A Single Swallow (3 page)

‘NO! My first was the story of . . .'

‘You must make a list,' he said, with a half-smile. The clock was
racing. Two minutes to get the form accepted, or the office would shut and my passport would miss visa day. The Algerian Consulate in London stamps visas on the 21st of the month. Miss visa day, miss visa, miss country.

‘Do you have a piece of paper?' I cried, desperately, scrabbling for a pen.

In the end, with a grin, I was granted a visa valid for eight days.

‘You can go anywhere!' cried the man. ‘But you must not miss the exit date.' (Algeria is the tenth largest country in the world.)

In my front left pocket was a wallet, containing a credit card for ‘emergencies', an expired National Union of Journalists' press card, a UK driving licence, UK National Insurance card and a debit card.

In the rucksack was a document folder containing vaccination certificates for Hepatitis A, Hep. B, Hep. C, Yellow Fever, Typhoid, Tetanus, Polio, Cholera, Meningitis, all ‘boosted' as necessary, and Rabies – recording a course of three injections. I also had a ‘fake' (i.e unstamped) Yellow Fever certificate, picked up at the travel clinic for use as a decoy.

‘Are you going to be around dogs, buses, public transport, will you be travelling away from cities, will you be eating . . . uncooked food?' asked the nurse.

‘Yes, yes – yes.'

‘Right. Better have everything.'

There was a Comprehensive Travel Insurance certificate, promising immediate evacuation from anywhere, regardless of limitless cost, and my birth certificate, showing that it had taken my mother some months to get around to registering my birth in Hammersmith. Divided up and hidden in various places throughout the rucksack, was cash: US $1,000 and €1000.

I had a mosquito net and three kinds of spray – the vicious chemical stuff, some herbal stuff and something else. I had a treated net and sufficient tablets to get me through the malarial zone, roughly calculated to start somewhere in Namibia and finish somewhere in the Sahel. I had my hat (Indiana Jones style, naturally, purchased in St James's, London, as was his) and a new pair of binoculars. I had a
‘Blackberry', allowing expensive and occasional access to email and web, also calls, text messages and GPS, which did not often work but could be thrilling, giving latitude and longitude and the degree of accuracy to which it calculated its position: normally about 8 metres.

I had books: Angela Turner,
The Barn Swallow
;
The Lonely Planet Guide to Namibia and South Africa
; and a collection of the prose of Seamus Heaney:
Finders Keepers.

In a sponge bag were rehydration sachets, Savlon, TCP and an emergency dental kit (numbing clove oil, wadding, a mirror and a sort of soft-tipped probe); elsewhere in the rucksack were a First Aid kit, a compass, a beautiful head torch, enough maps of varying scale and relevance to get me arrested as a spy virtually anywhere between Windhoek and London, a journal with a reward offered in the front for its return (US $50), pens, pencils, lightweight clothes, boots and a rainproof jacket. I had visions of walking miles through tropical rain in the forests of the Congo. I was not worried about the downpours, but feared that the weight of the rucksack would have me floundering in the mud.

After a few moments of sitting I stood up, and went, discovering later that the sitting had popped open a tube of sunscreen in my wash-bag. (The Russians also say that life is not a walk across an open field.)

I took a taxi to Paddington Station. As we climbed up onto the Westway a cold sun was setting behind us in a sky streaked with pewter and hard blue. The towers of London looked stark and hard against a flinty dusk. As it sank the sun threw an orange flood of light out of the west. There, over 100 miles behind us, was the journey's end. It was 12,000 miles by the way I was going. From Heathrow I called three friends to say goodbye. From one, Samrine, a blessing came:
Bismillah al rahman al rahem
.

‘Say it as you get on the plane,' she says. ‘You'll be fine darlin', you know you will.'

