’t forget your walking shoes–slowly, there’s no rush. Crystals of black ash and charred stalks as brittle as the wing bones of birds shatter under your soles. Already assegais of new grass are thrusting through the scorched earth, prickling your eyes with their pointed green. The black crust crackles underfoot like remembered flames. ‘Charcoal on the hoof.’ What are you looking for?–a greasy bottle with a Smirnoff label. half a brick with a scab of cement and an iron rod twisting out of it. a flattened tin. the foundations of a ruined substation. three porcelain insulators thrown down from the pylons by the Escom electricians, as beautifully wrought as vases. a burnt-out bulb. a signature. smudged lines. pencil stubs.

Are you still with me? In this dog-eared field, collapsing from one attitude to another, dragging your ghosts through the dirty air, your train of cast-off selves, constantly discovering yourself at the centre, in the present.

Signs (Route 3)

128

19 Barossa

‘Please open or nock hard’ (black marker on white sheet metal)

cnr Benbow & Barossa

‘Wits Mental Health Society’ (red and black enamel on white sheet metal)

Pavement, Benbow

‘Stan the Happy Man’ (blue aerosol on cement paving)

cnr Kitchener & Benbow

‘black’? ‘blank’? (black aerosol tag on steel Marymount Nursing Home sign)

21/21a Kitchener

‘Tuck Shop and Salon’ professionally prepared spaza sign. numbers on wall partly obscured by new municipal power box (enamel on board)

Vallivue Centre, cnr Kitchener & Appolonia (north-facing wall)

‘Salon Africa. We do braiding and relax. 083 9600 052’ (enamel on board)

Embankment, East Side College

‘If you DON’T speak out about HIV/AIDS, it becomes a burden–John, HIV Positive’ message clear, but name of author fading away (white and blue enamel on cement)

Embankment, East Side College

‘Nelson’s Panelbeating, Sppaypanting and repairs to Bumpers and Dash Broads’ (spray-paint on cement)

Vallivue Centre, cnr Kitchener & Appolonia (rooftop)

‘The Gravity Addict’ (unknown)

cnr Appolonia & Nourse

‘Phone & what-what. Bar & pool’ double ‘o’ in ‘pool’ pictured as 3 ball (green) and 12 ball (blue) (PVA on painted plaster)

Gem Pawn Brokers, Albemarle

‘Time will tell, Christ or Hell!’ (black aerosol on yellow PVA)

Gem Pawn Brokers, Roberts

‘These premises has been wired with razorwire!’ final word rests on spiky underlining of electrified barbs (gloss enamel on hardboard)

6 Roberts

‘JiC’ geometric monogram (black aerosol on white PVA)

Gem Supermarket, Blenheim

‘Salvation!’ (black aerosol on advertising chalkboard headed ‘Today’s Special’)

Substation, Blenheim

jailbird with stubble, shaven head (black aerosol on beige PVA)

Substation, Blenheim

‘blank’? ‘black’? (black aerosol tag on beige PVA)

129

‘Now I don’t mean to be insulting like,’ says Ben, ‘but your plumber is useless.’ And he waits for me to say:

‘How so?’

‘These taps are the wrong way round.’ And he waits again for:

‘Why?’

‘The hot tap in the bath should always be against the wall.’

‘Why?’

‘If a toddler comes in here, see, and wants to open one of these taps, chances are he’ll try the one that’s closest to him. And if it’s the cold, then he won’t scald himself. Maybe he won’t even be able to reach the hot if it’s at the back. Plumbers are supposed to know these things.’

130

The oaks in Roberts Avenue have shackles around their ankles. These iron hoops, which were used to edge the holes when the saplings were planted, look like the rims of wagon-wheels. With the thickening of their trunks and spreading of their roots, the growing trees have often dislodged the hoops from the paving, breaking them loose into the air. Sometimes bark has grown over part of the hoop, sealing it, healing it into the woody flesh. I imagine that here and there a tree must have engulfed its shackle entirely. My friend Liz says the shackles are there to stop the trees from wandering off, the poor things are no better than slaves. My brother Branko says she’s read too much Tolkien, it’s the other way round: the trees are there to keep the shackles from being stolen.

