The Pillow Fight (8 page)

‘He bicycles here from Johannesburg every day,’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘Fourteen miles.’

I had known about that, too.

Our excursion now became progressively more dull, as well as hot and irritating. Outside the church, we walked slowly down one of the streets, picking our way past the children and the goats, occasionally pausing to peer inside some wretched hut or sacking shelter. We were freely stared at; some of the men looked at me in a way I considered impermissible (it would certainly have had my father reaching for his
sjambok
). But throughout our tour Father Shillingford was seldom greeted, and never with any particular enthusiasm.

When I commented on this: ‘It’s true,’ he said, rather sadly. ‘It’s something which has happened the last year or so. They think all Europeans are either spies or exploiters – even me, and I’ve had this mission for nearly eight years.’ He was staring at a fat old woman selling a horrible confection that looked like pink peanut butter, and staring beyond her, as usual, at some ultimate horizon. ‘They’ve got to move on soon, you see. Even from this wretched place.’

‘Under the Group Areas Act?’

He nodded, his cheerful red face sombre. ‘That’s the magic phrase the Government uses … In future this is going to be a white area; all these people have got to get out, by the end of the year.’ He looked round him, at the squalor and filth of Teroka. ‘You wouldn’t think that would worry them much, would you? But this is home. It’s been home for twenty years or so. They
own
these houses and these bits of land. Now they’ve had orders to leave and start somewhere else, farther out of town.’

‘But it’s part of the overall plan,’ I said austerely, ‘to get Johannesburg properly zoned. There’s going to be a white area, and a native area. That makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t want them all mixed up.’

‘But it’s so cruel!’ broke in Steele. ‘My God, they already have to get up at five o’clock every morning, to queue up for those bloody buses to get to work by eight! Now they’re being pushed even farther away. And this place
belongs
to them! It’s theirs. How would you like to be kicked out of your house or flat or whatever it is, with no compensation and no appeal?’

‘I wouldn’t like it at all,’ I answered, ‘and I’m taking very good care to see that it will never happen.’

‘To you.’

‘To me.’

‘But that’s so selfish!’ said Steele, exasperated as I had intended him to be.

‘I
am
selfish,’ I said.

To my surprise and annoyance, Father Shillingford was smiling at me. It was not an amused smile; it even had elements of compassion and understanding, which I did not care for at all. Finally he said: ‘Miss Marais likes to be her own worst advertisement.’

It occurred to me suddenly that he and I were illustrating two aspects of integrity, the sacred and the profane, and that I much preferred mine. I engaged his intrusive blue eyes for a moment before replying: ‘I don’t fool myself, and I try not to fool other people.’

We did not stay long after that; I endured a few more streets, a few more smells, a few more insolent or sullen stares. More strongly than ever, I felt that I knew all this without being told it; I
knew
that Johannesburg natives were poor and meanly housed, that there was violence and theft, that they did not like or trust the white man. If it was Father Shillingford’s self-imposed task to try to soften this hard core of maladjustment, well and good. But when brought face to face with it, no bell tolled for me, nor would ever do so.

It was like getting involved with other people’s children on an aircraft or a train. If you betrayed the smallest interest in one of these deceptive brats, you were likely to become mother for the duration. Its sticky fingers would explore your hair, its wringing-wet pants would be pressed to your skirt; all its terror and boredoms would be your own. There was only one tactic to be employed on such occasions; to ignore it utterly, and if necessary pull a horrible face and frighten it away for good.

When we were driving away from the smells and the corrosive dirt of Teroka, Jonathan Steele said: ‘I’ll bet that’s one social engagement we won’t be reading about in your column.’

I was now comfortably beyond such minor strifes, but I wasn’t speechless on that account. ‘You really
are
rude, aren’t you?’

His hands on the steering wheel of his rotten car were, for a moment, steady. He said, with what seemed to me to be extreme care and concentration: ‘Kate, you are very beautiful and very accomplished. But whether you are lying flat on your back, or striding along to victory, Teroka is still there.’