You can see why the Greeks made sacrifices before setting out on a journey. The decision to travel any significant distance is a decision to
put yourself in harm's way, to place your fate in the hands of the gods of winds, waves and the road. In Erice, near the port of Trapani in Sicily, sailors used to visit the temple of Aphrodite (in Punic times the temple of Astarte) and there make offerings to her, in the belief that the goddess controlled storms. The tradition has survived in that the Madonna of Trapani is recognised by the Vatican as the patron saint of sailors. Because I am fond of the place and the story, I say a quick prayer to her. I will go like a sailor; the roads will be my ships and the countries will be seas. My religious convictions – suspicions would be more accurate – are non-aligned. In need, distress or exultation I will worship God in any language. The major faiths condense the multiple spirits and deities the ancients perceived into single figures.

‘
Bismallah al rahman al rahem
,' I mutter. In the name of Allah the almighty the all merciful . . .

I fall into a doze as we cross into Algerian airspace. Just before I drop off I see fires down there, rosy blooms of flame in the dark desert: oil wells. Two hours later we are still over Algeria. My head swims with muzzy forebodings: this is mad, it cannot be done, the swallows are just too quick, it is just too far, the plan is a joke . . .

I think of my father, somewhere in Cape Town and looking forward to tomorrow, to showing me around for a few days before he sees me off. He is there for a couple of weeks, researching his book about South African history, traced through its literature. Strange that the swallows should take me straight to the part of the beginning of my own story which is a mystery to me. South Africa, my father's story; somehow our family's story, which I have heard about but never seen.

‘As you see,' my father says, ‘South Africa is white!' Black waiters zig-zag between packed tables, frowning at the effort of carrying and distributing so much, much food. The tables are packed, and every customer is white.

I laugh a little, ‘
Je-sus
. . .'

‘It is a pretty spot though, isn't it?'

Cape Town's waterfront is an orderly jumble of boats and quays, of
drilling rigs, restaurants, bars and day trips, chopped at by the South Atlantic, with a wind, this lunchtime, coming from behind us, from the other side of Table Mountain, the southeaster from the Indian Ocean. The city has all the beauty of San Francisco; the luminosity of light, which sharpens colours to the peak of their intensity; the fresh sea winds which never abate; the different levels of streets and houses which seem to applaud the prospect of the ocean; the deep blue shadows and, out of the wind, the golden heat of the sun. The rich areas on the skirts of Table Mountain have an American opulence about them. Near where we are staying is a ranch with tall blue-gum trees and fine horses, ridden and groomed to a gloss. In Camp's Bay a white woman who looks like a model queues at a supermarket checkout wearing tiny scraps of transparent white cotton. The black man who serves her does not know which way to look. There are super-cars, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, jockeying for position in the freeway traffic, which hurtles along with a kind of recklessness. There is a recklessness in the wind and an untameable ferocity in the cliffs and abysses of the mountain. There is a tension in the air, as if all who live well live on borrowed time, and the millions more who live hard are running out of patience. San Francisco is a hundred times more at ease with the San Andreas fault than is Cape Town with the human earthquake that has not yet come, which merely rumbles, daily, in the crime round-ups of the newspapers. It is as though Table Mountain is a volcano.

‘As you see,' my father says, the next day, ‘South Africa is black!'

Now we are driving through Khayelitsha, a suburb where over a million people are living in tin shacks. We are the only whites on the road. Cape Town is cut into quadrants; it is half chessboard, half minefield. The residents speak in colour code: here live Blacks, here Whites, here Coloureds. Wealth, poverty and danger are distributed accordingly. All cities are segmented, but nowhere I have been are the lines so sharp and hard, or the penalties for crossing them so dangerous. I give up counting the ‘Warning! Twenty-four-hour Armed Response!' signs, and the private security vehicles and personnel.

‘We used to go down there and bring up lobsters, boil them in seawater and sell them on the side of the road,' my father smiles.

We are pausing on the way to Chapman's Peak; I am on the lookout for sharks and whales, grinning and baffled by the sun and the wind and the Cape's geography: while my father is entirely at home I cannot even grasp which way is north.

‘You're a South African, Dad!' I blurt.