131

Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended or it will be lost. Today the contest is fierce and so the defences multiply. Walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, even the highest walls acquire electrified wires and spikes. In the wealthier suburbs the pattern is to knock things flat and start all over. Around here people must make the most of what they’ve already got, and therefore the walls tend to grow by increments. A stone wall is heightened with prefab panels, a prefab wall is heightened with steel palisades, the palisades are topped with razor wire. Wooden pickets on top of brick, ornate wrought-iron panels on top of plaster, blade wire on top of split poles. These piggyback walls (my own included) are nearly always ugly. But sometimes the whole ensemble achieves a degree of elaboration that becomes beautiful again, like a page in the Homemaker’s Fair catalogue.

The tomason of access is our speciality. There are vanished gateways everywhere. On any street, you may find a panel in a wall where the bricks are a different colour or the courses poorly aligned, indicating that a gap has been filled in. A garden path leads to a fence rather than a gate, a doorstep juts from the foot of a solid wall. Often, the addition of a security fence or a wall has put a letterbox beyond reach of the postman. The ghosts come and go.

The tennis courts at the corner of Collingwood and Roberts are on a terrace. Once, a flight of stairs cut into the stone-faced slope led up from the pavement, and then a few paces would bring you to a gate in a low wire fence. Now a curtain of stone has been drawn across the stairway halfway up and a tall palisade fence raised on the edge of the terrace, through which you can see the old fence posts, like sentries standing guard on a fallen frontier.

The most common tomason of access by far is the metal hinge. Set into brick or stone gate posts, and thus too difficult or costly to remove, these hinges remain behind to mark the places where the old gates swung, before they were taken down and replaced by security doors or remote-controlled barriers.

132

When I lived in Eleanor Street, I used to pass by No. 13 on my way to the shops. One day I saw a man pottering in the garden and we nodded to one another, and from time to time after that we exchanged a greeting or a wave. Then I moved to Malvern. After David Webster was killed outside his house, Chas, who had been a student of his at Wits, took me past there to pay his respects. And it was only then that I put the man in the news reports together with my nodding acquaintance from the old neighbourhood.

Whether it’s because I only ever saw him in his garden, or read somewhere that he’d just come back from the nursery and was unloading plants from his bakkie when he was shot, I often wonder whether he planted the creepers and shrubs still thriving in the yard. Gardeners must have faith in the future. What became of the seedlings he bought that morning? Did his widow get round to planting them? Did someone remember to water them? Or were they left to wither in their black plastic bags?

The mosaic that commemorates his life spills along the garden wall. The panel on the left says: ‘DAVID WEBSTER 1940–1989. Assassinated here in the name of apartheid. Lived for peace, justice and friendship.’ The rest of it is a surf of brightly coloured tiles and glittering mirrors that turns the wall to water.

133

Wherever I go in Joburg, I bump into Herman Charles Bosman. I see him at the City Hall, talking from the steps or heckling from the edge of a crowd; gazing into a shop window in Eloff Street, barefooted and in his shirtsleeves, suffering from the recognizing blues; marching at the end of a procession along Commissioner Street; enquiring after books at the desk in the Public Library (where he is supposed to have met his second wife, Ella Manson); strolling along under the oaks at Jeppe Boys’ High on his way home to Grace Street. Long past midnight, he is wandering down Plein Street with his friend George, so deep in conversation they don’t even see me. And there he is again scrambling up the side of a mine dump with Ella (they are going to write their poems in the sand). And climbing over the wall of the municipal tram sheds.

Most vividly of all, I see him at High Court Buildings in Joubert Street where he had an office in the forties, standing on a tiny second-floor balcony–it is no more than a crow’s-nest with a flagpole sticking out of it like a sail yard–scattering seed for the pigeons. This is curious, because Bosman himself never described the scene in his work. Rather, it was Lionel Abrahams who saw him there, ‘shirt-sleeved, bare-headed, sunlit, in a cloud of fluttering birds’, and brought the moment to life in his memoir ‘Mr Bosman’. It is the privilege of writers that they are able to invent their memories and pass them on between the covers of a book, to make their memories ours.