I forgot Teroka speedily, though the words ‘very beautiful and very accomplished’ stayed with me, echoing for two busy days in many different places – Joel Sachs’ office, at conferences in my suite, at parties, in the street. At the advanced age of twenty-six, I still received enough compliments to satisfy a not-too-swollen ego; it was odd that I should remember Jonathan Steele’s, particularly since he had tacked on to it a sexual image – ‘lying flat on your back’ – which normally would have annoyed me very much. I decided that I wasn’t working hard enough … I did not see Steele again; Eumor said that he was ‘busy on his master-work’, and Bruno van Thaal said: ‘He can fry in hell for all I care,’ which seemed to dispose of the matter to the satisfaction of all parties.

Meanwhile I was enjoying Johannesburg, which I always thought of as ‘my town’ because I was born there, at a time when my father was emerging as one of the bigger stars in the gold-mining firmament. Working and playing there was always a tonic, after the more leisured pace of Cape Town. The Reef mines of the Witwatersrand were only sixty years old; the city which had grown on top of them was still a glorified mining camp, wide open, available for all corners. It wore always a flushed and hectic air, like a bride who might die tomorrow or an actor grown famous overnight.

People – young and old, thin or fat – threw their bodies on it at eight o’clock each morning, extracted every ounce of gold or profit during the next eight hours, and then rushed home in the evening to gamble it all away again. It lived perpetually on its nerves, hopes, fears and suspicions; and since there was no limit of any sort to human greed and gullibility, the whole place was jumping, on a round-the-clock, twenty-four-hour basis.

Civic happiness was geared to the mining section of the stock market; not just for operators or investors, but for everybody. When the market was up, even the poor whites running the lifts were buoyant as bees; when it was down, there was not a smile to be had from a derelict taxi driver. To hold aloof from this fever was an eccentric blasphemy; even the silliest women, restless, wayward and palpably insincere, chattered of margins and coverage, stopes and assaye-reports, a clean-up in this and a sell-out in that. I sometimes wondered whether their terms of endearment, their loving words-on-a-pillow, were not darling West Driefontein, beautiful Blyvooruitzicht, dreamy De Beers…

To match this nervous financial tic, there were some astonishing crimes and misdemeanours. ‘Salted’ bore-holes, peppered with alien gold, sent mining shares rocketing, only to plunge earthwards again when the perpetrators went to jail. Huge bets went awry as horses responded too readily to doping, and jumped the railings or sped backwards round the course. Only in Johannesburg would a horse, having broken its leg in a scuffle at the finishing-post, be shot dead by a spectator who ran across with his revolver from the Ten Shilling Enclosure.

Members of ‘sherry gangs’ kicked each other to death, and blamed it on tropical rain. ‘Fishing-pole burglars’ angled for loot through open bedroom windows, hauling out trousers, bedclothes, lovers … A combination of altitude and aptitude gave people the world’s strongest heads; there might be heavy drinking in other parts of the globe, but here it touched unique peaks of glory, and the altitude took care of the hangover.

Above all, it was a generous town. Involved in any kind of charity, I would rather raise ten thousand pounds in Johannesburg than ten shillings in London or Paris – particularly Paris. Partly it was due to a very strong Jewish community – acquisitive, cultured and open-handed. A by-product of this was an anti-Semitism of an odd and disgusting kind; not the unselfish disliking the acquisitive, but the acquisitive disliking the ones who had out-manoeuvred them. Johannesburg, however, had room for them all.

For two days I worked and wandered in this unique climate. We succeeded in sewing up the Anglo-African account, in the teeth of convulsive opposition from another firm; and I discussed with Joel Sachs about a dozen different layouts which were now due for production (the actual artwork was done in the main studio down at Cape Town). Gerald Thyssen gave an exceptionally pleasant dinner party for me; we all went racing at Turffontein, where I lost at least a week’s profits on one of Eumor’s ungenerous crocodiles. Then it was the eve of my departure, and by way of farewell I dined with the boys and took them all to watch a wrestling match.

Like the act of love, all-in wrestling in South Africa was the same as all-in wrestling in any other part of the world; predominantly crooked, patently rehearsed and (as far as I was concerned) hilariously amusing. We arrived at the end of one bout (the loser was just being finished off with a folding chair as we walked in) and wangled enough space at the ringside Press table to make ourselves comfortable. Flanked by Eumor and Bruno van Thaal, I settled down happily to watch Honest John versus the Demon Barber (one fall, twenty-minute time limit, championship of the Lower Transvaal).

