Double Negative (12 page)

‘I thought you loved cooking.'

‘Your father liked coming home to a plate of food, so I cooked.'

‘You never really enjoyed
it.'

‘Up to a point. Anyway there's not much pleasure in cooking for
one.'

I helped her put the deli on the table, the simple things she liked now: a French loaf, smoked chicken, sweet-and-sour pickles, tomatoes. We sat down to
eat.

For the first time in months, she spoke about my father's illness. It was the worst year of our lives. I would have come home to see them through it had I been able. It was clear that my father would not be travelling again. The false cheer when we spoke on the telephone could not hide the strain in their voices, each pained in its own way. The negotiations were going on in South Africa, but the place looked so violent from a distance. Everyone kept saying the process might still be derailed, it was not yet irreversible, to use the magic word. We spoke in riddles and I was never sure if we were talking about my father's cancer or the end of apartheid.

‘He was so brave,' she said. ‘Even at the end, he found it in himself to laugh. Once he sat down in his old camping chair on the patio and the canvas seat tore. How we laughed!
–
even though he was sick. In fact, that's what made it funny, that the chair should break although there was nothing left of him, he was skin and bone.'

Rosco Dunn was an echo chamber in which I kept hearing things. It was the perfect name for a boxer, not a champion mind you, but a contender. Finally I called Lenny Craven on the sports desk at the
Times
and he knew all about it. Knoetze had played Rosco Dunn in
Bomber
opposite Bud Spencer.
Skop, skiet en donder
, Lenny said, ham in all three disciplines. Rosco was a military man and the villain of the piece. I assumed the name was a screenwriter's invention, but when Lenny's fax came through I had to wonder if Knoetze hadn't made it up himself: Richard Dunn, Duane Bobick, Denton Ruddock. He'd beaten them all in successive fights. Roll the names together in your mouth and you might get Rosco
Dunn.

My second visit to Mrs Pinheiro started badly. I had scarcely sat down at the end of the pew when she planted herself in front of the desk like a lawyer in a courtroom drama and said, ‘You're not a historian.'

‘Mrs Pinheiro
–'

‘You're much too young.'

‘That's not important,' I managed to
say.

‘Why do you come with this nonsense about boxing? My father built this house. I was born and raised here.' She pointed a crooked finger at Dr Pinheiro's room. ‘If there was a boxer in this house he would have been my brother, I can promise you that.'

‘Rosco Dunn,' I
said.

‘Stop it, please. I know what you're up
to.'

I was all
ears.

‘You're an estate agent.'

‘Oh. Is that why you let me
in?'

‘I knew it! You get a feeling about someone. The minute I saw you, I thought you were in the market. This area has gone to the dogs and some stupid people are giving their houses away. You're not the first greedy agent to come snooping around here pretending to be looking for your cousin or collecting money for Boys Town.'

For a moment, my surprise that she was on to me obscured the fact that she was also entirely mistaken. It was tempting to go along with this new fiction, I felt like trying it on for size, but it was time to confess.

‘You're right, I'm not an historian … but I'm not an estate agent either.'

She wouldn't listen. ‘You work for Wanda Bollo?'

‘Absolutely
not.'

‘Tony Braz?'

‘No, I'm a photographer, a commercial photographer, and not a very good
one.'

That stopped her dead. ‘A
bad
photographer?'

‘Scout's honour.'

‘What do you want?'

‘I was here more than ten years ago, not in your house but next door at the Dittons. I came with a photographer called Saul Auerbach, a real professional. We were going to knock on your door and ask whether we could take some pictures but we never got that far, we ran out of time. I never stopped wondering what this place was like inside. When I found myself in your neighbourhood last week, I decided to try my luck.'

‘After all this time?'

‘I'm sure it sounds strange, but it's the truth.'

‘Then why didn't you just say
so?'

‘It seemed too complicated.'