He is momentarily amazed, then starts laughing. He was a schoolboy and a student here before his flight in 1963, when his friends and their friends were being shot, arrested, tortured, tried, imprisoned or banned. He was banned for over twenty years (they would not let him back even when his father was dying) but has returned several times recently, like the other ‘swallows', as some Cape Town residents call those among their friends who reappear between November and March, for the southern summer.

We went to a poetry reading where one of Dad's friends was performing. It was held in a bar called ‘A Touch of Madness' in the Observatory district, which is supposed to be ‘mixed'. There were two black customers among all the whites. Dad's friend read a poem about interrogations by the Security Police. The audience nodded, ruefully. An open-mike session followed: a young man read a long, chaotic, hip-hop/beatnik piece in the style of William Burroughs. The audience shifted in its seats. Then an Irishman stood and sang, plainsong, Patrick Kavanagh's ‘On Raglan Road'. The audience stilled and listened.

There were thirty people in the room, thinking different thoughts of different lovers, but as the song ended there was a single note in their faces, a melancholy for something lost, or something that never was: whether it was enchantment, happiness or harmony you could not tell. I thought of her, again. The dream of all romantics, the dream you should perhaps have grown out of, by now; the one, the realised mystery, your own equivalent of Kavanagh's dark-haired girl, waiting for you, somewhere along the road of your life, with a spell of certainty attending her: the promise that the moment you see her, you know.

We went looking for the birds in a place called Zeekoevlei, ‘Sea Cow Marsh', a little nature reserve between the Cape Flats and the sea. There was sun and wind and tall reed beds, there were hides for birdwatchers and high viewing platforms which we climbed because they were there; the wind made you hold tight to rails and posts. There were the tracks and droppings of hippos, there were ducks and stilts and all sorts of other pretty things I did not care about. There were no swallows.

‘Seen any swallows recently?' had become Dad's catchphrase, but he was not saying it now. Where were they? I had not seen one since late last summer, in Britain. My appallingly expensive, near-unbeatable binoculars, light in their skeletal frame, their lenses hand-ground in eastern Germany, wobbled across crisp blue air.

‘Try the sewage farm,' said one of the rangers. ‘They come here later.'

Of course, it was mid-morning: insects; hunting. Reeds and roosting are for evening. We returned to the hire car and drove in circles, nosing the unobtrusive little vehicle through a strange, angular world of water, fenced-off settlements and tall trees until we are possibly lost, definitely lost, and then probably on track.

CAPE FLATS WATER TREATMENT WORKS
NO ENTRY

We play our joker again. We have done it before, using the car park and lavatories of the Victoria Hotel in town, because we were white or because our colour gave us confidence, though we did sneak out like thieves, and now, penetrating one set of gates after another because we are birdwatchers and birdwatchers can do this.

‘There – swallow!' I shout.

‘Is it?'

‘Yes, look . . .'

‘Oh so it is – phew.'

They were there for a second, skimming alongside us, between a high bank and the car. We follow the road to another set of gates. We sign in again. A sprinkler is at work, brightening flowers and greening a lawn. Through the gates, behind the works, we come to the treatment tanks. Rows of big, handsome Sandwich Terns sit in line along their edges, barely bothering to eye the car. They have black crests, like tufts of biros behind their ears. We carry on.

DANGER! SNAKES
BOOMSLANGS – COBRAS
PUFF ADDERS

‘Crikey,' says Dad, mildly. I eye the edges of the track warily. How bizarre to realise that swallows, ‘our swallows', spend half their time living happily alongside boomslangs and puff adders. If a boomslang bites, you bleed from everywhere until you expire. A good dose of puff adder venom will kill you in half an hour.

Now we are moving into the lagoons. Tracks run along dykes. Wild flowers flatten in the wind, the sea wind, coming straight off the Indian Ocean about 300 yards away.

Every time the path divides the choice is between a rough track and a rougher one, and
DANGER! SNAKES
boards stand sentry. There are flamingos in the ponds, and ducks, and then there they are, at last.