A SONG IN THE MORNING (8 page)

The Minister of Justice had a long day in front of him.

Public meetings at breakfast, midday and late afternoon.

The by-election was to be held in twenty-seven days' time.

The Minister of Justice had been preceded by Water Affairs, Forestry and Environment Conservation, and by Community Development and State Auxiliary Services. In this constituency alone he would be followed before polling day by State Administration and Statistics, by Transport Affairs, and by Minerals and Energy.

The minister had slept in the back of the car for most of the drive from Bloemfontein to Petrusburg. He woke when they were three miles short of the town. His secretary passed him a battery shaver. The secretary sat in the front beside the police driver. In the back of the Mercedes with the minister was the local area Chairman of the Party, a fellow Broederbonder.

"What'll they be like?"

"Cool."

"Which means iced." The minister strained his chin upwards to get the razor's teeth against the skin of his jowl.

"We all want to know what the future holds."

"Change."

"You won't find this audience applauding talk about change. They like the old ways. They want reassurance that
we're
running our country, not American bankers."

"I'll get them laughing . . . "

"You'd have to get your trousers off to get a laugh."

"What do they want?"

"To know that our government is not abdicating its responsibilities in the face of overseas pressure, and Black pressure. Persuade them and we might just win."

"It's rubbish to talk of abdication."

The Party man shrugged. "Fine when you say that to me.

Tell your audience that and they'll shout you out of the hall, I promise you."

"What'll satisfy them?"

"You know the name of Prinsloo?"

"Should I?"

"Gerhardt Prinsloo."

"Don't know him."

"His parents live in Petrusburg."

"Don't give me riddles, man," the minister snapped.

They were coming into the town. One street on a main road, low buildings, a small shopping arcade, a decent church.

"His father runs a hardware store. His mother teaches in the nursery school. You should go to Gerhardt Prinsloo's grave."

"If I knew who he was."

"Everyone in Petrusburg knows the name of Gerhardt Prinsloo. He's the nearest thing they have to a genuine South African hero."

"Tell me, man."

"If the people here thought that you didn't know who Gerhardt Prinsloo was and what he did, then I assure you our vote would be halved."

"What did he do?"

"Warrant officer Gerhardt Prinsloo gave his life to save others. He smothered the terrorist bomb in the Rand Supreme C o u r t . . . "

The minister bit his lip in anger. "You caught me cold, early in the morning."

"I've heard it said in this town that our government of today is so preoccupied with foreign opinion, with the shouting of the liberals, with appeasement, that the men who murdered Gerhardt Prinsloo might receive the State President's clemency."

The minister leaned forward, tapped his secretary's shoulder. "Give me my speech and your pen."

Resting the speech on his knee he made a long addition to the back of the first page.

The car came to a stop. There was desultory applause from a small group of the faithful out to greet the minister.

"Straight after my speech I will visit the grave. I will lay some flowers there, and I want a photographer."

• • *

In the top half of the heavy door was an aperture covered by close mesh, too close to get the fingers through. Beside the door, and looking out onto the corridor of C section 2

was a window of reinforced glass. Against the far wall to the door was the flush toilet, and beside that, set in a cavity, was a drinking water fountain. If he sat on his bed, at the far end of the pillow, then his legs fitted comfortably underneath the work surface area that jutted out from the wall. He had brought no personal mementos with him to Beverly Hills, there were no decorations on the walls, no mementoes of any previous condemns. Eight feet above the floor a heavy metal grille made a false ceiling. The cell was sixteen feet high. On the corridor wall, above the grille, were slatted windows, and the guard who patrolled the catwalk above the corridor had a clear view down through these windows into the cell. In the ceiling the light burned, bright by day, dimmed by night, always burning. No daylight could reach the cell. Natural light came from windows above the catwalk, and then by proxy into the windows above Jeez.

From his cell he could see no blue sky, could never see the stars. The windows onto the catwalk and into the cell were always open, so the temper of the seasons reached him.

Stinking hot in high summer, frosty cold in winter. Now the cool of the autumn was coming. He doubted that he would shiver again in the winter cold.

He had eaten his breakfast, he had shaved under supervision, he had swept out his cell. He waited for his turn in the exercise yard. Other than his turn in the exercise yard, this day would go by without him leaving his cell.

He was the celebrity, the first White political to face death by hanging since John Harris and that was more than twenty years before. No one who worked in Beverly Hills had ever before handled a White political who was condemned. Many times in each day he would look up from his bed to the corridor window and see the flash of a pale face, the face of a watcher. They might have had a camera on Jeez for all the time they watched him. They watched him while he slept and while he ate and while he read and while he sat on the lavatory. He knew why they watched him, and why his shoes were slip-ons and without laces, and why he had no belt, and why there were adhesive tabs on his prison tunic in place of buttons.

When he had first arrived at Beverly Hills he had been told why they would watch him. One guy, a White, had once stood on his bed and nose-dived onto the concrete floor to try to cheat them out of his appointment. No chance that they would provide Jeez with an opportunity not to show for his appointment.

Because Jeez was a political he was allowed no association with the other two White condemns in C section 2. They were new boys. One had moved in three weeks before, and one had been there for four months, and three had gone because their sentences had been commuted to imprisonment. The other White condemns were permitted to exercise together in the yard leading off C section 2, but Jeez was only taken out when they were back and locked in. Jeez's cell was at the far end of the section corridor. The cells of the other two condemns were opposite each other and beside the door that led to the main C

section corridor; there were empty cells separating the White criminals from the White political. He had never seen their faces. He had heard their voices in the corridor. He knew they called him the "bleddy commie" or the "bleddy ter". These two bastards wouldn't be singing for him, not if it came to him keeping his appointment.