With a disapproving click of her tongue, Mrs Pinheiro went to the sickroom, listened briefly at the door and slipped inside. As the door opened and shut, a tattered pennant of noise blew out through the gap. A moment later the door opened and shut again, and she was back with a photograph in a frame.

‘Dottie left it to me when they moved,' she said. ‘Something to remember her
by.'

The frame was ornately leafy with the gilt chipped off its edges. Various photo-booth strips, creased passport photos and snapshots with pinked edges, tucked into the gap between glass and frame on either side, made it look like a stage with people peering out from the wings. Behind these rubbernecks, I saw Mrs Ditton in her lounge.

It was years before I came across Auerbach's book. Despite myself, I'd started taking more care over my photos. Using a camera nearly every day, watching people pick through my amateurish location snaps on the boardroom table
–
What on earth is
this
?
–
made me want to do better. Looking for guidance rather than inspiration, I turned to the photography shelves in the bookshops. On a Saturday morning, in the clutter of the Africa Centre, there it was:
Accidental Portraits
. Ignoring the viewing copy on top of the pile of books, I bought one sealed in plastic, sight unseen, and carried it home like a guilty secret.

The photo of Veronica was near the front. As I paged, I had been picturing her in the yard, against the red iron walls and bright lines of washing, but of course she was inside the shack in black and white. For the first time I saw into the dim interior, where she sat on an iron bed cradling her two babies.

The caption read: ‘Veronica Setshedi and her children, Joel and Amos, the surviving pair of a set of triplets, in their backyard shack in Emerald Street, Kensington, 1982. The third child, pictured in the smaller photograph, died the previous year from inhaling the poisonous fumes of a brazier. Veronica's husband Zeph is employed as a scooter driver by a large bank. They receive no special assistance from his employer or the state.'

My account of the day flickered in the glare of this image. So this is what will be left, I thought, for better or worse. This moment.

I paged further, through a long procession of Auerbach's people, municipal clerks, deep-level miners, shop assistants, a policeman with a cigarette pinched between his fingers, a flat cleaner with leather pads like shoes strapped to his knees, a house painter with freckles of PVA on his forearms. Absence had sharpened my relationship to these strangers. Without making the heart grow fonder, it had thinned the skin of my eye until every one of them could seem representative. In the flesh, on the same street, I would have kept my distance; at this scale, at this remove, they drew close and felt familiar. All their names were on the tip of my tongue. I kept thinking: I know this person. I know this kind of person.

And there was Mrs Ditton among her bruised artefacts, displayed like an idol on a cross-stitched cushion full of horsehair and gristle, her fingernails gaping like mouths.

When I turned the page, I almost expected to see the house next
door.

Later I showed the book to Richard, thinking I might speak of my small part in it. He laughed as he leafed through it, smoothing the gloom out of every page with the flat of his hand. ‘Can you believe these people? It's like Louisiana without the bayous. Son of a gun we're having fun anyway.' He was about to audition for some Sam Shepard play at the Tricycle
–
True West
, I think it was, or
Buried Child
–
and he said this was just what he needed for his research. ‘Look at this moustache. Can you see me in one of those? I can use that.'

Richard's girlfriend Faith was less diplomatic. ‘Ugly people in ugly places,' she said. ‘The whites I mean. You must be relieved you've escaped from all this.'

‘I'm sorry you're not an estate agent,' said Mrs Pinheiro, ‘because I need to get out of here. Never mind seeing the world, I'd just like to see the other side of town. If I could get a room at Nazareth House, I'd be the happiest woman alive.'

She was behind the desk squinting at the photograph of Mrs Ditton. I thought of telling her how much it was worth: not exactly a pension, but more than pocket money. Now that South Africa had rejoined the global community, Auerbach's reputation was on the rise, he had become collectable. The experts were beginning to say that he was more than a photographer; that he was an artist.

‘I'm sorry you're not a historian either. You could have written something about Dr Pinheiro. Such an interesting
man.'

