Rosamund Kendal

Rosamund Kendal was born in South Africa and currently lives in Durban. She is a writer and doctor with multiple interests. She says of ‘The Sunday Paper’: ‘In writing this story I hoped to illustrate the interplay between action and consequence. Nothing that happens is an isolated event.’

The Sunday Paper

The harsh bleeping of the alarm on Herman Luthuli’s cell phone woke him up at two-thirty in the morning. He stretched his arm over the edge of the mattress and felt on the floor for the phone, cursing under his breath as his exploring fingers pushed it further away from him instead of drawing it closer. He didn’t want the noise to wake the rest of the family, especially since his wife had been up earlier in the night with the twins, who were both sick again.

Herman turned off the alarm but procrastinated getting up, lingering for as long as he could in the nest of warmth created by his family’s bodies beneath the blankets. He knew what the cold would do when he left the comfort of the makeshift bed: it would make his skin contract into hundreds of pin-pricks and turn his bones into the heavy, aching bones of an old man.

He checked the time and realised that he could delay no longer. He crept from beneath the bed coverings, making himself as small as possible to minimise the amount of icy winter air he let into the cocoon. Despite his care, his first born still grumbled in her sleep, pulling the blanket up to the soft curve of her preadolescent chin. The blue light of his cell phone, bleaching his dark skin to grey as he dressed, and the silence, broken only by the rasping breathing of one of the twins, made Herman feel like a ghost, a watcher.

This relentless early-morning waking separated him from his family, from the muddle of bodies bundled onto the double mattress. For a brief moment he wished himself back in bed but almost immediately felt guilty for his thoughts. He didn’t want to appear ungrateful for the job, even if it was only to those who were able to read his mind. He knew with an animal knowledge (the aching cramp of starving stomach; the heart-rending wail of pleading infant; the silent, shaking tears of hopelessness) the scarcity of employment.

He dampened a cloth in the bucket of icy water next to the door and wiped his face with it, then put his phone and wallet into his pocket. He didn’t dare kiss the children goodbye; couldn’t risk waking them but he leant over the mattress and touched his wife’s forehead with his lips before picking up the packed sandwich she had left for him and making his way out into the night.

He walked briskly along the maze of alleys between shacks, facing the cold, attacking it in defiant, hurried strides. Occasionally the wind whipped up loose sand that stung his cheeks, or the cold became too much and bled tears from his eyes, and in those moments he lost his façade of bravery and gave in to the anger of the winter. In those moments he collapsed into himself, huddling and bending to the elements. He was a solitary figure then; for a second a lonely, beaten man. He didn’t look up when he reached the main, tarred road. There were no taxis at this time of morning, especially on a Sunday. He just leant his head more pointedly into the wind and made his stride brisker.

It took him an hour to get to the yard. He rattled the metal gate when he eventually arrived and Johann, the bent, arthritic caretaker, emerged from his wooden hut to undo the chain for him. Johann fumbled with the lock, his fingers clumsy in the cold, and Herman breathed impatient clouds of steam into the early-morning air. The gate clunked open and Johann passed a book to Herman, which he signed and dated and then handed back. He ignored the light spilling invitingly from Johann’s shed (he knew there would be coffee there, sweet, in a battered flask) and walked straight to the delivery van. He didn’t want to risk being late, not while he was still on probation.

None of the other drivers had arrived yet but he knew that they all had the safety of a contract tempting them to stay in bed a few minutes longer. Herman pressed the remote and the beep of the alarm immobiliser cut into the morning air setting off a cascade of barking from the dogs guarding the next yard. He climbed into the van and turned the key in the ignition.

The roads on the way to the printing house were deserted, factory shops and warehouses asleep over the weekend. Herman knew it would be different once he reached his delivery area, near the university. There, the roads would be cluttered with drunk students; the heave of bass would shake the air and neon lights from nightclubs would throw flashes of luminous colour onto the pavements. But for now, his were the only headlights picking out the hulking silhouettes of shut-down buildings.

He was the first driver to arrive at the printing house. He knew the stillness of the exterior belied the activity inside the building. He rang the bell and the gate opened for him.

‘First one here again,’ a man in blue overalls said to him as he got out of the van.

Herman dipped his head slightly in recognition of the greeting. ‘I need the job.’

‘Don’t we all,’ the man responded, heaving piles of newspapers bound up with twine in Herman’s direction.