Speaking of Abrahams, I bump into him too all over town, although these days he can seldom be lured from his house in Rivonia. I see him further along Joubert Street on his way to Vanguard Books (he is going in search of a copy of Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets). I bump into him on top of a mine dump too–he has gone up there with some friends to read Herbert and Holub. One of my dearest memories has him waiting for the tram at the stop outside his house in Roberts Avenue. Again–let’s not consider it odd–this is not my memory but someone else’s, passed on in a book.

Lionel Abrahams has written about the significance that certain stray corners of the city assume through personal association, places where we feel more alive and more at home because a ‘topsoil of memory’ has been allowed to form there. Louise Masreliez is concerned with the ‘private niches’ memory creates in the public space of the city. The image aptly suggests the small and fugitive nature of the association (a ‘niche’ may be as fleeting as a mood or atmosphere). Both writers present memory in intriguingly concrete terms. Whether as topsoil or niche, whether substance or receptacle, memory is endowed with a hand-warmingly physical quality. This most intimate faculty, residing in the heart or the mind, in the softest organs, might yet carve out or fill a space in the material world. So we allow parts of ourselves to take root and assume a separate life. These marks, the places where our thoughts and feelings have brushed against the world, are not just for ourselves. We are like tramps, leaving secret signs for those who come after us, whom we expect to speak the same language. Our faith in the music of this double address, in the echo chambers of the head and the street, helps to explain why apartheid deafened us to the call of home.

134

Every year, Piet Retief goes away for Christmas, not to Durban, I’ve decided, which is the mythical holiday destination of tramps, but to some farm in the Free State, where the child in him is remembered and loved. The people at home, die mense by die huis, parents, brothers and sisters, ex-lovers and old school-friends, believe his lies about the city, or pretend to. I want him to have a happy story.

135

The weather’s thumb crushes stone to gravel and rubs wood down to the grain. What comes to the surface is stubborn. Our meanings are tender sheaths, but the heart of things is fibre and flint, and will not yield to the hand or the eye.

A hand slipped here. This pane is spattered with paint from the bristles of a brush. The glass whispers its secrets to my fingertips, tells them the colour of a wall that cannot be seen. But here a hand meant to leave a mark. On this pane, in a moment of anger, idleness or thoughtless delight, fingers toothed with a coin or a key scratched out the view.

Where am I? Another window stops me in my tracks. But the eye goes on ahead, it plunges through glass, between bars, through cracks into the other room. The other room is almost there, a trick of light and shadow. The eye explores its sudden edges and returns with a warning: the wide world is at your back.

136

Yang-Ti, the second and last emperor of the Sui dynasty, ascended the throne in 604 after assassinating his father. He was one of the great builders in Chinese history, commissioning palaces and extending the Great Wall, and sparing no cost in materials, labour and the lives of workers. He built the city of Lo-Yang, the second of his capitals, on the edge of the eastern plains, and the Grand Canal, which linked the city with the southern capital of Chiang-tu on the Yangtze river. Like his father, the emperor was a generous patron of art and literature, and painting flowered during his short reign. The frescoes of the Sui dynasty were matchless.

When Yang-Ti went travelling to the outposts of his empire, he took with him a painting on silk two thousand paces long. Every evening when a halt was called, his painters and soldiers unwound the silk and spanned it in an immense circle, like a laager, and the emperor rested within. The painting, as complete as the horizon, showed a prospect of Lo-Yang. To the south, over the roofs and battlements and the suburbs where the tradesmen lived, the mountains. To the west, the setting sun. To the north, the black lands where the ancestors were buried, the furrowed hills full of sepulchres. To the east, where the moon was swimming, the forecourts of palaces, ministries, halls of justice, houses of pleasure. In the middle of his resting tent, in a small tower, the emperor dwelt, suspended in space and time, between west and east, yesterday and tomorrow. Even in the desert, Yang-Ti kept his city with him, believing that it was unbecoming for an emperor to live like a vagabond in the wilderness. He would not countenance a change of scenery.

Victor Segalen: ‘That was not understood in his time. Yang-Ti left behind the reputation of an egoist and a sedentary, since, true to Himself, he disliked to contemplate the world in any other way but at its centre.’