She tugged a photograph from the frame and held it out to me. It was a passport photo embossed with an arc of print like the inscription on a coin. A man with black hair swept back, a veined and bony forehead, and dark eyes gazing regretfully down a nose that was too long for his face. Not a bad likeness, I thought, less hair on the head, more flesh on the bones, a little less Bela Lugosi and a little more Marlon Brando, and he was the spitting image of the man I had imagined languishing in the room behind the
door.

‘I am not Mrs Pinheiro.' She left the words lying between us like the settlement of a debt. ‘I may be the love of his life, but we never married. Sometimes I wonder whether there isn't a Mrs Pinheiro somewhere else, waiting for him in Mozambique or Portugal. People do not always tell the truth about who they are, as you know.'

Some people are born liars, I thought, and others acquire the skill through patient effort.

‘Dr Pinheiro was a gifted physician,' she continued. ‘He had a thriving medical practice in Lourenço Marques. He came down here after the Revolution, as they call their crazy carnival, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He was not the only one, of course, there were thousands of refugees like him, but he lost more than most, even his stethoscope.'

‘How did you meet?'

‘My brother found him at Our Lady of Lourdes and sent him to me. He arrived with a suitcase, and in it, a suit. That's all. I thought it was funny but he didn't see the joke. He was suffering. I took him in as a boarder, I had the room, and I let him stay for nothing until he got back on his feet. I could see he was a gentleman.

‘He couldn't work as a doctor. They said his medical degree was invalid. There was an exam he could take and he was willing to study for it, he said, his English was improving every day, but the problem was that he couldn't speak Afrikaans. He got a job in the post office sorting letters. Can you imagine? A doctor, a man who should be giving injections and saving lives, standing all day throwing letters into pigeonholes. Sheltered employment for poor whites, for people with deaf ears and crooked feet. Yes, he used to say to me, it suits me, this job: I am a poor white.'

This must have been in the mid-70s, I thought, when I was still a schoolboy. Where would the depot have been? Perhaps at the Jeppe Street Post Office. I tried to imagine the doctor there, poring over the addresses on letters and postcards as if they were secret codes, while I sat at my desk with the plans for a Flying Fortress spread out under the reading light and the picture of the finished model on the lid of the box standing on end like a screen. No matter how carefully I dabbed glue on the tiny parts, they ended up stuck to my fingers.

‘Can you hear
it?'

‘What's that?'

‘I thought you were listening to the voices. It gets so loud sometimes I can't hear myself think.' We listened. ‘At first, it was just one or two, but lately it sounds like a crowd. Talk talk talk.'

The silence had a texture to it now, an undercurrent like a tap running in another room of the house.

‘The doctor seems like a clever man,' I said. ‘Did this job really suit
him?'

‘It was very hard for him. He didn't know the names of the big towns, never mind little villages or farms or railway junctions. Even the suburbs were new to him: how was he to know whether Troyeville was in Johannesburg or Pretoria or Blikkiesdorp? He had to learn everything from the beginning. It's a wonder he managed.

‘Every sorter had a pigeonhole for letters that were not properly addressed or illegible. A few times a day, the Chief Sorter would go around the depot and collect all these letters, and then he would try to decipher them. In the beginning, Dr Pinheiro's pigeonhole for unsorted mail was fuller than everyone else's, and he worried that the Chief Sorter would notice and give him the sack. So he started to bring these letters home with him. He would have lost his job anyway if he'd been caught, but it was worth the risk. Together we went through the letters and I helped him decipher the addresses. It was like solving a crime. That's how we fell in love.'

Make-believe is easier to catch than truth-telling. I was beginning to hear things, a radio playing in a distant room or a dance party in the next block, a burst of laughter going up like a balloon slipping from a child's hand, and then an angry voice trying to talk over the others, insisting on something, making demands. And rushing beneath it all, so quietly it was almost imperceptible, an undercurrent of my own thoughts like a subterranean river under the house.