Herman knew that what the man said was true, that everyone needed a job, but he felt that, with four children and a wife to support, and with sick, elderly parents to look after, and with a sister who was dying of Aids and threatening to leave three children parentless, he somehow needed the job more than others. And it had taken long enough for him to find the work. He had been unemployed for four years before the phone call that at last had notified him that his application had been successful; four years in which his soul had shrivelled and turned in on itself in shame and hopelessness. He knew that he could not have handled much more before breaking completely. He turned his attention away from the darkness of the memories and started stacking the piles of newspapers neatly in the back of the delivery van.

As Herman drove south towards his delivery area, the streets started slowly to come alive. First there were the joggers, reflective strips dipping up and down in the light of Herman’s headlights. Then there was the odd window lit up, its yellow warmth pooling in a spotlight of suburban garden. At the corner of Milner and Stanford roads he slowed down. This was where his deliveries started. Three months had taught him which houses got the newspaper: there was the one with the filigree metal gate; then the house with a ceramic cactus glued onto the wall next to the front door; then the house with the electric fence.

At each subscriber’s home, Herman jumped out of the van and placed a freshly rolled newspaper into a post box or between the rails of a gate. Some of the delivery vans had two people working them: one to drive and the other to dispense the papers but the company was short-staffed and, because Herman was the most junior employee (not even an official employee yet), he had to work alone. Herman didn’t mind it at all. He liked the silence and the time the driving gave him to reflect. He liked turning the heater in the van on full blast until the windows misted up and letting the radio drone on in the background, just loud enough for him to pick out the familiar tunes.

Herman wove his way between the neatly manicured verges until he reached the main road. There, the face of the landscape changed and the nature of his deliveries with it. The road became crowded with shops, restaurants, clubs and garages and, instead of delivering single newspapers, Herman delivered twine-bound bundles of twenty-five or fifty papers. He pulled up at an all-night garage and ran into the attached shop to drop off two stacks of fifty newspapers. He contemplated buying himself a cup of coffee while he waited for the manager to sign for the papers but decided against it: it was a luxury he couldn’t really afford. Next there was a twenty-four hour burger joint that needed four papers and then a Seven-Eleven (still dark inside) that needed fifty. Herman left the copies for the Seven-Eleven outside the door of the shop as he had been shown to do when he did his training rounds with one of the more experienced drivers.

‘You’re not supposed to leave the papers without someone signing for them,’ the man, who had been delivering newspapers for thirty years, told him, ‘but you can’t wait for all the small cafés to open. That way you’d never get done.’

Herman drove past a coffee shop that was still closed and then past a club that vibrated with the heavy beat of popular bass. A group of youngsters emerged from the door and made their way unsteadily to a neighbouring twenty-four-hour fast-food joint. Their faces were flushed and their voices loud with alcohol and endorphins and Herman smiled sardonically to himself and shook his head slowly, envying their almost impossibly carefree youth. One of the group, a young man wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a print of Fidel Castro on the front, caught Herman’s eye and waved cheerfully to him. Herman lifted his hand in response. The innocent forthrightness of the youth’s smile disarmed him; wiped away the niggling of resentment and jealousy that had started to blossom in Herman’s chest.

A little further down the road, lounging outside a bakery to which Herman delivered a few newspapers, was a homeless man. He was lying on a bed of flattened cardboard boxes and had half raised himself onto one elbow so that he could more easily make eye contact with passers by. His body was partially covered with a soiled brown blanket. Herman thought that the man’s position was cleverly chosen; customers to the bakery, exiting with their warm croissants or fresh, yeasty loaves of bread, could not help but feel guilty. And, of course, the easiest way to assuage that guilt would be to reach into their wallets. Herman knew that, were he in the man’s situation, he would do the same thing and he also knew how easy it was to become like that homeless man. Were it not for this job, he thought, it might well be him begging from beside a bakery somewhere.

Herman made one more delivery on the main road, to a garage, and then turned left into a quieter road. Here and there small groups, couples or threesomes, of students made their way back to their residences. On the horizon, the colour had been drained from the sky by the fist rays of the morning sun and, when Herman opened the door of the van, the sound of birdsong could be heard above the distant beat of the nightclubs. Captain’s Café and Take-away, the last café in his area, was still closed when Herman reached it.

The windows were dark and the door obscured by heavy metal bars. Herman, weary now, hauled a stack of newspapers from the van and left them at the door. As he walked back to the vehicle, a cold wind lifted the bottom of his jacket. Herman knew that the newspapers would be unlikely to come loose from the twine that bound them but he went back anyway and placed a half a brick on top of the pile to secure the papers against the wind. He didn’t want to have to pay for a copy stolen by the north-easter.