Sergeant Oosthuizen was the prison officer who had responsibility most days for Jeez. Most days Sergeant Oosthuizen escorted Jeez to the exercise yard.

Each time he heard the slam of the door that separated the main C section corridor from the C section 2 corridor, and each time he heard the key slot into his cell door he hoped, a short soaring hope, that the governor was coming with the message that would tell Jeez that the team had not abandoned him.

They always slammed the door between the main corridor and C section 2.

The team had been his life. The team was names and faces, clear as photographs, no blurring with time. The captain of the team was Colonel Basil, big and bluff and with thin blue veins surfacing on apple red cheeks. The men in the team were Lennie who had a patter of whip crack jokes, and Adrian who flirted with the fresh new recruits, and Henry who on a Friday evening at the end of the working office week played the piano in the saloon bar of the pub that the Century men used. Colonel Basil and Lennie and Adrian and Henry were his team and his life.

He hadn't let them down, neither a long time ago nor in Johannesburg. Of course they'd be working for him, moving bloody mountains for him. Probably old Colonel Basil would have set up a special task force desk to supervise the prising of Jeez out of the hole he was in.

Sergeant Oosthuizen was smiling at him from the opened cell door. They were cutting it rather fine. Hell of a good lime he'd had on the team, the real friendships, home and away. Being on the team mattered, because membership of the team was the guarantee. Shit, the guarantee was important to a leg man. It said that the team would never stop working their balls off for a leg man who was in trouble.

And Christ, was he in trouble. Jeez Carew, member of the team, was going to hang. And his faith in the team was slipping.

"Nice morning for a walk. Come on, Carew."

* * *

The solicitor had driven that morning from Johannesburg because it was useless to telephone for information, and worse than useless to write letters to the Justice Ministry.

He was not shown in to the civil servant's office until after the lunch hour.

It was a brittle meeting. The elderly Afrikaner South African and the young English heritage South African. The man on government pay and the man on private practice.

The solicitor's questions were blunt enough.

Had the decision been taken by the State President on whether James Carew would hang?

The civil servant had parried. "The decision has been taken, but the decision is not yet public."

Could the solicitor's client know of the decision of the State President?

"He'll know when he needs to know."

Surely, if he was going to get clemency then he should be told immediately?

"If he's not going to get clemency then he's better not knowing."

Couldn't the solicitor be given an indication of the State President's thinking?

"Look, I'm not going to tell you what is the State President's opinion. The way we do it is this, the deputy sheriff will go to the gaol not more than four or five days before an execution and he will then inform a prisoner that the appeal to the State President has been turned down. I'm not saying for certain that the sentence will stand in the case of your client, but I can tell you that if it does stand you will know at the same time that Carew knows."

It had been spelled out to him. The young solicitor softened.

"Not for Carew, but for me to know."

"You're asking me to read the mind of the State President."

"A bit of guidance."

"The minister was in Petrusburg this morning. He made an addition to his prepared speech. He said . . . 'There are people who say that your government is soft on the matter of law and order. We are not. There are people who say that our legal processes can be influenced by the threats of foreign governments. They can not. There are people who say that terrorists will get away with murder in our fine country.

They will not. I warn people who seek to bring down our society that they will face the harshest penalties under our law, whether they be White or Black, whether they be our citizens or jackals from outside.' . . . It's not me that's answering your questions, it is my minister."

"How long?"

"Not long, not a month."

"It's cut and dried?"

"Listen. At the moment we have a police strength of around 45,000. In ten years we will have a force of more than 80,000. Right now we have to fight this unrest with an understrength force. If any South African police line cracks then there is nothing to save us from anarchy. We have to sustain the morale of the police or we go under, and supporting the morale is not best served by reprieving police murderers."

"I appreciate that you've spoken to me in confidence.

What can save my client?"

The civil servant examined the file in front of him. He was a long time turning the pages. He looked up, he gazed steadily at the solicitor.

"If at this late stage your client were to give to the security police every detail of his knowledge of the African National Congress, then there might be grounds for clemency in his case alone."

"The others would go?"

"We could handle one reprieve, not more. We have never understood why your client ever involved himself in terrorism, and he hasn't helped us. If we had names, safe houses, arms caches, everything he knew, then we could talk about clemency."

"Guaranteed?"

Fractionally the eyebrows of the civil servant lifted.

"You should tell him to talk to the security police, that's all that can save him."

• * •

Sergeant Oosthuizen had been 38 years in the prison service, the last eleven of them in Beverly Hills. He was to retire in the next month, and then he'd be able to spend time with his daughter and his son. Sergeant Oosthuizen didn't require Jeez to have a conversation with him. He just talked, that was what he was happiest at.

It was more of a garden than an exercise yard. Against the walls was concrete paving. Each wall was nine paces long.

Thirty-six paces for a circuit. Forty-nine circuits was a mile's walk. The centre of the yard was Jeez's garden. The soil was twelve inches deep, then concrete. It was Jeez's garden because none of the other condemns showed any interest in it. The garden had not been looked after since a child killer had gone to the rope the month before Jeez arrived at Beverly Hills. Last spring Oosthuizen had brought Jeez seed. The geraniums had done well, the marigolds had threatened to take over, the chrysanthemums had failed. Jeez crouched on his haunches and picked discoloured leaves and old blooms off the geraniums. The sunlight was latticed over the bed and the concrete by the shadow of the grid above him. The garden was a cell. The song birds could manage it through the grid and out again, but nothing as large as a pigeon could have squeezed down to feed from the grubs that he turned up when he weeded his flowers.