137

The Argonaut Mine was first proposed in the early nineties. It has been estimated that this ultra-deep mine, operating at up to five kilometres below the surface, would cost R8 billion to commission. The developer, Durban Roodepoort Deep, is conducting a feasibility study and the decision on whether to proceed will be made in 2007. Argonaut would undermine a huge swathe of the Witwatersrand, stretching from Roodepoort in the west to Boksburg in the east, in an arc roughly thirty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide. Examine any map of this land and the goldfields ghost through from below. The names of the companies that pegged the original claims are honeycombed into the ground beneath our feet: Durban Roodepoort Deep, Vogelstruisfontein, Consolidated Main Reef, Crown Mines, Robinson Deep, City Deep, Simmer and Jack. The developer of Argonaut has some revolutionary ideas for the mine, such as generating electricity on site using subterranean water flows, partially processing the ore before it is conveyed to the surface, and housing the miners themselves in underground hostels.

138

As I’m coasting down the ramp to the Harry Hofmeyr Parking Garage, I remember the back way into the reading room, which I discovered the last time I came to the library. Should I use that door? I’m not sure I’ll be able to find it. Anyway, I should resist this scurrying about underground, this mole-like secretiveness. I park as usual near the cashiers’ booth, take the tiled tunnel under Harrison Street and go up the steps that come out beside the City Hall. I like the walk, never mind the broken paving stones and hawkers’ clutter. I want to approach the library along a city street like an ordinary citizen, passing from the company of people into the company of books. I won’t go sneaking up the back stairs like a thief.

I cross over Harrison and pass the cenotaph. The library gardens are full of people. It looks like a rally of sorts. Men, men in uniform, thousands of them, a ragtag army in blue, black and grey fatigues, wearing berets of every colour, combat boots, flashes on their sleeves.

‘What’s happening?’ I ask the man next to me at the Simmonds Street crossing.

‘Strike,’ he says. ‘Security guards’ strike.’

Cut-off whitey, he’s thinking to himself, doesn’t know what’s going on. Actually, I’ve read about the strike, and I know the library gardens have long been a rallying point for popular causes, but I wasn’t aware the strikers were gathering here. Probably wouldn’t have made the trip if I’d known. There’s a current of tension in the air and it swirls round me as I approach the hawkers’ stalls, a mood as pungent as the smoke from the braziers where women are roasting mielies and frying thick coils of wors in a froth of yellow fat. Up ahead, on the plaza in front of the library, between the lawns and the stairs ascending grandly to the main doors, a man is speaking through a megaphone. Perhaps the tension is rippling out from him? He could be announcing a breakthrough or a deadlock in the negotiations. Who are they negotiating with? One can guess at the issues: wages, benefits, conditions of employment. I climb up on a bench so that I can see the man with the megaphone over the heads of the crowd. There’s a statue to the left of the plaza, a family group in bronze, and he’s joined them on the pedestal, hooking a comradely arm through one of theirs. A knot of men at the pond on the right. What are they doing? Some sort of tussle going on in the water, it looks like a baptism or a drowning. All these berets. You can tell by their headgear which of the companies are run by military men, the out-of-work soldiers of the old SADF: these guards wear their berets moulded tightly to their heads, scraped down over their right ears, whereas the guards employed by businessmen have soft, spongy berets, mushrooms and marshmallows no real soldier would be seen dead in.

Familiar faces on all sides. There are security guards everywhere in Joburg, and now they all look like people I’ve seen before. If I had time I could probably spot Bongi, the apprentice security guard from my faraway birthday party. He must be a seasoned pro by now and uniformed from boot to beret. Strangers keep catching my eye, casing my white features. No doubt they’re wondering what the hell I’m doing here. This thought could make me apprehensive, except that no one focuses on me for long, their attention keeps being tugged to the left, to the Market Street side of the gardens.

What kind of crowd is this? What were the categories devised by Canetti?

Before I can follow the thought there’s a loud bang, a shotgun report, I think, and the crowd bursts apart like shrapnel from the heart of a blast. Some of them rush away in an anticlockwise whorl like water down a drain, others surge at me and carry me back towards President Street. I am running too, without thinking, and then stopping, as the wave subsides and wheels back intuitively towards the sound. We all turn, crouching, or huddled together, or craning boldly as if the whole range of attitudes has been choreographed. I am pinned between two men in front of the hawkers’ stalls with the mesh of a gate pressing against my back.

