Double Negative (8 page)

Brookes came to perch beside me on the balustrade. Where had he been all this time? He had faded into the background like a song on the radio and now he became audible again, rolling his pen between his palms as if he was trying to start a
fire.

‘Well, I was right. That's two out of two.' When I gave no answer, he went on, ‘Did you pick up some tips?'

‘Sure, I've learned a bit about talking your way in. Perhaps I'll go into insurance.'

‘It's been an eye-opener, I must
say.'

‘More like a door-opener.'

Next door there was no sign of life. The curtains were drawn, the rooms were dark. We would not be ringing that bell, I was sure of it now. When Brookes said he had an interview with a chap from MAWU, he had to get back to the King George
–
‘The place has international status, you know'
–
I was not disappointed. Nor that Auerbach agreed so readily. It had been a long
day.

Nothing more was said about the third house. Two out of two is good enough. Perfect.

The car smelt of middle-aged men, of garlic, Brut and sweat, and thanks to me a whiff of pipe smoke, the finishing touch.

I asked to be dropped off in Hillbrow, I would fetch my car later, and Auerbach obliged by sweeping up Hadfield Road into Berea. He did not ask what I had made of the day. To be frank, I meant to avoid that question at all costs. Young people learn things intensely. They're impressionable, we say. The proper image is not a tabula rasa, we are not written upon or etched or branded, but moulded from a substance already dense with thought and feeling. Our teachers reach into us, skilfully or clumsily, it's the luck of the draw, and shape this substance, they make ridges there, hollows and curves, and perception runs over them, bending to the contours, breaking against the sharp edges repeatedly, until they are as familiar as the roof of your mouth to your tongue. Experience swirls through these channels like water over rock, being shaped in turn and given a new direction. The day had diverted a current in me, but I could neither express this change nor predict its issue. If I joked with Brookes about what I had learned, it was only because I found the lesson baffling.

In Kotze Street, near the High Point Centre, Auerbach pulled over. We all shook hands. Brookes gave me his business card and wished me luck in the profession. ‘Remember to write things down
–
' the door swung shut ‘– on an empty stomach!' They swerved out into the traffic.

I had said I was meeting a friend in the Café Zürich, but this was just an excuse. Even before the Rambler turned down Twist Street, I was walking. The streets were lit with purpose, the surge of energy released when people knock off from work, when they come out of offices and shops and the evening lies ahead. Every intersection, where the stream pooled impatiently waiting for the lights to change, was a small spectacle. Long strings of brake lights glowed like coals, exhaust fumes mingled with the smell of rosemary and roast chicken. I walked from one end of Hillbrow to the other. White boxes full of blunt objects turned over in my mind, thumping at every step. I drank a beer in Willie's Bar, I drank another on the balcony of the Chelsea Hotel. Pulsing with words and pictures, Exclusive Books drew me. Auerbach's book felt light in my hands. Perhaps his images, those dark things floating on milk, had finally sunk? I imagined that I opened the book and the pages were blank.

Long after dark, I walked over to Sabine's house in Honey Street and found her making supper, trying to turn the usual strange assortment of cut-price goods from the vegetable co-op into a casserole. She had a sackful of parsnips and runner beans. We sat at the kitchen table, with wine from a box in glasses filched from some exhibition opening, and peeled and chopped the vegetables. I meant to tell her about the day, but in the end I left it lying in the back of my mind, pressed to my memory by a pencil of light.

The end of apartheid put my nose out of joint, I must confess. Suddenly the South Africans were talking to one another. They wouldn't shut up. Every so often one of them would wave a fist or shout a slogan, but it did not stem the flow. The world looked on amazed that these former adversaries had come together to talk the future into a different shape. After a decade of wilfully excluding myself, I felt left out of the
club.

I was reminded of the old line on wishy-washy liberalism (the adjective is stuck to the noun like a price tag). Black people, it is said, prefer a straight-shooting Afrikaner to a duplicitous Englishman. What sort of people are these ‘English-speaking South Africans', how can you trust them when they don't even have a proper name for their
group
? You never know where you stand with an English liberal; but you can bet your life on a racist Afrikaner.

I had always been sceptical about this notion, but now I began to think it might be true. We are all caricatures, I decided. Let the houseboy unstrap his kneepads and the madam unbutton her mink, let the freedom fighter lay down his rusty machine gun and the piggy-eyed politician throw his fedora in the river. Who am I to judge them? They've taken the punch and now everything's working out for the best. As for me, the
hensopper
in the seven-league boots, there's really no excuse. I didn't go the distance. Looking on as the country became a symbol of hope
–
of all things
–
I couldn't help feeling I had squandered the chance to make my small bit of history.

For all that, I did not go home as soon as I might have. Apparently, I needed to go on excluding myself a little longer.