Honest John (a new arrival from Rhodesia) was one of the least honest performers I had ever seen in the ring. He was rather old, rather bald, rather cynical about the whole thing; but he was still a splendid character, versed in all the stratagems which make ‘show wrestling’ such a meaty conjuring trick. He gave us (and the Demon Barber – who was entirely hairless) the works; closed-fist punching, elbow smashes that missed the chin and took the larynx, eye-gouging, knees into the groin, muscle-plucking on the referee’s blind side. He was up to all the tricks of defeat also; quite unsurpassed at cries of pain, the groggy-knees routine, fist-shaking at the crowd and appeals to high heaven for justice.

Once, when he touched my shoe in landing outside the ring, he whispered: ‘Excuse me, lady,’ and then roared at the top of his voice: ‘Foul!’ Thrown out of the ring a second time, he pointed at a projecting nail in the floor at least a yard from where he landed, and screamed in agony: ‘Oh, my knee!’ Naturally we backed him to the limit of our lungs.

And then, halfway through, suddenly I was bored; and just as suddenly I knew why.

The Demon Barber was taking time out on the ropes, simulating a profound coma; Honest John was protesting his innocence, and pretending to dispose of a knuckleduster at the same time. Bruno was talking to the sports writer sitting next to him. I tapped Eumor on the arm.

‘Where’s Steele, Eumor?’

He turned, surprised. ‘Who?’

‘Jonathan Steele.’

‘I don’t know, dar-r-r-ling. Why?’

‘I’d like to see him again.’

Eumor’s olive face creased into a grin. ‘You have some plans?’

‘No. I’d just like to see him.’

‘No, you have plans,’ declared Eumor determinedly. ‘You wish me to procure for you … It disgusts me … I will do it gladly.’

‘Hush,’ I said.

‘Trust me, Kate,’ he hissed, wonderfully conspiratorial. ‘I find him and bring him to your bed.’

‘Just bring him here,’ I said.

‘You want his body. I arrange.’

‘I’m sure you’ve done this sort of thing before,’ I said, resigning myself to the trend.

‘Not for some years.’

‘What are you two children whispering about?’ asked Bruno.

‘Nothing,’ answered Eumor. ‘I go to the gentlemens.’

When he came back he stood at the end of the Press table, and called to me rather loudly: ‘It’s all fixed!’ earning himself a malevolent glare both from the Demon Barber and the referee. Honest John was momentarily senseless on the other side of the ring.

Beside me again, Eumor whispered: ‘He was home. Comes straight away.’

‘But what did you tell him?’

‘Everything!’ exclaimed Eumor, with a gleaming eye. ‘He feels same way about
you
.’

When a man whom you want comes into a room – even so wide a ‘room’ as a wrestling arena – and moves towards you, some telltale chemistry goes to work, quickening your heart, stabbing your womb. I knew, seconds before Bruno said distastefully: ‘Darling, there’s your
bloody
communist!’ that Jonathan Steele had travelled swiftly, and was here.

Across the noisy, crowded, smoke-wreathed arena, I met his eyes, and smiled, and looked away again. He made his way through the rows, pulled out a chair, and sat down just behind me. In the ring, Honest John (the ordained winner) was getting in a few last licks at the Demon Barber, drawing his thumbnail briskly across his opponent’s eyelids. I called out, as loud as I could: ‘Come on, Johnny! Come on!’

Behind me, Jonathan Steele said: ‘The black sheep of our family,’ and I laughed with exquisite relief and pleasure.

I had already stopped thinking, or trying to work any of it out. When Honest John’s hand had been raised aloft in victory, and he had delivered the customary kicks at the prostrate form of the Demon Barber, we walked across from the arena to the nightclub on Commissioner Street where I wanted to spend my last evening.

Jonathan Steele and I were companionably silent; Bruno, who seemed to have guessed what had happened and how it had been engineered, was deep in sulks. Eumor was beaming like Mephistopheles himself. We must have looked a very odd quartet.

As we turned into the door of the Springbok, and the bright lights of Commissioner Street gave place to the warm, indulgent twilight which is standard atmosphere for all good nightclubs, Bruno muttered to me: ‘Darling, you
are
letting the side down!’