Herman had finished his morning deliveries. He turned left down a side street and pulled up on the verge next to a park. He had allowed himself this small luxury since starting the job: ten minutes to watch the sun rise while he ate his sandwich. He got out of the van and made his way to a wooden bench. The grass was wet and loose blades clung to the shoes he had polished the night before. As he sat down, he leant over and wiped the black leather clean with a scrap of tissue. He unwrapped the sandwich that his wife had made for him and bit into it. The bread was soft, as soft as the bread from the bakery, he imagined, and the ham thick. At this moment, eating his sandwich, with the morning sun warming his face, Herman felt blessed.

The club was pumping. Bodies writhed beneath the strobe lights in a series of black-and-white photographic stills. The humid air condensed on the walls and clung to T-shirts and foreheads and napes of necks. Elbows knocked together and feet trampled each other. Everywhere was the smell unique to pubs and bars: that particular blend of eau de cologne, cigarette smoke and spilt alcohol that seems to infiltrate hair and clothes indiscriminately, so that by the end of the evening everyone leaves with the same signature scent.

Scott Geard (commonly known as Parrot, on account of his rather beak-like nose) extricated himself from the mass of moving bodies and pushed his way through the crowd to the bar. From every side, people jostled against him and once he had to duck to avoid a carelessly flung cigarette. But tonight he wasn’t irritated by the crowd and the claustrophobia that occasionally manifested itself on nights when the club was very full seemed now a trick of his imagination. He knew that his new-found tolerance had nothing to do with the club – the mob was still as crowd-like as ever – and everything to do with his state of mind, which was bordering on euphoric. Two days before he had written the last of his mid-year exams (he was in his second year of an engineering degree) and the Boks had just beaten the All Blacks twenty-eight to fourteen. He and his group of friends had been partying since the rugby match, ten hours before.

Parrot caught the barman’s eye and ordered a round of beers for himself and his friends. He had forgotten whose turn it was to get this particular round but he had finished his beer and, since he was getting another for himself, thought he might just as easily buy a drink for everyone. ‘Keep the change,’ he said to the barman, handing over a hundred-rand note. Parrot’s generosity wasn’t the result of his intoxication; he always tipped well.

Beers held high above his head to prevent them from being bumped too much, Parrot made his way back to his group of friends. As he handed out the drinks the clanging of a bell interrupted the music.

‘Last rounds! Bar closes in fifteen minutes!’ the barman shouted.

‘Shit, should I go back and get another round?’ Parrot volunteered.

‘Nah, boet, don’t stress,’ one of his friends replied. ‘I’ve got to go after this one anyway. My girlfriend’s probably worrying about where I am.’

‘That’s exactly why I don’t have a girlfriend,’ Parrot laughed. It was meant as a joke but there was a ring of truth to it. Parrot didn’t want the hassle of a girlfriend; didn’t need the complication that thinking of another person’s feelings and desires and needs would entail.

The calling of the last round had shifted, albeit subtly, the atmosphere in the club. Slowly, people were peeling away from the groups on the dance floor and making their way to the door. Parrot was one of the last to leave. He had got caught up talking to a stranger about the strengths of the Springbok backline and his friends had become fed up with waiting for him. Parrot was known for his ability to talk for hours, even to people he had met only minutes before. And so Parrot ended up joining his new acquaintance’s group of friends. He left the club in their company and then moved on to a nearby fast-food joint with them.

By the time that Parrot had finished his burger and coffee, the sun was making its appearance on the horizon. The grease and caffeine had done little to soak up the alcohol in Parrot’s stomach and he was starting to feel that it was time for him to make his way back to his university residence. He said goodbye to his new friends, promising to look them up on Facebook if he could remember their names when he was sober, and began making his way home. As he walked along the main road, he reminisced over the evening, thinking what a success it had been and how much he had enjoyed himself. Parrot’s good mood manifested itself in a jaunty swagger and tuneless whistle that somehow mocked the portrait of Fidel Castro on his shirt.

His way home took Parrot past a bakery and, as he approached the building, the aroma of fresh bread assailed his nostrils. Despite the burger he had wolfed down earlier, Parrot was still hungry and he thought it would be a good idea to buy a bun or two to eat on his way back to his residence. He knocked on the bakery door but one of the bakers, rolling out dough on a table in the shop, shooed him away, indicating that the bakery was still closed to customers. Disappointed, Parrot turned away and almost tripped over a bergie lying next to the bakery entrance.

‘Please, baas, a little money for food,’ the beggar whined.