I voted at South Africa House. There was a carnival atmosphere, every newspaper would use the phrase afterwards. It's not often history steps down from its pedestal and comes to meet you in the street. Yes, we were making history too, I could see it that way if I squinted. So what if there were no proper ballot boxes, just bins with plastic liners? People did not want to leave afterwards. They lingered on the pavements around the embassy, greeting friends in the queue, laughing at faces masked in black, green and gold. I bumped into acquaintances I hadn't seen for years, even swapped phone numbers with a couple I knew from the anti-apartheid rallies way back
when.

‘We must keep in touch.'

‘Ja, let's have a
dop
.'

Producing the old slang like an expired passport.

We became a tourist attraction. An open-top double-decker drew up and the tour guide spoke into her microphone. ‘Over on the right, ladies and gentlemen, one of London's most enduring monuments, Nelson's column.' The cameras popped. ‘And over on the left, one of its newest and most transient attractions: South Africans voting.'

It was a day for making and accepting gestures. I was embraced by strangers, fiercely, as if they meant to squeeze the breath out of the past caught between us, and I held on as if my life depended on it, to say this is not about
me
, this is
your
moment. All around us principles I had nearly forgotten, togetherness, solidarity, engagement, glittered in the spring
air.

The broken shale of South African English, an abrupt concentration of flat vowels and sharp consonants, was reassuring and threatening all at once. I wondered what my own speech, worn smooth by ten years of English weather, would sound like to an African ear. If I went home
–
if
–
would my compatriots think I was a foreigner?

After I'd voted, I joined the tourists under Nelson's enduring column, where a babble of other tongues could wash the South African silt from my ears. Trafalgar Square has never appealed to me. I don't care for the excess of paving like pressed grey linen, it's too proper I think, a city square in a business suit. But on that day it had loosened its buttons. Even the pigeons, flung like scraps of paper over the roof of the National Portrait Gallery, seemed flightier than usual.

I watched the BBC reports on the elections in South Africa the following day, and the long queues of voters in the country districts, bent around thorn trees and thatched huts, looked like lines of print. My eye was drawn to the exclamation mark
–
the question mark?
–
of a white face. As the helicopter hovered to get these shots, some people looked up and waved like flood victims hoping to be rescued, while others flung jubilant fists into the air. Every face was turned to the future, but whether they were elated or proud or wary, I couldn't tell at this distance.

A few weeks later, my mother sent me a little corner-of-the-eye election story about an old woman at a voting station on the East Rand who had refused a ballot paper. Instead, before the surprised officials could stop her, she had thrown a handful of mealie pits into the ballot box. Chicken feed. She had been mistaken for a lunatic and arrested by the police, but she was a poet. Her gesture sowed nothing but questions. Who would squander their vote, this one in particular, to make a point? Had she used the ballot box as a granary or a rubbish bin? Or were the kernels meant to be planted? And if so, were they the seeds of hope or despair?

The poetry of the moment made me long for the prose of Johannesburg. I went to see a travel agent.

I rediscovered my home town in my father's car, the Mercedes he'd driven to work until a month before he died. It had been parked in the basement of my mother's flat for a few years. She didn't like driving it, she said, just fitting it into a parking bay was a mission. I promised to sell it for her as soon as I found something that suited me better, but then I had second thoughts. After a decade of using the tube, it felt good to be pampered. And it worked wonders on clients
–
it was a huge, glossy business
card.

Then again, the car was expensive to run and reminded me constantly of my dad. The first time I drove it, which I had never done while he was alive, I felt him sitting next to me, a reluctant passenger, telling me to watch out and slow down and keep my eye on the road. He was so vividly present, I could smell him. Later I realized it was no illusion: his aftershave was still in the leather steering-wheel cover and the warmth of my own hands had drawn the scent out on the
air.

The pressing need when I came back was to set up a business. I am a photographer, fairly independent, strictly commercial. I'd done a bit of everything in London, from catalogues for department stores to property portfolios, but I found my niche in the women's magazines. No high fashion, just run-of-the-mill advertisements and illustrations for features, those photos that say ‘Re-enacted by models', the ones that go with a footnote that says ‘Not their real names'. I was
–
am
–
the frozen moment guy. I specialize in things falling, spilling, flying apart. Before Photoshop there was some skill in this kind of thing.

Finding work in Johannesburg, going to every crappy shoot that came my way, took me all over the city. I got lost. There were offices and factories where I expected smallholdings or open veld. What had become of the aerodrome? The Snake Park? The new suburbs were not even in my father's dog-eared book of
maps.

I couldn't stop driving: I had to see everything again. I went looking for my grandparents' house in Orange Grove. What I wanted to see was the front stoep, a long slab of polished cement like a pool of cold blood. I found the address but the house was gone, devoured by an overgrown double-storey that barely fitted on the stand.