Tumult on the opposite side of the gardens, men in blue pouring in from both ends of the row of stalls. Riot policemen. Their quarry, the security guards, are also policemen of a kind, but in their berets and boots they look more like soldiers. The front lines clash, men go sprawling over the low walls onto the grass, there are more reports, bouncing back off the office blocks all around, rubber bullets or shotgun pellets, I don’t know. But I do know, with every bone and muscle, that I am in the wrong place, I shouldn’t be within a day’s hike of this madness. I cannot get myself shot in a security guards’ strike, especially not with a rubber bullet. No amount of irony could erase the ignominy.

A teargas canister comes arching over the green roofs of the stalls. The frozen moment thaws in an instant into flight. We scramble through a gap in a curving wall, buffeting one another. I plunge out of the stream on the pavement beyond and crouch behind the wall, among hawkers trying to defend spills of oranges and apples, relieved to have brick and mortar between my soft flesh and the guns. My fingers sink into orange pulp on the stone, my feet scatter Quality Street toffees and little building blocks of Chappies bubblegum. All around there is a strange blend of fear and hilarity, faces wincing and laughing. Impossible. I cannot stay here. The sensible thing would be to go east along President, there’s a staircase into the parking garage close by. But when I look over my shoulder, the intersection is a blur of men and vehicles and gas–it’s drifting downwind! So I must go the other way, crouching behind parked cars, feeling absurdly like a child playing a game. To my right a lane runs through to Pritchard Street, but there are armoured vehicles at the end of that too, beyond the frivolous jet of a fountain, and policemen with helmets, shields and batons.

I peep around the corner of the last stall. The police have taken the plaza, which is almost empty. Three dripping, bedraggled men, scabs the strikers were teaching a lesson about solidarity, are sitting on the edge of the pond with their hands in the air, coughing up water. Blood and slime bearding their chins.

While I’m deciding what to do, a head pops up between the parked cars ahead of me, closer to the library building, and then another. Half a dozen people step gingerly into the open. Innocent bystanders, my kind of people, a pensioner, a middle-aged woman, a couple of schoolchildren. The adults shepherd the youngsters across the plaza and up the stairs. The policemen at the pond glance back idly but do nothing to stop them. A quick knock on the door, which opens to admit them, and they’re gone.

I scoot over to the same gap between the cars. From here I have a better view of the plaza and the gardens. Apart from the group at the pond, and a thin cordon of armed men along the periphery, the place is nearly empty. The action has surged away across Simmonds Street and on into the city, leaving behind a trail of litter and placards, jerseys and shoes. I cross the pavement and go up the stairs, hurrying but not running, feeling more and more like a play actor. The stairs are low and wide and it is a long way to the top. I push at the first door but it’s locked. Immediately panicky, I hammer on the second one and it opens a crack. Two faces appear, one above the other, a grey-haired librarian and a shaven-headed security guard. Satisfied that I pose no threat, they roll aside a book-laden trolley and let me in.

If I was looking for sanctuary, an oasis of calm and quiet, I’ve knocked at the wrong door. The lobby looks and sounds like a marketplace. A hubbub as if every unread book had begun to speak at once. Children laughing and talking, acting out their narrow escapes for one another, librarians hurrying upstairs with armfuls of precious papers or manning the barricades, grimly amused or stoical.

‘You can’t go in there, sir, we’ve closed the reference section for the safety of the books. But the reading room is open.’

Basil is on duty in the reading room as usual and he fetches the bound issues I’m after. When I tell him what I’m researching, he bursts out laughing, and it suits the unaccustomed uproar. Some men are talking at the windows, watching the drama on the pavement in President Street where the police have their command centre. The air seeping in from outside is still soured with conflict. I find a space at a desk and settle down to work. Later, I’ll go upstairs to a window with a view of the gardens and see whether it’s safe to leave. If necessary, I’ll take the back way out, although I’d rather not. What’s the hurry anyway? I can read until it quietens down.

When I lick my finger to turn the page it tastes of orange juice.