Parrot knew that the money would be unlikely to be spent on food but, drunk as he was, he could hardly judge the man. He gave him a twenty-rand note, the money he had taken out of his pocket to buy the buns with.

Parrot turned down a side road, glad that he didn’t have much further to go. He was starting to get tired. The friends whom he had been at the club with would probably already be in bed by the time he got back to his residence, he thought. He felt suddenly aggrieved that they hadn’t waited for him. He imagined that he would have waited for one of them had the roles been reversed.

Parrot took a short cut, one that he didn’t usually take, down another road and walked past a café. He noticed a pile of newspapers, held down with half a brick, lying outside the door and the beginnings of a brilliantly drunken idea began to poke at his consciousness. It would be such a laugh, he thought, if he took the pile of papers back to the residence with him and then delivered them to his friends, as though he was a delivery boy. He would get himself a cap from his cupboard (or perhaps even borrow the scruffy tweed beret that the residence’s caretaker wore) and then knock on each of his friends’ doors and throw a paper into the room. He chuckled to himself thinking about what their reactions would be. And if he woke them up, it would serve them right for not waiting for him.

Parrot waited until he was sure that there was nobody around to see him then wrapped the pile of newspapers in his jacket. They were heavier than he had anticipated and he was glad that he was close to his residence. Had he had to go further, he would probably have given up on the idea; it wouldn’t have been worth the effort.

He walked the last couple of hundred metres to his residence awkwardly, ungainly both from the effects of the alcohol and the weight of his load. As he arrived at the gate, he noticed a bicycle chained to a pole next to the residence wall. It was a rusty, decrepit bike and he was about to pass it without further attention when he happened to see that it had an old-fashioned bell attached to the handlebars. If the device had been planted there, it could not have been more perfect. Parrot started laughing as he detached the bell. It was brilliant. He would ring the bell outside each room and then open the door and throw a paper in. By the time he had removed the bell from the handlebars, he was snorting with laughter. He was still chuckling as he opened the door of the residence.

Mr Mouton got the phone call as he walked into the office on Monday morning. He should have predicted it; the day had not started well. First there had been the incident of the cockroach in his box of breakfast cereal and then, when he had stopped at the bakery on Main Road on his way into the office to buy something to eat instead of the cereal, he had been hassled by a drunken hobo.

He had complained to the bakery manager about allowing the man to beg from outside the shop but the manager had raised his shoulders and explained that each time they tried to move the man he simply came back again a few days later. Out of principle, Mr Mouton hadn’t given the beggar anything but he had spent the rest of his journey to work feeling guilty about not having given the man anything. And now he had to deal with this complaint.

He listened in silence to the owner of a corner café rant for ten minutes about the Sunday newspapers that he had not received and then muttered some platitudes in an attempt to calm the man down. He put the phone down with a sigh. He suspected that he knew whose delivery area the café fell into: the new guy, the one who was still on probation. Because he hoped that he was remembering incorrectly, and that the café was situated in another of the delivery areas, he went to check the schedule. But his first instinct had been right. He felt somehow betrayed by this man who he hardly knew. He had thought that he had made a safe recommendation suggesting that the company employ the man (had even prided himself on his good judgement of character). The man had appeared trustworthy and dependable.

Mr Mouton cursed himself for being so naïve. It was ridiculous, after almost thirty years in the job, to have been fooled by a shiny pair of shoes and an ironed jacket. Polished shoes hardly proved honesty (although Mr Mouton did concede to himself that they showed a certain pride in appearance which, no matter what the outcome of this particular case was, was commendable in an employee). He sat down at his desk and unwrapped the chocolate croissant that he had bought from the bakery. He bit into the delicacy and dark, rich chocolate melted into his mouth. Mr Mouton understood what a temptation it must be to the delivery men to skim some papers to sell privately and it did happen, every now and then. It was always punished.

He finished off his croissant and wiped his hands on the trousers of his suit. Why hadn’t the guy at least waited until he was a permanent employee? He only had one day of his probation period left anyway. If he had been on a contract, Mr Mouton could have given him a warning instead of firing him but there was no such leeway for employees still in their trial period. That was, after all, the purpose of a probation period. And the company regulations were very clear that the newspapers were the responsibility of the delivery man until signed for by the recipient. Mr Mouton sighed again. This issue was making the croissant, normally such a treat, sit like cement in the bottom of his stomach. He hated making these phone calls. He scanned a list of numbers on his computer screen then picked up the telephone receiver and dialled the cell phone number of Herman Luthuli.