One Sunday afternoon, I drove out to Bramley with Acker Bilk in the tape deck (the soundtrack of my father's life had turned up in a plastic case under the seat). My mother had warned me to expect some changes in the neighbourhood, but I was not prepared for Villa Veneto. The estate covered a dozen of the old suburban blocks. Matchbox houses for the middle class. I followed the wall to the corner where our house used to be and found the end of the driveway marked by the stump of an oak. The cross section was the size of a dinner table, you could have seated six people there for a country luncheon. Right on cue, the melancholy strains of ‘Stranger on the Shore' rose like fragrant smoke from the grills in the dash. I drove on to the main entrance. It would have been easy enough to get past the storm trooper at the boom
–
another reason to keep the Merc
–
but the rows of tiled roofs and empty balconies were dispiriting.

I went back
home.

On another weekend, I drove around Yeoville and Berea, looking for my old hang-outs down Minors and Yeo and Honey, wondering if any of them were still occupied by students. Everyone said Joburg was too expensive and unsafe for student communes now. More and more young people were living at home until they got married. A generation of Peter Pans. Their poor parents couldn't get rid of
them.

A few months after I came home, I bumped into Sabine at the Rosebank Mall. We met on the escalators
–
I was going down to the movie houses and she was coming up
–
and we fumbled a greeting as we passed. Then I looked back and saw her waiting for me at the top, so I went up again and we had coffee at that place next to the information kiosk.

She'd been to some festival of apartheid films. ‘
Dry White Season
,' she said when I asked. ‘I watched it on video once when it was still banned, but it was amazing to see it on the big screen. Especially now when the past is becoming visible in a new
way.'

‘You mean it's coming back to haunt
us.'

‘Well, not just that. It will heal us too, I hope.'

‘It's a pity the past hasn't mastered a South African accent,' I said. ‘Sgt Oddball wasn't up to it, as I recall.'

‘They should have sacked the voice coach.' She gave the throaty, late-night laugh every man in her circle had found so seductive. ‘He sounded like a Dutchman who's lived in Moscow for ten years.' While I was imagining this combination and wondering whether she was sending me up, making a point about my own accent, she spread the festival programme out on the table and showed me the other films she wanted to see, documentaries about the struggle and the history of African jazz, a couple of dramas that had just been unbanned.

She looked good. I'd told her so as she kissed me on both cheeks like a European, and I meant it. Her features had sharpened with age, the baby fat had melted away, and it suited her. Although she still wore her hair long, the hippie style was gone too, the baggy dresses of the Honey Street days replaced by designer jeans and stiletto heels. How old was she? I'd read somewhere that women look their best at thirty-two. Or they think so, anyway.

‘What have you been up to?' I asked while she was sprinkling a sachet of sugar substitute through the foam on her cappuccino. I wanted to get in first.

‘Where shall I start? … Name an
era.'

The laugh was not as enticing as it had once been. Was she putting it on a bit? As I get older, I'm discovering how hard it is not to start playing yourself. ‘What did you do after varsity?' I asked.

‘I taught for a while, at King David Victory Park, of all places. I wasn't really qualified to do anything else with my
BA.'

‘Sure, Dad was right, it stands for Bugger
All.'

‘How
are
your parents?'

‘My dad passed away a while ago. My mom's going strong.'

‘I'm sorry to hear it
–
the first part I mean.'

Before she could take this further, I prompted her: ‘And after the schoolteaching? I gather you moved
on.'

‘Fast. I had to do something meaningful, politically speaking, so I got involved in ELP, you know, the English Language Project. We were teaching teachers in the Vaal Triangle. It was quite something. We went into the townships a lot. This was during the state of emergency, remember.'

Actually, I didn't know and I didn't remember. The grainy footage on the editing screens in production offices where my work sometimes took me, and the scraps of news on the BBC that I watched with one eye, scarcely qualified as memories. You could say the worst years of apartheid passed me
by.

‘It must have been rough,' I
said.

‘It had its moments. The boere thought nothing of chasing kids into the classrooms. Some teachers kept a bucket of water in the corner in case teargas blew in through the windows. Ordinary people were so brave. To go on teaching in those circumstances
–
it was heroic.'

‘You must have been brave
too.'

‘It's always easier with a white skin, you know, it's like a flak jacket. Of course, we weren't supposed to be in the townships at all. Once they had to smuggle me out of Evaton on the floor of someone's car, with a blanket over my head. Can you believe it? Me. Like a sack of potatoes. Playing hide-and-seek with the boere.'

She did it again: she gave the
boo
in boere a peculiar, ghostly inflection.

Later she'd worked for an NGO, researching and writing the new history that would be taught in the schools after liberation
–
‘We knew it would come!'
–
and still found time to get involved in worker education for the unions. I noticed that she used the word ‘worker' mainly as an adjective
–
worker plays, worker poets, worker publications. Along the way she'd joined the
UDF.

‘I became radicalized,' she said with a snort. ‘Imagine, we called ourselves radicals without a blush. It was appropriate too. If things hadn't changed when they did, I'd have gone underground. I was angry enough for armed struggle.'